Monthly Archives: February 2010

Are You An Eloquent Speaker?

Ideas To Words

The other day I attended this rather interesting lecture. It was downtown at the Learning Annex, where they have pretty interesting talks from time to time. Sometimes they sound pretty interesting, but the speaker is not quite as energetic and charismatic as you’d hope.

Once I went to see a lecture that was about Greek history and politics that surrounded the era of Plato, and how it led to his various philosophies. It sounded great on paper, and they must’ve had some pretty decent writer come up with the marketing material, but the speaker just didn’t give the topic justice. Most agreed that he was uninspiring, to say the least.

It’s amazing the difference between knowledge that’s in your head, and the knowledge that comes out of your mouth. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of getting ready to say something, and when you think about saying it inside your head, maybe even hear yourself saying it in your own voice, it sounds really fantastic and persuasive and eloquent. Then when you open your mouth and spit it out, you sound like a complete dufus. People look at you as if you’d just announced you discovered mustard for the first time.

Then maybe you backtrack, thinking maybe you didn’t set it up enough, and your point didn’t quite fall on ears that were ready to accept your magnificent insight. So you begin to give your background preamble, only to feel the bored stares of your friends and colleagues. Suddenly that brilliant doesn’t seem that brilliant any more.

It’s like that old skit that Jim Carrey did, way before he was famous, on the old show “In Living Color.” In the skit he played some rich snobby guy, on a date with his girl to see a hypnotist. The hypnotist called him up on stage, and put him in a trance. While in a trance, he’d only be able to cluck like a chicken, no matter how hard tried otherwise. So he did, and everybody got a good laugh. Only the hypnotist had a heart attack and died while Carrey’s character was still under a hypnotic trance.

Then the scene flashed forward twenty years, and the once pompous rich guy was a homeless bum on the street, still only able to cluck like a chicken. They showed him begging for money, and somebody gave me a dollar. So he went to the nearest fast food place to buy a hamburger. You could hear him practicing in his head:

“Ok, take it slow. Just say one hamburger please. One hamburger please.”

Then when he opened his mouth, all the came out was a cluck.

It makes you wonder how many brilliant minds are out there, wandering around, with brilliant, perhaps world changing and enhancing thoughts in their heads, but without the skills to persuasively verbalize them.

And I’m sure you’ve known a few people that had powerful skills of persuasion, and magnificently eloquent speaking skills, only their ideas were crap, or worse.

Adolph Hitler is considered one of the greatest public speakers of the twentieth century. You don’t have to understand a word of German to watch videos of his speeches and see how charismatic and persuasive he was, and how he could powerfully move a crowd. Of course, his ideas were poison, and it’s a tragic shame nobody put a bullet in his brain before he had a chance to do the horrible damage that he did.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read a powerfully moving book, only to find the author speaking either in person, or on TV. Many times it’s a disappointment, as effective writers are seldom as eloquent in real time as they are in print.

It’s been long believed by evolutionary psychologists that after language became part of the human repertoire, the leaders of the various tribes around the world weren’t the biggest, and the most aggressive, as in our non language using cousins, but the most eloquent and verbally persuasive. Even tribal chiefs today in various areas of the world where Stone Age life styles are still practiced are the most persuasive with words and other speaking skills.

It’s no secret that in order to become a leader of any of the world democracies today, you need to be a fairly persuasive and charismatic speaker. Even if your ideas aren’t all that great, you can sometimes get yourself elected if you can talk a good game.

It would make sense then that developing powerful verbal skills could give you a leg up in almost any field. The more you can persuasively convince others of your thoughts and ideas, the more you’d be worth to whomever you work for. For salespeople this concept is a no brainer.

As I realized in the lecture I attended recently on Greek history and the development of Plato’s ideas, you have to have a strong pre-set intention to learn in order to get through a less than effective speaker. If you are on the fence, if your neutral about any of the ideas being presented, then a speaker is obligated to not only grab your attention, but effectively lead you to naturally come to the conclusion that he or she wants you to come to.

This can be difficult, but there are plenty of ways to learn how to do this. Toastmasters has long been recognized as a great place to practice your speaking and persuasion skills. Many of the public speaking skills you’ll learn at toastmasters will easily translate into one on one skills of salesmanship.

Of course, many people are deathly afraid of getting up to speak, let alone committing to doing it on a regular basis in order to improve themselves. But in a competitive world, every edge can help. There are plenty of ways to get over you fear of public speaking. Some of the audio programs available through the link below can go a long way to eliminate your fear of public speaking altogether. If you’re interested in improving that area of your life, give it a go and see how it works out. They have a 30-day money back guarantee, so there’s no risk. You owe it to yourself to try it out for a couple weeks just to see if it can help.

Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

Come Back With Your Friends And Play

The Lost Monkey

Once there was this young monkey. He lived in the jungle, with the rest of the monkeys. And he played with all the other monkeys just like you would expect a young monkey to. He was at that age where the adult monkeys didn’t really expect much adult behavior from him, so they didn’t really mind him playing around all day. But he was still young enough so they felt as though they needed to keep watch over him to make sure he didn’t get into too much trouble. If monkeys are good at anything, it’s getting into trouble.

It’s not widely known that monkeys can be the most thrill-seeking animals there are. They have an elaborate warning system of cries and shrieks to warn the community when predators enter into their area. Some of the jungle cats in particular are very stealthy, and enjoy eating monkeys. Especially young monkeys that haven’t quite mastered the recognition of the various warning signs.

Young monkeys are so often yelled at by the older monkeys that they sometimes miss a serious warning cry, and end up being an afternoon snack for some hungry cheetah. So you can understand how monkeys at a certain age can be particularly troublesome for the adults.

Another thing that makes things difficult is that monkeys are much more communal that other animals. On the range of sexual behavior and monogamy, monkeys are fairly promiscuous. Some scientists believe it is the safest way to protect the young, or at least their best strategy. If you are an adult monkey, and you see a young monkey, you are inclined to protect it because there’s a fairly decent chance that it may be your own kid.

So having a group of young monkeys that are old enough to play around on their own, but young enough to not quite understand the warning cries are a nuisance to the adults who just want to go about their own monkey business, which in the monkey world is to find as many bananas and have sex with as many monkeys as you can.

Once that the young monkeys grow up and discover the secret of life, namely bananas and sex, they start to lose interest in playing around, and seeing how close they can get to the cheetahs without being eaten alive.

But this one afternoon, this one particular monkey had somehow separated himself from the group. He was swing around, from branch to branch, and suddenly noticed that there weren’t any other monkeys around him. He stopped, and didn’t hear any monkey chatter or monkey cries, so he became a bit nervous, inasmuch as monkeys can become nervous. Which in reality isn’t that much. They are monkeys, after all.

So this young monkey kept swinging from branch to branch when he discovered a big clearing in the jungle. It looked as if the trees had been cut down for some reason. Being naturally curious, he decided to investigate. In the middle of the clearing, was a big hole in the ground. But not just any hole, it had been dug to a specific shape. It was a perfect square, and went straight down into the ground as far as he could see. He kicked a couple rocks in, and waited to hear them drop, but he didn’t. He suddenly wanted to remember exactly where he was. His friends would really find this fascinating. He was torn between investigating further, on his own, or going back and getting his friends. He decided to climb down into the hole, just a little bit, to see what he could find.

The sides were pretty easy to hang onto, so he climbed down a few hundred meters. It took a while, but he had a sinking suspicion something really cool was going to happen. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but the further down he climbed, the more he got excited.

Finally the hole opened up into this giant cavern. Inside the cavern were all these strange looking machines and shiny pieces of things that he didn’t even recognize, let alone know what category to put them in.

He decided to go over and play on one of the machines. There were all these dials and knobs, and wheels. He started punching them and spinning them, and the machine, if that’s what it was, roared to life. It made all these strange sounds, and started rolling around, as if on its own power.

The monkey was scared and excited at the same time. He jumped of the machine, and stood back and watched the machine go to work. The machine started digging through the side of the cavern. When it dug, the monkey noticed some really shiny stuff, again that he didn’t recognize. He scooped up a handful of the shiny stuff, and climbed back up the hole. He’d have to tell his friends about his place for sure. He’d have to just be sure to remember how he got here, so he could tell his friends about this place and come back to explore.

Because he knew that what he’d found here was amazing, and he couldn’t wait to tell all his friends, so they could all come back here and play.

To be continued…

If you are interested in finding your secret treasure, click on the link below:

Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

Lunar or Solar?

Change Perspective

The other day I was talking to one of my neighbors, one of them that I don’t talk to very often. It seems that there is a local festival happening this weekend, and she was trying to explain its significance. Something to do with the lunar New Year. Every year the lunar New Year comes at a different time, and the length of winter is thought to be dependent on the arrival of this day.

It got me thinking about the overlapping of the two calendars, the solar and the lunar. The seasons are based on the earth’s rotation around the sun, and the lunar New Year is based obviously on the moon. The revolution of the moon around the earth has nothing to do with the revolution of the earth around the sun. They are two completely different physical systems, although they are nested. The moon/earth system is nested within the earth/sun system.

When you take the larger scale of time, based on the seasons and the sun, and compare it to the smaller system, it can seem entirely random. Some years the lunar New Year comes early, while other years it comes later. And over the years, humans have developed a rich mythology to describe the relationship between the two.

Of course, from an external and much longer perspective, they are simply two oscillating systems, one inside the other, and behave according to fairly simple physical laws. But within the system, you have all these stories and mythologies about dragons and spirits and whether or not you’re going to have a good crop based on how much moon you can see at a certain time of night.

Being able to switch in and out of an objective/subjective experience is beneficial helpful and a lot of fun. If humans were always stuck inside the subjective experience, of watching the moon dance across the sky, we would never have evolved past human sacrifices to ensure the crops would grow every year.

Advances in science continue to give us an objective, outside perspective so we can do away with hoping and praying to the gods, and to not only understand our natural environment, but to decipher it and plan accordingly. It makes life a lot easier if you know it’s going to rain with a certain degree of expectation.

On a personal level, this can be just as useful, but it can prove to be a little bit more difficult. If we look at our behavior from an objective viewpoint, some of our behavior that gets us into trouble can be pretty obvious. But it can be hard to do that. It’s very easy to stay within our own subjective experience and only see things as they show up in our own experience, without planning how to react.

One model in NLP is the ability to switch between the objective and subjective experience. One exercise I did at a seminar was particularly eye opening. It can help greatly if you ever feel yourself getting sucked into an argument that you suspect might not end well.

The exercise goes like this. You can do this with a willing partner, or completely covert.

While talking to somebody, try switching in and out of your “self.” During the conversation, imagine that you are above the both of you, and objectively watching the discussion, as if you are watching a debate between two unknown candidates on TV. Then switch into the other persons perspective, and watch yourself talking, and take the opposing viewpoint. Then switch back to an objective viewpoint, and then switch back into your own viewpoint.

This can be tricky and confusing to say the least, so it’s best to try this with a conversation that will allow for several pauses while you collect your thinking. Don’t do this while talking to your boss, or an important client at work.

It can be particularly useful to free yourself from a subjective viewpoint that isn’t as supportive as you think it is. You may even get a better perspective, and a few different ideas.

The more you practice this, the better you’ll get at it. I’ve known several sales people who perfected this technique, and were able to change their approach with clients during a conversation that resulted in them getting a sale, where before they wouldn’t have been able to.

They report that when they switched into their clients viewpoint, they got some ideas on how to better present their product or services, as well as some interesting insights into how to overcome some objections, many times even before they came up.

I’m sure you can think of many different areas where it would be good to be able to flip in and out of your own subjective experience. Try this and have fun.

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

What Is Beyond Our Five Senses?

More Than You Know

Once I was roped into going to this really strange seminar with a friend of mine. I say roped in because he had bought two tickets, or signed up for two people, and his buddy had flaked at the last minute. It was paid for, and although it was a two-day seminar at this hotel, it was local, so I didn’t have to travel anywhere. So I figured I had nothing to lose. So perhaps “roped in” is too strong a term to describe his persuasive efforts. Perhaps “talked into” would be a better term.

It was a weird combination of hypnosis and metaphysics. The guy who taught the seminar is a pretty widely know hypnotherapist, he has all kinds of self-hypnosis tapes and books out, a well as a pretty popular practice. He does seminars from time to time.

We started out doing some basic criteria exercises, where we spent some time doing some creative journaling to get to the bottom of what we really wanted out of life. Most people in attendance, myself included, were surprised to find out most of the stuff we think we wanted, wasn’t for the reasons we thought we wanted them.

One of the requirements for a “well formed goal” is to make sure you are going after the goal for your own reasons, and not or somebody else’s. Most of our goals, we found, were there because of beliefs and ideas that we’d all picked up somewhere along the line from other people. This one lady had a tremendous breakthrough. She’d been trying her whole life to get ahead in her career, and she found out it was only to try and please her father, who died when she was a young child. When she discovered that she was trying to please an imaginary person, or a memory of he father, rather than her own desires, it was a huge relief.

She said it was like this huge burden that was released, and she felt a lot more energetic than she’d ever felt before. When she uncovered her true calling in life, the thing that she really wanted to go after for her own sake, she nearly broke down in tears from happiness.

She wasn’t worried that what she wanted would require a complete career change, and perhaps some more education. Just finding a goal that was something that truly resonated with her on a deep level was enough to give her inspiration. And as a completely unexpected side benefit, this lower back problem, that she’d had for several years, had completely disappeared.

After that we moved on to uncovering some beliefs that were holding us back. This wasn’t so fun, as many of us in attendance found out we had some pretty crappy beliefs. The instructor said that one interesting thing about human nature is that we can really deceive ourselves into thinking that something unpleasant isn’t there, to save us the pain of confronting it. Because I few acknowledge it, and confront it and fail, it would be devastating. So many times we unconsciously choose to ignore these things. Which is why most of us, when we uncovered these beliefs that were holding us back, were a little worried that we wouldn’t be able to overcome them.

But then he taught us this powerful self-hypnosis technique to completely obliterate our self-limiting beliefs. I was lucky enough to be the “guinea pig” to go up in front of class and be hypnotized. I don’t remember too much of what happened, but it involved moving energy around and using this really cool visualizations. Then we later broke into pairs and guided each other through the same process. After we did that a few times, we were able to do it on our own.

Now, this wasn’t some instantaneous magic that immediately removed all of our limiting beliefs, but it gave us a meditative practice to do on a daily basis. And ever since then I’ve been doing it, at least in part, to slowly but surely chip away at all the limiting beliefs I’ve built up since childhood.
After we figured out our criteria, set some powerful goals, and removed the blocks, then we moved on into some pretty cool psychic energy work. Personally, I’m not big believer in psychic phenomenon. It think there has to be a physical or biological explanation for everything, but some of the stuff we did was pretty impressive.

One thing we did was learn to generate positive and negative charisma. When you generate positive charisma, people will naturally be attracted to you. I used to think that if you have positive charisma, guys would walk up to you and offer you money, and girls would walk up to you and offer you sex. But it doesn’t quite work out that way. What happens when you consciously generate positive charisma is people will feel a strong desire to be in your presence, but because you are the one generating charisma, they will kind of wait for you to tell them or guide them what to do.

If you were in sales, for example, and you generated a ton of positive charisma, a bunch of prospects would show up, but you would still need to go through the sales process and close them. But with positive charisma, it would be a lot easier.

Of course with negative charisma, you naturally repel people. Even if you tried talking to people they would do their best to ignore you, not respond, or simply jut walk away.

Now it’s one thing practicing these techniques in the seminar room, when everybody is “playing along,” but often times when you go out into the real world, it doesn’t quite work out as well. Which is exactly why he had us go out at night and practice these techniques around real people.

And let me tell you, I was amazed at how effective these were. I tried generating both positive and negative charisma in a large bookstore that evening. I went to a section where there weren’t any people, and did the exercise. Within few minutes there were about six people within a couple meters of where I was standing, where there was nobody there before. While this could have been a complete coincidence, I got the distinct feeling that every single one of these people was waiting for me to start a conversation with them. Their body language and posture all screamed openness. There were three women, and every one of them had their chests pointing straight at me, and their arms completely open. For those of you who study body language, this is a pretty strong unconscious sign of openness.

Next I went upstairs and did the negative charisma exercise. Again, I was shocked at its effectiveness. No matter where I walked, people would scatter like I had bubonic plague or something. Nobody even faced me, let alone made eye contact with me.

This seminar really opened up my mind to what is possible when you tap into some of the metaphysical energies that are surrounding us all the time. That was about five years ago, and ever since I’ve been interested in that kind of thing. Hypnosis, NLP, and all kinds of esoteric metaphysics. While some of it is complete nonsense, a lot of it isn’t. And the stuff that isn’t can have a powerful and profound impact on your life, and everything you want to accomplish.

For an example of some of the stuff that’s possible, check out the site below. It’s filled with different meditative exercises and techniques, many of which only require listening to a specially created audio file. They’re designed to guide your brainwaves into powerfully receptive states, where magnificent changes, including increases in charisma and sexual magnetism, are easy and automatic. Check it out for more info.

Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

How To Access Genius Level Creativity

Imaginary Friends

I was having lunch with an old friend of mine the other day. I hadn’t seen her since just after she had her baby. That was four years ago. I can’t believe how fast time flies when you’re doing the same routine day in and day out. If you don’t and look up from what you’re doing, life can zip right by without bothering to take you along for the ride.

She was telling me about how her son has all these imaginary friends. He has normal friends as well, he goes to this kindergarten three days a week, and he gets on well with the kids there, but while he’s at home, and his dad isn’t around, he’s always wandering around talking to people that aren’t there. When my friend asks him about them, he acts like she’s the one living in an alternative reality. He can see them, why can’t she?

She wasn’t too worried, but seeing as he’s her only kid, and she’s never experienced the “imaginary friend” thing, she started checking around to find out how normal it was. Maybe her house was actually filled with ghosts or something, and he could see them, and she couldn’t. If that were the case, she would need to learn to communicate with them so they wouldn’t keep him up past his bedtime.

She was telling me she did all this research, and actually went to see a specialist in child development. What she found out was both interesting and relieving. Her kid was normal, and her house wasn’t filled with ghosts. At least none that she or he could see.

What he told her was how the brain develops as we grow older, and one way that the brain switches between externally focused and internally focused. All of this has overlap with other areas of brain research, but part of it is particularly useful for understand how children develop, and how they are often in their own worlds, which seem to them as real as these words you are reading now.

The brain has four basic categories of brainwaves. The brainwaves are made up of all the electrical impulses pulsing throughout the brain at any given time. Every time you have a thought, conscious or unconscious, several billion neurons fire off in particular orders. The sum total of the firing of neurons, and the resultant wave of electrical impulses can be measured. They range from very slow, long brainwaves, to fast and short ones. Each category is associated with a different “type” of brain activity.

Most adults alternate between beta and alpha. Beta is the fastest, and is what most people experience when we are awake. Externally focused, thinking about the things around us and how to deal with them. Extremely high levels of beta are thought to be an indication of stress and anxiety. (An indication, not a cause).

The next is alpha. (An interesting side note, alpha is not the fastest, even though it’s called alpha. It’s called alpha only because it was the first one they discovered.) Alpha is associated with daydreaming, drifting off into imaginations about the past or the future. Artists and creative thinkers find alpha particularly helpful, as this is where they get a lot of their inspiration. When you kind of “zone out” in the middle of something, you have slipped from beta into alpha.

The next one down is theta. This is where all hallucinations, hypnosis, and deep meditation occur. During theta you can have wild ideas and thoughts. When you are falling asleep at night, and you drift from thinking about normal, every day thoughts, and catch your thoughts drifting seemingly on their own, with you just watching them, you’ve slipped into theta.

As adults, it’s very hard to be in theta and stay awake. Theta is that brief space between waking and sleep. Advanced meditators can hold this state for a while, but it takes some practice. Theta is though to be where genius ideas come from. Edison used to sit in a chair in a dark room, holding a weight in his outstretched hand. As soon as he drifted into sleep, and into theta, he would drop the weight. This would wake him up, and he would immediately write down as much as he could. This is how he came up with so many creative ideas. It wasn’t that he was smarter or more creative than the rest of us, it was just he effectively used his brains capacity to slip into theta, and exploit all of the genius level thinking that occurs during that phase.

Other scientists and inventors have used dreams, which are also in the theta brainwave state, to come up with ideas that have literally changed the face of science and industry.

One of the things that child development researchers are starting to discover is that when kids are growing up, they are in theta state a large portion of the time. Much more so that adults. Their brains are growing, and learning, and theta is the natural brainwave state to be in if you are learning about your environment for the first time. Learning how to walk and talk is one thing, but kids also naturally learn complex things like values, beliefs handed down with their parents, and complex emotional issues. They believe that theta is the perfect brainwave state for building strategies in the brain for dealing understanding and dealing with reality.

This may be why thinking of a problem just before bed is particularly helpful. Even though you may not remember, while you’re in the theta state just before sleep, your brain can come up with some pretty creative solutions to your problems, as Edison and others can attest to.

For most adults thought, accessing theta is only achievable through long practice of meditation. Unless we consciously practice in a regular basis, theta only comes with sleep, and unless we program ourselves before sleep to solve problems, the usefulness of theta is only useful to children.

But recently there have been discoveries that theta brainwave states can be achievable by listening to specific sounds. Sounds that we listen to have a profound impact on our brainwaves. With properly engineered sound, and focused concentration, theta is easily accessible by anyone with a CD player and pair of headphones.

It really is possible to tap into that same genius level creativity that Einstein, Edison and others have used over the years to solve problems, and come up with some astounding ideas that have changed the course of human history.

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

Watch Out For Cracks In Reality

Saved By An Old Woman

The other day I was wandering down town, not really wandering, just kind of maybe shuffling along. Shuffling doesn’t quite describe it either, shuffling is what drunken people do that don’t have a destination. While I didn’t have a destination, I wasn’t drunk, so maybe I’d better choose another verb. Staggering? No, ambling? Not sure if that’s a word. Meandering. That’s it, I was meandering down town the other day, and I saw this strange looking man. He had this peculiar feeling about him, and he was looking at me a bit strangely. I wasn’t sure if he was going to introduce himself as a long lost pal, or pull out a knife and kill me where I stood.

But before I describe the strange looking man, I need to explain why I was meandering down town in the middle of a sunny weekend afternoon. I had originally gone downtown to catch a movie, but as it sometimes happens, the times they list on the movie page are not the same as at the actual theater. To make matters worse, the movie I had intended to see not only started at a different time, but instead of being in English with Japanese subtitles, it was dubbed in Japanese.

Of course if I read a synopsis of the movie before hand, and paid close enough attention, I’d be able understand enough of the dialogue to make out the basic plot. But that would require brainpower, and that’s one of my main reasons for going to the movies, so I can shut off my brain for a couple hours. Not completely shut if off, I still need to be able to work my mouth and my hand so I can stuff my face with as much popcorn as possible.

But there I was, ready to spend a couple hours of brain-free relaxation, when my plans were thwarted by Internet inaccuracy. I wasn’t going to give in without a struggle. I was determined to expend a little brain energy as possible.

I can be frustrating when you are expecting one thing, but then something else entirely shows up in its place, and despite really liking this thing that you have here in front of you, you were maybe expecting something else. And no matter how much you try and convince yourself that this is OK, part of you continues to wish that you’d gotten the other thing that you’d expected in the first place.

Kind of like if you were expecting to go on vacation in Hawaii, but you got on the wrong plane and ended up in Alaska. Alaska is a cool place, and had you planned on going there, you’d likely enjoy it. They have some cool stuff in Alaska. But since you were planning on Hawaii, you wouldn’t be able to fully throw yourself in to your suddenly determined by fate vacation in Alaska. Not to mention that you’d probably be pretty cold, seeing as how all you had was a grass skirt, a surfboard, and a couple of ukulele’s. And to add insult to injury, instead of getting lei’d by a cute Hawaiian girl, you’d get hit in the face with a snowball by some angry alcoholic Eskimo. Which would suck under any circumstances.

I was just about to try and ignore this strange guy, and turn into the shop I happened to be standing next to, when he called out my name. So he did know me. I turned, wondering where I knew him from. When he started to approach, he did the strangest thing. It was odd, and I looked around wondering what other’s reactions would be, as most people don’t do what he was doing right there on the sidewalk.

Either nobody seemed to notice, or they just pretended they didn’t notice. Or maybe part of them noticed, but another part of them didn’t notice that they noticed, like some strange form of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is an interesting thing. Some say it’s the brains way of keeping everything in order, and not seeing things that are right in front of you, because if you acknowledge certain things, you would have to go through a lot of mental recalculation to re figure out your model of reality. And that can be time consuming. So the brain has evolved this mechanism for shutting out certain parts of the reality.

Those that study Freud say it’s to protect the ego. People that have bad habits, for example, don’t see them as being bad, at least to the extent that they do them. If we were to look at them objectively, or if we saw another person with the same habit, we’d be much more realistic in our judgment of the habit. But because that would require making a hard decision about what to do, we tend to ignore it.

But that only goes so far to explain why all those people ignored this guy, who pretended to know me, when he started doing what he did. People don’t usually do that out of context, and especially when they are alone. I certainly hope that I didn’t cause this strange looking man that pretended to know me to start to do that. I checked again to everybody that was walking past this guy, within a couple feet of him, and they didn’t even turn their heads. I started to think maybe I’d slipped through some crack into an alternative reality, I even started thinking that was why the movie times on the Internet were different from the real movie times.

I started to really get nervous. Everything that I thought was absolutely true was turning out not to have any corroborating evidence. What if reality really was a fiction of your imagination, and you can only succeed in life so long as you find enough people that have an overlapping hallucination? How do you know that red really is red? I started to panic, when this old lady stopped and started to lecture this crazy guy. As soon as she started to lecture him, other people turned to look, and started whispering amongst themselves. He apologized, and said he’d got carried away. He kept motioning over toward me while he was talking to this old lady, and for some reason, I stood where I was, a bit curious, and relieved that reality was still intact. But before I knew it, the man apologized once more, bowed to everybody that has stopped to watch him receive the shellacking from this old woman, hopped on his unicycle, and rode away.

Of course, I was left standing there, absorbing all the residual curiosity from the now very interested crowd. What I did next is another story.

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

Do You Have Apnea Symptoms?

Apnea Symptoms

How to find if you have apnea symptoms

There are millions of people today that suffer from sleep apnea, and apnea symptoms, but aren’t aware of the potential dangers. Sleep apnea, if gone undetected, can lead to a host of other health problems including high blood pressure, relationship problems, and unnecessary stress.

Obviously, getting enough sleep is vitally important to health. Most adults today simply do not get sufficient sleep every night. One of the main causes of this is sleep apnea. If you think you may be suffering from sleep apnea symptoms,  then there’s a good chance that by addressing these issues, you’ll not only stop your apnea symptoms for good, but finally be able to get the sleep that you need.

One of the reasons for this is that apnea symptoms can be hard to detect.  Apnea symptoms can be easily overlooked as being caused by other conditions.

Of course, the main reason apnea symptoms are often overlooked is because they exhibit themselves only when you are sleeping. Although many people wake up when they experience sleep apnea, it is only briefly, and they don’t remember anything in the morning.

Apnea Symptoms – Commonly Overlooked Symptoms

Some of the common apnea symptoms are headaches, restlessness during the day, and frequent drowsiness. All of these are very common ailments, and by themselves are usually not considered something worth seeing a doctor about. Most people would normally self medicate with an over the counter remedies.

apnea symptoms

Unfortunately, these over the counter remedies only address the symptom, and not the underlying cause. In order to address the underlying cause, it helps to be able to determine if these symptoms are due to sleep apnea, and are indeed apnea symptoms.

One quick check is to see how sleepy or drowsy you become when you are bored. In general, this is a good test to see if you are getting enough sleep, regardless if you have sleep apnea or not. However, if you are actually getting sufficient time in bed every night, and you still feel sleepy relatively easily during the day, there’s a good chance you may have sleep apnea.

Of course, the easiest and clearest way to determine sleep apnea is through a sleep study. This is where you go to a special sleep laboratory, and sleep in special room. The doctors will employ several monitoring devices to record sufficient data while you sleep, including brainwaves, heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure.

Of course, this is expensive, and not everybody will qualify. One way you can check yourself is to simply record yourself while you sleep. Because those that suffer from sleep apnea stop breathing several times an hour while sleeping, you don’t need to record yourself very long. A hand held tape recorder for an hour would normally be sufficient.

Alternatively, you can ask a partner or a spouse to monitor you for a short period while you are asleep. It’s fairly obvious when someone is suffering from sleep apnea. Your breathing will momentarily stop, and there be a period of silence. This is particularly obvious if you are a heavy snorer.

Another good way to collect data is to keep a sleep journal. It’s a good idea to get in the habit of recording any information you can as soon as you wake up. How many times you awoke during the night, how fast you fell asleep, how many times you had to get up to urinate. All of these are good pieces of data that can help your doctor determine if you have sleep apnea.

Because sleep apnea is a condition that is easily undetected, but have numerous side effects, it’s important to find out if you have it by recording as much information as possible. The more information you record, the easier it can be for your doctor to determine the best course of action.

And depending on what the underling cause of your apnea symptoms are, this particular course of action an range from avoiding alcohol before bed, to wearing a adhesive device to keep your nasal passages open at night, to laser surgery to prevent blockage while sleeping.

Sleep apnea can be a devastating condition, but it also can be treated fairly easily if you know exactly what you’re up against. Once you outline these apnea symptoms, you can be on the road to recovery.

How To Remember Names Easily And Automatically

Mrs. Big Hair

Once I was at this party, and I was with a friend of mine, actually a date. I saw some guy that I’d met before; at least I think I’d met him before. We did that bit of recognition when you make eye contact with somebody that you know. An almost instantaneous acknowledgment of who they are. As soon as we did that, he came over. Then, to my horror, I realized that I not only didn’t remember where I knew this guy from, but that I also couldn’t recall his name. Not even a first letter.

For a few seconds, I hoped he was the kind of guy that just walks up and introduces himself, regardless of the situation, like some politician running for office, or the host of the party, or something. No dice. He walked, greeted me, (using my name of course) and then stood there waiting for me to introduce him to my date. Of course, my date, not knowing anyone at the party, was patiently waiting for me to introduce her to him.

One of the most common complaints that people have about their memories is an inability to remember names. The trick (that I didn’t learn until after that embarrassing moment at party) is two fold. One is an understanding of how memory works, and the other is a simple trick that you easily learn and put into place so you’ll never have trouble remembering names again.

The way memory works is that it’s not passive, unless it is for life or death information. Let’s say you’re walking through the jungle (back during our evolutionary past), and happen to look up at a banana tree. All of a sudden a group of ferocious monkeys swing down, beat you up, and chase you away. You’ll likely have no trouble remembering that spot, aided by the presence of the banana tree, as a no no in the future. You wouldn’t have to go back to your cave, and review you notes of the day and drill yourself so you’d remember where the safe places were, and where the dangerous place were. It would be automatic.

Likewise, if you were huffing it across the desert, and saw strange looking tree, and upon arrival at the tree found a source of an underground stream, you wouldn’t have any problems remembering where the stream was. Remembering where a hidden source of water in the desert is much easier than remembering where you parked at the airport.

So our memory is only passive when it comes to life and death. We somehow know that when we take classes in school. We listen attentively to the boring lecture, and know we have to study and drill the information into our brain before a test. We can’t just sit there passively listening to the lecture and soak it all up without a problem (at least most of us can’t). So why do we think we can remember names without putting in any effort? Who knows. The key is to realize that we need to remember names just like we’d study and remember information for a test. We have to consciously input the information into our brains in a specific way so it will make it easier to find them later.

When we listen to a lecture, we usually take notes, and then study for our notes later. You’d look kind of silly at a party walking around with a pencil and a small notebook writing down everything people said to you. They would think you were some kind of reporter or something. Since writing the information down is out, we need a better trick to remember names.

The trick is to apply a mnemonic device, like “all good boys eat cows”, or however it goes for remembering the musical scales. That reason I can’t really remember that is because it’s lacking an emotional component. Remember the deadly banana tree and the hidden water source? Both those came pre filled with a strong emotional component. We need to use those when creating our mnemonic devices. Here’s how you construct an emotionally laden mnemonic for remembering names:

A visualization of the person + a visualization of their name + a funny picture connecting them together = remembered name.

When you first meet somebody, you need to think of one visual thing about them that stands out. This is only private, so it can be as goofy or as derogatory as you can imagine. You won’t be sharing this with anybody, and it’s only to help you remember their name, so whatever you come up with is OK. Let’s say you meet somebody, and the first thing you notice about them is that they have big hair. So before you hear their name, you can think of them as Mr. Or Ms big hair. Now when you hear their name, simply think of a picture to associate with their name. Let’s say their name is Lynne. So you run “Lynne” through your mind until you can think of an easily to visualize item that will help you recall “Lynne.”

Lets’ see… Lynne… Lynne… Lint! Lint from the dryer, all over your clothes. Now you simply attach “lint” and “big hair,” and what do you have? Some poor woman whose hair is filled with lint. So now every time you see this woman, you’ll immediately think of “big hair,” and “lint,” and you’ll have her name in a heartbeat. The funny thing about this is that you only have to go through this process of remembering all the pictures (which really only takes a couple seconds) once or twice. After that, their names will be automatic.

The best time to do this is within a few moments after you meet them, whenever you get a second. Picture associated with the person, picture associated with their name, and hook them together somehow. The crazier, the funnier, the more derogatory, and more sexual you can make either picture, will make it much more easy to remember. If you make your pictures boring, like “all cows eat grass,” it won’t be so easy to remember.

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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

Oh, and at the party, I suddenly remembered where I knew the guy from. His name was Mike, and I’d met him a couple weeks earlier at a toastmasters meeting.