Can You Change The Stories In Your Mind?

Active Personal Stimulation (APS)

Just like the phrase APS says, we can actively and personally stimulate the mind.  This is the key to most self help books and the way that using NLP on yourself works.   Affirmations are a method of APS as well.  The reason many people thing it doesn't work is that they use it wrong.

Some people will tell you that you can't predict your next thought and therefore you can't control the mind.  If this were true then all success would be a mistake, and we are just along for the ride, so why do anything at all?

With practice you can day dream, and choose the general feel of the day dream.  When you get "in the zone" you lose track of time and your mind just flows in a direction you want it to go.  No one ever talks about being in the zone doing housework do they?

Just because you don't actively create every thought doesn't mean you don't control it.  At the end of the day is "control" making every single thought or is it moving the mind in the right direction to achieve what you want?  Did Henry Ford build all of the cars? No.  What he in "control"?  If you agree the answer is "Yes", then you probably agree power of the mind is like power in life.  it is control that matters, not the details.

People who try to meditate everything away or maintain a mental center, miss this fantastic piece of knowledge.  You can send messages to the mind and let it sort out the problem.

Have you ever tried to remember someones name and hours later is just pops out for no reason?  That is APS at work.  You actively sent a personal message to the mind and asked it to give you an answer.  Instead of trying to organize chaos, it simply looked through its files until it found the answer, and as long as it doesn’t stumble upon a conflict along the way everyone is happy and moves on.

Affirmations are a form of NLP that you use on yourself.  My favorite method of accelerating affirmations is to look at the associated emotion.  For instance, saying “I will make a million a year by the end of the year”, 4000 times to yourself probably won’t work.  People who do this are those that say NLP doesn’t work.

On the other hand just changing the language might help.  Instead of “I will”, use the present tense of “I am” instead.  Doing this does change your neural pathways quicker because your mind needs to explain something that exists, not an imagined situation it can put off until later.

Also there is some psychology to the “I am” part of the statement that will help you think the right way.  For example if you spend like a millionaire before you are one, chances are pretty good you will never get there.  On the other hand if you invest and work like a millionaire before you spend like one you have a better chance.  

My experience with my clients is that using “I am” steers you the right way more often, and recently I learned a way to accelerate this method.

At the Inside Game, the Colts take it one step further and have you look at your emotions when you make an “I am” statement.  Using some meditation tools, they teach you to eliminate the emotional energy that you associate with the “I am” statement.  I have found this to be a great acceleration tool when used right, the key here is to find a coach to work with you on the tool until you can do it on your own.

One more piece that I have found to be critical is to limit the number of “goals” or “changes” you try to make with APS, NLP or any other technique.  After years of study, I find that having three goals with a specific order works best for me.  I haven't met anyone that has been successful with more than three at once.  I always start new clients with just one goal.  Gary Keller of Keller Williams wrote an entire book about the problems of trying to do too much at once with his book "The One Thing".

I like to list my goals in order with the top goal being the current and most important.  The next two are creating the foundation as they move to the top.  When a goal is achieved, it moves off the list, the next two move up and a new goal can then be added.

Most of the time when I meet people who have made a genuine effort at achieving personal goals and fail, it is simply because the list is too long.  The mind really can’t chew on more than three things at once, and the most successful have the ability to stay focused on just one goal at a time.

The toughest part is deciding what that goal really is.  Most people don’t know what they want, so there is no way to create a single goal to get them moving forward.

When you decide what you really want, you have direction.  When you have direction, you can determine priorities.  When a single priority moves to the top, that is your singular mission until you achieve it and the next one moves up.

What is the story you want to teach your mind and live out?

Do You Believe The Stories Your Mind Makes Up?

Last week I talked about the idea of the "new neuroscience" and "outside stimulus".  This week I want to go to the next step in the mental process. 

I don’t know if “Auto Stimulus” is the right term, but I like it for the context here, and will use it. 

When the mind is left alone, it still needs to move electricity.  This is a period I call “Auto Stimulus”.  It might be seeing and hearing or it might just be dreaming.  During this time the mind is organizing everything thing it has taken in through the senses and is trying to apply an explanation to them.  

This is  a bit different than “outside stimulus” because we aren’t actively trying to apply a stimulus or press for an explanation.  The mind is just doing it on it’s own.

The dangerous part here is emotional connections to the thought processes.  Your mind may attach an emotion or feeling of truth to something which isn’t true at all.  This is where questioning everything is so important.  If you don’t actively question the mind, it can take over with all of these false explanations.  

It is generally accepted that emotionally we can’t tell the difference between a real or a created event. At some point those “real emotions” begin to create “real events” that we have a hard time separating from or believing they are false.

The process of Neuro Linguistic Programming or NLP depends on this phenomenon.  If you tell yourself something enough, your mind will believe it and you will become it.

Auto Stimulus is the result of your mind creating the explanations for the unknown outside information, and eventually convincing you that the story is real.  Yes we all believe something that our mind made up.  That is why people are such horrible witnesses.

Does Your Mind Make Up Stories?

Stimulating “The Mind”

There is a lot of talk in self help and psychology about a “new neuroscience”.  Basically some tests where done that tell us why we make up stories to explain things like the sun and the moon before there was science.

The test is pretty straight forward.  An electrical impulse is sent to the brain and the person reacts, either physically or emotionally.  The emotional responses are simple responses from specific neural pathways being excited.

The interesting part comes in the interview.  When the person is asked why they are smiling, laughing or crying, the left part of the brain goes to work and comes up with a story.  The sensors indicate that the person really didn’t know why.

Much like a child who does things simply to learn and can’t explain why, adults react the same way when pressed for an answer.  They make up a story.

We now that the mind, is there to help us see logic in a world of chaos.  The ocean looks flat so it must be flat for instance. We now know that when you look from space the earth is round.  The difference in the point of view is what gives us a different perspective.

Some people are treating this like a ground breaking change in the understanding of how the mind works.  The most extreme say that everything we do happens first, and we build the explanation later.  I don’t buy this at all, and my experience with several different systems of mind work agree there is much, much more.

Outside Stimulus.

In the case of outside stimulus, much of what I just discussed is true.  The first time people heard a sonic boom. They had no idea what it was and made up stories to close the gap of understanding.  If you go back to Greek Mythology, you can see how a lot of things are “explained” by the mind that we know to be outright false today.

That said, we still don’t know everything about everything and never will.  Every time we have a new experience or discovery, we naturally want to create an explanation.  That is the job of the mind, making order out of chaos.

I don’t know why this is called “new neuroscience” when I think we call can accept the premise simply by looking at the history of science, and how many discoveries lead to a better understanding of earlier discoveries.  

I guess what is new is we have a new understanding of how to make it happen?  

I'll come back to this from time to time, and I think it will make a new chapter in the update to So, Now What?