If you have any phobias, here’s a quick and easy way to get rid of them. Actually a couple of quick and easy ways. Sometimes called the “swish” technique (although I think this term may actually be proprietary), and sometimes called something else, it can be very helpful in removing a non-resourceful response to an external event or trigger.

What is an external event or a trigger? Anything that you perceive in the world around you. A certain coffee cup, a person, a certain tone of voice. Anything that happens in the outside world, that gets into your brain through your ears, eyes, nose, mouth, or sense of touch.

The brain is an amazing computational device. Despite the incredible speed with which the Internet has been expanding recently, with any number of ways to connect and communicate, the entirety of the Internet is nowhere near the complexity and computational abilities of one human brain. Anybody who is worried that the Internet, or machines in general will somehow become “aware,” like “Skynet,” don’t’ fret. Our simple human brains which have been used by humans to throw rocks at moving animals for hundreds of thousands of years are much more advanced that any computer now, or in the future.

However, there are tradeoffs. It can’t do everything at once. Many times it sacrifices accuracy for speed. This crops up whenever we generalize, distort, or delete information between the outside world and our brains.

On the one hand, that is a great leap of evolution. You only need to learn how to open one door, and every other door in the universe (or at least on earth) is easy to figure out. Just look for the handle, and give it a turn, or a click, and you’re in.

However, sometimes, this works against you. If you are a little kid out for a morning stroll, exploring the wonderful world around your home, and a strange dog comes out of nowhere and starts barking, it can have the effect of making you terrified of dogs your entire life.

Or if you have to get up in front of your third grade class to give a book report, and you interpret the laughter from a couple of students as directed at you, rather than the nervous laughter that it likely is, it can have a profound impact on your ability to speak in public for the rest of your life.

The great promise of human development is to take all of these automatic processes, and raise them up into your conscious awareness long enough to tinker with them, so that when they sink down into unconsciousness, they no longer hinder you. In fact, it’s possible to tinker with them enough so that they support you, and make what used to be fearful, compelling and sought after.

Here’s how. The structure is to take an event, and relive it, but give the events different meanings than you originally gave them. There are many tricks and “procedures” that you can use to do this. One is the swish pattern. It goes like this. (For the sake of illustration, we’ll use the barking dog from some imaginary childhood.)

Go back into your past, until you see the dog. Run through events, slowly, right up until the dog came into your awareness. Either a sound, or a smell, or visualization. Find the trigger. Imagine you are some time traveler, and you are in that little kids head. What is the first thing that let you know there was a dog there, before you felt the fear? Was it a smell, a noise, a rustling off in the distance?

Ok, freeze that. Now come up with another picture, one that makes you feel as good as you can. A big bowl of ice cream, a Friday afternoon after school, going over to your best friends house for a sleepover, whatever you can think of.

Now take that previous memory, leading up to the barking dog, and right when you get to that “trigger,” immediately switch over to the positive, happy memory.

If you’ve seen the movie “Butterfly Effect,” this can be a good way to hallucinate this. Imagine yourself as a little kid, just about to get scared by the dog, but not quite, then suddenly switch to the other memory. If you do this enough times, it will start to happen every time you think of a dog, or see a dog.

Before, this is what happened in your brain. You heard a dog; your brain quickly scanned your memory to figure out how to respond, and found the original barking dog incident, and came back with a feeling of fear.

But if you do the swish pattern enough, with enough emotion, you’ll “short circuit” that process. Now when you hear a dog, you will search through your memory, and either come up with nothing, giving you a neutral response, or you’ll come up with the new positive, happy response. Naturally, the more you practice “replacing” the original response, the more of an effect it will have. Many people make the mistake of only doing this once, and wondering why it doesn’t “stick.”

That’s akin to practicing a new golf swing once and wondering why you can’t hit it perfectly every time. You need to put in several practice swings on the driving range before it becomes a habit.

As to how you actually do the “swish” where you replace one memory with the next, there are several ways.

One is to make a picture of the trigger memory, and then shrink it quickly and replace it with a picture of the new memory.

Another is to imagine the trigger memory as a picture, and then somebody pulling it from your head, as if it’s wrapped around your head with rubber bands, and then just before snapping it back into your brain, replace it with the new memory.

Another is to imagine Yoda standing behind you with a light saber, and every time the trigger memory pops up, he demolishes it and makes the new memory appear.

The more creative you get with this, and the more fun you have doing this, the better and quicker it will work.

Have fun.

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I used to have this friend that had a particular skill. It wasn’t anything that was going to make him rich, or famous, but it was really fun to watch. The interesting thing was that whenever he tried to purposely do it, like think about it beforehand, it never was quite as amusing.

It even was less funny to watch, and more obviously forced, when there was a group of people, and somebody mentioned this particular skill, and then everybody turned and expected him to turn it on right on the spot. He wasn’t a shy guy, so he never melted under pressure or anything, but it seemed to be much more spontaneous whenever he just launched into this particular behavior without any prompting, and kind of riffed off of himself. Especially when it happened at a party or something when there were plenty of people around, and they were completely taken by surprise.

I was reading this article the other day about something called a pattern interrupt. This is something from NLP that goes way back. What is likely the most taught, or talked about, or referenced example is the handshake interrupt.

Milton Erickson, the famous hypnotherapist invented this, mostly by trial and error. He would walk up to somebody, stick out his hand, and right in the middle of the handshake, he would suddenly shift into hypnotist mode, and pretty soon the person would be standing there staring at his or her hand.

The way it works is like this. The brain is a very lazy organ. Perhaps lazy is the wrong word. The brain is a very efficient organ. It doesn’t want to waste a bunch of energy figuring out the same things over and over. The brain likes to find patterns, so that it doesn’t have to expend a lot of energy. Most people are surprised when they find out that the brain burns over twenty percent of your daily energy. So it makes sense it wants to make things as efficient as possible.

So the way it does this is it looks for patterns whenever possible. Like when you first learned how to open a door, you pretty much knew how to open all doors. And when you first learned the alphabet, you could read any font, regardless of how esoteric or flowery it was.

If your brain had to stop everything, and spend all its energy trying to relearn how to open a door every time, then you wouldn’t get much accomplished.

One of the reasons, according to many evolutionary biologists, for the reason of our powerful brain was because we had to develop all kinds of complex social skills as we evolved on the African plains. So a large part of our brain goes into reading body language, and trying to decide who to trust and who we can take advantage of.

So it makes sense that patterns involving other people are very important to the brain. Once we figure out certain behaviors that we do over and over again, it can potentially save a lot of energy.

Meeting somebody for the first time is one of those patterns. If you can imagine what it would be like if we had to invent ways to get to know somebody every single time we met somebody new, it would be an extraordinary burden on our brain. Meeting somebody for the first time is extremely important, because how accurately we judge them can have a profound effect on our future safety, especially when you consider what it was like back in the caveman days.

If you made the wrong impression about somebody, perhaps thinking if they were harmless when they were really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it could be devastating later on. So when you meet somebody for the first time, you need as much brainpower as possible to “feel them out,” so to speak. Which makes the handshake interrupt very powerful.

The automatic portion of the handshake, where you respond by sticking out your hand when somebody sticks out there, grab it and pump it a few times, and say the automatic “My names Jack, nice to meet you, nice to meet you too…” is rarely given any conscious thought.

So when Erickson would stop right in the middle of the handshake, people were completely thrown off balance. The mind is do entrenched in the automatic behavior that there is a complete and total shutdown of all thought for a few moments as the “targets” tried to figure out what was going on. And during this brief window, Erickson would see how much he could get away with.

A typical interaction would go like this:

Erickson (sticking his hand out) “Hi!”
Mark (Responding with his hand) “Hi.”
Erickson (freezing the handshake in the middle) “Nice to meet you my name is….”

And then he’d quickly grab the other guys hand with his non shaking hand, gently turn it and lift it so the other guy was staring at his palm. He would do this in less than a second.

“..as you look at your hand you can start to wonder about all those things you’ve forgotten, and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to stand here and think of all those wonderful things…” or something similar, that would take up as much of the guys brain CPU as possible.

Then he would walk away and leave the guy staring at his hand.

I think the reason my friend was so funny when he was so spontaneous, was that everybody was busy caught up in their pre-programmed “behavior” and they would be shaken when he started to act out his bizarre behavior. If you take any popular joke, a key element is something that is completely unexpected, especially if the joke is a play on words or something, and delivers a punch line that completely shakes up the imagine that you were led to automatically think.

The old Groucho Marx joke comes to mind:

“Last night I shop an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”

Or the famous linguistic example of ambiguity:

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”

I’m sure you can think of many others.

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Once I had this really strange and sudden desire to eat Italian food. It wasn’t even close to lunch or dinnertime. The feeling just completely hit me out of the blue. Since I didn’t have any real solid plans for the next couple hours, I figured I’d go downtown and find an Italian restaurant.

Not being big fan of sit down type restaurants, (I almost always get food to go whenever I’m too lazy to cook) I wasn’t too familiar with the fine dining landscape, so I expected to have to search for a while. I did have a couple ideas on where I cold find something decent, hopefully before the strange desire vanished, and I found myself knee deep in ravioli with no motivation to transform it into human energy.

Energy is an interesting thing. Most people consider energy as some kind of matter in motion. When somebody is hyperactive and in a good mood, they say he or she has a lot of energy.

Some energy is more expensive than others. You can spend tons of money on electricity, or you can build a windmill in your backyard. The funny thing is that your toaster really won’t be able to tell where you are getting your energy. 110 volts is 110 volts despite how it was generated.

I suppose you could also build a nuclear power plant in your backyard, but you’d probably need a pretty big backyard, and it may be hard to find some fissionable material. You’d also need a safe place to keep it, and most people’s back yards aren’t big enough to put everything. And the people that do have back yards big enough to not only build their own nuclear reactors as well as a place to keep all their uranium don’t usually do so, since cheap electricity is the least of their concerns. They’re worried about what to wear to the Oscars or something.

It’s kind of interesting when you take a step back, and see things in a different light. You decide what you need in order to get something, and you set out to get that thing you think you must have before you get that other thing.

But then along the way, by getting those items you previously imagined were a prerequisite for that super important thing, you actually care less about getting the super important thing, and those prerequisites seem to satisfy you in ways you never imagined. Usually at a deeper level that you thought you’d get from achieving that super important thing in the first place.

And paradoxically, the less you value something, the more you start to get it. Pretty soon you’ve got oodles of that thing you used to think was super important, and now it doesn’t seem to matter much.

Huh?

For example, guys that are naturals with girls don’t read all kinds of books and spend all kinds of time practicing the right pickup lines, and making sure their clothes are all perfectly matched. Guys that are natural go out to have fun, don’t are much about meeting girls, but are somehow always surrounded by girls desperate for their attention.

Or people that are fabulously wealthy seem to always have a knack for making more money. But making money isn’t their primary goal; it’s more like a side effect. They just enjoy doing whatever it is they enjoy, to the point where get really good at it, and the money follows.

There aren’t too many professional athletes that originally got into sports because they thought it would be a way to make a living. Sure, plenty of athletes, after they discovered their talents decided it might be a pretty lucrative meal ticket, but that was after they played their particular sport for a long while, usually since early childhood.

Obviously, not everybody is naturally good at something that will make you rich. Most of us have to find things that we like, and get good enough to make a decent living doing them.

But if you dig deep, you’ll find plenty of natural talents that when applied creatively, will earn you a good chunk of change, if you focus on developing your talents, and enjoy doing so, rather than simply looking for a paycheck.

I suppose in a few years, maybe even in this generation (depending on which generation you count yourself among) they’ll develop some truly renewable energy resource that doesn’t require much environmental impact, nor space to store all that uranium. I think tapping into ocean currents is one way that future generations will have unlimited energy for pretty cheap.

And when I finally showed up at where I remembered the Italian restaurant to be, I was glad that I still had my cravings. And wanting to take full advance of that fact, I ate quite a bit.

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Here’s an interesting mind experiment. Ready? Here is the situation; you have four cards, with the following faces showing. D, 7, 3, F. You are told that each card has a number on one side, and a letter on the other. Now you are given a statement:

On every card that shows a “D” on one side, there is a “3″ on the other side.

Here is the challenge: How many cards do you need to turn over, and which cards, to conclusively prove or disprove the following statement, and which cards do you turn over?

While you may find this easy (I didn’t I had to cheat and read the logic behind the explanation to get it,) most people don’t. In face, when this study was first concocted by a couple of professors at Stanford (where you’d think there’s be some smart people) only about one out of four got the answer right.

Now here’s the same question, presented another way:

You are a bouncer at a bar. The rules are that you can’t drink unless you are twenty-one. Now the cards are “drinking coke, drinking beer, 16 years old, 25 years old.” Or if you prefer, there are four people sitting at the bar. One is drinking beer (you don’t know how old they are) one is drinking coke (you don’t know how old they are) one is 25 (you don’t know what they are drinking) and one is sixteen (you don’t know what they are drinking).

From a logical standpoint, the problem is identical, yet when presented the second way, most people quickly realize that in order to figure out if anybody is breaking any laws, all you do is card the person drinking beer, and quickly check what the sixteen year old is drinking. In effect, turning over two cards to see what is on the other side.

As in the case above, you turn over the “D” to verify it if has a three on the other side, and you turn over the “7″ to make sure it doesn’t have a “D” on the other side. If the D has a 3, and the 7 doesn’t have a D, then the statement is correct. If the D doesn’t have a three, and the 7 has a D, then the statement is incorrect.

The underlying problem is why, when the logic is identical, do so many people have a hard time (as I did) with the first question, and a much easier time (as I did) with the second question?

One answer could be that we aren’t as logically thinking as we’d like to believe. It may be that our brains aren’t designed to think in terms of Vulcan logic like Mr. Spock, but to think only in terms of social interactions, specifically to uncover social “cheats,” those that would break unwritten social contracts.

The thinking behind this idea goes like this. Humans lived in small groups for a couple hundred thousand years. That’s when we developed our “humanness” so to speak. One thing that evolutionary biologists think is one of the major driving forces behind the massive growth of the human brain during our history was social pressure from within the group. Our brains, our language, our thinking was all developed to outsmart each other within that small group of wandering nomads all those years ago.

Numerous studies of chimps and various apes have shown this to be a major portion for the need for their large brains as well. Most of them have plenty of food where they live, don’t need to organize sophisticated hunting parties, or come with complex methods of evading predators. Most of their thinking power, many believe, is so they can outsmart each other and rise as high in the social order as possible.

When humans developed language many, many years ago, we just took it a couple notches higher (to say the least) and developed all kinds of conscious and unconscious social skills. We learned to read facial expressions and body language, learned how to tell when somebody is cheating or lying, and be able to cheat and lie ourselves.

Many species have a specific feature, which is there solely for sexual competition within the species. The most often given example is the peacock’s tail. When peahens get together to choose their mate, they choose the male with the most flamboyant tail. Interestingly, the more flamboyant the tail, the dangerous it is for the peacock, as he is a much easier prey for predators, as well as having to lug that huge thing around should he have to run away.

In other species, they have other aspects. Bull seals have their size and strength, gorilla’s have their silver stripe of hair on their back, different birds have various ways to strut their stuff, from colored feathers to singing ability.

In humans, it is our brains, more specifically our verbal and social skills that became the driving force of sexual selection. Those that were the most eloquent, and the most persuasive, were the most prolific, and left the most offspring. Those offspring, having inherited slightly higher skills for eloquence and social prowess, in turn competed with each other. Continue that process for a few hundred thousand years, and you’ve got these big-brained humans walking around.

Us.

Something to think about yet next time you’re at a bar or club or other social gathering, and watching the vast throng trying to talk their genes into eternity.

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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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I remember once, a long time ago, way back when I was in Junior High school, I was playing golf with a couple of friends after school. There was one hole that I always had trouble with. The first 80 yards or so, you had to hit your ball over part of a lake. The part of the lake that you had to hit over ended on the left edge of where the fairway would be, and to the right it only got bigger. Being a habitual slicer, I usually sliced off to the right, and into the water.

In order to get over the water hazard, I only had to hit a normal shot. My normal shot didn’t start to fade until about fifty to a hundred yards or so, which gave me enough distance to get over the water if I could ever hit a normal shot. My problem was that on that particular hole, I never hit a normal shot. My drive was rarely more then ten yards or so off the ground and sliced a lot earlier and more pronounced than normal, sending my ball straight into the large area of the lake.

From a pure physics standpoint this is easy to understand. If you flinch even slightly in the direction of lifting your head to see where the ball went, you’ll hit the ball just a little bit higher than normal, giving you less height, and in my case, more slice, as I twisted the club head just a little bit more than I normally would have.

The funny thing is that I lifted my head because I was unconsciously worried about slicing into the lake. And because I lifted my head, I sliced into the lake. My unconscious actions, (e.g. lifting my head up and turning the club head more than normal,) which were based on my fears, actually caused my fears to come true, rather than preventing them.

From a structural standpoint, it went like this: I had this fear about an outcome based on a planned action. My anxiety going into the action changed the action slightly, and became the direct cause of my fears coming true.

In this particular case, it was one off shot, so to speak. I hit it in the water; walked about halfway up the fairway, about even where my ball went into the lake (next to all my other balls) dropped a ball, took a penalty and went on my way. This was a one-time event, which in the end only increased my score by two. The rest of the course was wide and open, so I could slice all over the place and be OK.

Naturally, every time I teed up on that particular hole, I remembered all the other slices into he water, which of course increased my anxiety, and made it much more likely to repeat the error. But only being a golf game, and only being in Junior high school, I figured that was normal. Until my friend shared with me a powerful secret that I still use today, and you can to, to break out whatever rut you happened to be in.

This problem, often called a self fulfilling prophecy, can present itself in many ways, and the feedback loop can be much more debilitating that a couple of strokes on an afternoon golf game.

Suppose you are a single guy, and you see a girl you like. You walk up to her, introduce yourself, and she blows you off. Happens all the time right? Only next time you walk up to a girl, you remember the last one that blew you off, and it makes our approach less effective. You are nervous, can’t hold eye contact, and basically come across as kind of creepy. This makes you get rejected even more harshly, which in turns makes approaching another girl too scary to even contemplate. You have effectively locked yourself into a vicious circle of defeat, by using your worst possible past in order to hallucinate a likely outcome. The likely outcome terrifies you so much; it cripples your behavior, and virtually guarantees itself.

Another example. You go ask your boss for a raise. He turns you down. You become depressed, and your motivation to work hard decreases slightly, which in turn decreases your productivity a little bit. Next time you ask for a raise, your boss is even less likely to give you one, based on your productivity. If you get locked into this horrible tailspin, you may very well find yourself on the list of people who are expendable when budget cuts are mentioned.

One of the insidious things about these self-defeating cycles is that it is incredibly easy to blame others for your predicament. The guy who is approaching girls can blame women for being stuck up and not having the ability to see his true worth. Maybe they think he’s too short, or doesn’t make enough money. This can lead to a belief that all women are shallow and materialistic

The guy who never gets a raise can blame his boss, the economy, his coworkers for talking about him when he’s not around, and so on.

As difficult as it sounds, only when you take responsibility for your lot in life do you have a shot at bootstrapping yourself up and out of any vicious cycle of defeat you may find yourself in. Even though that often times others are culpable, some bosses do play favorites, and many people, both men and women, are shallow and materialistic, that doesn’t help you a bit. You can’t change the world, but you can change how you interpret it and react to it. That is completely in your control.

So one day, just as I was teeing up, my friend, says “Hey wait, before you hit, just close your eyes and pretend there is nothing but a huge patch of green grass in front of you.” I tried it, and it worked. I don’t think I ever hit another ball in the water after that.

The funny thing is that he didn’t tell me to visualize my ball bouncing on the other side of the lake, like most sports psychologists would have you do, or visualize how I’d feel when I hit it over the water. The advice my friend told me was to imagine the playing field, the course, was physically different than it really was. By imagining a different playing field, my actions changed automatically.

It’s so easy to argue until we’re blue in the face that “the playing field isn’t equal” and that others have advantages and opportunities that we don’t have. But what if you could simply hallucinate a more helpful playing field, and allow your actions to naturally respond to your hallucination?

What if before approaching some cute girl in a bookstore, instead of going through the difficult procedure of imagining a positive outcome, and planning his various openers, he simply imagined that all girls were irresistibly attracted to his type? There’s no rule that says your imaginations have to be true or accurate, only that they lead to behaviors that get you what you want.

And what if the guy in the office imagined he was the boss’s nephew, or that he’d pulled him out of a burning care a week earlier, or something else as ludicrous? Sure, it’s completely false, but what if it works?

Something to think about next time you’re gearing up to imagine yourself into a positive outcome.

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There’s this Starbucks that I like to go to on the weekends. In order to get there, I have to take a train, and a streetcar. From the station near my apartment to the main station downtown is seven minutes. From the streetcar stop to the stop just in front of Starbucks is about 8 minutes. If I hurry, I usually get off the train, leave the station, cross the big street and catch the streetcar in about three minutes. From my apartment to the station is about two minutes.

So If I time it right, leaving my apartment just in time to catch the train, and going from the train station to the streetcar stop without issue, my door to door time from my apartment to Starbucks is about twenty minutes. Not bad considering my apartment is located in an area that could easily be considered the boonies, as there are several large fields and open areas, and Starbucks is smack in the middle of downtown, surrounded by high rise buildings.

Coming back is a complete different system. From Starbucks back to the main station is about a 30-minute walk, if I take my time, and 20 minutes if I huff it. Huffing it isn’t all that exciting, so I usually leave at least thirty minutes before I want to catch the train. Between Starbucks and the main station is this long, covered, no cars allowed shopping arcade, with all kinds of stores ranging from casinos and video game centers to comic book stores to bars and café’s.

One think I like to do is to waste time in a controlled manner. Obviously, if I lose track of time, and I only have twenty minutes or so, I don’t have time to stop and window shop, or flirt with whatever girls I may see. I have to walk in a straight line, looking straight ahead, with my mind on the time.

But when I leave earlier, I can afford to wander around like a pinball, bouncing back and forth across the road from shop to shop. A kind of planned time of no plans, or planned spontaneity, if you will. I know what time I need to leave, I know what time I need to arrive at the main station, but I have zero plans for what I will do in between. Only that I will slowly move from point A to point B with out any predetermined path.

I was reading this book on relationships once. Actually it was a book on communication in general, but the particular section I was reading was on relationships. One of the complaints that many people have when their relationship gets passed the “honeymoon” stage is that it gets boring and predictable. While certainly not the only cause, being bored in a relationship is reason enough for some to turn an eye elsewhere for excitement.

One thing that the book suggested was to have some planned spontaneity. Many couples, especially couples with kids, recognize the importance of having “date night” where they do something that they used to do before they settled down and have kids. Unfortunately, many times this “date night” is the same boring, predictable thing that they do again and again, like see a movie, or go out to dinner. While it’s good to get away from the kids once in a while, if you are moving out of one boring and predictable situation into another, it sometimes doesn’t really help out that much.

What this book suggested was planning some kind of activity where you don’t know what is going to happen next. You know you’ll leave the house at 6, and come home at 10, but if you can structure your “date night” so that you don’t really know what’s going to happen, it can have a much more positive effect on your relationship. Of course many people are afraid to try this, as they fear they will fall into the “I dunno, what do you want to do?” trap where they oscillate back and forth for two hours before settling on something just to settle on something.

But what this particular book recommended was to purpose give yourself a starting point and an ending point, and a specified amount of time to travel from one end to the other, or in a loop as the case may be. Like up and down a boardwalk, or around a mall you’ve never been to, or through an area of downtown you’ve never been to at night.

The rationale behind these ideas is that the human mind is set up to always crave new experiences. We learn more of our behaviors by either modeling others and trial and error. If the brain wasn’t set up to always crave new experiences, it would be impossible to learn anything. That’s why movies, TV shows, books, and even gossip is so popular. It’s like candy for the brain. If we don’t involve ourselves in new experiences, the brain starts to crave artificially created ones.

And one powerful way to create a relationship, or to strengthen an existing one is to experience new things together. If you think of all the strong friendships you’ve forged throughout your life, it was likely through a common, and new experience. School, clubs, work, armed forces are all places that we naturally form life long friendships, in large part because we share a common and new experience, the emphasis being on the new.

There’s a reason you don’t become friends with that guy you bump into at the donut shop (or wherever) every morning. While buying your morning donut is a common experience, it isn’t new, so that bond isn’t created.

If you can structure new experiences with somebody you’re already in a relationship with, it can have a profound effect. The more new and unique, exciting and emotionally stimulating the experience is, the deeper the bond will be.

While wandering around downtown might not seem that new and exciting, you can do it in a different way, or go a different direction, or even make it a point to try a new restaurant every week. That way you can get into the mindset of exploring something new together, rather than just getting away together.

And even if you’re not in a relationship, doing something new and interesting where you play it by ear for just a little bit can also have a positive impact on your creativity and perspective. Something to think about next time you’re deciding what to do on a Saturday night.

For more ideas on how to take charge of your brain, and your experience for wild success in any area of life, check out the link below.

Success with NLP

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I remember this story I read once in a book on communication. The story goes like this:

And old guy was sitting at edge of a small town out in the old west. He saw a horse and wagon, pulling a family of four. They stopped, and greeted the stranger.

“So, tell me, how are the people in this town?” They asked.
“Well, how were the people in your old town?” The stranger replied.
“Oh, they were pretty nice. Friendly, always willing to lend a hand.
The stranger smiled.
“Well, that sounds like the people in this town.” He said. The family thanked him and rode past toward there new home.

A few minutes later he saw another horse and wagon, pulling another family. They two were moving into town.
“So, tell me, how are the people in this town?” They asked.
“Well, how were the people in your old town,” the stranger replied.
“Oh, not so good. Always sticking their noses in where they didn’t belong, gossiping, always waiting for you to make a mistake so they could take advantage of you.”
“Hmm.” The stranger said, shaking his head.
“I’m afraid you’ll find people in this town the same way.” They thanked him, and rode toward their new home.

There’s a powerful method of goal setting, or rather goal getting, called the solutions focus. In it, you take whatever goal you are aiming at, and periodically do an inventory of what you’ve done so far. You rate yourself on a scale of one to ten, ten meaning your goal has already been achieved, and you are enjoying the results, while one is you haven’t even started yet.

Whatever number you give yourself, then you ask yourself why that number, and not a lower number. Even if you gave yourself a 1.5 rather than a 1, ask yourself why. This forces you to come up with all the positive things you’ve done recently that have moved you toward your goal.

The next step is to figure out what small steps you cold take to get you from a 1.5 to 2.

This is called the solutions focus because you force yourself to focus on what you are doing right, rather than what is standing in your way.

In the story above, the family that found the previous town filled with happy friendly people were likely to find the same in the new town, not because an objective measurement would show their previous town as filled with happy, smiling people but because they were the kind of people that seemed to find the good in others.

The second family, by comparison, even though they were going to the same town, would likely find only pettiness and unfriendliness, because that is what they look for. If you look for crap, that’s all you’ll find. But if you look for treasure, you’ll likely find that as well.

There are plenty of good metaphors and stories that illustrate this point.

There’s also a pretty good exercise to give yourself a lot more resources that you think you have. Here’s how.

Think of a skill you’d like to develop, or one that you don’t think that you have. Then relax a bit, put yourself into a comfortable position, and take an inventory of your life history, and look for any evidence of when you’ve already exhibited this skill you are aiming to develop.

For example, if you want to become a good public speaker, just find all the times in your history that you spoke in front of others. Any time since you can remember from your earliest childhood memories are fine. And any public communication is fine. Yelling, screaming, singing, any time you spoke out in public and effectively got any point across.

Now whenever you think to the future, and any potential public speaking engagements you may be involved in, force your mind to those times in the past when you’ve already done what you are planning to do. When you do this enough times, your brain will start to see public speaking as something that’s normal and natural for you, and not something that is strange and terrifying, as it is for most people.

Like it or not, your past does influence your future. But there are so many ways to interpret your past, so many different memories and events that you were part of, that you can literally take any event, and spin it any way you like to support any future you’d like to create. Of course, there are some limits. For example, I’d have hard time finding some past experience that supported my goal of being able to slam dunk a basketball. It just ain’t gonna happen. But I would be able to vastly improve my outside shooting, my free throws, and any other part of the game that wasn’t wholly dependent on my height and my vertical jumping capability.

As much as we’d like to believe, we aren’t psychic. We can’t predict the future. But we can make reasonable assumptions on how things are going to turn out based on what happened in the past. And when you can choose which part of your past to reference, and how to interpret it, you give yourself a lot more flexibility.

To find out more, click on the link below.

Success with NLP

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Once I was roped into going to this really strange seminar with a friend of mine. I say roped in because he had bought two tickets, or signed up for two people, and his buddy had flaked at the last minute. It was paid for, and although it was a two-day seminar at this hotel, it was local, so I didn’t have to travel anywhere. So I figured I had nothing to lose. So perhaps “roped in” is too strong a term to describe his persuasive efforts. Perhaps “talked into” would be a better term.

It was a weird combination of hypnosis and metaphysics. The guy who taught the seminar is a pretty widely know hypnotherapist, he has all kinds of self-hypnosis tapes and books out, a well as a pretty popular practice. He does seminars from time to time.

We started out doing some basic criteria exercises, where we spent some time doing some creative journaling to get to the bottom of what we really wanted out of life. Most people in attendance, myself included, were surprised to find out most of the stuff we think we wanted, wasn’t for the reasons we thought we wanted them.

One of the requirements for a “well formed goal” is to make sure you are going after the goal for your own reasons, and not or somebody else’s. Most of our goals, we found, were there because of beliefs and ideas that we’d all picked up somewhere along the line from other people. This one lady had a tremendous breakthrough. She’d been trying her whole life to get ahead in her career, and she found out it was only to try and please her father, who died when she was a young child. When she discovered that she was trying to please an imaginary person, or a memory of he father, rather than her own desires, it was a huge relief.

She said it was like this huge burden that was released, and she felt a lot more energetic than she’d ever felt before. When she uncovered her true calling in life, the thing that she really wanted to go after for her own sake, she nearly broke down in tears from happiness.

She wasn’t worried that what she wanted would require a complete career change, and perhaps some more education. Just finding a goal that was something that truly resonated with her on a deep level was enough to give her inspiration. And as a completely unexpected side benefit, this lower back problem, that she’d had for several years, had completely disappeared.

After that we moved on to uncovering some beliefs that were holding us back. This wasn’t so fun, as many of us in attendance found out we had some pretty crappy beliefs. The instructor said that one interesting thing about human nature is that we can really deceive ourselves into thinking that something unpleasant isn’t there, to save us the pain of confronting it. Because I few acknowledge it, and confront it and fail, it would be devastating. So many times we unconsciously choose to ignore these things. Which is why most of us, when we uncovered these beliefs that were holding us back, were a little worried that we wouldn’t be able to overcome them.

But then he taught us this powerful self-hypnosis technique to completely obliterate our self-limiting beliefs. I was lucky enough to be the “guinea pig” to go up in front of class and be hypnotized. I don’t remember too much of what happened, but it involved moving energy around and using this really cool visualizations. Then we later broke into pairs and guided each other through the same process. After we did that a few times, we were able to do it on our own.

Now, this wasn’t some instantaneous magic that immediately removed all of our limiting beliefs, but it gave us a meditative practice to do on a daily basis. And ever since then I’ve been doing it, at least in part, to slowly but surely chip away at all the limiting beliefs I’ve built up since childhood.
After we figured out our criteria, set some powerful goals, and removed the blocks, then we moved on into some pretty cool psychic energy work. Personally, I’m not big believer in psychic phenomenon. It think there has to be a physical or biological explanation for everything, but some of the stuff we did was pretty impressive.

One thing we did was learn to generate positive and negative charisma. When you generate positive charisma, people will naturally be attracted to you. I used to think that if you have positive charisma, guys would walk up to you and offer you money, and girls would walk up to you and offer you sex. But it doesn’t quite work out that way. What happens when you consciously generate positive charisma is people will feel a strong desire to be in your presence, but because you are the one generating charisma, they will kind of wait for you to tell them or guide them what to do.

If you were in sales, for example, and you generated a ton of positive charisma, a bunch of prospects would show up, but you would still need to go through the sales process and close them. But with positive charisma, it would be a lot easier.

Of course with negative charisma, you naturally repel people. Even if you tried talking to people they would do their best to ignore you, not respond, or simply jut walk away.

Now it’s one thing practicing these techniques in the seminar room, when everybody is “playing along,” but often times when you go out into the real world, it doesn’t quite work out as well. Which is exactly why he had us go out at night and practice these techniques around real people.

And let me tell you, I was amazed at how effective these were. I tried generating both positive and negative charisma in a large bookstore that evening. I went to a section where there weren’t any people, and did the exercise. Within few minutes there were about six people within a couple meters of where I was standing, where there was nobody there before. While this could have been a complete coincidence, I got the distinct feeling that every single one of these people was waiting for me to start a conversation with them. Their body language and posture all screamed openness. There were three women, and every one of them had their chests pointing straight at me, and their arms completely open. For those of you who study body language, this is a pretty strong unconscious sign of openness.

Next I went upstairs and did the negative charisma exercise. Again, I was shocked at its effectiveness. No matter where I walked, people would scatter like I had bubonic plague or something. Nobody even faced me, let alone made eye contact with me.

This seminar really opened up my mind to what is possible when you tap into some of the metaphysical energies that are surrounding us all the time. That was about five years ago, and ever since I’ve been interested in that kind of thing. Hypnosis, NLP, and all kinds of esoteric metaphysics. While some of it is complete nonsense, a lot of it isn’t. And the stuff that isn’t can have a powerful and profound impact on your life, and everything you want to accomplish.

For an example of some of the stuff that’s possible, check out the site below. It’s filled with different meditative exercises and techniques, many of which only require listening to a specially created audio file. They’re designed to guide your brainwaves into powerfully receptive states, where magnificent changes, including increases in charisma and sexual magnetism, are easy and automatic. Check it out for more info.

Powerful Metaphysics

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I was having lunch with an old friend of mine the other day. I hadn’t seen her since just after she had her baby. That was four years ago. I can’t believe how fast time flies when you’re doing the same routine day in and day out. If you don’t and look up from what you’re doing, life can zip right by without bothering to take you along for the ride.

She was telling me about how her son has all these imaginary friends. He has normal friends as well, he goes to this kindergarten three days a week, and he gets on well with the kids there, but while he’s at home, and his dad isn’t around, he’s always wandering around talking to people that aren’t there. When my friend asks him about them, he acts like she’s the one living in an alternative reality. He can see them, why can’t she?

She wasn’t too worried, but seeing as he’s her only kid, and she’s never experienced the “imaginary friend” thing, she started checking around to find out how normal it was. Maybe her house was actually filled with ghosts or something, and he could see them, and she couldn’t. If that were the case, she would need to learn to communicate with them so they wouldn’t keep him up past his bedtime.

She was telling me she did all this research, and actually went to see a specialist in child development. What she found out was both interesting and relieving. Her kid was normal, and her house wasn’t filled with ghosts. At least none that she or he could see.

What he told her was how the brain develops as we grow older, and one way that the brain switches between externally focused and internally focused. All of this has overlap with other areas of brain research, but part of it is particularly useful for understand how children develop, and how they are often in their own worlds, which seem to them as real as these words you are reading now.

The brain has four basic categories of brainwaves. The brainwaves are made up of all the electrical impulses pulsing throughout the brain at any given time. Every time you have a thought, conscious or unconscious, several billion neurons fire off in particular orders. The sum total of the firing of neurons, and the resultant wave of electrical impulses can be measured. They range from very slow, long brainwaves, to fast and short ones. Each category is associated with a different “type” of brain activity.

Most adults alternate between beta and alpha. Beta is the fastest, and is what most people experience when we are awake. Externally focused, thinking about the things around us and how to deal with them. Extremely high levels of beta are thought to be an indication of stress and anxiety. (An indication, not a cause).

The next is alpha. (An interesting side note, alpha is not the fastest, even though it’s called alpha. It’s called alpha only because it was the first one they discovered.) Alpha is associated with daydreaming, drifting off into imaginations about the past or the future. Artists and creative thinkers find alpha particularly helpful, as this is where they get a lot of their inspiration. When you kind of “zone out” in the middle of something, you have slipped from beta into alpha.

The next one down is theta. This is where all hallucinations, hypnosis, and deep meditation occur. During theta you can have wild ideas and thoughts. When you are falling asleep at night, and you drift from thinking about normal, every day thoughts, and catch your thoughts drifting seemingly on their own, with you just watching them, you’ve slipped into theta.

As adults, it’s very hard to be in theta and stay awake. Theta is that brief space between waking and sleep. Advanced meditators can hold this state for a while, but it takes some practice. Theta is though to be where genius ideas come from. Edison used to sit in a chair in a dark room, holding a weight in his outstretched hand. As soon as he drifted into sleep, and into theta, he would drop the weight. This would wake him up, and he would immediately write down as much as he could. This is how he came up with so many creative ideas. It wasn’t that he was smarter or more creative than the rest of us, it was just he effectively used his brains capacity to slip into theta, and exploit all of the genius level thinking that occurs during that phase.

Other scientists and inventors have used dreams, which are also in the theta brainwave state, to come up with ideas that have literally changed the face of science and industry.

One of the things that child development researchers are starting to discover is that when kids are growing up, they are in theta state a large portion of the time. Much more so that adults. Their brains are growing, and learning, and theta is the natural brainwave state to be in if you are learning about your environment for the first time. Learning how to walk and talk is one thing, but kids also naturally learn complex things like values, beliefs handed down with their parents, and complex emotional issues. They believe that theta is the perfect brainwave state for building strategies in the brain for dealing understanding and dealing with reality.

This may be why thinking of a problem just before bed is particularly helpful. Even though you may not remember, while you’re in the theta state just before sleep, your brain can come up with some pretty creative solutions to your problems, as Edison and others can attest to.

For most adults thought, accessing theta is only achievable through long practice of meditation. Unless we consciously practice in a regular basis, theta only comes with sleep, and unless we program ourselves before sleep to solve problems, the usefulness of theta is only useful to children.

But recently there have been discoveries that theta brainwave states can be achievable by listening to specific sounds. Sounds that we listen to have a profound impact on our brainwaves. With properly engineered sound, and focused concentration, theta is easily accessible by anyone with a CD player and pair of headphones.

It really is possible to tap into that same genius level creativity that Einstein, Edison and others have used over the years to solve problems, and come up with some astounding ideas that have changed the course of human history.

Breaking bad habits, enhancing communication skills, and changing beliefs about your ability to make a ton of money are all achievable through specific tracks specifically designed for these purposes.

If you’re interested in tapping into your genius level creativity for happiness, love, and profit, click on the banner below and find out how you can powerfully enhance your life.

Powerful Metaphysics

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Do you remember what it was like before you knew the difference between a small “b,” and a small “d”? Some adult, maybe a teacher, parent or an older brother or sister would write a bunch of squiggly lines, that were supposed to have some kind of meaning. After a period of time, they start to make some kind of sense to you. And pretty soon you knew all the letters.

After that you started to notice, or maybe it was pointed out to you, that certain letters always showed up together, and when they did they actually had meaning. Meaning of something that existed in the physical world that you already knew about. You knew what an apple was, maybe you even ate one every day. You knew what others meant when you heard the word “apple,” and you could say it yourself.

But somehow, when you first saw that collection of letters, a p p l e, it took a few tries to sound out what that word meant, and what it was referring to. After a few tries, you could look at the word and immediately think of an apple.

And before you knew it, you could look at the word apple, and you would think of an apple just as quickly as if somebody said it, or even just as quickly as if you saw a real one right here in front of you.

If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you get to repeat this process all over again. It takes a while to get used to automatically connecting a thought to a spoken sound, and then a little bit longer to produce the sound yourself. The next step, of course, is to recognize it in written form. If you are learning a language that uses roman characters, that isn’t such a big deal. But if you are learning a whole different writing system, like Sanskrit or Chinese, then you’ve got to go through the whole squiggly line learning process. Once you’ve learned the sounds, both how to hear them and how to make them, and how to recognize a specific set of squiggly lines and automatically associate them an apple, then you’re back on automatic pilot, and can spend your precious brain resources on other stuff.

This process happens over and over again as we move from the cradle to the grave. Unfortunately, for some of us, as we get older, it happens less and less frequently. Few skills are moved from the area of total confusion into autopilot. It seems to be much easier when we are younger. And we also seem to only associate “learning” with school, and things like language, mathematics, and classical literature. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

There are four discreet stages of learning in the human mind. Unconscious incompetence. We don’t know that we don’t know. After we are introduced to a topic, like a new language, and we first get started, we move into the conscious incompetence. Meaning that we know about this skill, and we know that we are no good at it. This can be very frustrating if you are trying to learn something new.

After this comes conscious competence. This is when we are good at something, but we need to really pay attention to what we are doing. We need to sound out every letter to understand what the word means, or we need to turn of the radio and tell our friends to shut up if we are driving just after we got our license.

The next phase is unconscious competence. This is obviously the best part. We know how to do something, and we don’t have to think about it when we do it. We can drive while listening to the radio, having a conversation, and shaving. Many times we drive somewhere, and forget completely how we go there.

Athletes that get into the “zone” say that everything just “clicks,” and they don’t really have to think. It’s like they are merely observing themselves giving a stellar performance. Conscious thinking becomes an obstacle.

Bruce Lee described a punch three ways. He said that at first, a punch is just a punch. Then when you study a punch through the frame of Jeet Ku Do, a punch is a complex movement of breath, body, energy and intention. After you skillfully master those elements, a punch is just a punch again. An altogether more effective and potentially deadly punch, but to the conscious mind, it is just a punch.

The great promise of the human mind is that you can learn any skill to the level of unconscious competence. You can easily learn to do anything without needing to think about it. There are literally thousands of things you’ve already learned to do in your life, where you moved through this process. Things that at one point in your life, you didn’t even know existed, but now you can do them without a thought.

So what skills would you like to have? Powerful public speaking? The ability to walk up a woman and sweep her off her feet within moments of meeting her? The ability to write a sales letter that will convert fifty percent of its readers? Artistic talent? Gold medal sports skills? The skill to look fear in the face and still have the courage to act?

When you learn the structure of learning, it becomes much simpler to make learning life long habit. You don’t need to sit in boring classroom, or study boring textbooks. With NLP, or Neuro Linguistic Programming, you can break any skill you want to learn into easy manageable tasks. NLP studies the structure of learning in such a way that you can model others who are performing at levels that you’d like to be at. You can basically reverse engineer their skill set, and make it your own.

While it’s not magic by any means, it can seem to be if you are stuck in the idea of learning the traditional, classroom way. With NLP you are able to explode your potential, and turn yourself into a life long learning machine, someone who will always be growing, and always be improving.

For more information on how you can use NLP to powerfully enhance every aspect of your life, click on the banner below for more information.

Success with NLP

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The other day I was hanging out with a friend of mine on this lake. Not really on the lake, next to it. There was this restaurant with an outdoor bar near one of the shores, or edges, or whatever you all the border between the lake the land.

We were watching all the people that were jet skiing, water-skiing, and boating. There seemed to be quite a few recreationists using motorized assistance in their recreational endeavors. There wasn’t much wind, so we didn’t see any wind surfers. There were a few swimmers, but for the most part, everybody had some kind of mechanized tool to assist them in their recreation. Then we saw something particularly strange. Something that both my friend and I had to do a double take, stop mid way through our conversation, and ask each other to verify what we’d just seen, to make we hadn’t slipped into some shared hallucination.

It’s kind of like when your brain is on autopilot, and starts to use your stored memories of what is going on around you to create the representation of reality, and then something completely upsets the system. They’ve done plenty of high level studies, using brain scans and cat scans and all kinds of other scans and when we are awake and conscious, up to fifty percent of everything we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell (all the data coming in through our five senses) is generated internally. Like when you go back to a web page without refreshing your browsers. You’re really looking at the website as it really is, only the way it was when you first surfed there five or ten minutes ago.

Like if you have a Yahoo! Email account, and you go to the Yahoo! Homepage, you’ll see so many messages in your inbox. Then if you surf someplace else, and then come back to Yahoo, you might not see any increase in mail, even though your buddy just sent you an email. Once you refresh your browser, you’ll see the new mail.

Scientists believe the brain works in the same way. If you are in a familiar environment, and the things around you aren’t changing all that much, your brain will start to rely on your stored memories to create what you think you see around you, rather than what is actually going on. So when something strange or out of the ordinary happens, your brain has to refresh it’s browser, and that can be a weird feeling.

Especially if that strange thing happens quickly, before your brain can refresh itself to catch up on what is really going on. Your brain doesn’t like to work very hard (or maybe that’s just me) so it will usually defer to stored memories whenever possible. It doesn’t like to continually “see” what is really going on unless it has to.

Many experiments bear this out. This is a reason why eyewitness testimony is the weakest link in any criminal case. One example of this is an experiment where they had a “criminal” come in and steal a professor’s briefcase during a lecture. Later, when they interviewed the students, the description of the “criminal” was all over the place. Some said tall, some said short, there wasn’t even any agreement on what ethnicity he was or even what color clothes he was wearing. Everybody seemed to base what they “saw” on their own experience with criminals, be it in real life or from watching criminals on TV.

There are all kinds of cool optical illusions that make use of this seeming limit on the brain. But is it really a limitation? What the brain in accuracy and detail, it more than makes up in speed. Our brains have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to deliver split second life and death decisions based on quickly changing data. Those that had slower brains, that sat around to contemplate things, didn’t last very long.

Those that had quick brains that decided when to run and when to fight, lived long enough to pass on those genes. So today we are left with a brain that is incredibly fast, but sometimes makes errors in reality detection. Sometimes we have to force ourselves to “refresh our browsers” to see what is really going on around us, rather then relying on assumptions and guesses.

Which is kind of what my friend and I did at the lake. It only happened because there was a momentary lull in our conversation, and we happened to be looking out over the lake at the same time, and toward the same spot. There was this guy on this Jet Ski that would jump out of the water, and then dive back in. He would dive completely under the water, Jet Ski and all, and then come back up a few meters later. Not such a big deal, as I’ve seen this in Jet Ski shows before.

But what we both saw was that this guy a was on a jet ski, by himself, and jumped up in the air, and then dove into the water, like normal, but when he came out there was a girl on the jet ski with him. As soon as we both saw that, we completely lost track of our conversation, and then asked each other if we both saw what we think we saw. After we verified that we both saw the same thing, we then focused intently on the water, specifically the area of this strange occurrence.

We weren’t exactly sure, but this “couple” did a few more tricks, and then both rode to the side of the lake, and as they did so a bunch of people were clapping and taking photos. It appeared to be some kind of show that was sponsored by a liquor company, who was hosting a big lakeside party that evening.

Had we been watching the whole show, it might not have been impressive as it was. But to watch one guy go under water, and come up with some girl on his jet ski is pretty cool thing to just happen to notice in the middle of some conversation about something that I can’t even remember.

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I met a friend for lunch the other day. Not really a planned thing, we had bumped into each other a couple days earlier and had made tentative plans on the spot. Kind of like “I’m gonna be here, at this time,” kind of thing. So anyway, he was telling me about this neighbor of his who recently moved in next door. Kind of a weird guy, but not in a bad way. Sometimes when you get a new neighbor, especially in a small apartment complex where you know you are going to run into this person on a regular basis, it can be a little interesting at first. Everybody wants to see who the new guy is.

It’s kind of like when you start a new semester at school. You have a whole bunch of new classes, and you aren’t sure what your classmates will be like, or any of your teachers. And you know that the first week of school you usually don’t do much anyway, so there aren’t any worries there. So you are pretty much free to let your curiosity roam and imagine some possible futures. Of course, that usually only last a couple of days, until you realize that it’s just another set of classmates, and another teacher.

Of course, sometimes you get lucky and sit next to a really cute girl or guy, or your teacher is particularly entertaining, somebody that actually enjoys their job. But more often than not it’s simply a matter of getting to know new people that turn out to be pretty similar to the old people.

So anyway this guy was into all kinds of exotic artwork from various different countries. He had traveled quite a bit and collected little pieces from here and there. When my friend saw him moving into his apartment, he couldn’t figure out exactly what the guy was all about. He saw him carrying in these different carvings and stuff, and had to come up with a story of what the reason was behind him. Maybe he was into voodoo, or maybe he was a professor. Every time the guy would go downstairs to his moving van, he’d bring up another box of stuff. And my friend couldn’t help but watch the whole time. His moving van was parked underneath his window, and when he walked to his apartment, he had to pass his big front window.

I was reading this book once on hypnosis. It was a hard book to read, or at least to pay attention to. It was written to give an objective overview of hypnosis and what it was, but the author also wanted to give the reader a subjective experience of what if felt like to feel the first hand effects of hypnosis. But he did it in an odd sort of way. He would be writing about some clinical aspect of hypnosis, then he would switch right into to a firsthand experience of it. What made it so interesting was that he never let the reader know when he was switching. So you’d be reading this, following along, and all of a sudden you would stop and wonder exactly what this was, and where this was going. Like you are sitting there, trying to remember what it was you were reading before you got to this part, and although you thought there was some sort of connection, you aren’t exactly sure what it is, now, reading this. But because it’s easy to find things like that interesting, you just keep on reading.

He was saying that when the mind looks at something that is unfamiliar, it is much easier to put it into a category that already exists. Some experts believe that there is a discreet time in a person’s life, when the categories aren’t completely labeled yet. This is up to about 7 years old. Not that we can’t create new categories after the age of seven, but around that time, the brain switches into “put it into it’s appropriate category” mode from “make a new category mode,” which can make for some interesting hallucinations, like my friend experienced when seeing this guy bringing all those weird things into his apartment.

The fun stuff happens when the brain finds a couple of possible categories, but there is nothing else that suggests what category to put something in. If you’ve ever had the experience of eating or drinking something, and getting one thing while you are expecting something else, you can understand this. Like if you grabbed what you thought was a bottle of ice water, and it turned out to be seven up, there’s be a brief pause while the brain figured out what in the heck was going on. You see the water, you decide that it’s water, so the brain already prepares and taste buds, and everything to receive water, but when the seven up hits your mouth, the brain has to back track and switch all of it’s reference information. That can take up to a second, and during that second your brain is temporarily off line. It’s actually pretty cool.

But after he talked to him, he did turn out to be a hobbyist. He liked to travel, and he would just pick stuff up at random, usually on his way to the airport out of wherever he had visited. If he were into furniture, he would have all kinds of different furniture pieces. If had been into music, for example, he may have had different musical instruments from different countries.

But because he’d picked up all his stuff in a completely random method, none of it fell into the same category, which made watching him move in so interesting. He was just some goofball who collected a bunch of random stuff from bunch of random places.

The interesting thing is that he told me that after watching this guy move for a couple hours, and just feeling his brain be sent in all different directions as he tried to figure out the connection between all this different stuff, he said he had this weird feeling for a couple of days afterward. Like he somehow felt he had more room in his brain or something, like it was stretched out somehow.

He said that he was able to remember things that he’d thought he’d forgotten, and was able to remember other things in ways that were different than he had originally experienced them.

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I was reading this book the other day. It was a non-fiction book, one that makes stop every couple of pages and think, or maybe take notes. The guy that writes this has this way of making you really reflect on what you’re reading, now. The book is about language, and anytime you use language to talk about language, it has this self-reflexive hypnotic effect. Kind of like when you stand between two mirrors, you can see yourself going back into infinity.

One of the things this book was talking about was the theory of recursion as being a test for a “human” language. Recursion is kind of like a nested loop inside of a sentence, where you have one entity, or thought, inside another. Instead of saying “the tiger ate her,” you could say “the tiger the girl who was running” to further expand on “her.” Or you could say “the tiger ate the girl wearing the blue shoes who has running.” According to Chomsky, language has the possibility of an infinite level of recursion.

They were comparing human language to the alleged “language” they teach chimps, which is supposed to show the humans aren’t the only ones that can master communication. Unless you consider the sentence “me banana banana me me me banana banana banana me me me banana banana,” an acceptable sentence in (any language) those chimp trainers have got a long way to go.

There was that scene in planet of the apes where they “expert” was on TV trying to explain the complexities of time travel. He showed some guy painting a picture of the sunset. But if it were an accurate picture, he would have to put himself in the picture. But then if that were an accurate picture, he would have to paint a picture of himself painting a picture of himself, and so on.

Infinite loops are everywhere.

There was this king once in Europe several hundred years ago. He hired a mathematician to figure out some problem, and as a model the mathematician studies the theoretical growth of rabbits. Starting with two rabbits, and assuming that each pair of rabbits make a new pair every month, he came with what is now called the Fibonacci sequence. Perhaps you’ve heard of it if you’ve read the DaVinci Code. The sequence is 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13 etc. Can you see the pattern? Each number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers.

What’s cool is if you plot it on a graph, starting with zero in the center, an interesting pattern emerges. Go up one, and draw a point. Then go to the right one (the next number) and draw another point. Then go down 2 (the next number) and draw another point. Then go to the left 3 (the next number) and draw another point, and keep this up. Pretty soon you’ll have this nice spiral that expands outward as you continue to draw points and connect. The particular mathematical shape of this spiral is found everywhere in nature. The curve of breaking waves at the beach, ram’s horns, flowers. There are even those that use this sequence to predict (fairly accurately) the movement of stocks and other financial securities.

Another cool part of the Fibonacci sequence is what’s known as the “golden mean.” If you take any one number in the sequence, and divide it by the previous number, you’ll get about .6, give or take. This ratio is also found everywhere in nature, as well as human constructions. The length divided by the width of the Parthenon in Ancient Greece gives you the golden mean. So do the width and height of any crucifix or Christian cross you see. Also your height and the height of your belly button, as well as your height and the length of your outstretched arms.

Now is there a connection? Is there a reason that a fundamental test for “human” language is it’s recursiveness, and that there are several recursive patterns that repeat themselves over and over again in nature?

I would suspect there is. If you look at flowers, they grow out naturally in the Fibonacci pattern. Our brains are comprised of neurons and dendrites that appear very much like vines, or plants growing outwards. So it would make sense that our language, which is a manifestation of our brains, would obey the same rules as various naturally occurring systems in nature.

There is another theory regarding the structure of the universe. This theory, which has been called the holographic universe theory, states that the structure of the universe is identical regardless of what size you are looking at. Taken its name from a hologram. A hologram is a specially etched piece of glass, and when you shine a laser through it, it will produce a three dimensional image. If you shatter the glass into a million pieces, they will produce not a shattered three-dimensional image, but a million smaller three-dimensional images.

The basic shape and structure of an atom is the same as the solar system. One center, and bunch of things spinning around the outside of it.

So the question I’ll leave you with is this:

Is the holographic theory of the universe accurate, does the universe really behave in the same way regardless of what size chunk you are looking at?

OR

Are we humans, with our limited capacity for measuring the physical universe based on the limitations of our sensory organs, merely seeing everything the same based on those constraints? If so, what really is out there?

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So the other day I was waiting for my coffee order. It was at this small shop that had just opened and I suspected they were still ironing out all the bugs so to speak. They seemed to have quite a few different coffee selections, and while my particular order wasn’t all that complicated, I could understand how somebody, especially somebody in high school trying to make a couple extra dollars on the weekend, could easily become overwhelmed at both the complexity of the equipment and the throngs of curious crowds trying to squeeze their way into this ingeniously located attractor of customers.

“What is the difference?” I heard a voice behind me ask. Since the place was packed, I assumed the voice, or rather the voice’s owner, was speaking to somebody else.
“Really, what’s the difference?” I turned to see this person was talking to. He was looking right at me.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“When you learn something, and when you know something already?”
I had to shake my head to make sure I heard him right.
“Huh?” Was the best I could do.
“That girl,” he said, motioning to the about to lose it girl who was struggling to keep up with the orders.
“In a few weeks, she’ll be able to do all this while talking on her cell phone to one of her boyfriends without any problems.”
“Um…”
“So what’s the difference?”

Now if this guy had been some smelly homeless person, I would have written this exchange off as some kind of random run in with a word salad generator. But he guy was clean-shaven, and dressed in clothes that he didn’t get from the good will. So I tried as hard as I could to figure out what in the world he was getting at.

I was reading this interesting article, or essay I guess, by Richard Dawkins, or maybe some other guy, the other day. He was talking about how genes have this uncanny ability to work together to give the illusion that we have genes for every specific action that is possible. Like I have a gene that makes me love chocolate ice cream, or I have a gene that makes me suck at fractions.

The example he gave was basketball. Some people are really good at basketball, and some people, like me, (actually many people like me) have no business being anywhere except in the bleachers at a basketball court.

But some people are naturally gifted basketball players. Which may lead some to believe that there is some type of “basketball” gene. As if two parents that were superb basketball players would automatically have kids that were superior at basketball.

But obviously, there was never any evolutionary selector for basketball. There certainly was for throwing rocks at moving animals, and being able to jump over ditches if you were being chased by a tiger, or being able to chase after a wounded zebra for a couple kilometers, or being tall enough to reach the good stuff that nobody else can reach. Only recently have these random genes been collectively beneficial in certain people who are good at basketball.

The point of this article is that one of the reasons, or at least one of the possible reasons, according to evolutionary biologists for humans’ dominance on the planet is our versatility. Humans have lived in all different kinds of environments from houses built out of ice to house built on the sides of cliffs.

The conjecture by this particular essayist is that we humans have such a versatile pool of genes to pull from that they can combine to form many useful skills in many useful environments.

One mistake people make is that humans have less instincts that so called lower animals, and more learning power. Lower animals have instincts built in so they are pretty much good to go after a few weeks. Human don’t have so many instincts, so it takes us a while to figure things out.

But more and more scientists are starting to agree that humans have both much more learning capacity than lower animals, and many more instincts. It is that combination that gives us our edge. To be able actually learn new things, until we can perform them as if they are second nature, or an instinct. We actually have the capacity to learn more instincts, so to speak.

Bruce Lee once remarked that before you learn Jeet Kun Do, a punch is just a punch. You throw it without thinking. Maybe it will hit its target, maybe it won’t. But when you start to study martial arts, a punch becomes a complex combination of intention, balance, breath and focus, and directed energy. After learn to master these different elements, and can do so without thinking, a punch is again, just a punch. But it is an altogether different, and much more powerful and deadly punch.

So I finally asked the guy, “What exactly do you mean?”

“When you come back in two weeks, she’ll me making coffee like a pro. If you compare her then, to somebody who is just naturally good at making coffee, how would you be able to tell the difference?”

“Hmm. I suppose you wouldn’t.”

“Exactly.” He said. Just then both our coffees were ready, and we both went our separate ways.

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So the other day I was hanging out downtown. Maybe a week or so ago, I can’t recall the exact date. I had originally gone downtown to see the latest movie that has finally made it’s way to my neighborhood, only to find out that the time listed on their web page was incorrect, so I had an hour to kill. I hadn’t planned on hanging out any longer than it took to see the movie and head on home, so I didn’t bring a book or anything to read. I don’t really like just sitting in a coffee shop unless I have something to read, so I figured I’d just wander around for a while.

I came across this stretch of road where the street performers usually hang out. It’s on this covered area where cars and bikes aren’t allowed. It’s only for pedestrians to wander around. The performers are the normal kind, mostly amateur musicians belting out some tunes they’ve either written or borrowed from somebody. There’s usually this guy with this white parrot that he’ll put on your shoulder and take your picture for a few dollars, or a few hundred yen as the case may be. Once in a while they’ll be somebody doing magic or juggling or something.

That particular afternoon is a rather interesting show. It was this man/woman team that did all these really cool unicycle tricks. They had all means of props and costumes and personalities they would switch in and out of all the time. They even borrowed members out of the audience to involve them in their tricks. One trick involved several guys laying on the ground, and then this girl ride at them and somehow jumps them with her unicycle. She spent all kinds of time building up to the actual trick, which in and of itself was very entertaining. I was impressed with her skills. Although she spoke very little, she communicated quite a great deal. I was reminded of the episode of “I Love Lucy” where Lucy dresses as Harpo Marx, and then the real Harpo shows up. They are both on either side of a partition, and they do a bit where they each come out from either side of the partition and are strangely mirroring each other exactly. They do this several times, and the joke, of course, is who is the real Harpo and who is the imposter.

The jig is up when the real Harpo drops his hat, and it magically returns to his hand. Lucy of course, doesn’t have that trick hat, and hers falls to the ground.

As I was remembering this episode of a performer pretending to be another person pretending to be another person, while watching a performer putting on different personas at will, I was amazed at people’s vast capacity for self-deception. Now before you accuse me of being a cynic, I don’t mean self-deception in any negative sense. Self-deception is a hugely useful trait that has undoubtedly been passed down to us through successive generations of people that have slowly increased their effectiveness in surviving in a harsh environment.

A recent medical study showed that children have the capacity to use their imagination to make pain physically go away. There are thousands of documented cases of hypnosis being used in place of anesthesia in surgery, dental procedures, and other cases of pain control.

That gifted performs such as Harpo, Lucy, and that lady doing the unicycle trick can tap into that capacity is truly a gift to humanity. I’m reminded of a course I took once in hypnosis. The instructor started out by asking who the best hypnotist we’d eve encountered was. Most people couldn’t really think of any. When we all thought of hypnotists, we all assumed he was talking about a stage hypnotists, or a therapist or something like that. He surprised us when he said George Lucas was an example of a great hypnotist.

When you think of hypnosis of being way to capture and focus your imagination on a particular topic, that makes perfect sense. If you go to see a hypnotist to quit smoking or lose weight, he’ll sit you down in a comfortable chair. You’ll lean back and he’ll start talking to you in a soothing voice. And as you listen to this voice, and start to feel yourself sinking into that chair you are sitting in, you will start to forget about things that you used to worry about. You will start to let those thoughts that normally bother you slowly drop off the edge of consciousness as you let those other thoughts take up the main stage of your mind. Once you are in this relaxed, focused state, the hypnotist will start giving you suggestions, suggestions you will hopefully take as authoritative and truthful, and affirming. Such as you only breath fresh clean air, you only eat healthy food, you respect your body, and you get plenty of rest every night and so on.

Compare that to seeing Star Wars. You are sitting in your comfy chair, relaxed, leaning back. The everyday distracting thoughts are drifting away as you are focused a created reality that you will lend your thinking to for the next couple of hours. The lights dim, the crowd hushes. Then you see the words on the screen:

A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away….

And magically, all conscious connection to normal reality is gone, and your imagination is handed over to Lucas as he takes you on a Campbellian tale of epic proportion.

Of course, this human capacity is a double-edged sword. Just as we can give our mind over to a false reality for entertainment, or to temporarily dull pain, we can also fixate our minds on things that don’t help us one bit. Fears that aren’t true, limitations that don’t exist, and anxieties about events that likely will never happen seem to take up a lot of space in our brain. The trick is to not be too quick to let go of our critical factor when such images seem take hold of our minds.

Nobody likes the skeptic who continuously points out all the violations of the laws of physics or the plot holes of an otherwise decent movie. But that skeptical attitude is exactly what we need to kick out the false fears and seemingly but untrue reality that has taken up residence in our minds.

If you are having a good time, let it be. But if you aren’t, and you suspect a negative false reality has snuck in past your conscious gatekeepers, try asking yourself these questions:

Is It True?
How do I know?
How would I know if this wasn’t true?
Who would I be if this were false?
What could I do if this was false?
Can I find any evidence that this is false?
Is this true for everybody, or just me?
If this is not true for them, how can I make it not true for me?

And see what happens.

Have fun.

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There was this prominent business leader giving an interview on a famous talk show. He had built several large companies, and had enjoyed massive amounts of success with them. It wasn’t always this way. We often make a mistake of perception when we see successful people. We assume that they were always successful, or they have some kind of secret edge that the rest of us don’t’ have. Maybe they were lucky enough to attend a prestigious university, or just enjoyed a string of lucky breaks.

But here’s some news that a lot of us don’t like to hear. A poll was done with successful, independent business owners. And when I say successful, I mean they were making enough money to live a good life, without any financial worries or difficulties. Wondering if they have enough money to buy something is not usually a concern for these people. The poll was to determine exactly how long it took for them to be successful. One question that was asked to help determine this was how many businesses they’d started before they started making serious money. The average answer was over ten.

All these successful people had, in some form or another, started at least ten businesses that ultimately failed before they finally found their niche.

Ten.

The reason I say most of us don’t like to hear this is because most of us are completely terrified, some even to the point of inaction, of the very thought of failure. Trying and failing, for some of us, is our worst nightmare. We imagine some horrible memory from our childhood, often vague and distant, but painful nonetheless. We imagine ourselves a little bit into the future, trying something new, and then suddenly imagining all the horrible things that will happen if we aren’t successful. Then the fear and anxiety kicks in, and we come up with a million reasons, or rather excuses, why we don’t want to try. Most of these excuses are self-delusional. See if you recognize some of the more popular ones:

I don’t have time.
I don’t have enough money.
People from my background (whatever you think that is) can’t do that.
I’m man.
I’m a woman.
I’m (insert your ethnicity here).
As soon as I (insert your lame excuse here) I’ll do that.
I’m going to get started next week.
As soon as I get a raise at work.
As soon as I get a boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/partner.
As soon as I pay off my credit cards.

The bottom line is all these are just excuses to cover the real reason we are afraid of trying. A mistaken belief that we formed before we even learned to speak. Since the first time we cried, and our moms didn’t come and immediately pick us up, we had to come up a reason to fill the cause/effect mechanism in our brains. This belief was created, and ratified thousands of times during the most formative years of our childhood.

I’m not good enough.

The good news is that this is only true if you believe it. If you don’t believe it, and throw it out like the garbage that it is and insert a more empowering belief in its place, that will be just as true.

Then you’ll learn one of the most elusive, deceptive and at the same time most powerful secrets of human development and potential.

Mistakes and failures are the best things you can do to be successful, in anything you try. Instead of seeing “mistakes,” or “failures,” as proof of your erroneously believed inadequacy, you’ll see them for what they truly are.

Feedback from the environment in which you are operating. If you have a clear and solid goal of where you want to go, these mistakes and failures will be the things that keep you on track, and guide you toward you target like a heat seeking missile.

This famous businessperson in the interview was asked as simple question:

“How can I double my success rate?”

The answer was quick, straightforward and simple:

“Double your failure rate.”

The most successful people, in any field, understand this. Every action they take offers feedback. They look at every feedback as a golden opportunity to analyze their actions, compare them to the results that the actions created, and then to go back and modify their actions to get better results the next time around.

When you make this process a habit, success is inevitable. No matter what you are after, with this mindset, you will achieve it. It may take time, and you may not get there in the way that you thought, but you’ll get there.

And for bonus points, you can learn to enjoy the path. For those that have learned to enjoy the journey, as well as the destination, are the happiest people in the world.

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I was taking this self-development seminar once, and the guy was saying that thinking about your future is like driving a car. At least when it comes to comparing how much time you should focus on the future, versus how much time you should focus on the path. His analogy was the size of your windshield compared to the size of your rear view mirror.

It’s important to glance behind you from time to time, but it’s much more important to keep a keen eye on where you are going. You should dwell on past mistakes, or worry too much about things from your past that you can’t change. Accept it and move on. Even if others have treated you like crap, it never does any good to hold a grudge. I believe it was Mandela who said holding a grudge is like drinking poison and hoping the other guy dies.

OK, that makes sense. It also reminds me of another metaphor by Wayne Dyer when he said that the wake doesn’t drive the boat. The wake being the waves of water left behind a boat as it goes across the water. The wake is purely an after the fact effect, and has no bearing whatsoever on the future direction of the boat. OK, sounds simple enough. The past is the past, and should stay in the past.

But is it really that simple? Humans have some really powerful, and really deep hard wiring in our brains to learn and improve. That is one of the reasons we have become the dominant animals on the planet over that last couple million years. We have instincts, just like many other creatures (some say many many more instincts) but we also have the capability to learn. And many times, that learning is automatic, unconscious and completely outside of our awareness.

Just ask a little kid who performed the unfortunate, but necessary experiment of sticking his finger on a hot stove. He or she will learn in about half a second that stove with fire equals danger, and should avoided at all costs. In that particular example, the wake indeed does drive the boat. The wake I this case being the memory of pain the child will remember whenever he goes near as stove. His memory of the event, or the wake, will definitely mold his choices and thinking in the future.

If humans didn’t have the capability to learn from our mistakes, and the mistakes of others, we’d have been extinct hundreds of thousands of years. When Zog and Bog were out hiking around, and Bog got eaten by a tiger, Zog didn’t was any time remembering every single thing about the event, and committing it to memory for future reference. The location, time of day, appearance and sound of a tiger were all burned into his brain. Because of the magic of language, he was able communicate all of these things to his buddies back at the cave, so they wouldn’t make the same mistake as poor Bog.

So it seems that our history and experience really can have a powerful and profound effect on our behaviors, thoughts and actions as we move toward the future. It’s not quite as simple as the two metaphors described above.

But there is some good news. While it’s true that our brains will automatically remember things that caused us pain in the past, and remind us of those memories as we move close to experiencing those things again (usually in the form of vague anxiety), there is a solution.

Whenever we label something as dangerous, our brains remember the label we give to the “thing” as much as the thing itself. When the kid touched the stove, and Zog saw Bog get eaten by a tiger, the events themselves caused an automatic reaction. But in today’s modern world, our interpretation of events is what causes the emotional pain in many cases.

Things like public speaking, asking a pretty girl or guy out on a date, or asking your boss for a raise bring up feelings of anxiety and fear not because they are inherently dangerous situations (unless of course you actually have an experience of giving a speech at toastmasters, and were beaten within an inch of your life due to your lackluster performance) but because we labeled them as such.

Many times this label is as automatic as Zog’s was while watching his friend being eaten. But there is a cool trick.

There is so much in your personal history; you can re program your brain to “access” different memories whenever you go into a potentially worrisome situation. If you let your brain choose, it will go for the most safety, so it will find the scariest memories. Your brain operates on a “better safe than sorry” strategy, so it picks out the most scary and painful memories in order to keep you the safest.

But when you realize that you have billions and billions of memories to choose from to use as a reference when you go into any particular situation, you can train your brain to use more positive and enhancing memories rather than scary ones. This takes some time and some conscious work, but the rewards are enormous.

Imagine having to give a speech. Scenario one is relying on your brains automatic factory installed programs, which find the most horrifying experiences of your life regarding public speaking. You’ll likely get sweaty palms, heart palpitations, and feel as if you are about to vomit.

Scenario two is instead of automatically recalling all those horrifying memories, you consciously choose to remember all the times you’ve expressed yourself in public and gotten good results. Like I said, this can take some practice, but after a few times you’ll feel excited and happy, as if you are about to do something really fun and exciting, rather than dreading it.

And you can do all this purely through your imagination. Just imagine yourself giving as speech, and then quickly and consciously recall as many positive experiences and memories as possible. Keep switching back and forth in your mind, imagining a future speech, and then going back into your past and thinking of all those good memories.

And here is a bonus tip. If you can’t find any positive memories in your history, you can make them up. Your brain won’t know the difference. Find some memories that are kind of close, and then change them around so you can remember them differently. This will have be jus as powerful.

The choice is yours. You can either leave your mental programming the way it came from the factory, designed to be used by cavemen and cavewomen to survive from saber tooth tigers, or you can upgrade to the modern version, and consciously go in reprogram your thoughts and memories to serve you in exactly the way you want.

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I was riding my bike downtown yesterday when I bumped into a friend. Not quite a friend, but an acquaintance. Some people have hundreds of people that they could consider friends, but I have a clear distinction in my mind between a friend and an acquaintance. Certainly acquaintanceships can grow into friendships, that’s how all friendships start, when you think about it. You meet somebody, you either share enough in common, sometimes a location or common goal, like at school or at work.

Then you make the all-important break from your commonalities. If you see somebody at work every day for several months, and you get on with them pretty well this can happen. Maybe they’ll be some after work party, or maybe you’ll get together for a game of basketball after work, and slowly move your relationship away from areas of commonality.

When you can have obvious differences, especially religious, moral or political views, and maintain a solid friendship that transcends all that, then you know you’ve got a winner

I was listening to this guy giving a lecture once on the power of a contrarian opinion. He said that most people surround themselves with people that share their same viewpoints. Most people easily fall into this trap. He was saying this is very dangerous, because if you only expose yourself to one viewpoint, you effectively shut yourself off from the flexibility of thinking if you were to expose yourself to other viewpoints. This works two ways. The first is that you may hear another point of view that actually makes more sense that yours. Another is that you will have to actually defend your point of view rather than just say “Yea!” to each other when you’re hanging out with like-minded friends.

Going through the process of defending and arguing for your point of view other than simply saying “Well, that’s just how I feel. We’ll have to agree to disagree.” Can be a profound learning experience. Saying that you’ll just agree to disagree only makes you and whoever you are disagreeing with dig into your own respective positions a little deeper.

Of course, this can be extremely difficult to do, as many times we have strong emotional connections and investments in our viewpoints. It can be hard to discuss them objectively without feeling we are in a personal battle to see who has the stronger emotional fortitude. Many times, if you break down the arguments from a linguistic and logical standpoint, they don’t differ very much from second grade schoolyard arguments:

“Nuh uhh!”
“Yea Huh!”
“Well, you’re stupid!”
“And your fat!”

And so on. If you remove the emotions from many discussions, debates and arguments, and look at them objectively, you’ll find that almost all arguments will fall into the above structure. Sure they will be much more eloquently stated, and much more long-winded, but the logic boils down the same. To really understand this, it can help to read them on paper, rather than listening to verbal exchanges.

Those that have a depth of understand and a really wide view of the world have the ability to make friends with people of varying viewpoints. Not only that but those that can accept their friends’ opposing viewpoints objectively, and respectfully, without thinking they are somehow morally or intellectually deficient in need to “fixing” are the true winners.

But the guy I ran into had yet cross that level of familiarity. He was an acquaintance that I’d met at a few seminars. We are both in the same line of work, so we attend the same kind of seminars.

So after I stopped and talked to him, we realized that we really don’t have that much in common. After exchanging pleasantries, how ya been, etc, and talked about the latest “news” in our particular industry, we really weren’t left with much to talk about. It was an interesting part of our conversation, that only lasted a few seconds. It was subtle, but I think we both understood what was going on.

I’d stopped my bike and got off, but not completely. I was still straddling it so I could easily start peddling again. He stopped in the street, and only half turned to face me. Both of us had only about half a commitment to the conversation. After the normal “how ya doin,” we moved onto the “what are you doing, where are you going.” Neither of us wanted to give up much, we each gave the perfunctory “oh nothing much, just hanging out.” Then the moment of truth came. There we were, on a Sunday afternoon. We knew each other on a first name basis, and if we kept our discussion to our respective jobs, we could probably fill a couple hours of conversation. Both had acknowledged we didn’t have any particular plans for that day. But neither of us had committed fully to the conversation, from a body language perspective.

So after our exchange, we stood there. Waiting for the other, or perhaps giving the other a chance to suggest doing something together. Grab a bite to eat, get a beer, whatever. But neither of us was interested enough to being the first to initiate it. But we both felt kind of obliged to allow the other person to chance. Neither of us did, and we said our “see ya around’s” and left.

The same kind of interaction that happens every day, hundreds of millions of times. The way humans kind of “sniff” each other out to determine each other’s intentions.

Now normally I wouldn’t pay much attention to such a non-event, but I’ve been reading a lot of Steven Pinker’s books lately, which focus on linguistics and how they effect psychology. There is a lot going on to our daily communications that are below the surface, and many times have much more influence on our relationships that the actual words that we use. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

I guess the moral of the story, or the take away, is realize that we humans communicate on many, many different levels, and we are always reading others and projecting things about ourselves to all of those around us, all the time.

So we got that going for us. Which is nice, I think.

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So the other day I was out on my morning walk, (so I guess I should say the other morning) when I bumped into this old guy that I hadn’t seen before. He was some old guy that I see downtown sometimes. At first I didn’t recognize him, because he wasn’t wearing his downtown clothes. So I had to go through that momentary transderivational search when the brain pretty much freezes all forward progress and searches it’s database for the relevant information.

I was once on this university campus when me and a friend were having fun seeing how long of a transderivational search we could induce in people. The brain is incredibly fast when coming up with information, but sometimes it gets stuck momentarily.

For example, if you grab a bottle of clear liquid, that you think is water, from the fridge after a hard workout, and upon taking a huge gulp find out that it’s vodka, your brain will spend maybe half a second freezing and trying to figure out what in the hell is going on. Opening up the fridge is automatic. Drinking water when you are thirsty is automatic. Your whole mind/body system is in pure automatic water drinking mode, so when you chug down the vodka, your brain has to momentarily stop all processes until it figures out what in the world is going on. It may even take you a few seconds to realize it’s vodka, and not gasoline or battery acid.

Compare that to sitting in a bar and ordering a shot of vodka. You see it coming, so naturally there is no disruption. This actually happened to me once. I was in a restaurant, and I ordered a scotch on the rocks. My girlfriend got some kind of mixed drink or something. The waitress brought us each a glass of ice water. Or what I thought was ice water. I took a big gulp of what I thought was ice water, and almost upchucked on the table. She had mixed up my order, and brought me a glass of straight gin on the rocks.

So at this university, I borrowed a stapler from some girl working in the student center. A friend and I were putting up some flyers. When I returned the stapler, I gave her a ballpoint pen instead. But when I gave it to her, I said, “Thanks, here’s your stapler,” and handed her the pen. Her face froze for about half a second until she realized what had been going on. It’s pretty interesting when you do this to somebody on purpose. Their face immediately loses all expression, and their pupils dilate briefly as their brain diverts thinking resources to try and make sense of what is going on. The brain loves to run on autopilot whenever possible, so throwing a monkey wrench in there tends to mess things up.

There was this guy named Milton Erickson. He invented a kind of conversational hypnosis that he used in therapy on people. The cool thing about Dr. Erickson was that he would go out and experiment on people. Not conk them on the head the take out their organs experiment, but what up to them and do goofy things like giving them pens instead of staplers and see how they’d respond.

One of the things he invented was called a double bind. You give somebody two choices, so they think they are retaining their free will (this is important to humans) but in reality the choice is pretty much the same. He would say things like “Do you want to shake hands with your left or your right hand?” People would think and say “right hand.” They would realize that he was pretty much forcing them to shake hands. Of course, you can go too far with this. He would walk up to people and say, “Do you want to give me five dollars or ten?” In which case people would laugh and walk away.

Another thing he invented was the handshake interrupt. Maybe you’ve heard of this. A handshake is one of those things that is automatic, and takes up a significant portion of brain processing power. The physical part about shaking somebody’s hand is automatic, but at the same time you are gearing up to hear a person’s name for the first time, and give yours. There is actually a lot involved.
So you have this automatic process that involves receiving information, usually without question, from the other person. You are not likely to question another person’s name, but at the same time, it is new information, so it puts the brain in a particularly vulnerable position. Which Dr. Erickson learned to exploit.

He would walk up to somebody, stick out his hand and say “Hi, I’m Milton, nice to meet….” And then he would suddenly change into a completely unexpected behavior, right at the point when the other person’s brain was open. He would take their hand, and quickly turn it around so the person was looking at their own palm. Then he would give them a few simple commands that would slip into their open to receive brains.

Now, when he started, he was nervous and unsure, which other people picked up on, and so it didn’t work so well. But when he practiced it and got better, he would do the hand in the face part just as natural as the handshake part, and people would go along with it.

So he’d walk up to somebody, say “Hi my name is Dr. Erickson, nice to….(put the other guys palm facing him)… and as you look at this you can think of all those things that make you feel that certain way…ways that make you wonder how many different things you can discover, now, that will allow you to feel those really good feelings, standing, there, thinking those thoughts…” And then he would simply walk away, leaving the guy looking at his hand. Usually about ten or fifteen seconds later, the guy would snap out of it, and look around, wondering what in the world just happened.

And when I finally realized who the old guy was, I greeted him accordingly. I asked him what he was doing in this neck of the woods, and not downtown where he is supposed to be. He said that he was visiting his grandkids, who live two houses down from mine. He had enough of their screaming and was out trying to clear his head. It’s good to do that sometimes.

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I was listening to the radio the other night, on the Internet. I wasn’t sure what station it was, I was kind of flipping through the channels while I was doing other things. A song came on that I hadn’t heard in a while, “Tom Sawyer,” by Rush. The particular album cover was pretty clever, from a linguistic standpoint. The name of the album is “moving pictures” which most people would take to mean movies. In the old days they called a movie a “picture” as in “moving picture.” which is where the word “movie” comes from, the root word (verb) “to move.”

But on the album cover, it showed a bunch of guys “moving” stuff out of a house an into a moving van. What were they moving? Several paintings. So they were “moving pictures” of a different sort. The “pictures” were being move by other people, as compared to the “movie” meaning given above, the pictures themselves are moving. For those language geeks out there, the verb “move” is an intransitive verb in one example (a verb that doesn’t require an object) and a transitive verb in the other (a verb that requires an object).

Where was I? Oh yea. The song I listened to, Tom Sawyer, has a verse that says:

“Though his mind is not for rent
to any god or government
always hopeful yet discontent
he knows changes aren’t permanent
but change is”

The first line got me thinking. Mind is not for rent. What exactly does that mean? What does it mean to rent out your mind? If you rent out a room, you let somebody stay there for a certain amount of money for letting them sleep in your house every night and store their food in your fridge and use your plumbing to bath and take of their waste. Is it worth it? Usually. Most often the biggest drawback is having somebody in your house. The additional financial burden of an extra person are usually not very much, certainly not close to the rent you’d likely charge. It’s usually a good deal for somebody that has an extra room and wants to save a considerable amount of money every month. Many people make a living by buying houses and renting them out. It can be very lucrative, even despite recent real estate and financial nightmares.

Back to the song. What does it mean to rent out your mind? Take thoughts that aren’t yours, and give them residence inside your brain. This can be very helpful, but it can be equally be as dangerous and destructive. Let’s first consider some of the benefits.

Unless you want to reinvent the wheel, Euclidian geometry and certain tasks like how to drive and how to hook up your cable TV, you’re going to have to accept those thought collections or mental instructions from other people. Humans are very social creatures, and the bottom line is that almost all of our thoughts come from others. Your name, phone number, driver’s license number, most of the facts and information you know (unless you are an independently wealthy research scientist living on a island studying esoteric biology) come from others.

Basic survival information, and useful things like how to do your job right, so you can earn a steady paycheck are welcome additions to our mental house. We hope those thoughts never check out, otherwise we’d be left babbling in the corner like idiots.

But just unhelpful and potentially harmful thoughts can enter into our brain and take up residence just as easily. Most of us are carrying around baggage from childhood without even realizing it. That statement from that second grade teacher who said, “Can’t you do anything right” may still echo whenever we try something new.

That statement by that child psychologist that you may have overheard when you were four years old that said, “Girls just aren’t wired to be as good at math as boys are,” may still reverberate whenever it comes time to calculate the tip at a restaurant.

Without getting into too much detail, suffice it to say that there are a lot of factors (due to long ago evolutionary elements) that let certain thoughts slip into our brains without much resistance. Authority is one. Social proof is another. If an authority figure tells us something (like that idiot third grade teacher or that moron on TV) we are much more likely to accept it as fact without questioning it.

Social proof is another powerful convincer. If a lot of people believe something, it can be a difficult thought to resist. (Purple kool aid anyone?)

The point is that we have evolved past the point of need to follow the herd, or listening to authority figures for our every day survival. Be like Tom Sawyer, in that song by Rush. Take inventory of your brain and kick out the thoughts that are doing you more harm than good.

Your brain, and your thoughts are the most important thing that you have. When was the last time you cleaned house?

It’s time to collect the rent, and evict the freeloaders.

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I went to a lecture once about how to interpret dreams. The famous Dr. Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, along with Dr. Watson, gave it. The lecture wasn’t about how to look into them like tea leaves, but rather how the brain was structured and why dreams have such a disjointed story line to them.

I don’t know if you remember you dreams. I usually do, at least for the first few minutes when I wake up. Unless it’s a particularly strange dream that seems to have obvious symbolic meaning, I’ll usually forget it in a few moments. Usually by the time I get to the bathroom. Sometimes, though, I’ll have a dream that has obvious significance to a problem that I’ve been giving a lot of conscious thought to, and many times the dream will contain a solution. When that happens, it’s pretty lucky.

Some people completely discount dreams as meaningless jumbles of random images that they can’t remember. Others treat dreams with as much respect as Neo treated the Oracle. I once saw this huge book, over a thousand pages, filled with dream symbols and what they mean.

That is another whole discussion in and of itself. If I dream of a purple teapot, and you dream of a purple teapot, do they have the same significance? Do they mean the same thing? I would suggest they don’t, but many think that they do.

The whole of Jungian psychoanalysis is based on the idea of “archetypes.” After listening to many hundreds and perhaps thousands of patients, he noticed they many of the same images appeared when they described their dreams. That led him to his theory of archetypes, or some kind of large, shared symbolic library that all of us have access to. This is the idea of some kind of “superconscious” or “infinite intelligence,” as Napoleon Hill described it in “Think and Grow Rich.”

If you read any work by Joseph Campbell, he comes to the same conclusion, that we all share a similar set of symbols and stories, but his reasoning is different than a “superconscious.”

If you aren’t familiar with Campbell’s work, he studied mythology from several cultures around the world, and discovered that they are all very similar in structure. The stories are the same, the characters are the same, and the underlying messages of the stories are basically the same. His reasoning was that since all humans share similar structures in our brains, and a similar experience of how we come into the world and learn to fight for our survival, we al develop the same stories and symbols, regardless of which culture and time we come from.

A good example would be a pasta machine (A what?). A pasta machine. Imagine you have a pasta machine that is set to produce a certain kind of macaroni. You dump in your pasta mix, hit the start button, and then out comes the macaroni. You put the macaroni in a bag, and stick it in the cupboard to eat later. Then you clean the pasta machine and put it away. Somebody else comes along, and makes another batch of pasta. Except they use completely different ingredients, so it comes out smelling and looking and tasting different. But they don’t change the filter on the pasta machine, so it comes out looking the same as your macaroni. Same length, same shape, same curvature. And then they stick it in the cupboard next to yours.

This happen several different times, until there are about twenty different bags of pasta in the cupboard. Then somebody steals the pasta machine and sells it at a garage sale to gamble on dog racing, or something. A few years pass, and the house I bought buy an amateur scientist. He happens to be from Mars, and doesn’t know a thing about pasta. He notices that despite having different flavors and smells, each pasta is shaped the same way.

So he assumes that all the pasta came from the same source. The same person made all the pasta. There must be some grand wizard that has some mysterious combination of all the different pasta’s. He starts to imagine what he great god of pasta must be like to have create all these different kinds of pasta from the same source. There must be some “super pasta source” or “infinite dough” somewhere to produce all these similar pasta.

Of course, his theory is incorrect. Different people made different pasta using different ingredients that they bought from different stores. They just squeezed them all through the same filter that they were too lazy to change.

Campbell’s conclusion was similar. We are all squeezed through the same filter. Namely the process of being born, struggling for several years learning to walk and talk and wipe our own asses and make money and buy food, and keep people from stealing our stuff. So consequently, we have similar ideas and visions and symbolisms about the world.

To him the idea of a superconscious is merely a placeholder in our minds to describe the confounding fact that despite never having come in contact until the last few hundred years both eastern tradition and western tradition both developed mythologies of giant dangerous dragons, which were both basically huge snakes or lizards.

The Jungian would explain this as some deep superconscious symbolism of a dragon being evil (even in the garden of Eden the snake was the bad guy) because of some metaphysical cosmic reason.

The Campbellian would point out that coming up with a mythology of huge dangerous reptiles would be natural if you live in an area where some seemingly small and harmless animal like a snake could kill you with one bite, hence giving it some mythologically dark properties.

Which brings me back to Dr. Crick. He was explaining that we have such messed up dreams because of the lattice structure of the brain. Everything isn’t neatly stacked into different piles separate from each other. All the information is cris-crossed all over the place. So remembering one thing may cause you to remember something completely different (Just like on Monty Python).

His theory was that dreams are merely a kind of disk defrag that our brains do naturally while we sleep. However, there have been many people throughout history who have solved complex problems, and made breakthrough discoveries by paying attention to their dreams.

It could be the when we have problems, we know the answer on some level, but we just don’t know how to express it. Because our brains are largely based on images, the solutions naturally come to us through all the various pictures and memories that we have stored in our brains.

For example, the guy who invented the sewing machine had a dream he was in the jungle, and the natives were throwing spears at him with holes in the tips. The guy that came up with the structure for benzene, and pretty much started the whole study of organic chemistry dreamed of a snake eating its tale.

Whether our dreams come from some collective intelligence, or they are merely remnants of our evolutionary past, they can give us very powerful messages. You just need to be creative enough to interpret them. A good strategy would be to ask yourself a question while you are falling asleep, and just pay attention when you wake up. Perhaps you dreamed the solution in the form of images and weird story lines.

The bottom line is that whatever you think about dreams, they can be a powerful tool that most people never choose to utilize. Just by asking some good questions as you fall asleep, and paying attention to any answers that may come in the morning, you might find yourself creating all kinds of good things in your life.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your life.

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life, or death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Maybe it’s somebody you know, or maybe it is a company that has taken a couple of seemingly obvious ideas, and by putting them together makes some incredible new product that everybody is raving about and can’t buy enough of.

Meanwhile, you are sitting back thinking, “Wait, isn’t that just a combination of this thing and that other thing that have been around, for, like, ever?”

Welcome to the club. It has been said many times by many people that nothing under the sun is new. Everything is merely re-packaged, re-shaped, remarketed in a new and unique angle.

I was at a seminar once for different writers and publishers in the self help industry. There was a speaker who was in charge of new products for a huge, well-known, multi million dollars a year distributor of self-help products. They didn’t produce any products; merely they packaged and sold them.

His advice? Anything you create only needs to be ten percent different or “better” than anything else that is on the market. You absolutely do not need to create anything from scratch. Just take whatever is out there, and make it a little bit better, or different, or put a different spin or angle on it.

On the one hand, that might say something about the gullibility of us humans. On the other hand, it provides a seemingly limitless opportunity of ideas that will get you lots of props, attention, and perhaps money if you market your idea right.

So how do you create the ability to do this? I’ll show you. There is one simple, but kind of weird trick that will help you to virtually explode your creativity and make connections between things that others have not noticed before.

Here’s the trick. You look at an ordinary object, like a book for example. But instead of saying “book,” you say something else entirely. And try to make your temporary “label” as different as possible. Different color, different category, different use. So don’t say “magazine,” or “information.” Say something like “elephant,” or “airplane.”

Do this for three or four objects in a row, and you’ll notice your brain is having a hard time. What you are doing is forcing your brain to create new neural connections where none exist. Whenever you can think of something easily, your brain is using pre-existing neural pathways. By forcing your brain to make new ones, you are creating the framework for massive creativity.

Make sure to make your new “labels” as different from each other as possible as well. Meaning don’t look at a book, chair, and a desk and say “car, boat, airplane.” Because all your new labels are in the same category, it doesn’t give your brain much of a workout.

When you do this every day for five minutes or so, you’ll soon notice a huge explosion in the way you look at reality. You’ll start making connections that no other people can see, and it will only be a matter of time before you come up with that million dollar idea that everybody will absolutely have to get their hands on.

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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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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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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.

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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.

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