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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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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

Always Have The Wind At Your Back

Make It Easy

I used to go on these long bike rides a couple days a week after work, and even some longer ones on the weekend. After work I didn’t have much time, so I’d to either go on a loop, or go on a long up and back trip to some particular destination that was interesting enough to go to. Usually the beach. What was cool about riding to the beach was that by the time I got there, the winds were just starting to pick up, giving me a pretty good push on the way back. I had one of those digital speedometers which measure average, max and all that. Not only was my average speed on the way back much faster, but also I exerted much less effort, as I had a strong wind at my back.

Of course there was an occasional weather pattern that would really mess things up. Coming back was really difficult, which made it hard to plan my energy exertion. Usually on the way down, I’d go all out, knowing coming back would be pretty easy. But to go out all the way down (about twenty miles) and then turn around only to find I’d messed up, and going back was going to be much more difficult that going down, that wasn’t too much fun.

I remember I took this really cool NLP seminar once. The last day we spent a large portion working on setting up our timelines. If you have never done any first hand time line stuff, it can be pretty powerful. To get a rough approximation of how your own personal time line is set up, imagine some things from your recent past, your medium past, and your far back past, and figure out where you keep them around you. For example, if you think of something you did yesterday, how do you represent that picture? Where is it? In front of you? In back of you? Above you? Below you? Likewise with something that happened a couple weeks or a couple years ago.

If you take the time to figure out where you keep things, it can have an impact on how well you do on projects you take on, and how well you get over things you wish you’d done differently.

For example, say you have this big goal of cleaning your garage. If you picture a clean garage as some big huge picture that is ahead of you, but far off in the distance, and way up high, then you might respond with stress or anxiety when you think of cleaning the garage. Not only is it far away, but it’s a long hill as well.

On the other hand, if you picture your clean garage as up close, and slightly down, then it might be easy. Anything that is close and downhill is easy to get to. Also, you may picture your clean garage kind of off to the side, almost behind you, so when you visualize it you have to strain your neck to even be able to see it. In this case you’d likely not even ever start. You’d only have this vague idea of wanting (or needing) to clean your garage.

One metaphor we tried at that seminar was going out into our future, using various hallucinations. Time machines, magic hot air balloons, floating lawn chairs. And as we went into our own futures, we placed presents for ourselves so that we could find them as we went through time toward our choices and goals. Both as encouragement to find along the way, and as proof that we were along the right path.

One trick you can do is to imagine your future goal, way out there. Maybe six months or a year. Then come up with five or ten things you’ll find along the way that will let you know that you are absolutely on track. The cool thing about this is they can be vague. You only need to give them certain colors and feelings. Your unconscious will work the details out later. You can also think of things that will help you along the way. Maybe chance encounters with strangers, or random occurrences with people you don’t know. Come up with five or ten of these as well.

Then imagine that you have these ten or twenty pictures, and fling them into your metaphorical future, and watch them sail out ahead of you. Some will go out only a little ways; some will go out almost to the end.

Then days or weeks later, when you are out cruising along, you’ll find one of these instances that you gave yourself from your past, and it will remind you how important your choice is, or give you proof that you’re already well on your way.

Of course, this is all a hallucination, but a useful one. If you come across a strange looking cat, you can interpret it to mean nothing more than everyday randomness. Or you can interpret it as aliens spying on your from planet Xexok, or you can interpret it as proof, given to present self, from your past self, that you are well on your way to achieving whatever it is you want to achieve.

Another way to use timelines is to go into your past and change your history. You can grab some resources from the present, hop onto your magic lawn chair, and float back into your past when you had some particular troubles before. Then you can float down just before the trouble happened, give your past self some of the resources from the present, and then step back and watch your past self go through the scenario again, but this time with more resources. And when I say resources, I don’t mean some magic sword to stab that third grade bully in the throat, I’m talking about a broader perspective, to give your past self much more understand of what was going on, so your past self can have more choice in giving meaning to whatever situation it was that used to give you trouble.

Then after you give your past self the resources, you can go back and relive the experience, only this time remember your present self (back then your future self) coming from the future to give you resources. Then go into the situation with those resources so you can get a better handle on things. Maybe your second grade teacher yelled at you, and at the time your only conclusion was that you were an idiot. Only when you go back to give yourself some resources, you might let your past self know that people are generally goofballs, and don’t always have a handle on how they talk to people. That way when you go back and relive the experience, instead of judging yourself an idiot, you can just write off the incident as your second grade teacher having an episode of less than appropriate behavior, for whatever reason. Maybe she backed over her cat on her way out of the driveway that morning. Whatever works. Your brain is pretty cool, and when you start to play around with it, you’ll find that you can do much more than you think you can.

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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

Get Relief From Stress NOW

One Simple Trick To Quickly Banish Stress

There is a quick way to beat stress, and once you realize how simple it is, you can do it more and more often, allowing you to get so good at it that it becomes almost automatic. This will have a profound impact on your life, as most of our problems are either caused by stress, or made much worse by stress in the from of unnecessary worry and anxiety.

We are all very busy today. It seems that there is less and less time to focus on ourselves, and our own desires. It seem that everybody would love no more than to steal one hundred percent of our attention for their own needs. Work, family, obligations. They can add up.

When most people think of a vacation, they think of a couple weeks off from work, on a plane to some island getaway. These can be wonderful. But when you consider that most people can only experience something like this once in a great while, they tend to lose their effectiveness in our daily lives.

So we need to develop the ability to get the same results without actually going anywhere. This is like taking a mini vacation. Once you get good at this, you will be able to do this several times a day, no matter where you are. At stoplights, during commercials, even while sitting in meetings. Pretty soon you’ll be able to do this during conversations with others (although I wouldn’t recommend doing this during serious conversations with loved ones or family members.)

The trick is to completely shut off all thoughts of the past, and all thoughts of the future. In the past are all of our memories. The first thing to realize is that most of our memories are inaccurate. We rarely remember things exactly as they happened. This is one reason that if all the police have is eyewitness testimony, they often times won’t pursue a case. It has been shown in several studies by leading psychologists that human memory is spotty at best.

The second thing about human memory is we usually tend to be overly critical on ourselves when remembering events.

I should have…

I wish I would have…

Why did I….

Why did he/she……

These are statements we usually use to frame the past. Rarely do we remember soemthing and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. So when you develop the ability to temporarily shut off your memories of the past, you also shut off the guilt, worry and stress associated with how you frame those memories.

The other side of the coin is the future. Unless you just won an all expense paid trip to Paris, (or somewhere else cool) when you think of the future, if you are like most people, you think of it with at least a little bit of worry and anxiety.

Will I be able to pay the bills?
What will he/she say?
What if I fail?
What if I screw up?

When we think of the future in these terms, it’s no wonder we have stress related health problems.

So the second trick is to temporarily cut off all thoughts of the future. When you do this, you can notice a small bit of relief in the present moment.

How do you do this? Focus on now. Focus on the physical feelings you are experiencing. Take a slow, deep breath and focus your concentration as much as possible on your physical body. Start with your feet and slowly move your awareness all the way up. Go for as long as you can without letting thoughts of the future or past creep into your mind.

Assert to yourself that you have the power over your own choice. You have the power over where your attention goes. Your mind goes where you tell it, not the other way around.

One way to do this is when you slowly breath in, say to yourself:’

“I choose…”

And as you slowly breathe out, say to yourself:

“Now.”

By combining your concentration on those two sentences, your breath, and whatever physical sensations you are feeling, you’ll effectively shut out thoughts of the past and the future.

Your conscious mind is like a computer. It only has so much processing power. By forcing yourself to think about your breath, your body, and those two statements (or whatever similar statements you want to use) you are effectively using one hundred percent of your conscious processing power.

One important thing to keep in mind is that it will be difficult to keep those other thoughts away for long. Thinking of the future and the past have been necessary for human survival for hundreds of thousands of years, and it can take a lot of practice to shut them out for more than a few moments. But that is all it takes to put a crack in stress and see the light of now, that can shine through and give you a small bit of needed relief.

The more you practice, the better you’ll get at this. Soon you’ll be a master of your own mind.

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 Quickly Skyrocket Your Creativity To Genius Levels

If you’ve ever felt the need for a sudden burst, of creativity, then this article is for you. I’ll show you how you can dig through the seemingly limitless resources in your mind to come up with such wildly creative ideas people will think you are a naturally gifted genius.

Scientists are always being surprised by the complexities and depth of the human mind. Just as they are beginning to scratch the surface, they continue to be amazed at the sheer processing power of the brain. If all the computers of the world were connected together, and tasked with “thinking” about one singular problem, they wouldn’t come close to the power of one human brain.

The structure of the human brain is thought to be of a lattice structure, with nodes connecting to several nodes, each of which are connected to several other nodes. What this does is create a structure where one “thought” or memory stored at one node has a seemingly infinite connection to every other “thought” or memory through the connection of only a couple other nodes.

Similar in nature to the theory of Six Degrees of Separation, which states that every human on earth is connected to every other human through no less than six people. For example, you know somebody, that knows somebody, that has met the Pope. And the Pope, of course, has met most of the world’s leaders. You therefore have about three or four degrees of separation between all of the world’s leaders.

The brain works in a similar fashion. One thought or memory is connected to several others directly, which in turn is connected to several others. Pretty soon every thought can easily be connected to every other thought through only three or four nodes.

When you can harness this idea towards creative thought, you can virtually become genius. The key is to focus on your outcome, and let your mind roam until you find a solution. With practice, you’ll be able to do this within a few seconds, silently, and come up with a solution to almost any problem on the spot. This works great for brainstorming sessions at work.

The way to get started is to simply practice letting your mind wander. One simple way is to create an ABC list of several different items, with each list constrained to a specific category. For example, one list may be of musical instruments, starting with each letter of the alphabet. (Don’t worry; you can cheat if you need to.) For example A = “A guitar”, B= “Bongo drums”, C = “Clarinet,” and so on.

Another list may be food. So A is apple, B is banana, C is Candy, etc.

Once you have your lists, just pick a letter, and start writing about anything that comes to mind regarding whatever to item’s you’ve selected. It might feel strange and clunky at first, but you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly. It’s best to use some kind of word processor, and just type away without concern for spelling or grammar.

If you do this for five minutes a day, you’ll be giving your brain a tremendous workout, and will be strengthening your lateral thinking ability. Once you get the hang of it, you can start problem solving. Simply choose one word that describes your problem, and use the first letter of that word to select items from your various ABC lists. Then just start free associating, starting with whatever items you’ve chosen.

You’ll be amazed how quickly you will come up with a solution to your problem seemingly out of nowhere. The trick is to be open and not censor yourself. When you get that “aha” feeling, you know you’ve arrived.

For example, let’s say you work at a manufacturing company, and you are having a problem with shipping. So you choose S, and look at your two ABC lists, and choose Saxophone, and Sandwich. (S instrument, and S food). Just start brainstorming away, using the two S words as your seeds, and see where you brain takes you. Just keep associating, and follow along wherever your brain takes you, and you’ll have a solution in no time.

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How To Use Your Unconscious Mind To Automatically Attract Money, Sex, and Love

If you’ve ever doubted the power of your subconscious mind, this article may be reminder of the massive amounts of untapped power you likely have sitting between your ears.

It’s no secret that several best selling books have been written on the subject, and perhaps you may have even read a few of them. Sometimes it can seem like they are talking about “somebody else” in those books. It can be easy reading about all those wonderful things happening to “other people” in the examples presented in those books, and somehow feel they don’t apply to you.

A quick way to banish this erroneous thought is to simply find experiences where you have been well served by your unconscious. Anytime you’ve acted on intuition, or what you may have called a gut instinct has been due to your unconscious.

Or anytime you were trying to think of something, a name of somebody, or a name of a band or dessert, and it was “just on the tip of your tongue,” and then you forgot about it, only to have it magically pop into your mind when you least expected it. That was your unconscious mind presenting you with the information you were requesting earlier.

One useful way to think of your subconscious is like a giant computer that contains all the information you’ve ever experienced. And when I say experienced, I mean stuff you’ve read, things you’ve seen, emotions you’ve felt, or anything else that has been filtered from the outside world, through any one of you five senses, and into your brain.

But wait, there’s more.

The unconscious is not merely a gigantic billion gigabyte hard drive in you brain. It is also jillion-gigahertz multi-parallel processor as well. It takes all the raw data, in the form of pictures, emotions, tastes, snippets of old conversations, and runs them through several algorithms so complicated it would make the best programmers at Google look like cavemen just learning to paint on their cave walls.

And the great thing about your unconscious is that it never stops working. It is always sorting through your data to present you with the best possible information to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve.

If you don’t program your brain with a specific direction, it will default to it’s factory installed programming, which is to point you in the direction of safety, being well fed, and sexually satisfaction. The order in which these appear is based on whatever threat might be present at the moment. Many times, there is perceived threats which interfere with your ability to achieve on or all of the above.

For example. You see a really attractive member of the opposite sex, and you’d really like to stroll on over and copulate, but something holds you back. What is holding you back of course, is fear. Fear is the big stopper of action.

Fear is a good thing though, it has kept mankind safe for hundreds of thousands of years, and will likely keep you from getting slapped if you walk over to that girl or guy and suggest some copulation over in the corner.

But I digress.

The big power of the subconscious is when you give it programming in additional to it’s factory installed programming. When you choose a specific goal, and charge that goal with enough energy so that your unconscious starts to find ways to make it happen.

Example.

Let’s say you are really hungry. A base need for humans. Everybody knows it is a horrible idea to go shopping at the grocery store when you are hungry. You have this strong desire for food, and everything looks good. Because of your strong desire, your unconscious is sorting through the environment and finding all those things that will satisfy this deep craving.

You ignore the sexy blond standing next to you, you ignore the sale they are having in Wii’s, you pretty much only see the food.

Another example. (The old new car stand by example.)

You buy a new car. It is very important to you. Suddenly you see the same car everywhere. You swear they weren’t there before. But because you have given your brain the temporary message that a purple Toyota Corolla (or whatever car you want for this example) is super important, you see them everywhere.

When you take something that you really want, like money, or a relationship, or a new house, and charge it strong enough, your unconscious will start to point out all kinds of things to you that will help you make it happen.

And the way to charge your subconscious is with pictures, feelings, sounds, tastes, and smells of what your desire will be like when you get it. When you make as many as you want, and charge them with powerful emotions on a daily basis, you’ll start to see all kinds of opportunities pop up.

It seems like magic, and to hear some of the people from “The Secret,” it sounds like magic. But I reality, all those opportunities were there before, just like all those purple Corolla’s were there before, it’s just that you didn’t notice them.

And the thing about opportunities is that they can be a double-edged sword. They are a little bit more complicated to spot that a purple Toyota. You might need to see a couple things, and thing of a creative way to combine to create something useful. Like maybe you’ll run into two different people within a week, and think of a creative way to combine everybody’s skills to create a really cool product that will make you millions.

If you hadn’t’ charged your brain to look for opportunities, you might have missed out. But when you program your brain through regular practice, and emotional visualizations, you’ll start to see opportunities of a lifetime on a regular basis.

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How To Sort The World For Maximum Benefit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Change Beliefs To Skyrocket Your Capabilities

If you’ve ever been hampered by a limiting belief about your capabilities, you are in luck. Today I’d like to show you an easy way to gradually shift your beliefs from limitation to enhancement. Although it may take some time, from a couple days to a few weeks, its simple to do, and the results can be absolutely profound.

First, a little bit about how beliefs work. Beliefs are the sum total of labels or meanings that you’ve given to your past experiences. The stronger the emotional response to any past experience, the stronger the belief. For example, if you had to give a speech in third grade, and the teacher corrected you in the middle of it, you likely would have felt pretty bad. Then maybe later, when you had to speak in front of several people in fifth grade, and something else bad happened, like maybe nobody really listened to you, or maybe somebody laughed at you. Then maybe in high school you tried to tell a joke to people that you weren’t really familiar with, and it didn’t go over well.

These experiences will add up to the idea that you suck at public speaking. When you think of public speaking, your brain will quickly reference all the instances in your past, and come back with the belief that you suck at it. This happens in microseconds much quicker than the conscious mind knows.

When you project yourself into the future, you will filter any possible future through this belief. So when you think to maybe giving a best man speech, or giving a presentation at meeting at work, you will likely get nervous because you are projecting your future through this filter.

The good news is that you can easily change this belief. In the example of public speaking you can slowly shift the belief to a positive one where you will not only believe that you are a good public speaker, but you will actually seek out and enjoy opportunities of public speaking.

The easiest way to do this is through journaling. Sit down and start from as far back in your memory as you can go, and recall any positive experience of speaking in front of other people. Describe each experience in as much detail as possible, to the point of reliving it as you are describing it. You can even make stuff up if you want, and add really cool things that happened. (Just make sure to make them plausible, like people clapping, or strangers smiling).

If you do this for a few days, or even a couple weeks, your brain will automatically access these memories whenever the idea of public speaking comes up, and your fears will slowly start to vanish. Pretty soon, you’ll get to a tipping point where the good memories outweigh the bad memories, and you’ll suddenly feel like speaking in front of a huge group of people is as easy as chatting with your best friend on Skype.

This only takes a few minutes every day. The best time is to spend five or ten minutes journaling at night, just before bed. After a couple of weeks you’ll be amazed at how you can dramatically shift your beliefs about your capabilities.

And when you start to do this on a regular basis, and choose a new enhancing belief to reprogram every month, just imagine how powerful you will be a year from now. Pretty much any belief you want you can easily reprogram into yourself. For example:

Good a public speaking
Make money easily
Easy to persuade people
Natural seducer of the opposite sex
Learns quickly and easily
Lose weigh easily

These are just a few examples of things that are absolutely easy to reprogram yourself to believe. It’s simple, and quick and can powerfully enhance your life.

Have fun with this.

How to Slay the Demons of Your Fears

I was having breakfast with a friend this morning. She wanted to try out this new restaurant that opened up nearby. It’s interesting how difficult it can be to open and maintain a restaurant. They can be incredibly rewarding, if you open up in the right location, and have the kind of food and environment that people like. There are a lot of variables that go into it. I remember reading a survey a while back, asking people what was the most important thing about a dining experience. I think the quality of the actual food came in third or fourth behind ambiance, and the general feeling of the place. Even McDonalds’ mission statement stresses “experience” over anything else. Experience can be a tricky thing to define. It can be really subjective, many people experiencing the same thing as different. Some people might not really enjoy something, but others can really like this. It’s like when you see this, you can really think to yourself how much you can enjoy this.

My friend was telling me about how she came up with an interesting way to help her toddler overcome nightmares. He is three, and is starting to have scary dreams. She was telling me how her physician told her that some children have more bad dreams than good dreams, so it’s important to develop good strategies to help overcome  fears. She had read a few books on child development, and being an ex kindergarten teacher, she was pretty well equipped to handle these kinds of things, so of course I was interested in what she did.

She said that whenever her son would wake up from a nightmare, she would ask him to describe it. She noticed that the more he described his dreams, the scarier they got. The monsters became meaner, with bigger teeth and hungrier looks in their eyes. Sometimes he would even imagine that they had blood dripping from them. So my friend decided to try something. She gently helped her child change some of the things that he’d experienced in the dream, without really changing the actual content. She changed the meaning behind the content.

For example, instead of having teeth that were dripping blood, the monster suddenly had teeth that were dripping chocolate sauce. Instead of having hungry looks in his eyes, the monsters eyes were red from laughing at a funny cartoon. And instead of having a mean look on his face, it became a look of consternation as he was trying to quietly fart without drawing attention to himself.

I asked her if this worked, and she said that it didn’t take long for her kid to begin to do this on his own. He would wake up, and as he started to recall his dream, he could change the pictures around so it wouldn’t be as scary. She said the trick was to take whatever pictures you come up with, and play with changing around certain aspects of them. You can use it for things other that scary dreams. You can use it on memories, or imaginations of the future, as well.

For example, if you have a particular memory you’d like to change, you can still remember the actual memory the same way, but change the meaning of the content. Like if you remember somebody yelling at you, you might have remembered that it was because you did something wrong, which would in turn cause you to feel not so good. But if you remember them as yelling at you because they were in a bad mood because they themselves got yelled at, it’s not so bad.

She went on to say that you could also play around with changing the actual content. For example, you can take a memory of a teacher yelling at you in front of the class in third grade, and shrink the teacher down in your mind to where she is only three inches tall, and her voice sounds like Mickey Mouse would if he had inhaled some helium. Then when you remember the class laughing in the background, you can remember them as laughing at her, and not you.

I thought that that little three year old is pretty lucky to have a mom that would become so interested in making sure that you can do these things to make your fears go away. I’ll be interested in seeing how much he can turn into a more resourceful person with so many skills to help others.