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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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.)

Circular Thinking: Works on fear – Makes you gutless
Reciprocal Thinking: Works on guts – Makes you fearless

This quotius is not actually a quote like most of the others I do here. That’s because it’s not a quote from somebody else. This time it’s my own idea which I made up in an attempt to vividly illustrate the striking differences between two distinct types of thinking: circular and reciprocal.

If you’ve seen more than one of my Quotius videos you may have noticed that I have little regard for the circular type of thinking pattern. I personally believe that thinking that has a pattern like this has been the sole cause of the stuckiness that many people experience in their own lives.

I don’t like it in myself and I don’t like it in others.

That’s why in each one of these little productions I end up destroying the circular band that represents circular thinking. This often happens in a rather extreme way. It’s intentionally violent and final. Like a deadly virus I don’t want it ever coming back.

Circular thinking causes you to make decisions that are hard to reach. They are long coming (if they get made at all) and they are usually the result of over-analyzing things. They are what I refer to as head-based decision making. All you do is go around and around and around burning up time and energy to finally reaching a flimsy compromised path.

If you tend toward this type of thinking it’s probably because it seems like the safe thing to do. But it’s not. It’s just time-wasting. Real opportunities aren’t often found in the safe area of life. They are found in the deep end of the pool and it takes some guts to swim out there to claim them for yourself.

Reciprocal thinking, on the other hand, is thinking that works in partnership with the two sets of independent brain systems found in all humans. The head brain and the gut brain.

You’re no doubt aware of the head brain and what it does.  But for some the knowing about the gut brain is still be a bit of a mystery. So let me give you a brief rundown of what I think was one of the top biological discoveries of the last fifty years.

The gut brain, known technically as the “enteric nervous system”, was a discovery that was first made public in North America in an article in the New York Times in 1996. The subject of the article was an announcement by cell biologist Dr. Michael Gershon. His area of interest had been the digestive system and that is how he literally tripped over the evidence of this (abdominal) brain.

He conducted tests and found some startling facts such as:
• The gut brain can, and does, act alone without instructions from topside
• The area of the gut brain is rich in “feel good” chemicals
• The gut brain is very sensitive to touch employing the same neurons found in the head

The brain in the gut was not entirely unknown however. A British doctor by the name of Langley had written about it about 100 years prior to Dr. Gershon’s work, but it had been overshadowed by the discovery of neuro-transmitters (chemicals said to help transmit nerve signals between each neuron).

Now that we know we have two distinct brains in the body why not use both of them in concert when considering critical choices? You can have the thought considerations from the head brain while being made more aware of invaluable signals about good or bad from the gut brain. Base your finial decision on that.

It is said that two brains are better than one. But what’s even better is when both reside in the same body and can agree on the same direction to go in.

More power to you.

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#4 Podcast Nov 29, 2010
I talk about how I learned to talk about a mystery like mindset immunity.

More power to you my friends.

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Today we start a new series that I hope will become a tradition every Friday around here at Mobiusman.com. It’s borrowed from an idea that I saw recently being done quite expertly on Donnie’s blog. I’ve just given it a little half-twist (in true Mobius fashion) of my own and called it “Quotivations”.

What is a quotivation? It’s a mash-up of  two words: quotes and  motivational.  Get it? I thought you would you brainy thing you. You knew all along that good quotes, just like all well-assembled word pictures, have the power to motivate and inspire didn’t you?

So here goes our first submission in the “Quotivations Day Series:

“Failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success”

I found this quote in an email I got last week. It’s a quote from one of my most favorite authors of the success/failure dynamic – Napoleon Hill. I like him a lot. Not because he wrote one of the best selling motivational self-development books of all time but because he himself – like a ton of modern-day self-helper/coaches after him – failed to deliver the raw goods and instead skillfully side-stepped the most important “how to” information everyone was needing but no one was aware of yet.

Of course that’s one of the reasons he got away with it. The other is the fact that his was still an age of innocence.  He became a masterful user of the language of his time and that was enough to placate his hungry audience. Enough that they bought his stuff in droves.

Unfortunately, Hill was a great salesman so no one ever noticed that he never got around to actually explaining the mechanics of persistence and determination that lay at the root of what he was trying to say in his books.

Is it because the English language had not evolved enough by his time so that he could use it to explain this mystery cogently? That might be part of it. We do have a better understanding of how human immune systems work these days than we had back then. But, of course, he would have had to have realized the esoteric connection as to what role mindset immunity plays in success attainment.

No one that I’ve ever come across has ever done it yet. A quick search in Google for “mindset immunity” just brings up results tied to this blog right here.

So, what exactly is the “seed of an equivalent success”?

I can sum that up in this one little three-word statement of fact: Failure causes immunity.

More power to you.

Do you have a favorite quote you think should be included in this series?  Please, just leave it here together with your comments. I greatly appreciate your help and involvement.

Want to know more about mindset immunity? I’m creating a new DVD called “Immune To Failure  – Essentials” and you can get notified of it’s release here.

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Photo by placbo - Flickr

This morning I was listening to the radio morning show on CBC. Every week they have a medical doctor on and he reports on some interesting findings from the world of medicine. According to the good doctor in past years lots of medical doctors and nurses showed up for work even if they knew they had a flu or cold. They thought that they were being of more service to their patients then not being there for them at all.

Of course, the fact that one sneeze can send out over 40,000 droplets of water full of active viruses into the office air, and could therefor easily spread the disease to the other patients, wasn’t fully considered that big a problem. After all the thinking back then was that no one was ever going to die from a cold or flu.

But that was before H1N1 cam along. That changed things forever and it’s a different story now.

But this is a blog is about mindset not medicine so I do need to draw a connection here and so here it is.

No matter if they be they embodied in physical viruses or negative thoughts damaging factors can easily spread, populate, and infect new hosts in very similar ways. For example, in offices everywhere managers have noticed that it only takes one worker voicing negativity to bring down the well-being of the entire work group.

Sound familiar?

That to me is a clear indication that thinking systems mirror the physical system as seen in the body. But the body has an advantage.  It’s got an immune system that, if maintained in health, does an excellent job of handling invading pathogens on a daily basis. Unfortunately the one corrective system that I believe is present in the mindset is itself very slow acting.

So slow in fact as to appear to not be present at all. That leaves the thinking much more susceptible to negative invaders. In fact studies show this to be true. Our daily thoughts, they report, are on average about 70% negative.

So what kind of flu are you helping to spread?

More Power to you.

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We’ve all heard it said that “your first choice is often your best choice” and “trust your gut feeling it’s usually right“.  This is something that is recognized as a phenomenon in many cultures the world over.  It has caused people to make major decisions based entirely on how it felt rather than how it looked regardless of how strongly others advised them against it. I think this has got to be the greatest motivational mystery of all time.

Recently I ran across an interesting video on Evan Carmichael’s site that suggests this same advice should be considered number one when making business decisions.  Check it out:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owXhVn-0YKI[/youtube]

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PS: If you want to learn more about how this  mysterious phenomenon, what I call the “mobius effect” fits in with my theory of Mindset Immunity then check this out.

More power to you,

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