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

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Mobius Monday Minute – June 20 , 2011

Do you dream about how good an ideal future outcome is going to be? Do you follow the typical common coach’s suggestion about visualizing yourself in the winner’s circle?

If you do you could be heading for failure.

Reams of studies put together by psychologists over the years have shown that indulging in positive fantasies actually makes people’s ambitions less likely to become reality. But no one had yet figured out why.

Until now that is.

A new study carried out by researchers at New York University’s Motivation Lab points to evidence that positive fantasies sap our energy. “By allowing people to consummate a desired future”, the researchers explain, “positive fantasies trigger the relaxation that would normally accompany actual achievement, rather than marshaling the energy needed to obtain it”.

It looks like fantasizing about successful outcomes makes the task of putting out the energy to do the hard work seem unnecessary. If success seems like a forgone conclusion then why work so hard?

Apparently, the study revealed that when the fantasizing sets in even the subjects seem to get so relaxed that even their blood pressure dropped. (Although that correlation to motivation is still being looked at.)

So, should we stress ourselves to success? Or fantasize ourselves into relaxation?

Could this be why we see so many successful people with heart problems and dreamers who are flat broke? It’s quite a serious trade-off at either end of the spectrum don’t you think?

Personally, I’ve never been much of a fan of dreaming about the future. I prefer to go with future vision. Dreaming about great tomorrows that might never come is not productive. Dreams tend to be just shinny new objects in the distance that we see through the eyes of our imagination. They often appear like a movie with lots of movement and plenty of drama. But they also change a lot from session to session.

Vision is different.

With vision all you see is one frame of the completed movie. It’s always the same each time. Solid and sustained over long periods of time.

But that’s not all.

Vision allows you to actually feel its truth… it’s absoluteness that the future will be that which has been seen. Accomplishment happens through hard work sustained over time. That takes a high state of motivation that apparently dreaming can’t call-up. Dreams may be nice things that can appear fuzzy and warm but vision is a manic steamroller on its way to the finish line.

Choose wisely.

More power to you.

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Mobius Monday Minute

# 11 – Jan 17 , 2011

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/18678091[/vimeo]

Sometimes we work away at things and it doesn’t seem like we’re getting anywhere. The timeline from start to finish (if there is ever a ‘finish”) can sometimes be a long one.

It’s easy to choose not to make it better and fall into discouragement. It’s easy to quit when it appears that reaching the goal is still far away around a corner or over yet another mountain.

But artists, and we’re all artists in our own right, have always struggled for newness even if that newness was just getting to the next day.

I’m not here to tell you to never quit  – your mother told you that. I’m here to ask you a question: Can keep up the struggle through the timeline for another day another month another year in order to find out what your true calling is?

If you can, I can guarantee you, it will result in you making it way way better.

For yourself and for the world around you.

More power to you.

PS: Have you heard about how Mindset Immunity works to make your life run smoother?  Attend our free once-per-week webinar every Tuesday evening at 6PM. It’s easy to do. Just fill in your info in the form over in the right sidebar at the top of this page. See you this Tuesday night at 6PM Pacific.

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It’s worth over seven billion dollars a year. Millions of us engage in its use every day.

But, for many of us it’s an unrealized waste of time.

I’m talking about the burgeoning self-help or self-development, or self-improvement industry. Whatever you call it that’s the one that’s got some of the biggest most recognizable names making huge profits from it.

Names like Dr. Phil, Dr. Laura, Dr. Grey and let’s not forget Tony Robbins.

But there’s a serious flaw here and it boils down to simple physics: heat rises.

What’s that got to do with your practice of self-development techniques?

Plenty.

Most of us have tried this in the past, but if you haven’t be a good sport and play along.

Take a positive statement such as “Today is going to be the best day of my life!” Say it out loud while you stand in front of your bathroom mirror or when you’re alone in your car driving down the freeway on your way to work.

Say it repeatedly for a couple of minutes or so.

Notice how you feel. A little more perked-up maybe? No different at all?

Either way it’s a problem. If you had paid someone like Brian Tracy to instruct you to do this and nothing happened you’d be out your money. On the other hand if something did happen and you felt better you’d still lose.

“Say what?”

You’d still lose because it’s simple physics that heat rises right? Now I know that your thoughts aren’t really physical things but that doesn’t matter the rule still applies. Here’s why.

Thoughts, even good ones,  originate in your head. Many thoughts added together, even if they’re repeated, form a pattern. That pattern throws off an invisible “heat,” called an attitude,that becomes a motivating force within you. The longer the thought pattern the greater the heat or attitude and the resulting strength the motivating force has.

Now stay with me here this is where it gets interesting.

This motivating force will cause you to move. It might be just a simple smile that you put on when meeting someone such as a client or your girlfriend’s father. Or it might be to boldly burst into your boss’s office to say you’re quitting because you’ve decided that life’s too short to waste your time working for him.

Doesn’t matter what it causes you to do as much as why it causes you to do it.

The motivational heat from thoughts in your head have gone downward into your body and made you act. But its effectiveness is short lived because of the physics of it.

It’s like trying to heat water by directing the flame from the top. You get poor efficiency and you use too much fuel.

You live in a world that is full of other sources of stimulation that also create attitude [heat]-producing thought patterns within you. They can conflict with existing thought patterns and often act to cancel each other out causing confusion as to which direction to take. This makes decision making more exhausting as well as time-consuming.

So you find yourself the next day back in front of your bathroom mirror with your positive affirmations again.

On and on it goes until you eventually burn out.

Doing things this way will make you one of the 95% of people who never succeed to the degree they’d like to. It’s just too much work.

The solution to all of this is to do what you do when you want to cook something in a pot. You heat it from below.

Don’t use your thoughts to create motivation instead go with your gut. Motivation from your gut (gut brain) is far more authentic. After all isn’t love based in the heart area?

Dynamic business leaders and decision makers don’t like fluff.  They very often will say that their best decisions are based on perceptions that come from how a thing feels.

Try it. It’s quicker and you’ll be happier for a lot longer with less stress.

Till next time,

More power to you all

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“Don’t watch the news!”
I’ve heard this advice before.  It was from mega-successful network marketer Mark Yarnell who authored several good books on that industry. He was saying things like ” Nothing ever happens anyway…”

Years ago I tried his advice myself and I did realize a lot more efficient use of my time. Of course I did get rid of my TV altogether so that had a lot to do with it.  The reception in my area was crappy anyway and what with building a new dairy business I was always quite busy with little time to sit in front of a boob tube.

But all that was before 9/11. Today the news seems to be a lot more full of all the gritty stuff folks just love. It gives them stuff to talk about but, in reality, you’d better avoid in order to preserve your positive mindset. I understand that.

But is that the best or the only option? Is all negativity something that we should be trained to avoid at all costs?

I think not.

Not because I like negative news – I don’t – but I realize that sensational news sells and that’s why there’s plenty of it.  Anything that get’s the emotions going sells.  We all know that. Purchases happen because the buying response is triggered by the emotions and then is immediately backed by logic. That’s marketing 101.

I don’t really care for it myself because it sounds manipulative but… that’s how things are.

We’re human.  We must live fully in the world good or bad. It’s not what we see or hear so much as what motivates us to act. If we are making choices based on how it looks we’re probably not going forward as we should.
My advice is to use the gut feel method to “see” if a decision is a good thing or not. It may not always work out to our satisfaction just then but perhaps later on we’ll see that it was for the best.

As for the news? It’s just information composed of letters and numerals which make up sounds and pictures. It’s ok to feel a well reported story emotionally but then engage your ability to detach quickly so that it remains “outside” of you.

(If you have trouble doing that then see this)

You are not the world.

You just live here.

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I have a friend who lives in Orlando. That’s the same town that’s home to one of the world’s happiest of theme parks on earth: Walt Disney World. It even has its own famous mouse.

My friend likes to believe that he lives in paradise citing the pleasant weather, fine dinning, and the ability to rub shoulders with others of his economic class. But two years after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans there was Fay which left a mark on the greenery of Orlando’s paradise. Many trees were uprooted and some homes damaged. Just after that I recall him saying something about the possibility of relocating to Canada, his wife’s birthplace.

But that notion was short lived. The fine weather returned to warm and balmy once more and he returned to normal too as the city workers gathered up the torn-up trees and disposed of them. Out of sight and out of mind.

But that was last year. There’s a new storm in town now and it’s not going to blow over any time soon. It’s the storm of economic change that so many around the world are now going through. It’s making him weak in his 70 year-old knees. Certain realities related to his investment portfolio have caused him to come to grief despite the sunny days, the warmth of deep plush carpeting, and the merry sounds emanating from the theme park.

It turns out that the guy that he sold his business to a few years ago is now about to loose his house and probably will very soon be in default of the motgage payment due my friend. He may be forced to take the business back and that will cost him even more cash every month.

The loan application for the luxury home that he’s been building down by the water’s edge has been denied by one of America’s largest mortgage companies. Of course, they themselves are in trouble and so loans aren’t so easy to get even if you’re considered well-off like my friend is (was).

To make matters worse his current home is now worth a lot less that it was just a few months ago. But this story is not really about my friend. It’s about the three blind mice. You see my friend is just an example for the all-too-common practice of adopting the “attitude of the day”. That’s the ever-changing motivational structure built of one’s emotional house of cards.

The three blind mice are the three types of attitudes that anyone can  select: positive, negative, and complacent. The default level of motivational voltage they generate is something of a Goldilocks experience. High, low, and one “in between”. The problem is these pesky mice, which invade our thinking early on in life, tend to blind us from all that we naturally had going for us, and work to replaced it with motivations that now correspond to happenings outside of us instead of inside of us.

Loose a pile of money on the stock market? That’s negative – cue the frown. Win a pile of money on the lottery? That’s positive  – cue the smile. Everything in between is just “ho hum” and that’s not all that great either.
Hard to enjoy your life if all you feel is generally unmotivated. Fortunately, that last one is not the most common of three mice people walk around with. Having only these three to choose from is rather limited I’ll grant you that but that’s how they run.

Not to fret though the human complexity begins to become more evident when the psychologists get into the game. Armed with the carving knives that came with their PhD’s they busily make charts, form profiles, and configure diagnoses as to how we can best deal with all our off-kilter emotional baggage. Heck they’ve been at it for over 100 years now. They’re still dong it pretty much the same way today except the drugs they use are better and now they can get advances from their next book deal.  (Psychologists! Don’t get me started.)

Personally, I don’t like mice.

I think that we we’re doing just fine when we didn’t have any. For one thing our eyes were a lot clearer. Of course that was back before our third birthday. You do remember it don’t ya?

Back then we didn’t need these mice to interpret the world. All we had was the joy we got from the doing of simple things. No investments to concern us. No political choices to ponder. Just the raw motivational energy pouring from our gut to our mind promoting objectivity and love 24/7.

My friend seemed to pine for those days too, even though he may not have realized it. Just the other day on the phone he said: “Sometimes I think it’s better not to have had anything”.

In my work with H.E.R.O.  I’ve seen what could be the return path to a real paradise. Maybe we can’t be kids again exactly, but perhaps we can get some of our objectivity and joy for life back despite what’s going on “outside” of us. I think we’re going to need it too. Every day I hear of more and more evidence pointing to the building of a generalized crisis of mindset. A tsunami of crappiness.

Darn mice. Grab your cleavers everyone, let’s cut their tails off!

More power to you.

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