self-belief – Mobiusman

What Do You Want?

by David

“The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.” – Ben Stein

To truly know what you want is not an easy question to answer correctly. Henry Ford once said that, in the beginning, if he had ever asked his prospects what they wanted they would have said “a faster horse”.

To know what you truly want is often tricky but it’s worth the effort to seek out an answer because it can reveal what you’re truly passionate about. That can set the path for how your entire life unfolds.

In my own experience my dad comes to mind. While just a teenager he saw a family member greatly relieved from excruciating pain by an osteopathic physician and he immediately knew what he wanted to do with his life from then on. After a successful 35-plus year career helping thousands of his patients get relief from pain he retired as doctor of osteopathy. Only one of two in our entire city.

He was one of the lucky ones.

Many wander through time “sheep-walking” as business blogger Seth Godin calls it, and never making the decision to end the cycle of getting a job, staying at it for a while, growing tired of it, then landing another, and then repeating. All the while never quite hitting that high note. Only to one day get past the point of no return. Always missing that point of critical realization and now too late to make a difference. Too late to ever know the answer to “What do I want?”.

I think that, like my dad, in a way I was one of the lucky ones too. I knew I wanted to become an entrepreneur. But I wanted to find something new and then offer it to the world. I did actually find something but, of course, I just never knew that it would take me to the age of retirement before I could finally see it being accomplished in any real degree of scale.

But now that it’s coming to fruition it’s my passion and my hope that it helps deliver many people to a place where a new self belief can thrive so that the great question is finally answered for them before too much time has passed.

That’s why I’m soon launching my next new project. I’m calling it “Human Potential 2.0”. It’s being positioned to re-tool what has become known as traditional self-help or personal growth. The original model, which began 100 years ago, was to help us realize our own human potential. But over the years it has lost it’s power to effect useful and lasting change that matters.

I intend to fix that by reassigning our focus to more authentic intrinsic elements. To foster a fundamental change that I’m convinced must come about in order to make better choices in how we view ourselves.

For example the fantastic but widely under-reported bio-medical discovery, now almost 20 years ago, that confirmed the fact that humans are dual-brained – one in the head which can think but not feel and a lesser known one in the gut that doesn’t think but feels everything.

With this project we’ll begin with another great quote, this time from Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

Most of this instruction is not too difficult to grasp. The “Do what you can… where you are” parts are no great mystery. Most of us know how to work hard and most should know who they are. The tough part begs another great question…

What is it that you really have?

Answering that is in essence what Human Potential 2.0 is all about. Because if we can answer that question in a way that resonates with our own thinking/feeling dual-brained personage then that will lead us to refine what it means to know what our passion is. And knowing your true passion leads to a tremendous sense of hope for the future.

Watch this space for my upcoming posts on this subject and the accompanying video series that follows.

More power to you.

Skill Of The Creative

by David

The simple paperclip can be a doorway to a creative moment

The ultimate skill of the truly creative person is their ability to survive change no matter how varied it may be.

Acquiring and then expertly utilizing already structured knowledge is the attribute of the very learned.

The creative person is uniquely interested in newness.

That, coupled with a passion for what they do, fires a gut-drive infused with persistence that sustains a vision that never changes.

It’s different than a dream.

It makes the timeline from start to finish, even if it’s very long (and it often is), seem more bearable.

Even when it looks like failure is following failure yet again this drive wins out because it won’t let them give up easily.

Another word for a creative person like that is “entrepreneur”.

In the 1920’s, and for many years after, Napoleon Hill interviewed one hundred and twenty-five of the most financially successful men of his day.

Know what he discovered? The top two attributes for their success was their persistence and determination. Not intelligence or connections. Too bad Hill himself never nailed down exactly what the nature of persistence and determination was and how to get more of it into your life. He instead got wrapped up in laws and lists of principals. More head brain work for you to do.

All that is a far cry from finally finding out what exactly it is that allows some to survive long periods of discomfort and to maintain a motivation through it all. For creatives who want to ‘make it’ on their own terms it’s as essential as air.

More power to you.

Quotius #10

by David

There’s a thing I often like to point out about belief. It’s the fact that it can only be developed two ways:

1) Through blind faith, which is usually based on a compelling argument, or

2) Based on some sort of tactile hard evidence.

This forms the basis of an observation.

There are two types of people in the world: There are those who can believe in something without actually seeing it and there are those who need hard evidence of its existence before the investment of their belief is forced out of them.

As today’s world shifts more and more towards the cynical belief in anything not proven with absoluteness seems increasingly rare. Yet it still exists. It exists for one reason. People require some semblance of hope just to carry on. They seek it everywhere. It’s as essential as the air we breathe.

As a student of entrepreneurship I know that things must be created and shipped even though they may not be perfected. Tweaks can be made latter. “Run it up the flag pole and see who salutes it” as the great copywriter Gary Halbert once said. That kind of productivity is scary. It can lead to many failures. But it can also lead to successes too. You just need to have the gumption to proceed.

Consider the mobius and how it elegantly demonstrates the duality principal yet again.

Belief, in its usual form, looks a lot like just another’s personal perspective and indeed it is. But, on the other hand, if you can get some sort of hard evidence then consider that a bonus.

It can disperse the strength of resistance and make the road forward more attainable.

More power to you.

Music attribution: The Annual New England Xylophone Symposium by DoKashiteru is licensed under a Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)

Quotius #5

by David

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.)

This is not your normal run-of-mill Quotius posting like I usually do.

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 printer 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.

Deep Self-Belief Test

by David

Mobius Monday Minute – May 30 , 2011

As you may know I’m very into examining the mechanisms behind our self-belief (or lack thereof). In my work I often find corresponding mirror-like operators in each of the two natures we humans have – the physical and the ethereal.

This duality thing is quite fascinating because it informs us of so many unique qualities that underscore the miracle of what it means to be human.

Case in point is the importance of the strength of our individual self-belief (ethereal body) and the level of glucose in our blood (physical body). Both seem to be indicators of the wellness of the systems that they are such a vital part of.

You probably know already that tests for blood glucose levels can be done by yourself at home using a glucose meter but what about a test for our own strength of self-belief?

I suppose a meter would be a cool thing to have for this too but that might be a bit of a tough thing to come up with since self-belief exists only in the domain of the ethereal.

Fortunately there is a reliable less outwardly mechanical way that helps give us an indication of the level of our deep self-belief and each of us already have it in our possession.

It’s the little known brain in the gut called the ‘enteric nervous system’.

Now, not everyone has heard that humans have another brain in their body besides the one in the head. Can’t say I’m surprised at that. I didn’t learn of it myself until 1996 and that was just by chance. A friend of mine had told me that there was an article on it in the New York Times science section.

It blew me away when I read it.

I had for years been trying to tell people that I thought there existed something like a base of operations for a motivational source that seemed to emanate from the gut area of the body. At the time there was a label in wide use back then calling this area the “solar plexus”. This seemed a descriptive term for it because it was recognized that there were a large mass of nerve fibers in this area that seemed to radiate out from a central area like the sun’s rays.

This description, although fancifully romantic, wasn’t very accurate medically. It was really just a boxing term for all the nerves identified in that area. It was Dr. Michael Gershon, it’s modern-day discoverer, who actually coined the more scientific term “enteric nervous system” for this unusual brain. ( In his book Gershon admits that he wasn’t the first one to actually discover this extra brain. He explains that the initial discovery was made 100 years earlier by two young British physiologists at London University – William Bayliss and Ernest Starling.)

So what’s the one thing that distinguishes this brain from the one in the head? Well, besides the obvious location differences it has one overriding feature: it’s a feeling brain not a thinking brain. It’s so good at feeling it can even sense things that would defy any scientific inquiry. It apparently can feel the presence of something in the ethereal (non-physical) plane.

Just to take the edge off that let’s just use the common vernacular and call it a “hunch”.

So, to test your personal self-belief all you need to do is tune in to and ‘see’ what your gut feels about your next big decision. Then, if you feel you can trust the direction it’s pointing you in (is it good or bad?) you should at least have some idea of which way to go.

Be warned though. Where it takes you to may not at first seem like a good thing. But remember, successful conclusions often come with long timelines. Of course, that’s why you need a sense of deep self-belief in the first place.

More power to you my friends.

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