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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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.

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Mobius Monday Minute

# 12 – Feb 14 , 2011

Photo: Morgufile

Are you taking care of your rent?

No, not the stuff you’re compelled to fork out every month to your money-grubbing landlord. Not that rent.

I’m talking about the “tear” in your motivational fabric every time you have one of those events we all call a f-a-i-l-u-r-e.

Of course I’m playing with words here because, in case you didn’t get the mildly insane insinuation, a “rent” is another word for “tear”. But this is not meant to be a lesson in etymology.

No, not at tall. It’s a comment about what happens to our mindset after we experience something that we tried and that didn’t quite make the grade. The “f” word is of course almost always a reflection of how we judge our past actions that didn’t render the result we had in mind. It’s really nothing else.

Upon closer inspection we can even get some good learning juice out of it if we dare to look for it. He wasn’t alone in this but a guy by the name of (all things) Samuel Smiles the author of the classic 1882 book SELF HELP once said:

“It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.”

Now, those 33 words alone may not help you completely recover from the battering you gave yourself after the fact, but at least you should feel a little bit better knowing that many others have ventured down this dark road before you.

I suppose that there is one thing I should add to this tidbit of information here. It’s this: The hurt you feel when bad things happen is like a bruise on an apple. Except being in the thinking it’s not a physical bruise like one in the meat. It’s an emotional or an ethereal one. These typically take way more time to mend. Maybe that’s why your mother may have advised: Sleep on it. It’ll look better in the morning.

Sure mom.

I don’t know about you but after a day of blowing it big time I never could sleep it off. It wasn’t till years later when I came upon the idea of mindset immunity which became my life’s work that I realized that there is an immune system that does for the thinking what the other one does for the body.

That’s what I’ll be talking about on my next free webinar coming up this Tuesday evening at 6PM Pacific. To get your free invitation go to: www.mobiusman.com/webinar.

More power to you.

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If you payed for head-based self-motivation you could end up taking a bath

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.” -Zig Ziglar

Welcome to this edition of “Quotivations” for December 17, 2010.

Usually every Friday I choose quotes that I think are motivating or inspiring. But today I’m doing something a little different.

Rather than being motivating I found this quote, from one of the original key figures of modern day Self-help, to be a less then a subtle complaint about one of the biggest faults of his positive motivational product.

It doesn’t last.

Never has and never will.

Poor old Zig. He’s been at this self-help game since before the earth was done cooling. A defensive quote like this one appears to bring out the curmudgeon in him.

It’s total spin though.

But there is something I’ve  got to give him credit for. He’s always been good at adding a touch poetry to make his message more memorable. Remember the famous line “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude”. Clever stuff like that sells well and it sure did for multi-millionaire Zig Ziglar.

But I still don’t buy it.

Want poetry? How about this: “Disable the fable about motivational spinners making you able”.

Ok, maybe it’s not as good as Zig can do it but, hey, I’m still working on it.

I believe that the real reason why motivation appears not to last very long is because of the type of motivation that’s being delivered.

What doesn’t last is the typical self-motivation injected toward your head-brain by clever artful dodgers like Zig.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, anyone who’s been at for over forty years, like Zig has, deserves some respect. I’m sure he’s helped some people along the path.

But we need some hard truth here.

The problem is that Zig, like all of his compadres today, did not and has not been able to recognize that there is another overriding motivational force that comes from the gut and powers through all the head-brain muddle causing a desired goal to be achieved despite all the great motivational sayings.

That energy, we refer to it sometimes as persistence and determination, cannot and does not originate in the head brain. It’s strictly a property of the gut brain (scientifically known as the enteric nervous system).

The problem with trying to change thoughts from negative to positive is that as humans we have a slight negativity bias to start with and the head-brain, which is always open to messages from the eyes and ears, can’t avoid reverting to and taking on the polarity of whatever has the greater amount.

In other words, there is a lot of negatively charged media fighting for attention with the positive stuff (poetry notwithstanding). It usually swings back to the negative side because that is often the default setting. Negative is also the polarity a lot of our perceptions happen to have about how our existence is treating us.

For example, you could be studying one of Zig’s great books and feeling very positive about your day. That’s until some jerk cuts you off in traffic or you get a flat tire on your way to work and suddenly bamm! just like that you’re back to where you started. You need to bathe your brain again in more positive juice.

The fundamental Problem…

It’s taken me a lot of years but I can now describe the fundamental problem with just three words: lack of immunity.

See the mindset is constantly under attack by our negative perceptions of our situation. But the body’s physical immune system is primarily a buffer against the attacks of pathogens and most of the time it works quite well.

But mindset immunity is another animal all together. It’s not physical it’s ethereal because thoughts are ethereal. The problem with it is that it’s too weak and too slow acting in most people to act like much of a buffer. But, here’s the good news:

I’ve found a way to fix that with this.

Not one of the best head-based motivators working today has ever thought of this approach before. If they did they’d have to change their whole business model to include one where they only deliver the result just once and it sticks.

Like I do.

They wouldn’t want to ever do that though. If they did their business could end up taking a bath… daily.

That’s it for today, consider yourself “quotivated”.

More power to you.

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# 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.

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“The times they are a’changing”  – Bob Dylan

Photo: Sotheby's

Famous Friday Quotivations # 4 December 10, 2010.

Today a tattered and worn old piece of paper was sold at Sotheby’s auction house in New York. The buyer was a wealthy hedge fund manager who ponied up $422,500 for the artifact.

In this series I usually quote famous leaders who had written great unforgettable one-liners. But this time I came across something different. That old piece of paper that changed hands today was the original hand-written draft of Bob Dylan’s protest anthem “The Times They Are A-changing”. It rattled in my brain all day.

I was just beginning high school back in October 1963 when Dylan picked up a pencil and scratched out this song on a three-hole punched piece of paper. He couldn’t have known of course the changes that were afoot just a short time later when President John F. Kennedy was shot dead by an assassin’s bullet during a motorcade through Dallas. Many things changed that day.

Here’s the quote:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

For Dylan this was a song to protest the war in Vietnam and the issue of civil rights. But for me now, some 47 years later, I see it as a reflection of the perils of not being adaptable to change.

Adaptability is an important human attribute and is a big part of what I cover in my discussion about my work and research as I continue to develop my theory of mindset immunity. Change is something that’s all around us and we’d better be good at handling it because one thing we can rely on is more of it in the future. Whether we’re ready or not.

Many are not.

That’s why I developed this.

Explaining it will be something I’ll get into in my new webinar that’s happening every Tuesday evenings at 6PM Pacific.

Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, for your enjoyment, here’s my favorite cover of that great Bob Dylan song performed by another iconic trio of the 1960′s era Peter, Paul, & Mary.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oU7M4OeSRM[/youtube]

More Power to you

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