Category Archives: Beliefs

What Are Your Instincts?

Man – Know Thyself

Last week I went to a book signing at a local bookstore. Some guy was going to sign some books, and give some kind of lecture. I hadn’t planned on going, but a friend of mine dragged me along. I think there is a girl that works there that he would like to ask out, but he is too shy to go by himself. On the way there we ran into this group of kids that were having a semi organized race with their remote controlled formula one cars. Maybe that’s not the best way to describe them. They were cars that were designed to look like formula one cars. They were pretty loud for how small they were, and much faster that you’d expect.

I don’t know if they got special permission from the city, but they had designed a small course in a park. They had set up some markers to create the points on each side of the track. There were about fifteen kids in all. I didn’t see any adults, so I’m not sure if it was a sponsored event or some sort of school club.

So while we were hanging out and watching this race, this guy came up and stated talking to us. We had about an hour before the guy’s speech at the bookstore started, so we had plenty of time. Plus my friend promised me that if I went with him, he’d ask out that girl. So he was likely stalling for time.

The guy started talking to us about genetics and determination. It was quite a strange topic to just bust out of nowhere with. I thought for a minute that he was some homeless bum that walks around blurting out word salad to whoever will listen, but it turns out he is a university professor. Halfway through his impromptu dialogue, he stopped and apologized for coming in out of the blue with such a potential divisive topic. The nurture/nature debate never ends well. I suppose he could have been talking about which is the best manufacturer of shoe polish, and my friend would have eagerly listened. He was really getting nervous about asking out that girl.

It’s funny when that happens. The human brain has this powerful mechanism for self-protection and self-preservation that comes out in many forms. Whenever we perceive a threat, we will do anything to get away from it. If there is no getting away from it, we will ignore it at all costs.

I’m always reminded of biology class I took in college. We were studying various primates, and great apes in particular. There was some lady that came in to our class once that had actually gone to Africa and studied them up close. She said the trick in not getting beat to death by the silverback, the alpha male leader, was to never ever make eye contact. You can get very close to the group so long as you don’t make eye contact with the leader, or any of the other powerful members of the group.

People spend a lot of time pretending to be really interested in something, but in reality they are avoiding making eye contact with what they perceive as a threat. In the jungle of course, making eye contact with the silverback will get you a good thrashing. But in real life, staring your fears right in the face is usually the trick to making them vanish.

Which is lucky for this weird professor who was going on and on about the way the mind comes pre-wired for certain instincts. He was saying that people used to think that man was different from all the other animals, because animals have instincts, and we have to learn everything as we go along. That’s why they used to think that humans took so long to make it to adulthood compared to all other animals. That we were born like some computer with only a hard drive, and no software.

But in reality, we come with many more instincts that all the other animals, AND the ability to learn along the way. Making us extremely flexible and agile when it comes to surviving. Our instincts are just as strong as migrating birds who know exactly where to fly every winter, but ours are flexible, so we get to change the where they point. Of course, the draw back is that if you don’t consciously evaluate your instincts and where they are pointing, you’ll be covertly guided by all the messages and advertising we are surrounded with on a daily basis.

Of course this agility makes it very easy for us to come up with unique and interesting ways to avoid overcoming our fears and our problems, like pretending to be really interested to some blathering professor in the park, like my friend was doing.

I was finally able to pull him away from the “professor,” who apologized profusely when he checked his watch. I guess he had lost track of time as well.

Which was just as well, because by the time we got up to leave, the kids had finished their tournament. The kid that won was being congratulated by all the other kids as we got up to leave. I saw a school bus pull up, and some adults got off and pulled out some boxes, into which the kids put their cars. I guess it was a sponsored event after all.

And when we got to the bookstore, the guy that was signing the books was the guy that we just talked to in the park. I guess he had written several textbooks on evolutionary psychology, and this was his first book targeted at normal people. As it turns out, his dialogue with us in the park was practice for tonight’s, lecture. I guess he thought if he could get a bunch of random strangers to understand his theory, then he could explain it to some eggheads in a bookstore. He made sure to thank us for being his guinea pigs. His speech was actually pretty good.

And my friend finally asked that girl out. Sort of. He got her name, and phone number, and a vague commitment to “maybe do something together later, or something.” I guess that’s pretty much what we came here for.

Her phone number.

But this sure was a round about way to get here, wasn’t it?

These Two Things Are Essential To Effectively Use The Law of Attraction

How To Properly Manifest Your Desires

I used to watch this TV show when I was a kid, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. “I Dream of Genie,” was the title. I watched it for two reasons, one because the girl that played the Genie was super hot, and was always wearing these sexy genie clothes. And two because I thought it would be awesome to just cross your arms and blink your eyes and make something come into existence. To have some sexy genie dressed in skimpy genie clothes doing that for you is pretty much a secret (or not so secret) dream of all men.

That is a pretty common theme in human history. Much has been written about metaphysics and alchemy. Alchemy is a specific category of metaphysics where you take any metal, and turn it into gold. This would be similar to today’s “law of attraction” and other metaphysical manifestation techniques. Most people would like to attract more money.

The whole concept of metaphysics is interesting to me. I see it as kind of a vague placeholder in our imagination to describe things that are just outside our realm of understanding. They aren’t really magical or mystical or beyond our capabilities, just outside of our normal every day realm of the cause and effect reality that we think we live in.

A couple of examples. Most of our physical laws make sense, but only because we see them happening on a daily basis. When we see something that “makes sense,” what we really mean is that it matches our experience, so it doesn’t require any extra thought to describe it.

The first time kids study gravity in school, it can be a little bit unfamiliar, kind of like a fish studying water currents. When you show a diagram of planets and the sun, it’s pretty easy to make the leap. Of course the math, which is pretty complicated, is another issue.

It can take an extraordinary imagine to figure out laws that aren’t so obvious. Maxwell was a physicist who came up with a bunch of very complicated equations that described electromagnetic radiation. These are both light waves and magnetic waves. These can’t be seen, so you have to have a very highly developed imagination to play around with pictures in your head and then describe them with complex mathematical equations that actually prove to be true when applied to everyday things like electricity and photo voltage measurements.

One of my favorites is when quantum physicists and solid state physicists were having a hard time describing these small spaces that had an extraordinary large number of particles bouncing around. They could pretty easily describer one or two particles, but after that, the math got exceedingly complex.

Then one guy thought of an idea. Instead of thinking of the system of a boatload of particles stuffed in there, each with it’s own mass and charge and spin and whatever else properties particles have, why not think of it as a system with a couple of holes, with all the properties associated with particles assigned a zero value? (To physicists, zero is as just a valid number as 43).

Well, it worked. It described the system perfectly and made the math a lot easier. All by pretending there was this hole there bouncing around, with zero mass, and zero charge, and zero spin, and zero whatever else particles have.

Ok, back to metaphysics.

My own personal belief about metaphysical laws is they are very similar to the holes in the above example. The “law of attraction” and other metaphysical laws of manifestation are simple placeholders to make our thinking about complex issues much simpler, much like the math was made simpler in the hole theory.

Example.

You are a salesperson. You’ve been around salespeople for a while. You’ve been around really good salespeople, and you’ve been around pretty cruddy salespeople. You are an average salesperson, but you’d like to improve your skills to become one of the best. You have two options.

Option One

You study sales book after sales book. You attend sales seminars. You take notes after every sales call, and analyze every sentence. You even ask some customers if you could bring in a video camera and tape yourself so you can later watch it and analyze your body language, your tone of voice, your inflection, the actual words that you use, etc etc etc. You buy some expensive statistical software and collect as much data as possible from every single sales call. From time of day, what color suit your wore, what color clothes your customer wore, where you sat with respect to North and South, the number of minutes that elapsed before you “asked for the sale,” every possible piece of data you collect, and plug into your software. Then on a weekly basis, you look at your sales, and tweak your performance to slowly and gradually improve your sales.

Option Two

You read a book on the law of attraction, and affirmations. Before going to sleep every night you tell yourself “I am the best salesperson at my company.” And just like all the books say, you put feeling and emotion into your affirmations. And just like the books say, when you go about your day, you release your affirmations to the superconscious, or whatever, and wait for the changes to take place.

So which do you think would work better? Believe it or not, method two would work much better. Not because of any mystical law or anything, but because of the massively powerful computational powers of your brain. When you tell your brain enough times that you want to be the best salesperson at your company, really program yourself to do that with powerful emotions, it will automatically do everything outlined in option one. But it will be doing it all unconsciously, so you won’t really notice. From a conscious mind point of view, you are only doing affirmations every night, and then magically in a couple months, you are the number one salesperson.

This requires a couple of things. First is a goal that is within your grasp based on your current situation. If you have sales experience, it’s pretty easy to go from average to excellent. Second, you are surrounded by some good salespeople, so you brain has something to model your behavior after.

This is the number one reason people fail when they “use” the law of attraction. They are either giving their brains some vague instructions, so it doesn’t really know what to go after, or they are giving specific instructions, but not exposing themselves to examples of how to get there.

When you make sure both of these are present, a clear objection, and sufficient examples of how to get there, with properly constructed affirmations, you can pretty much allow turn over any goals to your unconscious and let it soak up the behaviors from people around you.

Of course, this requires that you have the underlying beliefs that you are capable of actually performing the objective you claim you want, but that’s for another post.

For now, whenever you choose to do affirmations, remember the more clear you are the better, and the more examples you expose yourself to, in as many forms as possible, the better. That way you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your goals.

You Have More Choice Than You Think

This one or That one?

The other day I was walking down the street, minding my own business. I had forgotten my iPod, so I was just lazily listening to the everyday sounds drifting around as I slowly made my way towards wherever it was that I was going to end up. I wanted to take the train downtown, but since it was Saturday, they only run every hour. I had just missed the last one, so I had an hour to kill.

Eventually, I knew I was going to end up back at the strain station, but between now (which was really then) and then I had an hour to kill, and a couple of internally accepted restrictions.

A word about restrictions. OK, maybe a couple words about restrictions. Basically there are two kinds of restrictions. Internally imposed, and externally imposed. Most of the restrictions are internally imposed. Now, before you click off to another blog describing something easier to stomach, allow me to explain myself.

If somebody points a gun at your head, and says “you’re money or your life,” (Henny Young man jokes notwithstanding) you’d likely see this as an externally imposed restriction. Not entirely. You still have the choice to give the other person your money (which in this day and age may not buy you much), or go simply give him the finger (which would most certainly not lead to a happy ending).

Yea, but that’s stupid. Who would choose death over life? What good is a choice if one of the choices is so incomparably stupid that it doesn’t even count as a choice?

Well, believe it or not, this is an extreme case of a decision, or choice that we make on a daily basis. Most of the time we make our decisions unconsciously, and mostly in line with decisions we’ve made before. We like what’s comfortable, so what we chose yesterday, is most likely what we chose today.

Think of the structure of the gunpoint choice. Choice number one is to remain hold on to your possessions at all cost, hold on to your ego of giving into a mad man, and accept the consequences. Because the consequences are so immediate, and so obvious, it is hard to not feel their weight. So most people would choose (hopefully you’ll never have to make this choice) choice number two, which is go give up your possessions, swallow your pride in hopes of holding that which has suddenly become more important, in the moment at least, than either of them.

Your life.

But what if the choice isn’t so cut and dried? What if the negative implications of a choice aren’t so obvious, and aren’t so immediate? Everybody knows that smoking causes lung cancer, which in turn causes death, but still millions of people still make the choice to smoke a cigarette several times a day.

Why?

The short-term benefits outweigh the potential long-term detriments. For the smoker, the pleasure they get is more than the pain they will experience in the present when considering the long-term downsides.

Now, most people who don’t smoke can’t imagine how anybody could come to this conclusion. It is obvious that smoking causes lung cancer. It is obvious that smoking causes poor health. It is obvious that smoking causes bad breath. So why in the world would anybody choose to smoke?

What about other choices, like to eat ice cream instead of a bowl of oatmeal? Surely we are aware that ice cream is not as healthy as oatmeal, right? Here is where it gets interesting. The way we trick ourselves around this is by saying that “it’s only just this once.” Surely we aren’t planning one eating a bowl of ice cream every single night, right? By telling ourselves that “it’s only this once,” we allow ourselves to significantly minimize any negative feelings we might experience in the moment when considering any long-term downsides.

How many times have you heard a smoker say the say thing?

I’ll quit tomorrow.
This is my last one.
This is the last pack I’m ever going to buy.
After next week I’ll never smoke again.

What about the flip side. We can that by tricking ourselves, we can minimize any future negative consequences of our actions, and making the present moment more enjoyable, regardless of any objective evidence to the contrary.

What about doing something that we know will benefit us in the future, but we don’t do it because it causes negative emotions in the present?

Did you exercise today? Why not? Surely you are aware of the long-term benefits of exercise right? Well, the same mental trickery works here as well. Either in the form of excuses, (to minimize the present negative emotions) and in from of promises about the future.

I’m too busy today.
I have too much to do.
I have a bad hip/shoulder/leg.

I’ll start after the holidays.
I’m going to start next week.

The human brain is a fantastic machine that can use many forms of lightening speed shell games to hide reality from us. We minimize the potential negative outcome to better feel good now. We minimize the future benefits to better feel good now. When we have a gun pointed at our heads, when there is only NOW, all the mental trickery collapse into single choice.

Life, or death.

So what do you choose, life or death? When you decide to smoke, or yell at your husband, or eat a bowl of ice cream, or go to or avoid the gym, how are you tricking yourself? What are you doing to convince yourself that the future won’t be so bad if you keep doing what your doing? How can you convince yourself that you’ll start doing whatever it is you know you should be doing today, tomorrow?

Your life, all of it, is the cumulative result of all the choices you’ve made. If you are completely happy with your life, or completely disgusted, it’s all on you. People that are generally successful and happy realize this, and make changes along the way to improve their lot. Those that are generally unhappy refuse to accept this, and try their whole lives to find blame in somebody else, somebody outside themselves.

Kind of a heavy post to make, but one thing that you will always have and you should always use, is your choice. You can choose. No matter if you have a gun to your head, or a choice between the gym and the TV, you can choose.

So back to my story. My self-imposed restriction was that I wasn’t allowed to buy anything. Because then I’d have to carry it around with me all day after I made my way back to the station. And since it was only ten in the morning, that was too long to be carrying something that I bought on whim.

Unless I see something really cool, then all bets are off.

How To Powerfully Blast Through To The Other Side Where Massive Abundance Awaits

Are You A Child Or An Adult?

A long time ago, a lot of ancient and primitive civilizations had some kind of “coming of age” ceremony. There are still remnants of that today in both the Jewish and The Catholic traditions, and likely a few others of which I’m not qualified to speak of.

But the ones from before, way before, were much more significant. Simply because the tribe depended on the full adulthood of all it’s members in order to survive. There needed to be a clear line between children and adults. The children were dependent on the providers, and the adults were the providers. If an adult still had some childish characteristics, and depended others more than he or she was able to provide for others, then he or she would be a detriment to the group. Perhaps even cast out.

So societies developed rituals, and traditions where boys became men, and girls became women. With women it was fairly easy. By giving birth a child, the girl would swiftly transform herself from a dependent to a provider. With a constant reminder of how close death was, this became fairly easy.

With men it wasn’t so easy, so they needed to develop a coming of age ceremony. Not like today, where they are mere echoes of those of the past, these were real and life changing events. Boys were dragged of and forced to spend days in the wilderness, alone. Given hallucinogenic drugs, forced to hunt and drink the blood of their prey.

When they left, their mothers wept. Because they knew that the boys would never return. They would come back forever changed into men. Men that were no longer dependent on their mothers or the tribe, but providers, hunters, and killers.

They went through this transformation by facing their deepest fears. The fear of isolation, separation and death. The ultimate rejection. By facing their fears and overcoming them, they became more powerful than they thought possible as boys.

By going through this fear facing life-changing transformation, they transformed themselves from receivers, to creators.

With modern society, this has all but vanished. There are a million ways to avoid your fears and remain dependent on others. It is relatively easy in today’s modern society to remain a child your whole life, expecting others to provide for you. Your girlfriend, husband, government, society in general. These can all be crutches that keep you from reaching your greatest potential.

Society is no longer dependent on every single person making the transformation from childhood to adulthood. In fact, arguments may be made that today’s society functions more efficiently if only a small number make the transition to be creators and providers for the vast majority who are content to remain dependent receivers their whole lives.

In ancient Rome, much is spoken about how powerful and innovative their government was, by few are aware of the vast majority of people, Roman citizens, were basically on welfare. Completely dependent on the state for their livelihood.

And so it has been for that last few thousand years. The only way to make the transition from childhood adulthood is to make the choice yourself. Nobody will do it for you; nobody will drag you to a cave and force you to face your fears. Nobody will allow your child to die if you can find enough food. No tigers will come and eat your baby if you don’t watch after it 24/7.

If you want to become and adult, and realize your true human potential you need to stop relying on free gifts from others. Free support, free dependence. Get rid of the notion that everybody deserves X.

That can be harsh idea to accept. But once you accept the idea that the only way you get X is to figure out a way to secure it for yourself. That may mean paying money for it, or entering into an agreement with somebody else, where they give you X and you give them Y, whatever they may be.

The fear is that if you give up expecting free X from somebody, (e.g. free parental love from a partner, free money from the government) that you will never get it. That you will be left out in the cold, rejected and abandoned.

The truth is that is exactly what you need to feel to make it to the other side. To face your fears, and realize what Rocky Balboa said to Clubber Lang in Rocky III holds much truth:

“You ain’t so bad! You ain’t nothing!”

And then you will realize that on your other side of the fears you’ve created in your mind, there is a world of abundance waiting for you to readily give you anything that you properly ask for through your behavior and communication.

The choice is yours. You can be safe, or you can be free.

The Meaning Of Life (For Real)

Ok, Seriously, Why Are We Here?

There have been, are, and will be plenty of discussions regarding the meaning of life. From the spiritual to the metaphysical to the clinically scientific, there is no end to the plethora of opinions about why we are here. It is something that I have been particularly interested in, as a hobby more than anything else, so I’ve come across some very interesting viewpoints that I’d like to share. None of them are likely true, as we will not ever know what our true purpose is here. But the path of discovery is like no other.

The first thing I’d like to mention is the idea of “models.” When you take a look at reality, and it behaves in ways that you simply do not understand, the human brain has this capacity for creating a working “model,” some kind of organized structure so that we can depend on it. There is something about accepting reality as some random sequence of events that is particularly unsettling on a very deep psychological level.

As man progresses through history, and we find better ways to observe and measure our reality, we come up with more detailed models of the world. A great example is that everybody used to think the world was flat. It was a largely accepted fact, until somebody sailed around the world to prove it wasn’t. Literally overnight, people rejected the flat earth model and accepted the better, more realistic round earth model.

When humans first started coming up with “stories” about how the world worked, they were surrounded by mythology and characters much like themselves. When it rained, the gods of the sky were angry, when it was sunny and warm the gods of the sky were happy. Different societies have different myths that were largely based on their predominant environmental structures.

So what are some of the basic models in our society? Let’s start with religious.
The entire universe was created by some kind of conscious, super intelligent, perhaps infinitely intelligent entity. He or She knows all that ever was, and all that will ever be, down to the minutest of details. From what your boyfriend will say to you tonight about what you decide to wear, to the very moment of your death. There has been much discussion and essays by some very smart people that elaborate exactly how it is possible for a supreme entity to know everything, while still maintaining the idea of human free will. Your boyfriend certainly can choose exactly what he is going to say about that outfit tonight, but the Creator knows exactly what he will choose.

The purpose of the creation that we live in is a mystery, and only our Creator knows the purpose, and where we are headed. Some believe that we get one shot on earth, and the rest of our eternity will be determined by how we live this one shot, while others hold to the notion of reincarnation and the ability to improve on the last go through.

This model provides for a general guideline in the form of religion, and a loving, omniscient Creator who is watching our every move and rooting for us to make the right choices.

Many of the world’s religions, whether they be mono- or poly-theistic fall under this general umbrella model of the world.

The next model is similar, but the Creator lacks a specific identity. It is more a collective of human consciousness. A nameless, faceless infinite intelligence that exists somewhere, somehow that everybody is capable of tapping into. Generally it is believed that this creative, intelligent “force” is at the heart of all “energy” that permeates all matter in the universe. This “force” is generally good, and is the underlying energy beneath all human behavior. This force is ambivalent, and behaves like natural laws. Those that know how to tap into it and maximize its live lives of unlimited abundance and happiness. Those that are either unaware of ignorant of it’s existent are destined to live lives of destitution and struggle.

Many eastern religions fall under this umbrella, as it doesn’t require a human like entity at it’s core as the creator and guardian of all that. The central, creative force is just that, a force, like the wind. You can build sail and harness it’s power, or you can curse it as it blows your leaves around, or you can be completely ambivalent.

The next and final model is the purely scientific model. This holds that there is no intelligent, creative “force” in the universe. We are merely a collection of matter that has, through the course of billions of years and measurable, repeatable, and describable physical laws, organized itself somehow into feeling and thinking creatures that can write long winded posts about the nature of its own existence on the Internet, and hope that many other like minded, self organized blobs of matter will read this and find enlightenment from it. This view doesn’t hold that our meager human minds have the capacity to even begin to understand the incredible detail and depth of all these naturally occurring physical laws. It just holds that there isn’t some “spaghetti monster’ in the sky watching our backs the whole time.

Of course, these three views are not mutually exclusive, and by no means exhaustive. There is plenty of overlap. And many times you may find yourself believing in one more so than the other two, and then out of the blue, some even, maybe random, maybe not will completely and forever change your worldview.

But regardless of where you are on the spectrum of the many theories of existence, you certainly can appreciate the fact that we are here at all, living in a time where such massive communication between people is so easy.

It is truly wonderful to be alive. I hope you feel the same.

The Untapped Power Of Negative Thinking

What Can You Learn From Your Fears?

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, and she was unloading some of her problems on me. I guess that’s what friends are for. They weren’t really any life threatening problems, just the kind that build up, and if you keep them that way they can explode in an unhealthy way, so it helps to find someone to complain to. Which is pretty much what she was doing. Boyfriend problems, boss problems, parent problems. It seems like the entire universe was conspiring against this poor girl.

It got me thinking of a seminar I went to once. (One great way to allow people to vent without getting too emotionally involved is to let your mind drift to other things while they are venting.) This guy was talking about the value of negative thinking. Up until that point, I had always assumed that negative thinking was bad, and should be avoided at all costs. But this guy had a different take.

He said that everything we do naturally has a purpose. Some believe that purpose was put there by God, others (like myself) believe that purpose slowly evolved over time through natural selection, still others (like the guy teaching this seminar) believe in a metaphysical combination of the two. There is some life force that was present right at the big bang that inhabits all of us, and there is a purpose to all the crap we have to go through.

Anyway, he was explaining that negative thinking is a natural outcome of human’s special ability to think and plan for the future. Some biologists think this all started when humans started using tools to hunt animals. We had to kind of plan ahead when we threw a spear at our dinner as it was running away. The brain had to develop a way to accurately predict where the animal would be in a few seconds, and throw our spears accordingly.

This grew into our ability to plan for the future based on current events around. The way it works is the brain will sort through all of our possible choices, and then extrapolate all those choices out into the future, and create several likely scenarios and present them to our imagination. Based on what we imagine, we choose our behaviors accordingly. This happens pretty quickly and unconsciously. When we make a decision that has the potential for a negative outcome, we get nervous an anxious about the future. When we choose behavior that has an almost guaranteed positive outcome, then we get really excited about the future.

This guy at he seminar was saying that our negative thinking about the future can be a powerful warning sign to indicate some problems that may come up. Since we can never be really sure of anything, he was saying to give yourself the luxury of following your imagination for a while, and see what terrible things might happen, and plan accordingly to minimize any bad outcome.

He kept referring to the famous quote by Mark Twain, (which I’m paraphrasing here) “I’ve experienced many terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” Which means that rarely do our worst fears come true.

By allowing yourself to slip into negative thinking can be helpful if you consciously think and plan to avoid the negative outcome. It can be a bad thing if you allow your fears of the future to keep you from taking any action at all. That would be the often referred to condition of “paralysis by analysis.”

People that suffer from this need to plan everything in great detail, so they will be virtually guaranteed of a positive outcome. Of course, we all know that doesn’t always work that way. No matter how much you plan, stuff can happen to disrupt he best-laid plans.

The guy was saying that the people that are the most successful take a balanced approach. They respect their negative thinking enough to make good decisions, but they also respect the randomness of life to have a “Damn the Torpedoes, full speed ahead,” attitude when it comes to taking action.

People that rush in without too much thinking, with a “shoot first, aim later” attitude can be very successful, but they also have to be able to put up with a lot of setbacks and readjustments.

People that won’t even take the first baby step without being completely assured of safe and automatic success leave the starting blocks.

It’s that magical place in the middle where you can tune in just long enough to your negative thinking to put in a few safeguards, and then plow right on through life, confident you can handle and deal with anything that comes up along the way.

And by the time my friend stopped venting, she seemed to be feeling much better. She even had a couple of ideas on how to fix a few of her problems. She thanked me profusely for being such a good listener, and even paid for lunch. She seemed to be in a pretty good mood when we parted ways.

The Dangers Of The Wrong Mindset – And How To Overcome Them

Scarcity or Abundance – Which One Are You?

There has been much written, spoken about, and talked about regarding the difference between a scarcity mindset and an abundance mindset. These two seemingly ubiquitous concepts can change your perception of reality itself. But do we really understand what they mean?

I can understand the mechanics and philosophy and process of baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies. I can even study material, research methods and techniques, and even publish books on how to make chocolate chip cookies, but until I smell and eat them, I really have no idea what I’m talking about.

The funny thing is that the language I use, the illustrations I use in my descriptions of making and eating cookies will be the same whether I have experienced the or not.

It’s easy to think you understand he concepts of scarcity and abundance, but until you experience them firsthand, they are two completely different worlds. One objective, looked at from the outside with only an academic understanding, and the other subjective, from the inside, from an experiential feeling of what it’s really like.

One quick test to see if you really have an abundance mindset or a scarcity mindset with regards to money. How do you feel about salespeople? Car salesmen, door-to-door salesmen, time share salesmen? Do you love them or hate them?

If you truly have an abundance mindset towards money, that is if you really feel deep in your bones that money is plentiful, and you will always have an avalanche of money, then you will never feel threatened or put off by salespeople. You will welcome them. You will enjoy talking with them and seeing what they have to offer.

What good is money if you never spend it? If you truly believe that there is an unlimited amount of money in the universe, then you will never feel a lack. And when the salesman comes knocking you will never fear that he or she will con you out of something. You will never feel as if you are getting a raw deal on anything.

Take air for example. Most everybody naturally has a deep, unconscious belief that there is plenty of air in the world. Enough for everybody. We don’t even thinking about worrying about getting enough air to breath when we wake up in the morning. We don’t get into fights with our loved ones over how we are going to be spending our precious air.

If somebody we don’t know walks into the coffee shop we are passing the time in, we don’t suddenly get worried that they will take our precious oxygen. (Of course if they are smoking that is something different altogether).

Likewise with money. Very few people have a true sense of abundance when it comes to money. Sure we all like to proclaim to each other that we have an abundance mindset. We believe in the Law of Attraction. We put down others when they exhibit what we judgingly call “scarcity thinking.”

But when the salesman comes knocking, or we walk into a car dealership, if we are the least bit nervous, or put off, or fearful of our pocketbook, then we are living, breathing and feeling scarcity.

Most people think that once they get plenty of money, then they will stop their scarcity thinking. That is backwards. That is like saying you want to go on a diet, but you are going to lose weight first, then you’ll start to diet and exercise.

That is the great paradox of human nature and how we perceive reality. We spend our childhoods learn the have-do-be mindset. We have something, then we are motivated by our possessions and then it shapes our personality. We are born completely blank, and we have to be given thoughts, ideas, and behaviors, as we grow older. We absorb who we are, how we behave, what we get from the adults around us.

But when we become adults, we must make a shift from the have-do-be mindset to the be-do-have mindset. When we are children we are because of what we have. As adults, we must learn that what we have is a result of what and who we are.

As we grow up, our personalities and behaviors reflect our environment. But as we grow older, we must learn that our environment becomes a reflection of who we are.

The simples test to who you really are on the inside, beneath all the posturing and affirmations and efforts and appearances is to simply look around you. What does your house or apartment look like? Your friends? Your relationships? Your bank account? They won’t change, unless you do.

Change yourself first and your environment will follow. It may take some time, but it will change. Don’t give up.

It’s easy to blame the world. But that is the reaction and thinking style of a child. Children blame the world. Adults take responsibility and change themselves, knowing the environment will change accordingly.

No, it’s not easy. And yes, it can take a lifetime. But what else are we here for except to shape our own reality?

Nurture Vs. Nature – Why It Doesn’t Matter

How To Program Yourself For Automatic Success

There has been an ongoing debate for a while among people that study human development and potential, and believe it or not, linguists. There is one camp that believes that when humans are born, we are completely blank, and don’t know anything about anything. It would be the equivalent of buying a brand new computer with no operating system, not software, nothing.

Similar to the computers of many years ago. They didn’t even know how to start. So every time you had to start up your computer, you actually had to insert a punch card that was configured to give the program the start up parameters.

There are those that feel humans are completely and utterly blank when we come into the world, and that all we are is a result of our environment.

From a purely physical standpoint, that seems a bit ridiculous. As a general rule, and maybe you’ve noticed this, but children of Asian parents usually grow up with Asian features (e.g. black hair, brown eyes). Same with people from other parts of the world. Of course you could likely explain that different climates in different parts of the world gave rise to different physical features over hundreds of thousand so years of evolution, but you could hardly say that this process is repeated for each generation.

So at the very least, it appears that we come pre programmed for at least some kinds of things, such as certain physical traits, which are based both on our ethnicity and our parents. Tall parents usually produce tall kids, etc.

On the other extreme is those that argue that we come in with pretty much everything all configured, and life is nothing more than a discovery of that configuration. People will usually point out cases of twins who although separated at birth, grew up into mysteriously similar lives. Same lives, same names of their wives, same habits, down to the brand of cigarettes.

Of course, these cases are few and far between, they are anything but the norm. Those that study statistics will tell you that you can prove any theory, no matter how hair brained, by choosing certain data to represent your case. Nostradamus, and the appearance of the twin towers on a folded twenty-dollar bill to name a couple.

But along those two endpoints of the spectrum, we have to lie someplace in the middle. We do seem to come pre programmed with some kinds of pre-determined characteristics.

Despite how this seems to suggest that we are doomed by fate, there is a ray of hope in something called meta programs. These are a shorthand collection of decisions the brain groups together to conserve valuable processing time. The reason I say ray of hope is because although in many people these usually go undiscovered and therefore unchanged, once you find out your own metaprograms you can change them to improve your results. Here are a couple important ones. As you read, ask yourself which “endpoint” resonates most with you, and just be aware of it as you go through your daily life, to determine if it serves you, or if you want to change.

The first one is motivation. Are you motivated more by fear of pain, or the promise of reward? Many people are motivated by the fear of pain, and take action in the right direction. But as soon as they make progress, the fear of pain diminishes, as does their motivation. This is one of the main reasons it’s so hard to stick to a diet once you start it.

In order to overcome this, focus on the end results, and make it really big and compelling.

Another one is sorting. Do you see similarities in things, or differences? If you see differences more so than similarities, the world can seem to be a dangerous and confusing place. The human brain is more comfortable with similarity. If you want to try to something new, and only see how it’s different than what you are used to, it might be hard to get started. However, if you train your self to find similarities it will make doing new things easier.

For example, starting a new job can be a frightening experience, if you are always comparing how different it is to your old job. But if you consciously look for similarities instead, it will be much easier to adjust.

Another important one is verification. When you choose something, how do you know it’s the right choice? The two options here are internal and external. If you seek external verification for all your choices, you will always be following somebody else’s lead. What diet to go on, what to order at a restaurant, what movie to rent at the video shop, all these decisions will require you get somebody else’s opinion first.

On the flip side, if you only need to rely on yourself, then you’ll have much more freedom to choose. This can be the toughest one to change because it is very easy to rely on the opinions of others. If you find yourself asking others opinions often, try choosing by yourself, and be happy with your choice. Take small steps, and as your confidence continues to increase, it will become easier.

When you start to examine your own meta programs and how the help you achieve what you want in life, it opens up a huge realm of possibility. Just by noticing how you choose things, you will be far ahead of most other people.

To summarize here are the three main ones:

Pain or Pleasure – Which motivates you the most?

Same of Different – What do you see the most?

Internal or External – Do you always need others opinions, or is yours enough?

After you get skilled with these, there are about twenty other ones I’ll be writing about later on to help you make success automatic for you.

You Are Surrounded By Beauty

What Treasure Do You Hold?

The other day I was sitting in a bookstore talking to one of he girls that works behind the counter in the coffee shop section. It seems that many bookstores these days have a full-blown coffee shop inside. Which makes sense, because what goes better than hanging out in a bookstore and reading books?

One of the cool things I like about bookstores is how many completely ideas different people have about certain things. Even if we confine ourselves to the measurable physical universe, there is still an endless supply of things known and unknown to talk about. Even things we can see, touch taste and feel we have really no idea of the underlying structure and substance.

Many quantum physicists have dramatically questioned the nature of reality after discovering the incredibly illogical subatomic world. Many have gone on to write philosophical books on the subject.

Even you wander into the religion section, you are in for a wealth of different ideas, beliefs and opinions regarding who we are, how we got here, and where we are going.

There are some really interesting books that lie on the border between religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. I never cease to be amazed at the sheer variety of thought that is available in bookstores. And those are just people that sat down and wrote a book and convinced somebody to publish it and sell it in a bookstore.

Imagine all the incredibly diverse thoughts in people’s heads that are just walking around and waiting to get out. Many times we make the mistake and assume that because someone may not be so eloquent with words that their thoughts are therefore inferior, but that is never the case.

One of the most prevalent theories of human existence is that every single human shares the same DNA. Not that we all have the same parents, but the structure of all human DNA is the same. It’s not like some people have more chromosomes than others.

So it stands to reason that everybody’s brain has the capacity for thinking up new and wonderful ideas. Speaking skills may not be their Forte. Even the great Moses called up his brother Aaron to do his public speaking for him. Can you imagine if you tried that at work?

“Uh, yea boss, I’ll give the presentation at next years shareholder meeting. But I pretty much suck at public speaking; in fact, they kicked me out of toastmasters. So I’m gonna have my brother come in and give the speech for me, ok?”

So as I as talking to this girl that worked behind the coffee counter, she started telling me her story. She is originally from Laos, and her family escaped to Thailand during the seventies. She said she remembers being shot at as they crossed the river from Laos into Thailand. Then in Thailand they had to live in this “reeducation camps” for a while before they figured out a way to get to the United States.

She was very young when all this happened, so she doesn’t remember much other than what her older brothers and her parents told her. She was six when it happened. Imagine getting shot at trying to escape the country of your birth at six years. I don’t know if I even learned to tie my shoes when I was six.

I couldn’t help but be amazed at the incredible amount of stories and ideas and experiences that everybody is carrying around with them. And most of them will be more than happy to share with you. All you need to do is ask.

How To Sort The World For Maximum Benefit

The other day I was having a chat with an ex colleague of mine. We were talking about various things that we used to be involved with together, that we no longer are, and the different things we are doing now and how we’ve kind of drifted in separate directions. One of the more interesting things we discussed was how people tend to categorize things. Even when I referred to this person, you’ll notice I referred to him as an ex colleague. Not an old friend, or an old co-worker, or an old boss, but an ex colleague.

What does that imply? Other than our actual relationship, it is an example of how we are constantly looking out at the world and sorting everything into categories and compartments. I was playing poker the other day with a couple of buddies (notice I used a different word there to describe these people) and noticed they each stacked their chips differently.

We weren’t playing for money, or anything, just pretend. We were using different colored chips, but they were all the same value. If you aren’t familiar with poker or gambling with chips, usually different colored chips have different monetary value. In this case they were all worth the same thing.

One guy had his all neatly stacked accordingly to color, even though we had agreed that the value didn’t depend on color. Even he would make a bet; he would make sure that each chip was the same color. And many times, the amount that he would bet was dependent on how many of each color chips he had.

The other guy had a seemingly opposite approach. When he made bets, he made sure there was an equal amount of colored chips in each bet. Since we had four different colors (red, blue, green and yellow) he always made his bets in increments of four.

While we were playing and shooting the breeze (notice how with buddies you shoot the breeze, but with colleagues you have discussions) I started thinking about categories that people carry around in their heads, and how we are always sorting things we encounter in the world and putting them into different categories.

I suppose this tendency served us well in our evolutionary past, as it made life or death decisions more or less automatic. Safe or unsafe, delicious or poisonous, familiar territory or far away from home. But sometimes it can be very limiting.

My two buddies are a good example of this. They were both completely limited on how much they could bet based on how they chose to sort their chips. When an opportunity came up that called for a different sized bet (like sometimes in poker you want to call without raising) they didn’t seem able to break from their pre set strategies.

It’s interesting when you examine how you sort things, experiences, even people. Friend? Enemy? Helper? Detractor? There’s that old saying that you should keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, but I think the deeper truth is to be able to notice the enemy and the friend in all people. While I’m not advocating walking around like Richard Nixon thinking that everybody is out to get you, I think it helps to keep people and their behavior in context.

One very useful and powerful skill to have is to be able to rearrange your own categories that you place people and things into, and be able to routinely examine what you’ve placed in those categories and determine if they don’t deserve an upgrade or a downgrade.

Everybody knows somebody that is completely trusting and gullible, and is always being taken advantage of (a salesperson’s dream customer). This is an example of somebody that is unable or unwilling to put people into the “not to be trusted until further notice” category. Of course on the opposite end of the spectrum are the always paranoid and “Trust No One” crowd.

When you get down to it, people are a collection of their behaviors and capabilities. And as people grow and learn, many times their behaviors and capabilities change over time. Some for the better, some for the worse. There’s no reason why shouldn’t always be updating your categories, so you can better use the resources that are always around you.