Category Archives: how to

Dangerous Dudes Are Everywhere

Covert Sumo Defense Tactics

It’s very common for humans to look for shortcuts.

We are hard wired to look for anything that will maximize our return, and minimize our efforts.

Paradoxically, this is the driving force that has been behind our path as humans from the days of ancient hunter-gathers to modern life.

All the inventions, creations and ideas were based on one simple concept.

“There’s GOT to be an easier way of doing this!”

Businesses and customers are forever locked in the same battle.

Business want to minimize costs and maximize profits.

Customers want to minimize purchase price and maximize what we get for that purchase.

When businesses compete for our money, it’s a wonderful thing.

Fast food wars, for example, force all businesses to come up with the cheapest menu items.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to stumble through your local fast food joint on the way home from your local bar, this is a wonderful thing.

Get a sack of burgers for a few bucks.

Other kind of competition is not so nice.

Especially when not everybody knows there’s a competition.

Sure, when you’ve got a street lined with shops, everybody knows what’s up.

Cheapest price, best product, best customer service, cutest waitresses, etc.

It’s all part of the game.

But when you go into a meeting, and you’re thinking it’s just to share ideas, but your coworker has decides he or she is competing, and he or she is competing against you, that’s when it gets dirty.

From the boss’ point of view they might even like the competition.

It saves them from having to make a decision.

Even within social groups, friendships and romantic relationships, there can be some “beneath the surface” competition going on.

It’s almost like covert Sumo wrestling.

Two huge guys rush each other and try to push the other guy off balance.

When both guys know what’s, it’s called sport.

But when one person is doing this conversationally and covertly, it can feel pretty crappy.

There you are trying to have a regular conversation, and they’re slipping in deadly blows that push you off balance and make you feel weak.

Many people unfortunately don’t feel strong unless they make others feel weak.

If it’s a schoolyard bully, you can punch him in the face, or kick him in the nuts.

But if it’s emotional, and covert?

How the heck do you defend against it?

With this:

Weaponized Hypnosis

How To Make Everything A Logical Conclusion

Follow The Bouncing Ball

Once I had this friend who had this really overactive imagination. I guess overactive isn’t quite the right term, as I don’t suppose his biochemical neuro activity was any more or less than the next guy. But he had two things that stood out when it came to his imagination. He was very good at verbalizing his thoughts, as they came up, as well as getting on a track, and just keep on going.

I’ve met some people that were absolutely scatterbrained, they’d be talking about the benefits of exercise, and all of a sudden start talking about something that happened to them last weekend, and then remark about how the grocery was having a sale on bananas. All without any logical switch between the two. Of course, in their mind, there is always a logical switch, or at least a neurological connection somehow. You fire up one neuron, and the other neurons that are connected to it get fired up, and then the surrounding ones in turn get fired up, until you have a large enough cluster centered around what your brain thinks is an important idea, or a pertinent memory, and that kicks the verbalizing department into action, and pretty soon your listeners are wondering what planet you’re from.

Most people, when you listen to them, you can sort of see the connection in their ramblings. They’ll be talking about oranges, and then mention their grandfather was an orange farmer, and then tell some story about how they went fishing once one summer with their grandfather, and pretty soon, the story is all over the place, but it’s left a trail of bread crumbs back to the original story or idea.

I remember when I was in college, when we used to sit around in our dorm rooms in an altered state (due to excessive studying, of course), we’d sometimes try and follow our conversation backwards and see how many ideas we could link. “You were talking about this, and that was because he was talking about that, because you said, the other thing, which reminded of his pet when he was a kid…”

It usually didn’t work out so well, as you’d probably already guessed.

But this guy would not only clearly ramble on about his imaginations, but he would do so in such a linear and easy to follow fashion, that it was a kick just to sit back and let watch him go. It got to the point that when he started talking, we’d all kind inwardly smile, and know when to just shut up and enjoy his imagination.

The funny thing was that sometimes he would go off in a positive direction, and other times he would go off in a negative direction. Positive meaning he would start thinking in “best case scenario” terms and the end result would be everybody getting laid like rock stars and getting paid millions of dollars for barely passing a geometry test.

When he would go off on a negative bent, we’d all end up serving a life term on death row in a Mexican prison, figuratively. The funny thing was that he knew full well that we enjoyed listening to him go off on his tangents, and it became kind of like an impromptu performance art. Once he started, he would see how far he would go.

But the interesting thing was that whichever direction he started off in, he would always stay in that direction, either positive or negative. I asked him about it once, and he said that the brain was just like a muscle. Just like you can train your muscles to do certain things, you can train you brain to do certain things.

If you train your muscle to do certain repetitive actions, it becomes unconscious and automatic. If you know how to dribble a basketball, there was a time when you didn’t, and you had to go through the process of learning. Maybe you learned quickly, maybe it took a while. Maybe you had to start by watching the ball, and watching your hand, and you had to be all by yourself, otherwise you’d lose control of the ball, and you’d have to chase it down the street or something.

But after you learned how to dribble without looking at the ball and your hand, you then maybe learned how to walk and dribble at the same time. You could direct where the bouncing ball when without even looking at it. If you kept at it, then you may have been able to move sideways, backwards, even a slow job while keeping the ball under control.

I remember once when I was a kid I spent a couple hours one day learning how to dribble between my legs. I saw somebody on TV do it, and I thought was pretty cool, and I wanted to learn how. After a while, I could dribble back and forth between hands, between my legs, while I was walking, without even looking.

This guy with the amazing skills of imagination said the same is true of your thoughts. If you just let them go wherever they go, they’ll usually end up in a bad place of fear or anxiety, as that’s the way the brain is hard wired from evolution. To always be on the lookout for danger. But if you train your thoughts like you train your self to dribble a basketball, pretty soon, you can direct your thoughts in any direction, and they’ll start going there automatically.

He said that once he learned how to do this, he had great fun just setting a basic intention, and a theme, and then letting his mind do the rest. It would pretty much go in the direction he sent it without having to keep conscious focus on it, like when you are beginning to dribble a basketball.

And if you can learn to direct your thoughts as well as some people can dribble a basketball, there’s no limit to what you can creatively come up with.

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How To Apply The Powerful Integration Of Parts Technique

Union Talks

I was mindlessly reading various articles on the net the other day and came across a description of an NLP procedure I learned a few years ago in a seminar. It is pretty useful procedure, but many people don’t realize in how many different ways it can be applied, and in how many different situations for various results, both for yourself and for others.

The procedure is called “Integration of Parts,” and has been written about in quite a few NLP books. The interesting thing about NLP is people tend to think that it is set of tools that were “invented” and didn’t exist until Bandler and Grinders started their work. The actual truth is that all of NLP existed before, in various forms, they just weren’t called “NLP,” or they weren’t used in the specific way the “NLPers” are taught to use them.

One of the presuppositions of NLP is that the more flexible you are, the better equipped you are to handle different situations. You’d think that being taught this from the get go, NLPers would be able to see how the same procedures have been used for quite a while, some since the beginning of recorded history. In one particular book (I believe it was persuasion by Kevin Hogan, but I may be mistaken) he goes over a passage from the New Testament, where in one of St. Paul’s letters, he is clearly using the sales technique of “pacing and leading.” Only back then he didn’t call it “pacing and leading,” he was likely a natural salesperson.

The thing that many people tend to overlook is that NLP only collects the techniques and strategies that people that are “naturals” are doing anyway. They study excellence, elicit people’s strategies, and then write them down in an easy to follow recipe. Sometimes you’ll hear a particularly gifted and eloquent speaker, and people will whisper and argue whether or not he’s “using” NLP. A better question might be is he a natural, or did he learn those skills, or is it a combination of both?

A lot of people claimed that President Obama was “using” NLP while he was campaigning, but I think he is merely a naturally gifted speaker. If you study the tonality and gestures that he uses when he speaks, they aren’t anywhere near as proficient and congruent as in somebody who has studied embedded commands and anchoring.

But back to the particular procedure. Integration of parts. Lets say part of you wants to pick up the phone to make a cold call, so you can make some money. But another part of you is afraid of getting rejected. It would seem that you have two parts that have two completely different intentions. These warring parts create anxiety, stress, and a high turnover rate in any sales job.

So what do you do?

Integration of parts.

You ask the part that wants to make the call to come out and play. Put that part in your right hand. You then talk to that part, respectfully of course. Parts don’t usually get a lot of focus, and are used to operating in the background, so you need to be gentle. First chat him or her up a bit, and develop some rapport. Describe them as much as you can, in as many sensory modes as possible. Then ask the part what’s important about his top level intention (wanting to pick up the phone to make a call). Then do some basic conversational criteria eliciting skills and find out the intentions under that. You’ll probably need to go three or four deep to get to the big one. For example, he wants to pick up the phone, to make some money, to pay the bills, to not worry, to feel safe. Safety is important. Make sure at every step of the way to validate you part, and make sure they know you respect their intention.

Then you do the same with the other part. Make sure that before you do that, you ask the first part if they’ll sit tight for a bit. They usually will, as it’s nice to sit out side in the open. Once you chat up your other part for a bit, start digging down for their deeper level criteria. It doesn’t take long to get the “Aha!” when you realize that both parts are really after the same thing, only at different levels. The first part took a while to get to wanting “safety,” while the second part might be fighting for that right off the bat.

Once you find that both parts are really after the same thing, ask them if they’d like to join forces, like the superfriends. Most of they time they’ll agree, then slowly bring them together, and give them time to get used to each other. Once you combine your hands, you’ll be holding a new part that has all the strategies and resources of both parts, but not evolved into more powerful more resourceful part. Slowly bring this into your chest, take a couple of breaths, and do whatever hallucination is useful to let this new part sink down into your soul or wherever the parts live inside you. It’s different for most people. I knew this one guy that had all his parts living in an energy ball that floated behind him, and was tethered to the back of his neck. Not really his neck, the tether went right into his spinal column.

(Keep in mind this is only a hallucination, there really are no parts or anything called NLP or any of that other new age nonsense. It’s just pretty useful, that’s all.)

Can you see how this simple communication strategy between two entities with seemingly different intentions can work? You can use this for:

Union Negotiations
Sales Meetings
Asking for A Raise
Nuclear Arms Reduction Talks (if you’re into that sort of thing)
Deciding where to go on a date

And much, much more. You are only limited by your imagination, and you willingness to play with this and see what happens.

If you’re interested in a really cool guided meditation/dual induction CD (about twenty minutes long) that helps you through this process, check out the New Option Generator, from Learning Strategies Corporation.

Have fun.

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Focus On What’s Important, Not What Isn’t

Keep Your Eye On The Ball

When I was a kid I played little league. One of my problems was watching the ball hit the bat. I remember my coach was always saying to do just that, but I kept looking up to where I wanted the ball to go, or where I expected it to go I swung and connected correctly. It seemed a lot easier to “watch the ball hit the bat” when you were supposed to bunt, but I never really liked bunting. Something about sprinting towards first base and always worried you were going to be thrown out.

I must rather enjoyed hitting one into the outfield, and thinking of second base on the way to first base. Rounding first, slowing up a bit and checking to see what the ball was doing was a great feeling. A mixture of success, control, and possibility for more. A bunt, on the other hand, is pure danger. Like you are challenging the pitcher to a race. Of course, when you bunt, you aren’t supposed to bunt it right back at the pitcher, you’re supposed to bunt toward the first baseman or the third baseman, providing they haven’t read your signals and are playing way up.

They say baseball is a game of inches, and when you’re talking about bunting, they are certainly right. But it’s much more fun to blast away and hit the ball as far as you can (or at least intend to), so you don’t have to run very fast towards first.

I finally figured out way to drastically improve my batting, and start to hit it out of the infield on a consistent basis. It was just a small addition to how I usually practiced.

I used to date this girl in high school. I guess it was your normal high school relationship. Nobody really knows what you’re supposed to do. You’re lucky if you can get a car. Being in high school, I never had much money, so going out on dates was always a challenge. Drive somewhere, sit around, and hopefully make a move of some sort. I found the best dates were the ones where I didn’t worry about the little things along the way, when I was able to focus on the big picture, so to speak.

When there was something big going on, (and free) like a county fair or some kind of event, it was much more fun. I was able to look forward to something large, rather than focus on every single nuance of the conversation along the way to just parking somewhere and hoping something “happened,” if you catch my drift. Those dates were always worrisome, as I felt I needed to maintain every little change in the mood, and keep the interest level up.

But when we went to some carnival or something, I didn’t even worry if my date was having a good time or not. I just kind of assumed it, as I was having a pretty good time myself. Those dates were always much easier, and ended much better (ahem.)

Once with a couple of friends, we decided to go skydiving. It was the tandem kind, where you strap yourself to an instructor. You get to pull the cord, but he is there, strapped onto your back in case you black out or something. That is perfect for first timers, as it only requires about fifteen minutes of instruction. It’s pretty idiot proof. The alternative is to jump with two guys on either side of you, but that takes several hours of instruction and drilling.

One thing the guy I was strapped to said just before we leapt out of the plane. He said not to look down. At first I thought that was the regular advice given to people that are afraid of heights. If you look down, you’ll freak out, and lose your nerve. But he was referring to the minute or so after we jumped out of the plane, and was free falling.

That was without question, the most exhilarating minute of my life (except the obvious exception). And it was also the quickest minute (except the obvious exceptions). The reason he said not to look down is that you tend to find some spot below, and try to focus on it, or “fixate on it,” as he said. And when you do that, you miss out on the feeling flying. When you are free falling, you only actually feel like you are falling for the first couple seconds. After that, you hit terminal velocity, which is when you stop accelerating. And you feel like you are literally floating on air. If you look down, you’ll miss out on the fantastic feeling, and spend your brain energy staring at something that isn’t important. If you keep looking forward, and enjoy the experience, it will be much more memorable, much more thrilling, much more extraordinary. So when he said “don’t look down” he wasn’t trying to keep me from getting scared, he was trying to make sure I got the most enjoyment out of the situation.

And the funny thing about learning to consistently hit the ball out of the infield was to practice doing the thing I hated the most. Bunting. I’d go to the batting cages, and stand there like I was going to swing, and then at he last minute, lay down a bunt. I must have looked pretty foolish practicing bunting in the batting cages, but it really trained my hand/eye/bat coordination.

Pretty soon I moved from simple bunts, to short, slow swings, to bigger swings, and to full motion full power swings, all while keeping my eye on the ball the watching the ball hit the bat. Pretty soon I was smacking them all over the place.

Just changing where you place your focus can make all the difference.

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How To Stay Focused For Automatic Success

Horizons

Once a long time ago I took a drive with a friend of mine. We started in Los Angeles, and our only goal was to make it to some city in New Jersey within a certain amount of time. I think it was something like five days. That’s about three thousand miles over five or six days, which is a lot of driving each day.

We had the route planned out, and our destination was clear enough, and the math was all figured out. Our basic plan was to wake up at six every morning, and start driving. We didn’t even figure on mileage per day, we just figured if we drove for twelve hours a day, with a minimum of stopping, we’d make it in time.

Sounds like a good plan, right? Only there was one thing we neglected to take into consideration. While this small detail didn’t affect the overall outcome of the trip, it made it a little bit more troublesome than we’d anticipated.

I had a friend once that really enjoyed math, and so he majored in math in university. He never really knew what he was going to do, he only knew that he liked math. He ended up being a high school teacher, but for a while he was a bit worried. When he graduated, he started looking through the want ads, and going to job seminars, and even went as far as to sign himself up with a few headhunters.

The thing about a degree in math is that by itself, it’s not all the applicable to very many industries. If you studied some kind of applied math like statistics, or actuarial science, you can do pretty well for yourself. I remember even reading several years ago about some huge ranking a major newspaper did on different jobs, using all kinds of factors like salary, working conditions, opportunities for advancement, etc. And an Actuary was ranked number one.

But my friend didn’t study any applications, just basic math theory. I think they called it foundations. Most people who focused on that aspect of math usually went on to get their PhD’s or something. Which was why my friend was a bit worried.

He figured just by doing something that he liked, that would be enough. Luckily, he really enjoys his teaching job, and he graduated when there was a severe shortage of math teachers in the public schools, so he could pretty much choose any school he wanted. But had he majored in something like history, or art or something, he wouldn’t have been nearly as lucky.

My other friend was much more specific. He studied a specific branch of electrical engineering. And when he was only halfway through university he already had talked to several different companies, and knew exactly what kind of people they hired, and what kinds of extra curricular backgrounds they liked for their fresh graduates. Needless to say, he was much more focused, and when he graduated he already had several offers lined up. And they were all for quite a bit of money. That must have been a pretty good feeling at graduation ceremony.

I went to this seminar once on goal setting. It was one of those local things they have every now and then down at the learning annex. This guy was saying that there are two kinds of goals. There are directional goals, and milestone goals. He said the directional goals are like walking toward the horizon. You will always walk in the same direction, but no matter how far you go, the horizon will always be a fixed location way off in front of you.

So long as you pick a point off in the distance, you’ll keep walking in the same direction. But if you only have a directional goal, it’s easy to get discourage, as you will never seem to make any progress. It’s tough to stay focused through will power alone.

On the other hand, there are milestone goals. Like if you pick something specific, and you know exactly what will happen when you achieve. Not only will you have something solid to look forward to, but you’ll also have evidence that you’ll collect along the way.

But if you only have a bunch of milestone goals, you could very well end up walking in a circle, so to speak. Each time you achieve your goal, you could pick another one, but if may take you back toward where you started. It’s easy to fall into a trap of oscillating back and forth between two extremes.

The best is to have a combination of the two. When you choose a solid directional goal, and several milestone goals that are lined up in the same direction, it would be like walking toward the horizon, and achieving several significant goals every so often along. These will be enough to keep you motivated and keep you going, and the horizon will always be there beckoning you to keep going. If you keep this up, pretty soon you’ll be accomplishing some pretty fantastic stuff, as they will tend to increase in size along the way.

The easiest way is to pick something way off in the distance, and then work your way backwards until you have several small pieces of achievements laid out in front of you just waiting for to start walking along your path and scoop them up along the way.

The funny thing that happened to us on the way to New Jersey was we’d get to six or seven at night, and figure we’d done enough driving. So we decide to stop for the night, only to look on our map and find that the next town wasn’t for another hundred miles or so. And when you’ve been driving for twelve hours, and you’re about ready for a cheeseburger and a couple beers, and a soft bed, another hundred miles is a long way.

But at least it was a hundred miles in the right direction. I’d hate to imagine what it would be like to realize we made a mistake and had to turn back for a hundred miles. That would be devastating.

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How To Model Others To Easily Achieve Excellence

Doin Some Cookin?

I was watching this cooking show on TV the other night. I don’t usually watch cooking shows, but this guy was pretty entertaining. One thing I liked in particular was he didn’t seem to measure any of the ingredients. It was a handful of this, a pinch of that, a little bit more of this. Even when he cooked some of the dishes, he never said what level to set the heat to or for how long to cook them. Just throw some stuff together, stick it in the oven until it’s done, and next thing you know you’ve got a gourmet meal on your hands.

I took a cooking class, two cooking classes a few years ago. Asian cooking. We learned to cook Chinese, Thai, and Japanese food. Two different course, and two different instructors. But they had two completely different approaches to cooking.

The first class I took (the classes were each four weeks, one night per week) she was extremely specific. Cut this exactly this way, measure this, make sure to shake the measuring spoon exactly three times to let the ingredients settle, but don’t shake too much, otherwise they’ll settle too much. Make sure to wash your hands and the instruments (cutting board, knives, measuring spoons, etc.) after each and every step. I was even lectured about placing the washed utensils in the drying rack at the proper angle so they would dry properly. Extremely detailed. The food, however, was magnificent. I don’t remember what we cooked exactly, but it was better than anything I had in a restaurant.

The other lady, who was from the course I took a few months later, because I had enjoyed the first course so much, was completely different. She was more like the guy on the cooking show. Put some of this in; add a bit of this spice, and a dash of that spice. Cook until it looks done. The food came out just as tasty, but not as “perfect” as the first class. This lady seemed to have the philosophy of showing us the general idea of how to make stuff, which we could later add to our own tastes. Whereas the method taught by the first lady didn’t seem to lend itself too much to improvisation. Being somebody who likes to cook, but rarely from a recipe, I rely heavily on improvisation. I have cooked some doozy experimental meals in the past, some good, some outrageously horrible. Once I tried making peanut butter popcorn, and it didn’t come out so good. One of the many tragedies of theory meeting reality.

One thing I noticed about the temperament of the two ladies is that the first lady seemed to be what I would describe as a type “A” personality. Detail oriented, always has a shopping list when they go to the store, lives and dies by their personal planner.

The second instructor seemed much more relaxed and a “make it up as you go along” type of person. While neither is better or worse, both characteristics have their strong points and weak points, there is evidence of type “A” people suffering more from stress related diseases. There’s also evidence of type “A” people making more money than the slackers among us.

One interesting idea I read in a book on personal development is that you can train yourself to be either type “A” or type “B” depending on the situation. If you need to perform some consistent behavior to get a specific result, you can train yourself to follow a specific set of instructions to maximize your success. Likewise, when it’s the weekend, you can easily switch into type “B” mode, and sit on a park bench and stare off into space when it’s time to unwind.

The trick is to develop a “switch” that sends you into automatic behavior mode when the situation calls for it, and being able to turn the “switch” off when the job is done.

One way to do that is through modeling. When you model somebody, you unconsciously soak up as much as their behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes as you can to achieve the same result they want. For example, if you are a student, and you have a difficult test coming up, it may help to model the most diligent person in your class. For the time being, simply pretend that you are them, as much as you can.

Where do they study, how long do they study, how many breaks do they take, how long, and how often. How do they motivated themselves, whey they are feeling lazy, what do they say to themselves to keep them focused, what do they visualize when they see themselves achieving their goals. Are there any authority figures from their past telling them supporting messages (in their imagination) while they are studying.

These some things that can collectively turn you into a studying machine. If you need to “switch” on this behavior, develop a kind of external anchor that you can use to put you in study mode. I had a friend once that was studying for a chemistry exam, and one of his “heroes” (as much as you can have a hero if you are a chemistry geek) was the guy that came up with the chemical structure for benzene from a dream he had of a snake eating it’s tale. This guy (the hero) had a relentless desire to figure out how stuff worked, so much that it permeated his dreams.

So when this guy (the student) wanted to get into “the zone,” he would sit at a table, place both palms on the table, close his eyes, and take a few deep breaths. Then he would imagine the ghost, or the spirit of the benzene guy slowly slinking into his body from behind, and giving him all his motivation and desire to figure out how stuff worked. He (the student) said this really helped to study, and he always did well on his chemistry tests.

So if you can figure out what you want to achieve, figure out somebody that has already done it, and come up some kind of physical “switch” along with a useful hallucination to help you take on their behavior. You may find that this can help you more than you realize.

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Rewrite Your History For A Powerful Future

How To Apply The Secrets Of Alien Abductees

Many years ago, I used to be an avid reader of fiction. My bookcase at home would be filled with all kinds of books, usually paperbacks that I would buy and tear through in a weekend. I would come home from work, and instead of sitting in front of the TV or a few hours, like most people do, I would sit in front a novel for a few hours. Not that one is better than the other. They both serve the same purpose, namely, a temporary escape from reality through a powerfully engaging story that captures and leads your imagination away from whatever daily crud you deal with on a regular basis.

It’s interesting when you think about stories, and story telling. In some form, story telling has been around since humankind learned to speak. And it survives today in various forms. I have no idea how big of an industry it is, although I doubt that you could even categorize all the different forms of story telling in the same group. Books, movies, plays, TV shows, operas. The list goes on and on.

I can imagine what it was like thousands of years ago. The guys would go out hunting, or searching for food. The gals would hang out near wherever their home was, taking care of the kids, searching for roots and other edible plants.

Then they’d get together at night, sit around a fire, and there would inevitably be a few people that were good at spinning tales. Perhaps they were embellished from actual hunts that were significant, or maybe they were stories past on from previous generations.

One can see how certain elements would creep into them, the sun, the moon, and the various weather patterns. I imagine that some of the stories told at night had social and cultural significance, while other stories were told purely for comic relief. Very similar to what you see on TV today.

That humans have retained our basic tastes in stories and how we use them in conjunction with our imaginations in order to remove ourselves temporarily from the daily stresses of life never ceases to amaze me.

I started out by saying that I used to read novels. I don’t them so much any more. I tend to read non-fiction. I like reading personal development books, and books that border on philosphy/psychology. I’m particular interested in books pertaining to human evolution and how it has shaped our current mindset.

On interesting passage I came across recently in a book I was reading about reframing was a procedure in creating a new history for yourself.

Just as the stories described above make extensive use of your imagination, this procedure does the same. But instead of somebody else’s imagined story, this method can be used to recreate your own story.

This sounds strange at first. Most people feel that their history is their history. You can’t change what happened to in the past. While you can’t change the actual events, you can certainly change your interpretation of them. And you can choose which events you automatically remember when you enter into a familiar situation.

For example, if you are terrified of public speaking, every time you even think about public speaking, you will remember all the times that you experienced emotional discomfort or pain whenever you expressed yourself in a public setting. This includes all instances, even back to when you were three and your mom told you to shut up while you were in line at the supermarket, even if you don’t consciously remember that happening.

The power of re creating your history is two-fold. First, you can change your interpretation to the events that happened. Second, you can change which events you use as your reference points as you look toward the future.

So you can either go into your history, and re interpret all the events where you tried to express yourself, but were shut down by others. Instead of remembering them as painful experiences, you can remember them as simple feedback from the environment. Maybe you were told to shut up at the supermarket because your mom was trying to talk to somebody. So instead of giving the event the meaning of “public speaking is scary” you should give the event the meaning of “when public speaking, be careful not to interrupt others, or they’ll get mad,” or something like that.

What makes this possible is the fact that our memories are not set in stone. Our memories are completely malleable, when can give them any meaning we want.
Even our memories of the actual events themselves are suspect, as any good defense lawyer will tell you. If all a prosecutor has is eyewitness testimony, he or she will have a very weak case. The law recognizes that human memory, even recent memory, is highly suspect.

The second thing you can do with this procedure is simply choose different events to remember. Choose events where you expressed yourself in public and everything went ok. This means singing at birthday parties, giving a recital that went ok, or anything else you can imagine.

Here’s another secret. If you can’t remember any positive experiences of expressing yourself in public, make them up. That’s right. You can make up some examples in your history of you doing things that you want to be able to easily do in the future. Don’t think this is possible? Just ask anybody that is convinced they were abducted by aliens.

In order to do this procedure, simply think of something you’d like to do. Relax and imagine yourself drifting through your past, and look for any events that are similar to your current goal. Change those events around by changing the meaning, and put in positive events if you can’t find any real ones. Do this until you get five or six events that are a positive memory of you doing something that you’d like to do in the future.

Then any time you think of doing that thing, just purposely recall your five or sex “created” memories. It may take a few times, but pretty soon you’ll be recalling those “created” positive memories automatically, and your future will look brighter than ever.

This Big Breasted Beauty Revealed A Powerful Memory Technique

The Power Of The ABC’s

There is a radio show I listen to sometimes on the Internet. I work in Japan, and sometimes it’s nice to listen to American style radio. The particular show I was listening has a contest every year called Miss Double December, which is a beauty contest of sorts. The contestants, if you haven’t guessed by the name, must be well endowed to enter the contest.

One by one the girls come into the studio for the interview. That way the listeners can not only judge them based on their pictures, but their interview skills, personalities, and any other traits they may have.

The girl that was on the other night had an interesting skill. If you gave her any word, she could name each letter’s number based on its order in the alphabet. For example, cat would be 3-1-20. C is the third letter, a the first, and t the twentieth.

Now they were treating this as a cute trick, and making references to the movie Rain Man, where the main character was a genius but completely incapable of living an ordinary life without constant supervision.

The truth is that this is a powerful memory technique that can help you immensely to remember lists of items, as well as super charge your creativity, making people think you really are a genius. Here’s how.

First you need to understand something called mnemonics. These are so called memory “tricks” that are sometimes used in school to help you memorize things like musical scales, the order the planets, biological classifications and so on.

All Cows Eat Grass, for example is a mnemonic to help remember the musical notes on the spaces in the bass clef, starting from the bottom. A,C,E,G.

Kevin Put Crap On Fred’s Green Snake, helps you to remember the order of biological classifications:

FPCOFGS

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

These are pre-made mnemonics and can only be used for the particular case they were created. But when you create a system, Like Miss Potential Double D’s, you can use in a bunch of different ways that will make it really easy to remember a lot of stuff. There’s a little work required on the front end, but once you got the basic list memorized, you can use to remember virtually anything.

First you need to construct a list of words that start with each letter of the alphabet. Generally speaking, the best way to do this is to just say each letter to yourself, and choose whatever word comes to mind first. A..a..a..apple. B..b..b..banana (you can tell I’m hungry while writing this) C..c..cat etc. Go through your ABC’s a couple times to make sure you remember each word.

Next you want to connect each word to it’s particular order in the alphabet. So apple, and the number one. You want to make a connection that is as visually interesting as possible, so it will be easy to remember. Maybe you can imagine a birthday party, and everybody is wearing those goofy hats, and they bring out an apple with one of those big candles shaped like a number one. The birthday kid starts crying because he was expecting a cake. Or something like that.

Next, banana, two. Maybe imagine somebody holding their hand in the “peace” sign, except their two fingers have been replaced by bananas. Continue this with each letter, and each word you chose. By now you realize that it’s best to choose easy to picture nouns to fill out your ABC list.

It may take a while to completely commit this to memory, so you can spout off the numbers for the word “Thanksgiving” like the girl did on the radio the other day, but once you’ve got it committed you’ve got a powerful tool. Here’s a couple ways to use it.

Whenever remembering a list of items, either shopping list, or bullet points in a speech, simply attaches them to each particular alphabet picture. Do this in the same way as you did before. Whatever is first on your list, attach it to apple. If you’ve built your list correctly, you won’t need to consciously connect apple and one, whenever you think a, or one, or apple, you will automatically remember the other two items. (A will give you one and apple, one will give you a and apple, etc).

Another way to use this ABC list to help your creativity is whenever you have a problem; think of the main root word of your problem. For example, let’s say you need to write a report, and you have no idea how to start. Look up R, for report, on your mental ABC list. Let’s you chose racquet for R. Just start to mentally free associate anything and everything when you repeat the words “report” and “racquet” and let your mind go wherever your imagination leads. You’ll be surprised how quickly you come up with an answer that appears seemingly out of nowhere.

The trick here is to give your mind room to play around with different ideas and create space for you imagination to fill in the blanks. The way the brain is structured, each neuron is connected to every other neuron in your neural network via only a few degrees of separation. So just going back and forth between these seemingly unrelated words (report and racquet) you’ll be surprised how much you stuff you have up there between your ears.

Like I said, this takes a bit of work at the beginning, but once you’ve got a solid ABC list set up with numbers and objects, this can be very useful in a lot of different ways.

I initially learned this procedure from a product called “The Memory Optimizer” from Learning Strategies Corporation. If you’d like to powerfully expand your thinking capabilities and mental strength, give this program a once over.

How To Powerfully Blast Out Of Stagnation

Philosophical Meanderings On Chipmunks and Big Fish

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself if you are considering some kind of personal change, is how would your life be today, if you’d made the change three months ago. Six months ago. One year ago. Five years ago.

This can give you powerful perspective and motivation to get out of the “now” where it seems that sometimes the problem exists. Should you not realize the incredible power of this idea, consider that the new ideas that you have will always feel a little strange at first. But as you grow accustomed to them, they will seem more normal and familiar. Simply by continuing to find and implement new and better ideas, you’ll find yourself growing at ever increasing rates.

And what else is as powerful as self-growth? Many people make the mistake of continually comparing themselves to others. That is always a losing game. Nobody else has your unique background, upbringing, and characteristics, and you don’t have anyone else’s. And you will never likely know the whole story of somebody else, so by comparing yourself to others you are only comparing the surface of a very deep and likely completely different ocean.

You can either start to look at things like this with a new perspective, or you can begin to realize that by understanding that life is always in flux you can feel the need for becoming more than you already are.

And as more and more people become aware of this, they are starting to realize just how easy a fresh perspective can be to a normal everyday life.

Once I was sitting on a bus next to an elderly gentleman. He was reading “Old Man And The Sea,” and seemed to be taking his time. By taking his time, I mean he would read a passage, and then gaze out the window for a few moments, then read another passage, and then gaze out the window or a while.

I waited until the time seemed right to ask him about the book, and he smiled and told me that he was a retired professor of literature at from a local university. He still gave an occasional guest lecture now and then, but most of his time was spent traveling around exploring his local world.

Of course, I asked him about his take on Hemingway’s classic, and he smiled and nodded his head. He said that “Old Man And The Sea” was a lot like life. You could interpret it many ways, and depending on your experience, you would have a completely different meaning. He said that literature is fantastic that way.

Despite being writing by an individual with a specific intention and specific meaning (usually) most works of literature can be interpreted many different ways by many different readers. Even the same reader can interpret it differently depending on when they read it. It’s like the old proverb “you can never step in the same river twice.”

Ok I’m getting way too philosophical here. The point I’m trying to make is that if you look at life as simply a series of tasks to be performed, (usually with the least amount of risk and effort) and checked off some mental list as you go alone, you are as good as dead. Unless you are striving for a specific goal or choice, then you may as well join the Borg. Resistance is futile.

Most people are completely averse to risk of any kind, and want a guaranteed result with little chance of failure before they even try anything. While living that way is certainly safe, it’s pretty boring, and it gets old after a while.

It helps to shake things up a bit and try some new things once in a while, even if they don’t make any particular sense. If you make a fool out of yourself, let the haters have their laugh while they convince themselves of their risk averse superiority.

Only those that are brave enough to reach out and take a risk to achieve the good things in life will ever find true happiness.

And that is how the chipmunks saved the day. Or something like that.

How To Use Life’s Problems To Your Advantage

How To Powerfully Blast Through Any Obstacle With Ease

The other day a friend of mine and me were talking about how different people deal with adversary. His girlfriend is currently going through a crisis at her work, and the people that are employed there are having some difficulties.

Because of the economy, it is quite obvious to everyone that business is slowing down, and although the owner hasn’t come out and said anything, changes are coming, and they aren’t likely going to be pleasant. It is a small operation, and they don’t have a lot of reserves to fall back on. Lately it has become evident, at least through the company grapevine, that making payroll every month is getting more and more difficult for the owner.

Now my friend’s girlfriend has a side business that she has been secretly cultivating for a few months, and she is almost at the point where the income from her side business is the same as her salary. So she has the luxury of being an observer without running around trying to protect her livelihood in any way possible. And she has noticed some startling, or perhaps not so startling things about her coworkers.

She said they basically fall into two different categories. The first category are the people that have faith in their abilities and skills to find employment elsewhere if need be. Then there are those that seem to be getting more and more terrified as the days go by. These people have been working for this small company for a long time, and don’t know how they will survive if the company has to start letting people go, and they are one of the people.

An interesting paradox is that the people that seem to be most relaxed and confident in their skills seem to be doing the most to try and help the company stay afloat. They are the ones putting in extra hours, trying to come up with creative solutions to generate more business and income. The ones that seem to have the least amount to lose if the company goes under seem to be the ones that are trying their best to keep it going.

The second group, on the other hand, is doing the opposite. They seem to have the most to lose if the company goes down. And paradoxically, their behavior more on pure self-preservation rather than trying to help out the company. They seem to be more worried about positioning themselves so they aren’t the ones that get laid off. And she says they are doing so in really underhanded, and less than professional ways. Backstabbing, gossiping, spreading rumors that are not true, banding together to smear the reputation of others. Their behavior seems to be making the problem worse.

I remember reading a book about human behavior many years ago. There are things called paradoxical problems that pop up frequently in the human experience. As we move through life, we encounter all kinds of problems, in various forms and levels of severity. How we deal with the problems that come up can define our lives and how much pleasure we can experience. Usually we come up with familiar problems that we’ve overcome before, so they can be a valuable learning opportunity to foster growth and the development of useful skills.

Other times, however, we encounter problems, and for whatever reason, our best response to the problem, one that we think we help, actually makes the problem worse. And the more we try and solve the problem, the worse it gets directly as a result of our actions. And of course we respond with more of the same, which makes the problem even bigger.

Of course, we rarely realize the problem is getting bigger because of our actions. We usually blame some other, seemingly external cause. Our situation, the behavior of other people, some general state of society, likes the economy or whatever. These paradoxical problems will persist until we “step out” of ourselves and view our behavior and the problem as if we are completely on the outside looking in.

The method described in this book explained how to do this. You need to figure out your objective, take some action, then step back and judge your actions from a third party perspective and see if they effected the situation in the direction that you wanted. Then adjust accordingly, until the problem is overcome.

The reason this can seem difficult is many times our response to situations are unconscious, and we really aren’t aware of what we are doing. For example, if you wanted to lose weight, and you decided to try a new diet. Through sheer will power you kept on the diet for a couple weeks, but then gave up.

After giving up, you felt dejected and depressed, and you turned to the one thing that usually gives you comfort. Food. This of course makes the problem worse. You’d likely keep it up until you decided to diet again, and of course the same thing happens.

The solution is to decide upon a clear objective. Losing weight is kind of vague; it will help to be more specific. How about losing while enjoying the benefits of good food? That might be easier. So next time you try a diet, you’d step back periodically and ask yourself if you are meeting all the criteria of your objective. Are you losing weight? Are you enjoying the food you eat? If both answers are yes, then you’d likely continue your diet, and you wouldn’t fall of the wagon, and get dejected.

If you were losing weight, but weren’t enjoying the food, then you’d simply adjust to a different diet plan, until you found one that satisfied both requirements.

By doing this, you’ll learn a valuable lesson about yourself. You are much more resourceful than you think, and you can overcome any obstacle you come up against, providing you look at it with the right mindset.