Want to train yourself to succeed? Here’s how…

Want to train yourself to succeed? Here’s how…

via Inc.com by Bill Murphy Jr

Henry Ford once famously said: “Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.”

It’s a pithy quote (Ford was a quote machine), but now, just over 70 years after his death, a new research project funded by the National Science Foundation points to a wealth of evidence that backs him up.

The research focused on college students, specifically studying factors that made them more likely to good grades, stay in school, and graduate. There were three findings that together make up what I’m going to go ahead and call the Henry Ford rule: Learning to believe in yourself and your abilities, empirical research suggests, makes you more likely to succeed in and of itself.

Here’s the research project, the takeaways, and how you can use them to improve your life–whether you’re still a student or have long since left the classroom.

Not just a study: a study of studies.

The NSF-funded project involved 12 psychologists and other PhDs from universities and think tanks around the country, who reviewed reports on a total of 61 other experimental studies on college students and success.

Across the board, the report found, there were three main factors that foretold greater achievement across disciplines and regardless of factors like the students’ test scores or socioeconomic status. The factors included:

1. Developing a sense of belonging.
This first factor has to do with the degree to which students believe they “belong in college, fit in well, and are socially integrated,” according to a summary that quoted one of the study’s co-authors, Fred Oswald, a professor of psychology at Rice University. Of the 61 studies involved, more than 50 found that simply feeling like they belonged in school had a positive impact on students’ grades…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE