Category Archives: Learning

Supercharge Your Learning Capacity

How good are you at learning? Do you soak up new information like a sponge? Only need to hear it or see it once, and it’s second nature? Can you flip through a complicated technical manual and immediately understand how operate a piece of machinery you’ve never seen before? Would you be able to watch a documentary on the History Channel and then take an graduate level essay exam the following day?

Or do you struggle? I remember when I was a kid learning long division for the first time. It was horrible. I had no idea what those stupid boxes were for, and how in the heck did my teacher know what numbers to write on top? Have you ever tried to learn a foreign language? You hear a word that means something, then immediately forget it after you say it a few times?

Most people experience a mix of the above styles of learning. You can learn easily in some subjects, and sometimes it takes a little effort to learn other things. Most people assume that it’s the subject matter. You might hear people say that they are good in math, but terrible in English. Or fantastic at playing the trombone, but absolutely horrible at juggling. The truth is, there is a lot more that goes into learning than most people realize.

Teachers, environment, diet, how much sleep you got the night before, your own preferred learning style all play a part in how well you can learn things easily. Something that I’ve started really learning about recently is the difference between structure and content. In the above examples, the content would be the actual subject, like long division, and the structure would everything surrounding how the content was delivered.

Believe it or not, the same content can be really easy, or really difficult depending on the structure, or how the content is delivered to you. For example, if you are operating on a good nights sleep, haven’t eaten any high sugary foods recently, are sitting in a comfortable position with your back fairly straight, and learning from a teacher that is speaking slowly and clearly, you will likely to learn fairly easily.

However, take the same subject and try to learn it while you are hungover, next door to a construction site, and the teacher has just been dumped by their significant other, you might have some problems.

Similarly, your mindset can have a profound effect on your learning capacity. Whether or not you think something will be hard or easy. How motivated you are to learn. If you only focus on the positive benefits of knowing the material, or if you are only focus on the difficulties you expect.

Ask yourself a question, and pay attention to the answer. How good of a learner are you? Or you can try it this way. Say the following and pay attention to any internal responses: “I easily and naturally learn things quickly with little conscious effort.” How did that feel? Did you hear a little voice saying “No Way!”

If you did, don’t worry. Most people only focus on the material, and not the fantastic realization that as you change your mindset about your own learning, you can change how easily you can learn something new. The more you realize that changing the structure can have a profound effect on how easily you can learn the content, the easier it will be to learn anything you want.

Of course changing external structures like described above (being hungover next to a construction site) are fairly straightforward to remedy, but what about your internal learning structure?

One fantastic way that I’ve gotten fantastic results is from the Personal Genius Paraliminal from Learning Strategies. Listening to that CD sporadically over the past several weeks has given me a fantastic new way to look at reality itself. You can use the CD two ways, either for a specific learning task, such as a new language, or learning a sport, or learning how to operate a new piece of machinery. Or you can use it in a general sense, as I have been doing.

Personally I’ve become very interested recently in being able to switch back and forth between content and structure for different aspects of life. This CD has been a fantastic godsend. Like the other Paraliminals, it uses a hypnotic technique called dual induction, along with some other technology to lower your brainwaves into a receptive state. Then it proceeds to deliver the message that will help you to wrap your mind around whatever particular learning opportunity you find yourself presented with. I highly recommend it.

If you’d like to read more, you can check it out here.

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Pay Attention to Expanding Neural Networks

I was chatting with a friend of mine from overseas last night on Skype. It’s been a while and we were catching up on old stuff, like you do when you haven’t done that in a while, because it’s a natural thing, right? And she was telling me about this new guy that she’s dating. I think she mentioned in passing that he was English, although I can’t be sure. I say in passing, but I’m I don’t know if that’s the correct grammatical description of what happened. She mentioned something that sort of led me to believe that he was English, although she didn’t say what specifically. Like his uncle who lives next door owns a fish and chips shop that has been in the family for several generations, or something else random like that. 

It’s weird when that happens. You’ll be talking with somebody, and you’ll make all kinds of inferences about what was said, but you don’t really don’t pay attention to the underlying intention of the conversation. Like somebody will mention their boyfriend, and then they’ll switch topics completely, and you think they are still talking about their boyfriend, but they’ve switched referential indexes completely so you don’t know exactly who they are talking about.

Like once my other friend was explaining to me the grammatical structure of the Laotian language. They generally don’t use grammatical modifiers, like past tense or familial references. Everything is modified by context. If they start talking about something that happened last Tuesday, everything in that conversation from then out is referenced from Tuesday unless otherwise indicated. I suppose in different languages you develop the ability to pay attention to different levels of intention.

Which I guess it’s a good reason to learn several things, like languages, because they can really help you to develop a rich outlook on life. It’s been proven that an easy way to really have the ability to see things from a different perspective is to learn another language. And not only just words, but to actually think that way. They’ve shown it actually creates new neural pathways that are used differently from other ones. Some of the smartest people in the world can speak several languages. And one tends to wonder, do they speak several languages because they are smart? Or do you become smarter than you already are because you can speak several languages?

Well, at any rate, I hope my friend can get along well with her new boyfriend, regardless of how the fish and chip restaurant pans out.

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Feel Youthful Dreams At Any Age

So today I was hanging out with these four junior high school kids. Which isn’t really something I normally do, but sometimes when you find yourself in an odd situation that happens every once in a while, you can use this opportunity to learn something new that maybe you’d forgotten about. Like sometimes when you get older, you sort of forget what it’s like to be a kid, so when you talk to them, they seem to have a fresh and new perspective on things, until you realize that they are really looking at the world through eyes that you’d had before, and you’d neglected to look through for too long of a while.

So I was asking these kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. One kid said she wanted to be a nurse. Ok, sounds good. A job where you can help people, work in a hospital, wear a cool uniform. The next kid said he wanted to be a teacher. So far, so good. Help out kids to learn about life, help them to discover new things everyday. Next kid said he wanted to be a professional soccer player. Now we’re talking.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional baseball player. That was before you learned that you sort of had to be good at what you want to be when you grow up. Because I wasn’t all that great in baseball. In fact, when I was as old as these kids, I didn’t even make the junior high school team. Before you feel sympathy, realize that I was kind of relieved, because by that time, I’d learned that the baseball team was always the last to go home everyday.

Kind of strange how that works out. You develop these big dreams, then you sometimes realize that your dreams aren’t really based on anything other than a wish. You sort of make your goals based on what you see on TV, which really is just a bunch of imaginary stuff when you think about it. Not that watching baseball on TV is imaginary. It’s just that they only show the fun part, or at least what they think that you’ll think is the fun part. Who wants to watch the part where they stretch and practice and line the field? Unless you really enjoy that, which I guess professional baseball players do, which is why they are professionals, and I didn’t make the junior high school baseball team.

But as you go through life and learn new things, you start to really get a taste for what it is you want to spend your time doing something rewarding, right? I don’t suppose you could be a professional singer unless you really enjoyed band practice.

The thing that struck me the most, is that you can develop a realistic view of life as you grow and learn and experience, and still retain your youthful expectation that you always have the possibility of being able to become something greater than you are. I mean, who wants to stay a junior high school student your whole life?

And the fourth kid said that he wanted to be a taxi driver, which is actually my favorite answer of them all. Because instead of saying something that he thought other people might approve of, he said something he thought would be really cool, for whatever reason it was. And when you can combine your youthful expectation of greatness with saying what’s really on your mind, you got yourself a winning combination. 

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Create New Traveling Paths For Success

First allow me to apologize to my readers who have been wondering where I’ve been the last couple of days. I moved to a new city this weekend, and in the hustle and bustle of moving I haven’t had time to write any new articles. Henceforth I shall be posing at my regular intervals, so those of you that have sent emails wondering what’s up, all is well. And thanks for the thoughts.

Moving to a new city is both exciting and sad. Exciting because you get to meet new people, introduce yourself to strangers, and explore new areas of a new neighborhood. One of my favorite parts of moving into a new neighborhood is finding all the local coffee shops and bookstores. It’s places like that where you can chill out and read something interesting that can perhaps expand your mind.

Another thing that is both exciting and sad is saying goodbye the old and creating a new morning walk. My previous walk in my old city took several iterations until it was just right. You know how you try something, and keep shifting it a little bit until you get it just right, right? Like when you order a coffee and you get the sugar and milk ratio just right. It’s as though you don’t really want the refill because you don’t want to mess up the perfect mix that you’ve created.

So I was on my first exploratory morning walk, going down this small side street, checking out this bridge, looking in the window of that shop. And it made me think of how the brain is able to create new memories. From a structural standpoint, it’s almost identical to creating a new traveling route.

Like for example, if somebody says ‘baseball,’ and you automatically think of ‘hotdog,’ that means there is a strong electrical/chemical/physical connection in your brain between the collection of neurons for all things ‘baseball’ and all things ‘hotdog.’ Mentioning one automatically makes you remember another.

So as I was walking I started wondering, as I usually do, which is one of the main reasons for my walks. What if you could engineer the connections in your brain, instead of letting them grow on their own? For example, what happens when you think of the following words:

Test

Economy

Money

Sex

Race

What words did you come up with? Did you like them? Would you like to change them? One of the great things about human development is that you can learn to create associations in your brain, just like you create a new traveling route, as I was doing this morning. For example, when you think of the word ‘test,’ what if you automatically thought ‘a great opportunity for to show your knowledge?’ Or if somebody says ‘economy,’ how would you like to think ‘a fantastic complex structure where you can make incredible amounts of money?’

Of course, just as it will take time for me to create and settle into a new walking route, it won’t be automatic for you to create new connections, but don’t you think that it’s worth the effort?

I can’t wait until tomorrow morning. There is another street I saw that I hadn’t been down yet. How about you?

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The Wonderful Difference Between Girls and Boys

I was having lunch with a friend of mine the other day, when he started telling me about this weird internet radio show he was listening to. They were having some kind of a debate between a pastor of some church that neither me or my friend had ever heard of, and this biologist, or zoologist, or something. And they kept taking calls in, which was odd in and of itself, naturally because they show didn’t really seem to have any set parameters, it was just kind of a free for all.

For example this one caller called in and started saying that it was impossible that people came from monkeys, and another guy called in and said “yea, that’s exactly right, we didn’t come from monkeys, we evolved from Australopithecus africanus, which is totally different from monkeys, which proves that evolution is correct.”
Which I actually thought I remembered reading somewhere. Then they started talking about how some differences between men and woman can be attributed to differences in how we lived hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The guy was saying that our minds and bodies evolved for thousands of generations to live on the savanah in small groups of hunter/gathering tribes. And because we lived for so long like that, our bodies are still pretty much designed for that kind of life. Living in big groups in agricultural societies is relatively recent in human history.

For example, men were generally the hunters, and women were usually the gathers. So over the course of several hundred thousand years, men developed sight that was geared more for looking at possible game far off in the distance, and kind of not seeing what was on either side of him. (At least not in much detail.) Women, on the other hand, developed sight that was more for short range hunting for food. So women’s sight is naturally much stronger as far as peripheral vision goes, and men’s sight is much better as far as seeing points off in the distance.

So if you’re a guy, and you can’t find your keys, ask your wife or girlfriend. She is probably looking at them the whole time you’ve been searching. And if your a girl, don’t get too angry with your boyfriend or husband if he doesn’t mind clutter. He literally can’t see it.

Which kind of explains why guys have to turn their heads to look at the girls around them when you two are out and about. Otherwise, they literally can’t see them. And now we know the secret why girls don’t need to turn their heads to check out all the guys. Simply because they have such super sonic peripheral vision, they can check them out all day long and nobody is the wiser. Who knew.

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Easily Tap Into Abundant Prosperity

Prosperity. Abundance. The Law of Attraction. The Secret.

These concepts have been very popular in recent years. A check of “The Secret” on google yields over three hundred million pages. The other words yield similar results. What is it about these concepts that elicit such interest? Easy money? More of the good stuff in life? Happiness? The fact that these concepts have been around for ages tells there might be something deeper involved that just getting rich quick.

With literally hundreds of courses and seminars and webpages and blogs telling us how to make money quickly and easily, why are so many people still living a life of lack? I used to have a friend that was involved in the heavy lifting portion of buying and selling real estate. That is, he owned a carpeting company and was contracted out by the guys that would by foreclosures, fix them up, and then re sell them. One of the startling things he discovered was that sometimes in the houses, people would leave behind books on prosperity and abundance. If these books that were left in foreclosed houses don’t hold the answers, what does?

I think a lot of the material out there on abundance and law of attraction really only touches the surface. I believe that in order to truly attract abundance, you need to take a deep look at your beliefs. And this can take time and effort, which is what many people are trying to avoid when they buy into these seemingly ‘get rich quick’ ideas. Not that there’s anything wrong with getting rich quick. I also think you need to be internally prepared to accept abundance.

I remember reading a project Oprah did many years ago. She selected a group of down and out people, and gave them all houses, money, jobs, clothes, everything. What do you think happened? Yep. Twelve months later they were all back out on the street.

And we’ve all heard stories of sudden lottery winnings that have ruined peoples lives.

I think it’s clear from this that before being able to attract true abundance, you need to do some deep inner work to make sure you’re ready to receive.

One thing I’ve found that helps me tremendously, is the Prosperity Paraliminal CD from Learning Strategies Corporation. I’ve written about them before, as I own almost everything they produce. That’s one of their CD’s I’ve listened to several dozen times, and know I will several more. Like the Self Esteem Supercharger, it uses a variety of techniques to lower your conscious resistance to deep changework. It uses a dual induction method that will quickly bypass your conscious resistance to change, so that you can receive lasting benefits. In the left ear is a pretty cool metaphor, about two teachers, and in the right ear is some kind of visualization exercise. One of the interesting things is, is that the more you open yourself up to abundance on a deep level, the more you realize that it is so much more than just easy money.

One cool Jungian synchronicity that happened to me after a listening session was that I found a dollar bill in my laundry. Not a big deal until you consider I was living in Taiwan at the time, and really had no idea where that dollar bill came from. I did eventually find the source of the dollar bill (it wasn’t magic), but it was strange coincidence that it appeared when it did. The unconscious mind can work in strange ways sometimes.

If you are interested in exploring a fairly low cost way to increase your capacity for abundance, have a look over at Learning Strategies. You might find something interesting.

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Instantly Kill Social Anxiety And Let Your Brilliance Shine

And our next speaker will be telling us the exciting news about [insert your specialty here], please show a warm welcome for [YOU]!

You stride up to the podium, completely calm, right? Not a worry at all, right? No probably don’t even need note cards, since when you speak in front of a large crowd you feel the same as though you are speaking to an old friend over a couple of beers, right?

How about this. You are meeting a friend for a drink, you think it’s going to be just the two of you. You show up, and there are about six people that you don’t know. You slowly walk up to the table, and your buddy says “Hey! He’s here! I’ve been telling these guys all about you!” They all beam looks of expectation you’d normally see just before the curtain opens at Cirque du Soleil. Of course, since you are completely at ease and outgoing without need for any preparation going into any social situation, you can handle this situation flawlessly, right?

Or how about this. You see a fantastically attractive member of the opposite sex standing across the room. You flirt with your eyes a few times, and you’re pretty sure you see a brief flash of something that could be a smile. Of course, being the socially at ease person you are, you naturally stroll over, confident that your social and conversation skills are sufficient to easily decide within a few minutes of conversation whether this person is a match for you or not. Right?

Well, if you fall a bit short in the above situations, please raise your hand and join the human race. Social anxiety is one of the biggest obstacles known to mankind. People consistently rank the fear of public speaking higher even than dying. There’s a reason at high school dances boys stand on one side of the gym, and girls on the other. 

Luckily, I have a couple tricks that can help you easily overcome this. One is a realization that you probably already know, and the other is some mental practice that you can do that will consistently give you an edge as you practice it.

First the realization. What are you thinking of in these situations? If you can, imagine now that you are in one of the above situations, and pay attention to your thoughts. What are you thinking of? Your faults? Your weaknesses? The worst thing that can happen (or more accurately about a billion worst things that can happen?) Well guess what, whenever you are in a social situation, everybody thinks those thoughts. People don’t have near enough brain energy to focus on their own worst fears AND be cognizant of what you might be afraid of at the time.

Of course, this is easy to forget when you are hit with the unexpected adrenalin shot of social pressure, but the more you practice remembering, the easier it will get.

This realization really sunk in for me when I was taking a public speaking class. During one of the speeches, I was the first to go. I don’t what it was, maybe because I was talking about a subject that I was really familiar with, or the teacher was really nice, I’m not sure. But I was really relaxed. And during the middle my speech, I paused and actually scanned the room and noticed the expressions on everybody’s faces. They were all terrified. They were all thinking “oh no i’m next!” I probably could have been speaking Portuguese, and they wouldn’t have noticed.

Many times people will pretend they are not nervous, but trust me, they are doing their best to keep their game face while they think “oh no oh no what do I say???”

The trick I spoke of earlier is to focus outward as much as possible whenever you are in those situations that can make you feel less than comfortable. The idea is to stay out of your head as much as possible. Focus on their eyes, their nose, how their lips move when they talk, their boobs (ok, maybe not the boobs,) their ears, earrings, mustache, haircut. Try to figure out from their breath what they ate last, the sounds in the room, their posture, how many different colors they are wearing. Anything to keep the focus OUT side your head.

Of course, they key is to remember these two tricks when you get into those situations. If you know you are going to be in a situation, like a speech or a first or second date, no problem. Just make sure to rehearse doing this in your mind beforehand.

If you find yourself in a situation where you are suddenly on the spot unexpected, it’s good to set up a signal system to help you remember the two keys:

They are just as afraid as you.

Focus on physical things to reduce your own fear.

One thing you might do is use the pegging technique, and attach one to each thumb. Of course, like any new mind technique, it will take some practice. Another way to do this is to purposely go into situations that make you feel a little anxious and then just practice these techniques until you become natural.

While you might not become incredibly charismatic overnight, the more you practice these techniques, the easier it will be for you to be at ease in all situations, so you can feel relaxed enough to share your true self with the world. You owe the rest of us that much.

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Quickly Unlock Your Potential for Explosive Growth

What do you want to be when you grow up? Have you ever asked that question amongst your friends when you were kids? What answer did you give? When I was really young, under five I think, I wanted to be a cowboy. Then when I got a little older, I wanted to be a baseball player. I only made it until I was cut from the junior high school baseball team. Then in high school, I wanted to be a nuclear physicist.

How about you, when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Did it change?

Have you ever heard that song, “don’t worry, be happy?” Catchy tune, isn’t it? Wouldn’t that be easy if you could always be happy?

How about when there was that girl or guy you wanted to talk to, but you felt a little shy or uncertain. Did you ask your friends for advice? What did they say?
“Be confident!” or “be relaxed!”

How about the advice that all parents tell their kids when they ask how to meet a special someone?
“Just be yourself!” Do you think that is good advice?

How about making friends in general? Have you ever heard the seemingly sound advice, “if you want to make a friend, be a friend?”

These all sound like good, honest truisms that might appear to help us to focus on what we want, don’t they? 

There is something, though, that I’d like to call your attention to. It is a simple shift in thinking that can help you to free your mind from unnecessarily conflict, giving you more energy to focus on what you want to achieve in life.

Be. Is. Are. Am. These are the so called “be” verbs of the English language. Linguistically, they are the same as an equals sign. So when you say “1 + 1 = 2”, you can either say “one plus one equals two,” or just as truthfully, you can say “one and one is two.”  Sounds harmless, right? But when you look under the surface just a little bit, you can see it is not as simple as it appears.

For example, lets take the simple statement “I am happy.” Sound good? Sound like something that you’d like to say, and believe? When you think of it as a mathematical equation, which is how the brain interprets it, it becomes a little bit more complicated. What else do you equate with “happy?” What do you think when you complete sentence “happiness is…”.  Whatever you come up with to complete that sentence, you are also saying that about yourself, in your mind, whenever you say “I am happy.” What if you equate some things with being happy that doesn’t really mesh well with what you personally want to feel like? For example, what if you are an athlete, and you think one day that ‘happiness is victory.’ Which means in order to be happy, somebody else has to lose. So when you say

“I am happy”

you are saying, in a sense, that

“I am making people lose.”

It might not seem like it, but whenever you use one of the “be” verbs, your mind puts all the things on the one side of the “be” equation into the category of “same” in your brain, equating all of it to the other side of the ‘be’ verb.

What if one of your goals in life is to “be happy?”  When you tell yourself “I want to be happy,” do you really mean it? Do you want to be happy when you come across an accident victim needing help? Do you want to be happy when you break your arm?

If this sounds strange and nonsensical, it is only because most people don’t take a critical view of the words that we use on a daily basis. Our language is largely unconscious, and sometimes we speak in a manner that isn’t totally supportive of ourselves.

The brain acts like a powerful computer, much more powerful that we’ll probably ever understand. And it also operates extremely fast. As a consequence, it takes huge amounts of incoming data, thoughts, images, sounds, textile feelings, and sorts them into categories as quickly as possible. When we use ‘be’ verbs, we  basically tell our brain which categories to use.

How do we get around this simple yet powerful concept? Stop using the ‘be’ verbs as much as possible. When you think about it, all that you see, trees, people, buildings, are changing processes. Nothing is static. All is undergoing flux, all the time. So nothing, in reality, ever “is.” Nothing is ever frozen in time. People grow, people change, thoughts change endlessly, one into the next.

Instead of saying “I am happy,” try saying “I feel happy.” Instead of making it your life purpose to “be happy,” try making it your life purpose to “feel happy when appropriate.”  Instead of saying “Be yourself,” try saying “behave in a manner that honestly represents both your desires and what you can offer others.”
Instead of saying “I’m so stupid,” when you make a mistake, simply say “I made a mistake.” Take whatever statement you want to make, and exchange the ‘be’ verb for a more appropriate action verb.

If this sounds like a trivial semantic argument, try this for a few days, and you’ll really notice a change. When you start to understand yourself as an ever changing, never static process, life can become much more satisfying. Always growing, always changing, always improving.

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Powerfully Develop Bullet Proof Self Esteem

Try this little mind experiment, just for fun. Say to yourself “I can do whatever I want.” Or if you want to, you can say something specific like “I can sell anything to anybody,” if you are a salesman. Or you can try “I own my own house,” or “I will own my own business,” if those are appropriate. After you say them, do you hear any responses from your mind? Are there any insidious voices inside saying “yea, right,” or “get real,” or “ha ha ha!”

If you do hear those voices, or sense that they are there, don’t worry. Most people have them. How they got there is not really important. What’s important is how to get rid of them. Most of us go through carrying judgments of ourselves that didn’t even come from us. Maybe when you were six, your teacher said something, that she thought might’ve been helpful at the time, but turned out to be a limiting statement like “you can’t do that!” when you trying to do something that you weren’t supposed to. I remember once in kindergarten I was having a ball painting blue paint all over everything. How was I supposed to know you were supposed to keep it on the paper?

Other times an adult will say something out of anger, when they are not really angry at us, but it seems that way at the time. So we carry that judgment with us, almost without knowing.

These judgments and opinions that others have given us over the years build up and mix with our own opinions of ourselves. Even if we have great ideas and plans, it’s hard to achieve them if we have those old tapes playing over and over in our heads.

A great way to help yourself to easily achieve what you want in life is to choose to release others’ judgments of you, release those old voices. Choose to listen to yourself, and yourself only. Let the others go. They aren’t important any more. The more you work on releasing their influence, the easier it will be to achieve greater success in your life.

One of the things that I’ve found that works fantastically well for this is a product I’ve been using for at least ten years. It’s only about thirty dollars, and it’s amazing to listen to. It uses a kind of hypnosis called a dual voice induction. You can hear a different voice in each ear. Each one telling a beautifully crafted metaphor, which are specially designed to guide your brain into more resourceful thinking. The particular one I’m talking about is called the Self Esteem Supercharger. Even though I’ve listened to it hundreds of times, I’m still not completely sure what’s on it, because I zone out completely every time. It doesn’t use any subliminals or any other secret technology, so there are no hidden messages. It’s a completely relaxing experience that can free you to feel more resourceful and less dependent upon the opinions of others. The name of the company is called Learning Strategies. I’ve bought and used several different products from them, and I can confidently say that they are one of the best companies out there if you are interested in self improvement. And trust me, I’m a self development junkie.

In the future I’ll be posting more reviews of their products, as they are incredibly helpful in making it almost automatic for you achieve whatever you want in life.

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Your Incredible Power of Thought

Have you seen the movie, Titanic? The one where that ship crashed into the iceberg, and sank? I’m sure you realize that the reason they crashed into the iceberg is because ninety percent of the iceberg is below water, where they can’t see it. And of course, since they didn’t have very advanced sonar back in those days, they didn’t really see it coming. The fact that they were trying to go fast to impress the newspapers, and weren’t willing to always pay attention didn’t help either.

How about that episode of Seinfeld, where George went the movie theater and that guy was shining a laser pointer at the screen? Because everyone thought it was so funny, George decided he would try the same thing, only he got different results.

Or how about those books that have all those satellite pictures from space? When you look down at small towns in sparsely populated areas, you can barely see a dot of light. Yet in that dot of light are hundreds if not thousands of people, all with thoughts, dreams, fears, hopes, and memories of wonderful pleasure.

Your brain is like that. The thoughts that you are thinking now are the proverbial tip of the iceberg, because there are literally millions of thoughts that are going on in your mind that you aren’t aware of. And the difference between the thoughts that you know about, and the thoughts you don’t know about, are a lot different than the 90/10 ratio in that iceberg. George’s laser is a little bit closer, with the dot being the thoughts you are conscious of, and the whole screen being your other than conscious thoughts. 

For example, what are you thinking right now? What were you thinking before you thought that? What are you thinking now, as you read these words, and remember to feel your left foot? How about as you feel your left foot and begin to wonder what is going to happen exactly one week from now? And when you think about that, can you remember your birthday when you turned seven years old? How about your first kiss? How about the first amount of money that you truly earned? How about the first time you were alone with that someone special? How about the night you were so scared, you didn’t think you were going to make it? (But thankfully you did!) How about that time you were so happy you cried, and then wondered if anybody noticed?

One of the most fantastic thing about the brain being set up like this is that there are literally millions of thoughts in your mind that you can harness to support you. While the magnificent potential is always there, sometimes our thoughts aren’t as cooperative with each other as you’d like. It’s when you give your brain a clear, strong, direction, infused with good emotions, that these thoughts start to sychronize.

A great way to do this is to think of something you want to accomplish or attain. Imagine how it will look when you accomplish it. What will you see, what will you feel, what will you hear that will show you, without a doubt, that you were able to accomplish this? Make another picture, filled with other pieces of evidence of your accomplishment. 

For example, imagine that you want to earn a certain amount of money. Decide on the exact amount. How many things can you picture that show evidence that you have your goal, already achieved? What do you hear people saying to you about your achievement? How do you feel? Can you feel the paper? Is it a bank statement? Are you opening an envelope? Can you feel the weight of the actual cash in your hands?

Once you have a picture in your mind of what you want, close your eyes and sit with it for a few minutes, and really feel gratitude for having it. Really feel thankful for yourself, already achieving it. Feel thankful for all the people that have helped you achieve this goal.

Do this at least twice a day, every day. This will powerfully align the thoughts in your brain to be more cooperative so you can achieve what you want.

And if you think that this is encouraging, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

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