If you challenge your mind to expand your comfort zone, you will naturally expand your wealth zone. By striving to grow your comfort zone, you are constantly taking risks and finding more opportunities, ideas, actions and growth than you ever imagined. The bigger your “container,” the more income and wealth you will attract and hold. Challenge yourself to constantly make your container larger, and watch the universe rush to fill the space.

What is the single most important skill you can master to increase your happiness and success? Training your mind.

How do you train your mind? Start by observing your thought process. If you are like most people, your mind continuously produces both empowering thoughts, such as those that lead to success, and disempowering thoughts, including those that don’t support your wealth and happiness. As you identify your thoughts, you need to begin consciously replacing your disempowering thoughts with empowering ones. In doing so, you will begin adopting empowering attitudes as your own. Start by making declarations to yourself, such as “I act in spite of fear,” “I act in spite of doubt” and “I act in spite of inconvenience.”

Believe it or not, you can choose your thoughts and control your mind. You have the natural ability to cancel any thought that does not support you. You can also install self-empowering thoughts at any time by choosing to focus on them.

At one of my seminars, Robert Allen, a close friend and bestselling author, said something quite profound: “No thought lives in your head rent-free.”

What he meant is, you pay for your negative thoughts in money, energy, time, health and happiness. If you want to move to a new level in your life quickly, begin by dividing your thoughts into two categories: empowering and disempowering. Observe them, and determine if they are supporting your happiness and success. Choose to entertain only the empowering thoughts, and refuse to focus on the disempowering ones. When a nonsupportive notion comes to the surface, replace it with a more supportive way of thinking. I call this process “power thinking.” And mark my words, if you practice it, your life will never be the same.

So, what is the difference between power thinking and positive thinking? The distinction is slight, but profound.

People use positive thinking to pretend that everything is rosy when they really believe it is not. With power thinking, though, we understand that something is neutral until we assign it meaning by creating a story.

This is the difference between a positive thinker and a power thinker. A positive thinker believes their thoughts are true. Whereas a power thinker recognizes that their thoughts are not true, but since they are making up a story anyway, they might as well make up a story that supports themselves. Why do we do this? Not because our new thoughts are true in an absolute sense, but because they are more useful to us and feel a heck of a lot better than nonsupportive ones.

Observe yourself and your thought patterns, and entertain only the thoughts that support your happiness and success. Challenge that little voice in your head whenever it tells you, “I can’t” or “I don’t want to” or “I don’t feel like it.” Don’t allow this fear-based, comfort-based voice to get the better of you. Make a pact with yourself that whenever the little voice in your head tries to stop you from doing something to support your success, you will do it anyway to tell it that you are the boss. Not only will you increase your confidence dramatically, but eventually, the voice will get quieter and quieter as it recognizes it has little effect on you.

Particularly during economic downturns like this, it is crucial that we change our pessimistic thoughts into empowering ones and stretch our comfort zones to attain and hold more wealth. We must constantly choose to remain positive and not let disempowering thoughts take hold, regardless of what the media says about the global economy.

Practice getting out of your comfort zone by consciously making decisions that will make you uncomfortable. Talk to someone you would normally avoid, ask for a raise at work or try something that scares you.

Living a mediocre life does not lead to happiness. Constantly wondering what could have been does not lead to happiness. What does lead to happiness is living in our natural state of growth and reaching our full potential.

The next time you are feeling uncomfortable, uncertain or afraid, press forward instead of retreating. Experience the feeling of discomfort and accept it for what it is—a feeling. Recognize that a feeling does not have the power to stop you. Push on, and eventually you will reach your goal.

The point, however, is not whether or not those feelings of discomfort eventually subside. If they do lessen, take it as a sign that you need to increase your objective because the minute you get comfortable, you have stopped growing. Managing your mind to live at the edge of your comfort zone will allow you to grow and reach your fullest potential.

Because humans are creatures of habit, we have to practice. Practice acting in spite of fear, in spite of discomfort, in spite of inconvenience. By doing so, you will quickly move to a higher level, and your wealth will almost certainly increase.

The mind is a powerful tool, but it is also the greatest soap-opera scriptwriter in history. It creates powerful stories based on dramas or disasters that have never happened and likely never will. As Mark Twain said, “I’ve had thousands of problems in my life, most of which never actually happened.”

It is important to remember that you are not your mind—you are much bigger and more powerful than your mind alone. By learning to train it, though, you can conquer your fear, expand your comfort zone and dramatically increase your wealth.

T. Harv Eker is an author, success trainer, and founder and president of Peak Potentials Training. His books include the No. 1 New York Times Best-Seller Secrets of the Millionaire Mind and the international best-seller SpeedWealth. He also offers the Millionaire Mind Intensive, a three-day seminar that helps people take control of their minds and nurture self-empowering thoughts.