Category Archives: Brain Power

How to Achieve Anything

As you sit there, reading this post, feeling the feelings in your chair, you might begin to recall a time when you thought about something that you wanted in life. Perhaps it was a new car, or a relationship, or a box of chocolate flavored marshmallows. If you’ve ever had the experience of wishing for something that didn’t come true, then this article is for you. In this you will learn the exact steps to take that will turn those “wishes” into strong desires that will in turn manifest into reality.

I’m not sure if this works because there is some underlying metaphysical principle that governs our lives, or if it is because of the unique nature of our brains due to the complex process of evolution. Either way, this simple process has brought untold riches and happiness to many people. Unfortunately, throughout time, some of these truths were twisted and misinterpreted, either on purpose or accidentally, to achieve social control and power. If you’ve heard about the controversy of Napoleon Hill’s original “Think and Grow Rich,” manuscript, with respect to organized religions, you’ll understand the power of these techniques.

The process is simple, but it does require some diligence, and some patience. It is quite a shame that the vast majority of people throughout time have lived lives of “quiet desperation,” when there is this simple method that can get you exactly what you want.

The first step is to create an absolutely clear goal of what it is that you want. You have to make sure that you truly want it, and you haven’t been brainwashed by society or church or your family into thinking that you want this. This may take some time, so be patient. Dig through your desires until you find one that you can really accept if it comes true without reservation.

The second step is to put it in present tense writing. Clear, concise, accurate writing. I own a red convertible, 1967 corvette. I have six pack abs that I can see in the mirror every morning when I wake up. I have a golf handicap of 10.

The third step is to come up with at least three or four mind pictures of what your goal looks, smells, tastes, sounds and feels like. Take your time and come up with as many rich representations as you can.

The fourth step is to get in the habit of repeating your goal to yourself several times a day, while picturing the various images of it in your mind. It’s very important to feel a strong emotional appreciation for your choice. At first this may seem fruitless, as you will feel weird imagining that you have something that you don’t. Be patient. This is the part where most people fail. They try this a few times, and after a week without a sack of money magically appearing on their doorstep, they give up. If you don’t feel a strong emotion at first, keep doing this. You will be building actual neurological pathways in your brain every time you visualize this. The more you do this, the easier it will be to do, and the more real it will seem and the easier it will to really feel that sense of appreciation for what you are creating. It’s important to feel the appreciation in the present, as if you already have this.

You should do this visualization step several times a day, for five minutes or so each time, and as you fall asleep every night. Again, this crucial step is the reason so many people don’t achieve what they want in life. We are too distracted by TV, news, swine flu, anything else that keeps us from quiet reflection. Don’t give to the giving up your thoughts to brain candy.

The best way to get started with this is choose something easy; to make sure that this really works. Simple personal habits good for this, like smiling and saying hi to strangers as part of your personality. Or waking up naturally at a certain time every morning. When you easily achieve this, you can move on to bigger and better things.

For resources, I recommend the following books:

Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
Dr. Maxwell Maltz, Psycho Cybernetics
Dr. Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

There is nothing that you cannot achieve with the right use of your mind.

How to Create a MasterMind Group

I was re-reading Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” the other day. I was reading the part where he was describing his “imaginary master mind group.” If you haven’t had a chance to read that fantastic book, or if you haven’t read it in a while, I can’t recommend it enough. There are several free versions of it online, or you can go buy yourself a hard copy to take with you. Lately I’ve been reading snippets whenever I’m on the train, or hanging out in a coffee shop. I think it’s a great idea to always have a good book such as “Think and Grow Rich,” or other books of that nature to pull out and read this whenever you get a chance. It can really be helpful.

The “imaginary mastermind group” that Hill was describing was a modified version of his Mastermind Group idea. I don’t think the idea was his, most likely several people over the centuries have discovered the concept of synergy in a group. The basic idea is to get a group of people together, and collectively solve a problem. Business problems, social problems, political problems have all been solved in the past with the application of a mastermind group. The original framers of the United States Constitution is a particular good example of an effective and powerful mastermind group. Their efforts have proved to be valuable to many people over the years.

Sometimes, though, you don’t have a group of powerful individuals at your disposal to collect together and figure out how you are going to pay your rent, or write that report at work. Sometimes, you have to go it alone. Which is how the imaginary mastermind group comes in. You look through history, and get a collection of real, historical figures that you admire. It’s good to have a wide variety of disciplines. Doctors, scientists, orators, mystics, magicians, politicians, whatever. Come up with as many different specific fields as you can, and then choose on person from each one. I think Napoleon Hill had Darwin, Lincoln, Henry Ford, and Emerson, among others, in his group. Just choose anybody who exists, either currently, or historically that you’d like giving you advice and counsel.

Then at night, just as drifting off into sleep, gather your imaginary mastermind group together and have a meeting regarding the day’s issues. Make sure you are in charge, and each can only speak when you give them the floor. If you want, you can ask them questions regarding different problems you are having in your life, and the best way to solve it. You’ll be amazed at the insight they will offer. It’s important to release any weird feelings that you have about doing this, and allow your imagination to speak through them. It kind of gives your brain permission to look at things from a different perspective, and think of ideas you wouldn’t normally think of.

You can also imagine key members of your mastermind group going with you into certain situations. For example, if you have a big meeting with your boss, you can have a meeting with your mastermind group the night before. Whoever seems to give you the best advice, take them with you, and imagine they are standing behind you, whispering into your ear. (Just make sure not to turn around and say “Huh? What was that?” to them during the meeting.)

Hill even went on to say that after a few months of regular meetings with his mastermind group, they began to take on distinct personalities, and he had to stop because he feared they were becoming too real, even for him. So be careful, and don’t let your imagination run away with you. You don’t want to end up like that mathematician in “Beautiful Mind.”

Your brain is a fantastically wonderful and barely understood part of you that can offer up many different ways to get what you want out of life. The imaginary mastermind group is but one way to tap this fantastic source for whatever pleasure you want to easily achieve in life.

Permalink

Unconscious Guidance

The other day I was walking somewhere and got sidetracked. Has that ever happened to you? You will have this clear goal in mind, this clear outcome that you’ve decided is what you want to do. You set out to achieve this goal, sure that you will achieve it. But then something happens, and either because you didn’t allow yourself to see all the possibilities, or maybe your original goal was well formed enough, you just kind of end up in another place.

One way to get around this is to be aware of what your underlying intentions are. It helps to be able to dig deeper to find the real reason behind your goals. When you search beneath what is pretending to be the important part, you’ll be surprised to discover that many of your goals fall under the same basic categories. Safety, comfort, recognition, personal growth.

As I got off the streetcar (yes they have street cars where I live) I saw my goal in sight. The coffee shop where I had intended to relax and spend an hour or so writing in my journal. As it happened, the weather was particularly nice, and there were a fair number of people out and about. There is a street going just past that I’ve always kind of wondered about. There was a steady stream of people walking up this street, that looked as if they were going to some kind of event. You can sort of tell when people are going to find something special here. Because of the way they are dressed, many of them carrying water bottles, cameras, other things that make it appear as if they are on a mini-trek that might take a few hours.

But something funny happened. Usually when I’ve made a choice, (other than to wander around without a clear choice) and I see a distraction, I have at least a few moments of indecision. Should I go this way? What about my other plans? Which is better? Hmm. But not this time. My coffee shop plans instantly disappeared as I followed the crowd up the street. When I emerged back about two hours later, much richer for the experience, I never even gave my abandoned coffee shop plans a second thought.

If you are thinking this is completely platitudinous and futile, maybe you’re right. The thing that struck me was the speed at which I’d abandoned my coffee shop plans for an unknown trek up the street, merely using the crowd as my guidance. Which leads me to suspect that something told me that the underlying reason I wanted to hang out at the coffee shop would better be served by following the crowd up the street. On  an unconscious level, the change in plans didn’t even warrant a the token elevation into consciousness. My desire just shifted, without any conscious thought.

Maybe because I’ve been doing a lot of meditating lately, I was able to not need to question the greater wisdom of my unconscious. I just went with it, and had a much richer experience because of it. Of course I wasn’t doing brain surgery, or walking across a tightrope over the grand canyon, I was just wiling away a Sunday afternoon. But in that moment I experienced an unconscious guidance that I don’t usually experience.

Thank you unconscious, whatever you are. That was fun.

Permalink

Plant the Right Seeds in Your Mind to Claim the Fruits of Life

I was watching my neighbor the other day work in her field. She has a small field that has a couple rows of cabbages, and some kind of long white turnip that only grows around here. She was spending a lot of time preparing the ground for the spring planting. She needed to start mixing this stuff into the soil, and then she goes out to add this other stuff. She explained it all to me, but it sounded really involved. I always thought that you just planted some seeds, and hopefully remembered to water them, and then like a month later you’d have an apple tree or an orange bush or a bunch of tomatoes or something. I guess growing stuff is kind of complicated. I’m sure glad some people know to do it, because I would get pretty hungry otherwise.

Which kind of reminded me of that old commercial for Carl’s Junior. It showed a guy in the supermarket looking for food, and he was wondering how to cook it. And then the tag line of the ad said “If it wasn’t for Carl’s, people would go hungry,” or something like that. I thought it was clever tag line, pretty funny. It’s amazing what ideas people can come up with to grab your attention. When you think about it, they have  really tough job. You’re sitting there, watching TV, and then the show stops, and you know a commercial is coming, so you automatically fire up your anti commercial defense shield. And every commercial you see is mixed in with every other commercial. These marketing guys know there stuff, because they can come up with something entertaining and capable of blasting through your anti commercial defense shield, all in thirty seconds for less. I don’t know if that is a wonder of modern advertising, or a result of the modern day short attention span.

I was hanging out at this yoga class a friend had talked me into going to. (Of course I was supposed to meet her there, and she didn’t show up, but that’s another story,) and he started talking about how important it was to cultivate your thoughts. He said underneath your everyday thoughts are base thoughts. These base thought contain your beliefs, values, how you think about yourself compared to the rest of the world. He was saying that these base thoughts are very powerful and can make life exceptionally easy and rewarding, or exceptionally difficult, depending on the quality of the base thought. The problem is that not only is your base thought difficult to change, but most people don’t even know that it’s there. He said the clearest indication of the quality of your base thought is the quality of your life. And like a gigantic ship, it takes a while to turn. And most people just don’t have the discipline to keep feeding your base thoughts consistent surface thoughts on a regular basis. He said these surface thoughts are like giving water to a plant. You have to feed your base thoughts with consistent surface thoughts in the direction you want your life to move. The problem is most people get this, and try to do this, but they give up after only a couple of weeks. He said it would be like planting a seed and then digging it up every couple of weeks to see if it had sprouted yet. You need to be patient, and most importantly, you need to be consistent with your surface thoughts that you feed your deeper self with positive ideas about your future that is coming true for you, now.

I especially like watching the Superbowl, specifically because they have such great commercials. And one of my favorite things to do when I’m bored, is look up good commercials on Youtube. You can see my current favorite if you go there and type in “Nike let your game speak.” I find that one especially inspiring.

And my neighbor was telling me that although now is the busy time, getting the soil ready, getting the seedlings ready, getting ready for the spring planting festival, the best part is the waiting. Because once they plant the right seeds in the right soil, it is inevitable that the right fruit will come up.

Permalink

Play with Your Mind

If you’ve ever had the pleasure, or unfortunate task depending on your outlook, of following a two or three year old,  you know how incredibly energetic they can be. Try as you might, you can never predict entirely what their next move will be. They can be completely absorbed in something fascinating, like a doorknob, then suddenly shift their attention to something colorful. It can be wonderfully refreshing to see how much joy and happiness that mundane objects we adults take for granted can bring to a young mind bent on the thrill of discovery. Of course, being adults, (unless you are a full time care provider) we usually have other things on our mind than chasing around a three year old all day long. It can be fun.

I was in sitting in a coffee shop last weekend, the kind that is inside of a large bookstore. I like coffee, and I like books, so for me it’s a great combination. The bookstore itself was inside of  a fairly large mall. A woman came walking in with her daughter. She appeared to be about four. As soon as she walked into the bookstore, her eyes lit up as she was hit with the incredible cacophony of colors and shapes and unlearned words on display.  When she first walked in, she had a look of slight boredom on her face. This quickly shifted to an open sense of wonder, then to a pure blissful look of discovery as she took off running towards the treasure. Her mother on the other hand, had a look of delight at her daughters pleasure, mixed with a “here we go again,” expression of knowing.

Sometimes when I’m out walking, I’ll be thinking of something, kind of letting my thoughts drift here and there. It’s almost like when you are laying in bed at night, your thoughts meandering around different ideas and memories. Then your thoughts can shift, and you begin to follow them and wonder where they are going. And sometimes you realize what has been happening here, and you kind of wake up, and think, “huh? How did I get here?” When this usually happens to me I usually just give in and let my wandering thoughts take over. But when I’m out walking, I like to follow my thoughts and try to figure out what they are trying to tell me. Sometimes I’ll have to stop, and backtrack to the preceding thoughts to see what led to what I’m thinking about now. And sometimes it’s amazing when I can discover the metaphor that my mind is trying to tell me about something.

And the great thing about most book stores nowadays, is they have whole sections for kids to play in. They have all kinds of fantastic books for kids. And toys that can help you learn and spread out your mind to be able to grasp and understand the world around you. One of the biggest mistakes that people can make is to forget how fun it is to learn and play. Because when you are a kid, learning and playing are really the same thing. Imagine how cool your life will be when you realize that you never have to stop learning and playing. What if you were to discover that learning and playing is really what life is all about? Wouldn’t that be fun?

Permalink

Tap Your Memories for a Powerful Future

One way to really put yourself on the fast track to success is through the creative use of your imagination. Humans are unique among the animals, as our brains give us the ability to imagine different outcomes for our immediate future. Many evolutionary experts believe this is one of the driving forces behind our incredibly large brains, compared to other species.

This of course can be more of a hindrance than a help. If you’ve ever thought about doing something a little bit risky, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You think about doing something. Like raising your hand in class to ask a question, or speaking up with a perhaps controversial point in a meeting at work. Or you see an attractive member of the opposite sex and you’d like to go and introduce yourself.

What happens next is almost so fast we don’t even realize it. You quickly imagine all the possible outcomes of your prospective course of action, and many times the answer that comes back is a big NO! DANGER!. The brain looks into the future, and imagines what each potential outcome will feel like. Any feelings the brain deems are not desirable, get rejected, and you suddenly feel anxious and nervous about doing what you only thought a minute ago was a no brainer. Now you’re not so sure.

How can you fix this?

Not to worry. Here’s what you do. Before you go to sleep at night, scan through the day for any instances where you wish you could have acted differently. Say you saw a beautiful woman, and failed to take this opportunity to go and introduce yourself. Forget about why, and forget about chastising yourself. Instead, imagine what resource would have been helpful in that situation. For example, what resource would have been helpful when you saw the beautiful woman? Courage? Wit? Charm? Amazing linguistic dexterity? Anything will work. Since this is only in your imagination, you can try different ways until you find something that works really well.

Let’s say you chose courage. Here’s what you do. If it seems kind of weird, don’t worry. It is. But that’s ok. Remember, this is all only happening in your imagination. Scan through your whole life until you find a couple examples of that resource. What was it? Courage. Anytime you felt courage, in any situation, is fine. Now freeze the two memories out in front of your there. See yourself in the memory over there on the left, where you were courageous. And see yourself in the more recent memory over on the right, where you were about to go and talk to the girl of your dreams before you changed your mind.

Exhale all your breath, and breath in all the courage from the picture on the left. Slowly exhale your courage into the picture on the right, giving yourself the courage in your more recent memory. Do this three or four times. Next, float over into yourself on the picture on the right. Now that you’ve infused yourself with the courage that you already experienced, relive your recent memory, only with a different outcome. Walk over and talk to her, throw down some mad game, and get her number, or whatever it is that you wanted to do when you first saw her. Repeat this a couple times.

The key with this exercise is to do it consistently, every night. It might seem difficult, or strange, or even borderline psychotic at first, but when you get the hang of it, you are sending your brain a clear and powerful message. You can not only imagine different futures, but you can reach back into your past and extract resources from anywhere, anytime and from any context and apply them to now, so that in the future you’ll be much more successful than you were before you read this article.

Permalink

The Blue Birds of Happiness

Once upon a time there was a little bird. He was blue, but he wasn’t a bluebird. He was one of those birds that you didn’t exactly know what category to put him in. His name was Charlie. One day he was hanging out with his bird friends. They had already found all the worms that they had planned to eat for the day, and it wasn’t mating or nesting season, so they really didn’t have to do much except just kind of hang out and chirp about this and that. There were six in all, they were all starting to get bored. They were past adolescence, but they still had sufficient energy so that they weren’t content just to sit and do nothing.

Kind of like when you have a particular busy week at work, and you are looking forward to the weekend. Then the weekend comes, and after the relief of having no more work for the time being wears off, you kind of get bored. That happened to me once. I decided to go to the movies, like I do, but when I got there I realized there wasn’t anything playing that I wanted to see. I don’t do that very often, it’s just that on that particular afternoon I was fairly bored. So deep down, i sort of realized that just the drive to the movie theater was better than wasting a fine Saturday afternoon happy that I didn’t have to work. I could be happy I didn’t have to work anyplace, no reason to stay at home right.

I think it’s fascinating the way your mind works like that. Like when you make a decision, you think that consider all the options. Then something happens and throws a monkey wrench into your plans. Then you find out that you made a mistake in planning that somehow took into account the sudden appearance of Mr. Murphy. Like your mind was able to look into the future and plan for all possibilities without you even knowing it. Sometimes I think your unconscious is a lot smarter than you realize. And when you allow yourself to really trust your unconscious, and allow it to help yourself do things, you will be amazed when you find out how incredibly powerful it is. Sometimes I’ll be wandering around my house muttering to myself “I can’t find my keys, I can’t find my keys, I can’t find my keys,” and I’m sure you realize that never works. It’s only when I switch (unconsciously of course) to muttering “where are my keys? where are my keys?” do they suddenly appear, as if by magic.  Other times I just lose my place, and forget things.

So when I realized there was nothing playing at the movie theater I wanted to see, I started wandering around. I happened into bookstore, and I saw a book I had been looking for. Of course I bought it, and enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s like my brain was telling me to go buy this book, but it was tricking me into thinking I was going to see a movie. Like my unconscious knows how to keep me motivated. Otherwise I’d forget what I was after.

So the birds decided to head on over to the new neighbors house. They had just build a gorgeous birdbath. And the birds had just suddenly remembered that they had forgotten it was there. And everybody lived happily ever after.

Permalink

Dropping Frogs Can Lead to Changing Beliefs

I was reading an article in the paper the other day about a small town in the midwest that experienced a very strange phenomenon. One fine during the summer, or perhaps the spring, it started raining frogs. It happened in the fifties, and it was a small town, so there is absolutely no evidence that this actually took place. Some say it was a hoax. Others think it was due to an extremely unlikely confluence of meteorological events pulled the frogs out of a lake them through some strange quirk of air pressure and deposited them on the unsuspecting town inhabitants. Others claim that it was mass hypnosis. Mass hypnosis is a strange thing when you think about it, because there have been many documented accounts of mass hypnosis. Some of them easy to understand, some unexplainable like the falling frogs.

I was reminded of this story when I recently saw a movie where a guy fell in love with a prosthetic doll. At first people thought he was completely nuts, but then slowly, as they realized he had deeper problems, decided that the best course of action would be to help the poor guy. At first he was the but of jokes behind his back. I’m sure you can imagine the jokes that would circulate should you show up at a party with a fake person and in all seriousness claim her as your girlfriend. One of the most fascinating things about the movie was how the townspeople slowly started to get sucked into his reality. Because he believed so completely that this rubber doll was a real person that he had real conversations, (and even a couple of arguments with,) the townspeople slowly started becoming involved in his obvious break from reality.

This is an example of when you have a really strong, congruent frame of reality. If you walk through life holding a strong set of beliefs in your head, others will believe them as well if the beliefs held tightly enough. It matters not if they are true or not. The key is when you choose a belief, to make sure to choose helpful ones, and act one hundred percent that they are actually true. When you do that, people will only follow your lead. Imagine some people in the world that have really strong beliefs, and act on them. Suppose you could have a strong belief that you are incredibly attractive to the opposite sex? Suppose that you held a belief that money is easy to come by? Suppose you were to hold a belief that you were able to learn new things easily and quickly? How easy would your life be then? What other beliefs can you come up with that once you believe them, others will as well? How easily can you imagine your life when you switch out old beliefs, and switch in new ones that support you and what you want to create better things in life?

So as the movie went on, the main character decided, most likely subconsciously, that he learned what he needed from his relationship with girlfriend, and imagined a deadly disease for her. So she could die, and clear the way for him to start to build relationships with real people. I think there are several important lessons in this movie, not the least of which is how powerful your mind is to create the life that you want, by almost any means necessary. Even enlisting the help of the entire town in some incredible group self induced hypnosis. That is pretty powerful stuff.

And as far as group hypnosis, sometimes called ‘mass hysteria,’ there are different kinds. Their are the organic kinds, like the raining frogs, and certain episodes of dancing hysteria, and laughing hysteria. Then there is created mass hysteria, although the creation of mass hysteria is not always the intent, as what happened in the famous Orson Wells “War of The Worlds” incident, where everybody thought we were under attack by Martians. Personally, I’d prefer some falling frogs. Unless of course they were Martians disguised as falling frogs.

Permalink

Powerfully Change Your Present by Easily Changing Your Past

There has been a lot of talk in the media and in popular areas of discussion recently about the importance of happiness. Happiness is that elusive goal that you don’t really know how to define it, but you certainly can appreciate it when you have it. Many people have tried to define happiness in such a way as being measure by external circumstances. Money, Car, Friends, Relationships. Most people don’t realize that the path to happiness is an inside game. Of course, I’m sure you’re also aware that a solid inside game automatically leads to a fantastic outside reality. The mistake most people make, is that when they see an outside reality in somebody else’s life, they try to reproduce the outer effects, without realizing that you need to pay attention to the inside first, and the outside will naturally follow. One way to do this is to change your happiness set point.

One of the best way to increase your happiness set point is to change the thoughts that you habitually think. If this sounds confusing, don’t worry. It is actually fairly easy once you incorporate some easy habits into your daily life. Long term success is all about what you set up to do today, on a regular basis, so that your future will automatically come pre delivered the way you want it.

The first step in changing your habitual thoughts is to become aware of them. Most people amble through life, day after day, thinking the same thoughts over and over without really being aware of it. Because the brain is not only incredibly fast, but also incredibly efficient, there are thousands of thoughts that happen below the threshold of conscious awareness.

For example, when I was a kid, I was out riding my bike. I saw a big scary dog, that growled at me and showed me his big white sharp teeth, dripping with saliva he was no doubt hoping to use to digest my bones after he ate me. The standoff lasted for only a few seconds, but in my childhood mind, it seemed like an eternity. Now when I see a dog, my brain immediately notices that there is a dog in front of me. It then sorts through all my memories of dogs to determine the appropriate emotional response. When it finds that memory I described above, it comes back with the emotion of scary, danger, run away. This all happens so quickly that when I see a dog today, I seemingly immediately only notice a feeling of anxiety. I’m not aware that my brain is doing all that searching and deciding.

It’s only when I unpack that memory, and do some basic memory operation procedures to detach the unpleasantness from that memory of the dog from my current experience, that I can see a dog and feel a sense of happiness and safety, rather than anxiety and fear.

One way to look at your happiness set point is the sum total of your automatic responses to the environment that you encounter on a regular basis. If you are deathly afraid of snakes, and your next door neighbor has a pet boa constrictor that he takes out for a walk the same time as you every morning, you are not going to have a particularly high happiness set point.

What can be helpful, is to go back in time, in your mind, and change whatever memory is there that your brain uses as a reference to tell you to be afraid of snakes.

It sounds really bizarre, but it is pretty simple, and kind of fun when you can learn to do it fairly quickly. Here’s how I did it with my dog memory.

First thing I did was to go back and find the first memory of the dog. Because this can take some time, it may be the most cumbersome step. More practice will yield more memory dexterity, so don’t worry.

Next you tweak the heck out of the memory, so it doesn’t bother you any more. One way to do this, is to relive it, but change certain aspects of it. Like you can view it dissociated. That means that instead of being “in” the memory, I am actually watching myself have a showdown with the dog. And every time I relive that memory, I can change it. Like I can make the dog really small, with clown shoes on. Or I can make the dog dripping grape kool aid instead of child digesting saliva. Or I can have a flea circus performing on the dog’s back, complete with trapeze and the tiny clown fleas getting out of the even tinier clown flea VW bug.

And on top of all the above tricks, you can play the memory backwards, forwards, stuttered, black and white. You can even make the dog a person dressed in a dog costume. And the whole time I am doing this, I can imagine my adult self standing behind my child self, with my steady adult hand on my child shoulder, telling him how funny that dog looks.

I only had to do this a few times, before that memory lost it’s bite. (sorry.) And when you begin to go through your daily life, and systematically dig up and change memories that are giving you trouble, you can really start to raise up your happiness set point. Imagine what life will be like when ordinary objects that you see every day can give you feelings of hope and happiness instead of fear and anxiety.

After all, they are your thoughts. You can think them any way you want to.

Permalink

The Unstoppable Power of Silence

If you are a smoker, or a drinker, or an overeater, and you’ve ever decided to cut back, or quit, you’ve probably heard the advice that you should tell as many other people as you can about your goal, in order to give yourself some social support to keep going, and some social pressure in case you backslide. This can be great advice. Many times I’ve had weight loss bets with friends to keep motivation high. I’m sure you can remember a time when you wanted to achieve a goal, or stop or cut back a habit and have been able to enjoy support form friends and family.

Other, more lofty goals, may require a different tact. These might be better left secret. There is an ancient law of magic that goes as follows:

To Know

To Will

To Dare

To Be Silent

Let’s break them down, shall we?

To Know.

Sounds simple enough. You want to do something. It helps if you know what you are doing. Skills. Techniques. Where to get resources. Many places can help you in this regard. Library. Friends. Mentors. Websites. Humans are by nature, very curious creatures, so finding information can be the easiest part of creating a reality that you desire.

To Will

This is where the fun begins. You have a vague idea of what you want. Happiness, wealth, sexual and emotional intimacy. To will you need to create a plan and make a decision to bring it into being. This is different from a wish, or a hope,  or a longing. This is a strong decision to create what you want, by hook or by crook. Or as the character in Apollo Thirteen put it so succinctly, you must decide that “Failure is Not an Option!”

To Dare

This is the scary part. You’ve decided you want to create a relationship. You’ve studied material on how to be socially adept, how to flirt, how to ask the right questions. You’ve made the decision to make this happen. Now there he or she is. You must walk over and introduce yourself. What separates the Bill Gates and the Tiger Woods and the Oprah Winfreys from the rest of the wanna be hacks is your ability to try and try and try again and again until you get it right. To be able to take action, over and over again, until there world is exactly how you want it. When you realize that life affords you as many chances as you are willing to take, this can be easier. The opportunity of a lifetime comes along just as often as you are prepared to take it.

To Be Silent.

This is where the metaphysical cool stuff starts. Some say that by keeping your goal silent, you build up psychic energy that will increase the your will and your ability to take action over and over again. Some say that you shouldn’t tell others about important goals, because they might give you reasons that you hadn’t thought of as to why you can’t achieve it. Sometimes this can be a blessing. When I was in high school I had decided to run a marathon. I told my best friend, and he told me, with as much good intentions as possible, that he didn’t think I could finish, and I might injure myself. I took this as a challenge, and allowed his disbelief in my ability to spur me on to finish. And hobble around in pain for a few weeks, but that’s another story. 

This is a rare case. Many times when you share your goal with somebody, unless you are a hundred percent decided that you will succeed, even the best intentions can derail you.  Another theory is that if you have a huge goal, even support can derail you. It works like this. Say you want to start your own company. You have this fantastic image in your mind with yourself being successful, with people giving you all kinds of props because of your great business. You use this visualization to pull you through rough patches of doubt. If you tell others, and they believe you and support you, their support and well wishes might take away the attractive pull of your visualization. If people in the present are giving you props for your dreams, the props you imagine receiving in the future might have less effect, and give you less incentive in those times of doubt.

So it boils down to the type of goal you want. If you want to lose weight, or give up a habit, it can help to enlist the support of others. If you want to create something fantastic in your life, be careful who you tell. Perhaps it’s better not to tell anybody until after you’ve already achieved success. If you are lucky enough to have a special relationship with somebody that will support you as much as you support yourself, teamwork can be a great asset. 

Otherwise, be silent. An powerful goal, unspoken to others, can grow to enormous proportions, giving you more power than you’ve ever dreamed. And you may be surprised how being able to tap this power will automatically give you an incredible mastery over reality unknown to most, and envied by many.

Permalink