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

Each week I intend to dispatch my pent-up creativity by creating a new version of something I call a “quotius”. (Learn about the genesis of it here.)
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Okay, it is a quote, well, sort of in a way at least it is. I mean, I’m quoting a collective group of people here but no one person in particular so there will be no attribution attached.
This is not only ground-breakingly different for me but I saved ink too because I just did it by hand with a marker.

The group I’m referring to, if you can believe it, is the population of biology researchers laboring away at labs all over the country.

I’m using a short list. I’ve stripped out everything extraneous so that all I’m left on it is six basic items. The professionals I’m quoting probably wouldn’t have done that themselves. They like long reports and white papers. They need those to justify their research funding.

The list includes the six main elements that make up the bulk of all living matter on planet earth: Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Sulfur and Phosphorus.

In the video I’m keeping with my usual theme of showing my inherent lack of respect for a circular-shaped thinking pattern. As usual I make sure it meets with a quick if not painless end.

In the circular thinking model I show what the problem is. You can only read half of the items on the list. The other three appear upside down on the inside of the band. They are separated and alone.

With only three items instead of the required six you can’t end up with a living organism. If you work in a lab and these three are all you have you may have something organic but it’s most likely not living or breathing nor will if fetch a stick.

Nevertheless science has a name for it… It’s known as “dead”.

The same can be said of the pattern of circular thinking itself. All that one can do when you’re caught up within it is stay trapped in an endless spiral going further down the road of frustration and time loss.

So who am I to make such critical observations?

After all the closest I ever got to being a scientist was watching Star Trek on television after school more than forty years ago. But for the last two decades I’ve closely watched the way circular thinking has taken hold in so many people’s lives. Promoted by the rush and demands of life these days it has stolen more of its portion of our joy and happiness. If they would just slow down enough they would appreciate the fact that they can see their own potential and build a deep self-belief on that hard-evidence-based vision. All it takes is a simple little brain tweak and the direction we all desperately need can begin to come into focus.

My point, if I may say so myself, is visually well made. Thinking like this is as dead as the organic waste that only three basic elements can make. It’s thinking that needs to be changed.

In this video I reconstruct this old model by it taking apart and by giving one end a little tweak by twisting one end of it 180 degrees (like the coil in a DNA) before joining it with the other end.

We now see something new.

It’s a model of a mobius strip of course but, at the same time, it’s also a 3D illustration of a reciprocal system of thinking. Now in this form we can easily read all six elements one–by-one because this new strip only has one side and one edge. With this complete list of six items we have just about everything that’s needed to define every living organism in the physical world.

We also have a very elegant metaphor for the shape that this new thinking pattern takes on. I have been helping people for a long time to make this type of change and it doesn’t take long to do. One day at the most. The rewards are a greater self-confidence, less stress, and a much clearer pathway to get out from under the weight of the world.

And it’s all because of a well placed little twist and a little tweak.

More power to you.

PS: Have you noticed that a lot of personal development methods no longer pack the punch they once did? Could be the times. I went ahead and invented this simple little brain tweak that makes a huge difference in leveraging your efforts for creating a better version of yourself. Want more? Check out my FREE webinar here.

Related Posts:

• The Physics of Motivation
• Shooting the Head Negs
• Syncing in self-belief
• What two brains can see
• Are You Immune Enough?

Mobius Monday Minute – May 9 , 2011

I subscribe to a design blog and they send me updates like a lot of blogs do. The latest one contained a quote someone sent in from broadcaster Ira Glass. Ira won the much coveted Edward R. Murrow Award in 2009. He’s a very accomplished writer and radio personality. Been doing it since he was just nineteen years old.

Know what he said about his beginnings in radio? He said that he took the longest time to reach a level of mastery in doing interviews and stories on radio then anyone he knows. He says that getting through the beginning time can take years of working through the frustration with your own crappy output. It tries to be good but it’s just not. He says that’s where most loose it. They quit because they are convinced that they will never ever see success.

I know what he’s talking about.

I’ve just had another birthday blow by and I’m still trying to refine my message about mindset immunity and the fact that I have the tool that can allow anyone, in 24 hours or less, to see and feel the huge ocean of potential that exists within them. And when they use this tool they can create amazing levels of self-belief.

When attempting to do something new it becomes a creative work no matter what field you work in. There is a lot of failure to contend with.

In another email I got this week Ishita Gupta was interviewing Steven Pressfield on his new book “Do The Work“. In it Pressfield related a story about Picasso:

“There’s a famous story of Picasso after he had finished about 24 paintings for his next show. He invited his agent or his manager to his studio to look at the paintings and as Picasso was looking at them with his manager, he started to hate them. He grabbed a painting knife and started slashing the paintings. The manager absolutely freaked out and said, “NO, NO, NO!” but Picasso kept slashing until they were all ruined. Then he went back to the drawing board.”

That’s the kind of craziness that happens with our own self-assessment. It’s punishing to be a creative or a leader of any kind.

If I was going to quit I should have done it 20 years ago. But I didn’t and now I can’t. There is just too much at stake. Too many lives to help make better, richer, more fulfilling.

Besides, it worked for Ira so it’ll work for me.

It’ll work for you too. Hang in there.

More power to you.

PS; Let me know what you think about the challenge of trying to put together something brand new. Leave me your thoughts in the comment area below. If you’d like to get alerted on new blog posts  you can subscribe by clicking here.

Related Posts:

• Charlie’s Powerful Belief
• Wait Problem
• Try It One More Time
• The Three Letter Question
• Mobiusmanifesto

I was born with two brains.

Let me be clear though. I’m not claiming that I was somehow favored with an exceptionally large heaping helping of neurological goodies far beyond the norm. To my knowledge my particular gene pool wasn’t necessarily Olympic-sized and overpopulated with excess ganglion. It hasn’t allowed me to be a lot smarter than you or anyone else for that matter. See, I simply can’t claim that for myself. I’d like to but… I can’t.

Know why?

Turns out that my birth attributes weren’t all that special at all. At least when it comes to a tally in the brain department. The fact of the matter is, you have two separate sets of brains in your body too. So does the rest of the human population. All seven billion of us.

Seven billion problems

With all these brains there arises a problem though that needs to be addressed. None of us came with an owner’s manual. Having two sets of brains living in one body can be difficult to get a handle on at least from street level.

It doesn’t help that one brain set is in the head and the other one is in the gut. Or that the latter feels but doesn’t think while the former thinks (like gangbusters) but can’t feel a heck of a lot – if anything.

Out of sync

You’d think, given such a different set of skills, that each brain would seek out the other to form some sort of a coalition. That would work well if they actually knew each other existed by more than a passing glance. But as they mature they don’t seem to. Like the group of metronomes in the video posted here these two brain sets just seem out of synchronization most of the time. There is some communication between them but mostly they’re left to do their own thing.

For example, the head-brain can deliver to us a complex cognizance of our world. It can sometimes be seen as a romantic view and what all that means and then… other times? It could be a negative black hole.

The gut brain handles the smelly [definitely unromantic] task of digestion. This sort of disconnect allows the head-brain room to get into some turbulent thought territory. When that happens is it produces a lot of “noise” for our intellect to deal with. Often that noise is expressed as stress which tends to drown out all chances for optimal productivity in the thinking-straight department.

So, why is that?

Just take a look at your computer. All sensitive systems need some sort of buffer from external factors that might be damaging to its integrity. Of course we don’t call them buffers we call them “firewalls” and “anti-virus programs” but the effect they have on the system is similar. It would be foolish if you were to turn off those services and go out surfing all over the web wouldn’t it? You’d be asking for trouble and it wouldn’t take very long to find it.

So you can imagine what it’s like for the beleaguered head-brain. Every day it steps out into the world and – sooner or later – it will fall into some crappy thought-company.

It desperately needs a buffer too.

In the video we see how that was accomplished. The metronomes finally got a buffering platform that allowed them to communicate with each other. That little bit of connection quickly turned around the chaos and made it into an organized mass of oneness. Like those metronomes we too could pull these brains into sync with a new platform. One that can cause a unique unbroken communication of energy between both sets of brains creating harmony from randomness.

It could become more of what was intended: a symphony of ideas coupled with the motivation to put them into action. That platform is the ocean of potential that comes as a standard factory installed capability within each of us. The only reason we don’t think we have ready access to it is because it’s too huge a pattern to fit into the confines of our head- brain.

The ugly-duckling gut brain though has a unique advantage. It doesn’t think it feels. That potentiality is energy-based. Easy for the super sensitive gut brain to know if it’s there or not. It can feel it.

That dynamic informs us of who we are: a feeling/thinking being capable of amazing things. Let’s hear it for a solid self-belief built on inner-togetherness.

More power to you.

Related Posts:

• Shooting the Head Negs
• Quotius #5
• Dark Energy and You
• Deep Self-Belief Test
• Charlie’s Powerful Belief

Famous Quotivations # 14 – February 18 , 2011

The most important thing you can have is an unbridled belief in yourself. This one thing will fuel your personal vision of the future like nothing else can. It will be a vision that is so real that it is not a question of weather or not it is going to come to fruition but only when.

But, given this truth, there is one fly in the ointment. Belief, any belief, is established in one of two ways: through argument or through hard evidence. If you go out and attempt to build self-belief by investing in the argument method only it might not be sticky enough to pull you up the life’s incline.

Better you should seek an authentic burning eternally-fired energy-backed belief based on the hard evidence that you’ve been successful before.

The key can be found in your success history. Locate that and you at least stand a fair chance no matter what the current circumstances look like.

Charlie was a child performer and had lots of ups and downs.

But he must have been keenly aware that those times when he persevered would create memories of real victories that he could draw on later.

Must have worked because he did go on to gain many honors. Playwright George Bernard Shaw called Chaplin “the only genius to come out of the movie industry.”

It’s Friday. Consider yourself “Quotivated”!

PS: If self belief is something you’d like to have in abundance then check out my free webinar on Tuesday night at 6PM Pacific. To get a notification go here.

Related Posts:

• Quotius #5
• Hangin’ in there
• Syncing in self-belief
• Shooting the Head Negs
• Too big to believe

# 6 – Dec 13 , 2010

In this edition I’ll speak about my favorite subject: Persistence and the new book I’ve just released.

More power to you my friends.

Related Posts:

• What two brains can see
• Shooting the Head Negs
• Mobius Monday Minute #5
• Don’t Take a bath
• Try It One More Time