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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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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Although I usually write quite a bit about “mindset immunity”  a while back someone asked me about my “Mobiusman” handle. This post is in response to that. It‘s also an add-on to a series of posts I had previously published beginning here.

Most people will not know what a mobius is although they might recognize it if they saw it. I have explained it in previous posts but here’s a quick refresher.

It’s an invention that, about 150 years ago, was credited to August Ferdinand Mobius.  He was a professor of advanced mathematics at the University Of Lipzig where he contributed to the advancement of a very esoteric sub-field of geometry known as “topology”. When he created the first mobius strip his interest was the examination of two-dimensional forms in three dimensional space. Originally he took a strip of paper and, before joining the ends to each other, gave one end a half-twist.

When I first saw it I was a young boy of ten or eleven years old. It was in an illustrated book on mathematics and I was immediately intrigued with it.

Many years later, when I developed the H.E.R.O. eMachine together with the theory of mindset immunity, I immediately employed the mobius strip as the perfect metaphor that symbolized the key points I was attempting to communicate to the rest of the world.

What better image then a simple construct like the mobius. In an amazingly elegant way it suggests a continuous stable loop of motivation as well as infinite possibilities. For myself and for others it has become an appropriate symbol of personal transformation caused by using the H.E.R.O. eMachine format just once.

There are a few key points that I like to use the mobius strip to help me illustrate. 

Key Point One: Duality Principal

I was continually invoking the idea of the double nature of humanity in my work. I’m a visual guy so I needed a physical structure with which to model the story of how the integration of both mindset and physical immunity work to improve the efficiency of the entire system.

In fact the mobius was so good at illustrating the phenomenon of transformation it was chosen by Gary Anderson in 1970 as a base for his design for the symbol for recycling. It’s still in use today.

Industry leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, and average families today need to get more out of existing resources because it’s more efficient to do so. This applies to physical as well as creative or intuitive resources as these produce results quicker and time – as they say – is money.

The idea of duality is deeply involved in what it means to be human. The idea of the two human natures, the physical and the ethereal, go back a long long time.  Discussions about these elements can be traced back to the times of the great philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato.

Key Point Two: Infinity

I really like the idea of infinity as it relates to how endlessly dual immunity can work to support each of its two parts. The symbol for infinity in mathematics is called the “lemniscate”. It basically looks like a figure eight lying down on its side. Lemniscates, if drawn in three dimensions and then rendered in the third dimension as a flat band, becomes a mobius strip.

Key Point Three: Freedom

It is clear to all of us that negative thinking makes us “stuck” and unable to move forward as we should. In a story, the first ever published on the surface of a mobius strip, I told of the opportunity for freedom of mindset that transformation brings.

I like to think that the mobius is a story about potential. I tell this story often with special emphasis on the two directions that information can travel. It can go to you or it can come through you. The latter being more easily comprehended at a gut level.

So, what’s your handle?  Do you have one? If so tell me about it and if it’s visual send me a picture of it. I’d love to hear from you.

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I’m not a huge health nut.  I’m a mindset immunity nut. So what am I doing writing about trans fats? There is a story here.

Not that long ago my wife and I went to the grocery store to pick up a few things. We soon found ourselves in the dairy isle so we got our cheese, sour cream, and some yogurt. Then we got to the butter. “Where’s the butter?” I asked her as if she would know. There wasn’t any. The shelf was bare. Seems there was a sale on butter and, since this was latter in the day, other customers had run off with it.

Our only alternative was the other brand and it was about twice the cost of the house brand that was on sale.

But by now I was hooked on getting a deal and we did need butter. So the only other choice was something that is not even a dairy product.  It’s margarine, that molecular mash-up that often stands-in up to four times as often as butter in many families’ refigerators. Same color, similar consistency, and it even has the same packaging as butter. The one pound square this I got comes dressed in that familiar paper wrapper and its even exactly the same size as a pound of butter.

But of course it’s not the same.

It’s margarine.The label says that on the front. On the back is its ingredients and nutritional info including the trans-fat percentage. This is the thing that’s been linked to many diseases including some types of cancer. It’s a molecular freak that the body simply can’t use. If it tries to it will turn it into something even more deformed.

Now that I’ve had a chance to research it a bit I find that it’s probably closer to being plastic than food. Nothing will grow in it. Leave it out and no pesky flies will go near it. Won’t rot or smell weird if left out either. It’s definitely not butter.

So why did I buy it?

I was skunked by price. Outmaneuvered by the marketing and seduced by easy availability.

Sounds familiar? Many do it every day when they pick up a great book of advice, positive quotes, or read stories of successful people. Get their shot of motivation for the day to help them overcome a tough situation or just help them figure out what to do next.

What else can they do?

Real authentic passion and mindset immunity is in short supply. It’s rarity makes it expensive in time and effort to find it too. So we stick with the mind-candy even though we know that it’s addictive and eventually leads to system breakdowns. It’s loaded with trans-fat thinking that:

• is extrinsic, it doesn’t come from you it comes at you
• clogs the pathways of good clear creativity with rules and “guidelines” that are not your own
• it’s not natural to you so it may not quite fit and it doesn’t last very long
• it’s just cheap and instant and requires little work to get because there’s lot’s of vendors out there who are ready to give it to you

I’ve read some of those trans-fatty books. I know what they are like but I now know better.

Glad I’m finished with this post. Now I can go to my fridge, reach in for that chunk of margarine, and chuck it in the garbage trans-fats and all.

More power to you all.

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Freud: Happy? "No, just less miserable."

For a long time now, particularly ever since I discovered the phenomenon of mindset immunity, I've been very interested in human happiness. Or should I say lac of it. (See I suspect that there might be a happiness deficit in the world today.) I had a hunch that there might be tons of people just like myself who are interested in happiness and how to make it stick around longer.

As I researched the topic of happiness I, naturally, ran into many references to the field of psychology. One in particular was Sigmund Freud. He was known widely as the founder of psychoanalytic school of psychiatry, a branch of medicine where it's practitioners try to make their patients better through analyzing things like dreams but Freud, as it turns out, was quite a pronounced pessimist and I'm guessing not that very happy a guy himself.

Flooded with clients who had lost their joy of life I think in time he must have caught what ever unhappiness bug it was that they had. Whatever the case it must have resulted in a man who eventually concluded that happiness and hope might be close in the dictionary listings but that's about as close as they got. Check out what he had to say about happiness:

• "It's a doomed craft. It's propelled by infantile aspects of the individual that can never be met in reality."
• "One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of creation."

Whoa! And he was a doctor!

I think that old Sig should have forgotten his head and had is gut examined instead. If he had perhaps he'd now be listed among today's innovative researchers like Dr. Michael Gershon. Dr. Gershon you see is a professor as well as chairman of the Anatomy and Cell Biology department at Columbia University Hospital in New York City.  He's the guy who noticed that the human gut contains large amounts of feel-good chemistry and brain cells exactly like the one's found in the head.

GUT BRAIN

Not only that though. According to Dr. Gershon the millions of neurons in the gut qualifies them to be recognized as a brain all by themselves.  He even wrote a book on it called "The Second Brain" in which he describes in detail the disorders and the mysteries of what he calls the enteric nervous system.

The moment back in 1996 when I first heard about his discovery made that a red-letter day for me. I was looking for something concrete to put into context the incredible results I was seeing with attendees at my seminars who had just used my H.E.R.O. search tool.  They all reported a strong feeling of happiness and solidness eminating from an area just below the rib cage. Thanks to Dr. Gershon I now I know how to frame an explaination for it. One that I will be using extensively in my soon-to-be-released DVD entitled "Immune To Failure".

I happen to believe that happiness is a part of our birthright. After all don't we normally all start out that way?  Only taking on sadness and despair usually much later in life? Now, when I talk about happiness I'm not talking about the showy over-the-top jovial Santa-type happy but a steady ability to weather the storms that existence sometimes throws at us. Happiness has to be authentic. The smile on a used car salesman's face is for example quite different than that which comes to us from a new mom who sees her baby for the first time.

No contest right?

Here's an interesting video on happiness from a TED seminar by the famed luminary of positive psychology Mihaly Czikszentmihaly.[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs[/youtube]

A Poll:

One day I was wondering about how happiness was being prioritized by business people on the web. I wondered how it effected their mindset so I wanted to ask a multiple-choice question.

I'm a member of the popular Warrior Forum so I posted a new thread and asked. Here's the results I got after the thread had been going for just under 200 days: The title of the thread was " Which of these is your top priority?" In this poll I asked people to weigh in on a short list of things:

My number one priority in life would be: (Please choose one)

1) More happiness

2) More time

3) More money

4) Other (please note a short description)

Results are In!

Here are the details for the poll as to the end of February 2010: a total of 196 days. Total views: 1,822 Total Responded: 123 Here's the choices they made:

More Happiness: 58

More Time ——- 9

More Money —- 21

Other ————- 20

Not clearly selected: 14

It was obvious early on that happiness was going to trump all other choices. Interestingly, those who choose "More money" felt that they had to explain themselves even if in a very brief sort of apologetic way.

Those who chose happiness more often than not just made the one brief statement: "I choose happiness".  No apologetic reason ever seemed to be needed although some did make statements concerning the state of the world.

Seems the exercise did reveal quite a bit about the state of some people's mindset wouldn't you agree?

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Nelson Mandela in 2008. Photo Credit: www.sagoodnews.co.za

Madiba is not a name most of you will recognize right of the bat.

I didn’t.

That’s because, for one thing, I’m not South African and for another I didn’t take the time to closely educate myself about the man whose unfailing belief in his cause changed his whole country first and later the world.

If you just look at the picture on this page you’ll know right away who Madiba is.

Just in case you’re wondering (and I didn’t know this myself either till I found it here) the other name of this man is of course Nelson Mandela. Madiba is an honorary title adopted by elders of his clan.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the day that he walked out of prison a free man after being locked up for an entire third of his life (Mandela is now 91).

What kind of strength of mindset does it take to survive 27 years in a prison cell and then come out of it and not seek vengince on those who condemded him to all those years?

I only have a clue.

…But

It’s not just positive thinking (although that might help)

It’s not deep-breathing excercises (though that’s a good one for health)

It’s not keeping really busy doing something else (though I think he certainly did that too)

It’s all of those things and something more. Something natural and a mystery at the same time.

A phenomenon really.

I have a name for it. I call it Mindset Immunity

It kept him from becoming a bitter and resentful beast.

It does it for you too if you’re very lucky to have it strike your insides.

Happy anniversary Madiba!

More power to you.

…David

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