Does shooting the negative thoughts then replacing them with positive ones work as well as we're told?

For years I’ve been watching how those who claim to assist and train others in being better and more successful and I’ve noticed something. There’s one main thing that they all love to suggest to everyone:

They always advise us to shoot the negative thoughts and replace them with more positive ones.

While I can’t disagree with the main core of that approach entirely I do have trouble with the methodology.

It is true that negative thoughts might cause us to under perform so I’m not against doing something to eradicate them. But the coaches, motivational speakers, and psychologists all sing in the choir of the method known as “thought replacement”.

It works like this:

You identify your negative thoughts and then replace those thoughts with positive ones.

Now, on the surface that sounds pretty simple. Something anyone can do. But wait, there is a problem. Here’s what it is:

It’s a ton of impossible work here’s why.

Research has shown that the average human processes thousands of thoughts per day. That’s a lot of thoughts. Not only that but the experts estimate that of those thoughts about 70 percent of them on average are considered negative.

Hmmm.

Let’s see then. So if you have about 50,000 thoughts per day and 70 percent of them are negative then that’s a boatload of effort to replace all that. Not to mention the fact that as you are busy replacing those thoughts new thoughts are constantly being formed and 70 percent of those are quite possibly going to be negative as well.

If looking at it this way begins to give you negative thoughts about this article then I can’t blame you but read on because there is a workaround for this dilemma.

So, seeing as the task of trading in all those negative thoughts for positive ones is virtually a never-ending one, at least the way that the great personal development gurus are teaching it, I think it’s time for something completely different.

To give this a new shocking perspective I’m going to have to introduce something that many of you have not heard of before.

First though I have to make one key observation. All of the advice that pertains to thought replacement is what I call bead-based. What I mean by that is that the focus is on the brain that’s in the head.

Of course, I do understand why they place such a lot of interest there. Thoughts, either positive of negative ones, appear to be made in that region so it makes sense. The fine old head brain is what people are thinking of when they talk about brains in general. But what if there was more than one set of brains in every human?

Sounds like a weird thing to say I know but the fact of the matter is…

It’s true.

In 1996 a cell biologist  Dr Michael Gershon announced to the world through an article in the New York Times that he had found evidence that there is a crude brain in the gut of every human and it can, and does, act on its own.

To me this was big news since I had been using a new system of my own design to boost a person’s potential and to buffer the effects of negative thinking automatically. This system relies on the release of the hidden energy available in the gut brain to soothe the upper brain creating an elegant dual relationship between the two.

I’ll talk more about this in subsequent posts as well as on my free online web shows.

If you’d like to attend my show on Monday nights at 11PM Eastern - Click here to join

More power to you

Related Posts:

• What two brains can see
• Dark Energy and You
• Famous Quotivations Day #1
• Mindset Immunity and Happiness
• The Physics of Motivation

It was just a few days ago that I heard about it on the nightly news.

Scientists have come to the conclusion that the universe is not expanding at a steady rate after all. It’s speeding up.

In a way that’s bad news. It’s bad news because eventually, some day far off in the future, when we look up into the night sky we will perhaps see our moon but that’s about it.

Like you needed more bad news eh?

Sorry about that.

The only reason I mention it is because of why these brainy guys and gals are reporting this phenomena. They’re calling it dark energy. It doesn’t mean that they’ve figured out what exactly it is of course.  Far from it. When thay don’t know what something is they always call it “dark” – whatever.

They not only have a name like “dark energy” but one called “dark matter” too. What they do know is that, whatever it is, there is a heck of a lot of it out there and it’s the reason why the universe is expanding faster that they once thought.

To me that’s quite interesting because, as I have been talking about on my show for the last two weeks or so. Like those scientists I think there is a lot of dark stuff right here on terra firma and it’s inside of every human who lives here.

The universe is obviously a hostile place. That dark energy will eventually tear the place apart (in a billion years or so). But if it’s hostile “out there” in the inverse it’s quite the opposite inside of us.

Take the good old gut feeling for example. In my theory of Mindset Immunity I describe this unknown energy that we can feel from time to time as “friendly”. If you’ve ever made a decision based on how something feels rather than how it looks then you’ve probably seen a benefit – if not immediately then at some time later.

My point is that this dark energy, which by the way, has enough weight to it to enervate our very sensitive nerve endings located in our gut brain also must be intelligent and somewhat caring about our personal welfare.

Now I can’t prove any of this stuff myself since I’m not a scientist but I can read books and reports about the human body. It is a fact that the individual neurons that make up our nervous systems don’t actually touch each other. There is a gap between them called the “synapse”. They actually sort of float in a very thin clear watery substance. These tiny long string-like cells, science says, then send chemical messages to each other through the synapse.

Since I found out about that I wondered: “What is in the empty dark spaces between the nerve cells?”  If there is that much of it then it must be an important constituent in our makeup. And what if the “dark energy” is lurking in all that seemingly empty space?

If I’m right then whatever you want to call, it be it “dark” or not, it could be worth investigating. That’s exactly what I plan to do in subsequent posts on this blog and in future webinars.

Why not join me in my new project on Facebook  and see how I’m doing it?

More power to you.

Related Posts:

• Shooting the Head Negs
• I’m Guilty As Hell
• What two brains can see
• A Mindset Paradox
• Too big to believe

Mobius Monday Minute – June 13 , 2011

I was reading one of my favorite blogs the other day and Coleen, the blog’s author,  had linked to a fine article on the problem of information oversupply.

Instantly some bells rang for me so I’m here writing about it. As I was typing this I was beginning to realize something about what I’m doing right now. I’m adding to the incredible bulk that our age has become known for: The out-of-control growth of the humongous information pile.

That article came to the sad conclusion of what we must now be prepared for. I can tell you, it doesn’t look good.

It turns out that – for me at least – hoping to be considered as “well read” by any known standard is now virtually unattainable. There is just too much to read, watch, listen to, taste, and touch in the world today. More boldly it seems, that to try to fit the requirements for being well read into our pathetically short little lives is just an impossible task for anyone. But thankfully we have two choices of responses to choose from: “culling or surrender”.

The former is for the focused and the latter for the time-maxed.

Personally, I love reading especially since the day my wife and I gave up the idiot box a few years ago. But now I’ve become more mindful that not only am I not going to get to see or hear it all, I’m going to miss almost all of it by default. Lac of time, added by my current snail’s pace of reading and comprehension, will see to that. And, even if by some chance miracle it didn’t, the rate of info overfill would continue on so relentlessly that I’d fall way behind it anyway.

Like looking at a car accident as you pass by it on the highway, it’s absurdly fascinating to see the scale and scope of this world-wide info head-brain overfill. It’s starkly summed up by the article’s author as she looks at the numbers: “Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.”

Ugh!

As an artist that statement alone is enough to give me visuals. At least it would have if she hadn’t beaten me to it. Her clever use of her literary skill allowed her to end the essay with the imagery that information today is like an ocean and all we are going to be able to get out of it is a paltry little cupful.

That’s another good reason why I recommend making a simple little tweak in your system of thinking. It’s a “brain tweak” that allows for a fundamental change in your focus. It’s now possible to go from information  – that’s not only coming to you – but information that’s now coming through you. It’s something I talk about in my free Mobius Effect Webinars and you can learn more about it here

Trust me. All is not lost.

More power to you.

PS: Would you like to learn about a new way to discover what you are really meant to do? What is true and natural for you instead of taking direction from others? Check out my free Mobius Effect Webinar.

Photo: Copyright by stephamelon on Flickr

Related Posts:

• Shooting the Head Negs
• Dark Energy and You
• Too big to believe
• Quotius #7
• Same Word – Different Culture

# 15 April 11 , 2011

I see things.

No I’m not saying that I “see” strange things. I don’t for example see a boogie-man hiding under my bed or anything like that.  Nothing so weird or dramatic that it would be such that you might imagine streaming from the likes of Stephen King or Alfred Hitchcock.

Sorry to disappoint.

Please understand it’s just that my job demands that I see things. I was trained as a graphics guy you see. I studied as a visual artist and graduated from art college back when desk-top computers were still in short pants. I had a lot of catching up to do in that department but that’s another story.

What I’ve been working on for the last 30 years or so was trying to come up with a way to visually understand a phenomenon that we all experience at one time or another: The moment when a peculiar drive kicks in causing us to create a successful conclusion. We know it as persistence, determination, perseverance, or doggedness… take your pick.

Of course there is a more generalized word for it.  One that describes the entire landscape that I wish to “see” more clearly in three dimensions. That term is the ever-familiar phrase ”human potential”.

Know how I see it?

It’s an ocean. I say that because, like the five physical oceans on this planet, it’s huge (and even liquid-like) in its nature. In fact it’s incomprehensibly huge. It’s so huge a pattern that it won’t even fit into the boundaries of the human brain.

Not only is its sheer size problematic but it’s weirdness is troublesome as well. I mean, if you consider it, how can you describe something in words that does not lend itself very well to fitting into the terms of reference we might otherwise use in our daily lives?

That’s why I’m glad I found out about the mobius strip. It’s a shape that is the perfect metaphor of the impossible becoming possible. I figure that human potentiality must have been born in a shell with a shape like this. Just look at it. It’s got the weirdness thing down pat. A simple two-dimensional object that occupies three-dimensional space? I need to put a cold cloth on my noggin just to think about it for more than a few minutes.

But I’ll make it easier for you.

Just consider the video posted here.

A young violinist, who just happens to be deaf, is forced to make a choice and close her eyes to the notes she’s playing and see the beauty of the music in her soundless world through the realm of shapes and colors.  In the greatest moment of need these are delivered to her quieted ears through the most gut-felt drive of persistence and determination. Working so fully-engaged with her potential she triumphs over all adversity.

Now that’s the best pair of ears I ever heard of wouldn’t you say?

More power to you.

Related Posts:

• Quotius #6
• Same Word – Different Culture
• Don’t Take a bath
• Too big to believe
• Quotius #8

# 14 April 4 , 2011

I recently got an e-mail from a good friend of mine copywriter extraordinaire Donnie Bryant.

Donnie knows a thing or two about my theory of mindset immunity and how I’m always interested in what’ s happening in the field of human behavior.

When I first went to the link that he so kindly provided it was a bit of a shock at first. Had some Harvard psychologists usurped my discovery and are now basking in the all the glory of a major breakthrough in human behavior? Had I been totally scooped? Are they now about to crash through my front door any day with the muscle of the Thought Police to seize all my related documents?

Not likely.

False Alarm. I overestimated the size of what looked like a disastrous event. Seems I wasn’t alone either. In fact over-estimating the negative effects of the punch-ups that existence often throws at us was the main focus of the study that was being reported on.

The article entitled: “The Psychological Immune System” seemed to hit close to home for sure but as I read it I could see that their submarine dive into the ocean that is the human mind was on a fairly shallow curve.

The psych study, published almost twelve years ago in 1998, was comprised of a few Ivy League researchers from Harvard University. I won’t go into a lot of detail, you can read all about it here, but what I get from this article is that all they’ve done is merely observed that the phenomenon of an immune system for the mind seems to exist to ameliorate negative emotional effects coming off of negative happenings.

More Ink Please.

Maybe it was the just the reported focus of the study, I don’t know, but it seems to me that they could have made more of it than they did. After all, I’m only a graduate of a small art and design college, but when I realized that there had to be an immune system at work for the thinking I almost went through the roof with excitement.

This sounds like a good study make no mistake, but if there is indeed an immune system working to pull our thinking back to normal then it deserves more than a small study wouldn’t you say?

After all we have a boatload of people walking around with some severe mental problems. In the US alone there are the many millions who are caught up in the tsunami of clinical, bi-polar, and manic depression that is sweeping into our communities with more man-eating force every year. Predictions (made by other psychologists no doubt) are stating that by 2020 depression would become the 2nd most common health problem throughout the world.

If we have found a type of an immune system that can look after some of that I think we need to take a closer look at it righty away.

I didn’t go to Harvard. Nor did I attend any hall of higher learning at all save for that art school (does that even count?). But I think that the reason they stopped where they did in their investigation on the psychological immune system, as they call it, is the cold hard fact that it operates in the domain outside of our own reality.

It’s invisible. You can’t see it. Apparently that sets up a challenge that even researchers who study the invisible mind have a issue with. I guess some phenomenon’s are like that.

As I say I’m not a doctor. I was trained as a visual artist not a scientist. But like them I too have quite an intense interest in human behavior and I too have for years suspected that “mindset immunity” had to exist in some kind of organized way. But I wasn’t constrained by their meticulous scientific methods, nor did I have the need to fund expensive studies to come to the same conclusions. I just worked with people one at a time and observed what happened as they used my invention to link their head brain intellect to their gut brain energy.

What came out was a quick and easy immune response that left them almost breathless with wonder at what they could become. It’s hardly heavy therapy. I call it the H.E.R.O. eMachine. It only takes one day to complete.

Being a visual kind of guy has allowed me to create pictorial representations of the mechanisms for how something like this strange immunity might work. Or sometimes doesn’t work. It may not be hard science but there’s a few things that I include in my free live “Mindset Immunity Explained” webinars that I think even those Harvard types might find quite interesting.

A Serious Bias

Their study found that we humans have a serious bias for over-estimating the level with which we react to all the bad stuff that might happen to us. Is that such a revelation? When we were just kids didn’t each of our parents point that out when they warned us: Don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill?

I really love the guys and gals in the white coats. Don’t get me wrong. They always spend tons of time and money digging up cool findings that I can weave into interesting and fun blog posts.

More power to you.

PS: I could use more sharp eyes like Donnie’s. If you see something interesting on the web that’s relevant to human behavior or self-help please let me know about it either here in the comments section, in FaceBook, or on Twitter.  Of course, I’ll give you a big shout-out for your help. Thanks in advance.

Related Posts:

• Quotius #2
• Writing about mindset immunity
• Minus and Plus
• Mindset Crumple Zones
• Education: Failure

Seth Godin’s post on his blog this morning talks about how Kraft Singles has “the normal … the regular kind” market in it’s particular field sewed up.

“That slot is taken” he says.

Anyone trying to break into that market is going to fail unless it can make what it offers so compelling that it moves the entire market center toward itself and away from the previous “normal”.

In looking at this it made me see that he is probably right even in a market that includes personal development (PD) products that are aimed at developing the positive aspects of thinking. In fact I’ve long felt that this industry (PD) is ready for a big shakeup. The “normal” kind of stuff that’s being offered has become so ubiquitous that its effects are now wearing thin.

It’s become too normal to work against the kinds of problems facing so many of us these days.

With my launch of the Mobius Effect the focus will be away from head-based “therapies”.  It’s going to be a shift.  I’m not going to be offering the usual staple that this industry is so known for: forced acquiring of repetitive old-hat information and head-brain stuffing.

Instead, we’re going to move the center of gravity towards the most natural thing in the world – something I call Mindset Immunity. The delivery of a fractal of a pattern of potential in you that is so large it wouldn’t otherwise fit into your head-brain alone. Need to draw in the gut brain too.

The effect will be an instantaneous recurring and generous ROI – Return On Immunity. This will give those in the market for personal betterment a clear choice for the first time in a long time. ROI: Return On Information-stuffing or ROI: Return On Immunity.

One jams you up the other offers freeness.

More Power to you.

Related Posts:

• Shooting the Head Negs
• Don’t Take a bath
• Mobius Monday Minute #6
• Times Change
• Mobius Monday Minute #4