Train Your Brain For Success
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Mental Factor Number Three: What You See Is What You Look For
The pictures that will live in your mind most consistently will probably be the pictures that you condition your mind to see. There is a very powerful part of your brain that can work either for you or against you. It's called the Reticular Activating System (RAS), and it acts as a filter on your brain. It'll cause you to notice what you teach it to notice, and filter away almost everything else. You've experienced this part of your brain at work if you've ever made the decision to buy a particular kind of car. Think back to anytime you made the decision to buy a new car. As soon as you decided what you wanted, where did you start seeing that exact vehicle? That's right—everywhere! And that's not because they all of a sudden showed up in your environment; it's because you finally flipped the switch to notice them. And as soon as you flipped the switch you couldn't not notice them. The good news is you can use the reticular activating system for achieving your goals much more quickly and easily than you have. By the way, you'll see several references to the RAS throughout Train Your Brain for Success; it's very useful when used properly.
Critical concept: Your brain is always working. Your brain is either working for you or against you, but it's always working. And it's vital to understand that your brain's default setting for how it works is not very helpful. When it comes to your brain's natural tendencies, there's bad news, good news, and really good news.
The Bad News: Your Comfort Zone Limits You
One of your brain's strongest tendencies is called the homeostatic impulse—the desire to stay where you are. More on this later, but your brain is highly evolved for survival; it is exceptionally good at keeping you alive. You may not like where you are right now, but the fact is that where you are right now has not killed you yet. As a result, your brain has deemed it safe, and will do all kinds of weird things to keep you there. Have you ever known someone who lost the same 20 pounds, four or five times? Have you known someone who paid off all their credit cards, only to rack them back up again? Or someone who had the same relationship with the same kind of person over and over again? All these are examples of this homeostatic impulse, popularly known as the Comfort Zone.
This is bad news because no growth can occur in the Comfort Zone. The only place you can grow is outside your Comfort Zone. I love this visual; see Figure I.1.
Figure I.1 You Can Elevate Your Comfort Zone
Your Comfort Zone must be addressed if you want to see lasting change, because it's pull is incredibly strong.
The Good News
Now that I've convinced you that you could be stuck forever right where you are (which you could), you must understand that this is not your destiny. You absolutely have the capacity to move your Comfort Zone to any place you'd prefer. Here's why:
Whether you realize it or not, your Comfort Zone is something you have chosen.
You've chosen it unconsciously, but you have chosen it. This is encouraging, because you have control over your choices. So you can consciously unchoose your current Comfort Zone and then choose differently. And the best part is that once you've elevated your Comfort Zone, your life stays elevated! You can permanently reset your internal thermostat to a higher level. It will require commitment, education, and a little help from outside yourself, but you absolutely can do it.
The Really Good News: Small Changes Make a Huge Difference
You don't need to be 100 percent better to see a 100 percent improvement. You just need to be a little better. There's a concept in play here called the winning edge. It means that a small change in the right place makes a huge difference in the end result. In golf, a 1-mm difference in the angle of the club head means the difference between “middle of the fairway” and “you can't find your ball.” In a horse race, the winning horse often wins “by a nose,” but that split second is usually a fourfold increase in prize money. In sales, the tiniest perceived difference between competitors can mean the difference between receiving all of the business or none.
So take heart—small improvements in the right area of your life will give you a huge improvement in your end result. Here are some examples I've seen with my clients:
An executive makes a small change in how he schedules his week and sees a $125,000 boost to his company's bottom line.
A banking professional alters one thing about how she starts her day, and triples her income in six months.
A salesperson simply pays attention to his forehead, and his results skyrocket.
A teacher applies the simplest possible concept for Reading Smart, and his student goes from understanding almost none of what he reads to understanding almost all of it.
And I could go on and on. Ultimately, you get to choose how you use your brain. Train Your Brain for Success gives you the specific tools and skills to turn on your brain in a way that propels you forward.
How to Use This Book
Train Your Brain for Success is not created as just a recreational, passive read. It's been set up to be:
1. An ongoing resource for your development.
2. A gateway into an entire system of accelerated learning and record-breaking results in your life.
In the first section, Your Learning Foundations, we'll tune up the most fundamental learning skills you possess—your Instant Recall Memory and your “Smart Reading” capacity. You'll be able to learn in a way that stimulates more of your brain and enables you to absorb any information more quickly and more permanently. Both of these sections are Memory Optimized™ with interactive video exercises that you'll find listed at the end of each chapter under Reinforcement and Bonuses. “Memory Optimized™” means that you'll literally be walked step by step through an easy, fun process for committing the main points to your long-term memory. Just follow the instructions and visit www.planetfreedom.com/trainyourbrain, using the access code found in the About the Author section of this book.
Read these sections first, and more importantly, do the Memory Optimization exercises that support the chapters. Will it take a little more time? Yes, on the front end. But the result will be that you will absorb the rest of the book much more efficiently and you'll remember it better. The best training in the world does you zero good if you don't apply it, and you can't apply it if you can't remember it. So get involved with your own learning.
The rest of Train Your Brain for Success will focus on the four components of record-breaking performance. Anytime an individual or an organization takes their results to a higher level, there are four things you can observe and then model.
1. Having energizing goals.
2. Being fully present; using time as it's meant to be used.
3. Being brilliant with basics.
4. Practicing aggressive mental care.
Chapters 7 through 18 are devoted to elevating your skills with these four components. In these chapters you'll develop specific plans for thinking and acting that are proven to get results quickly and in a way that lasts, in any important area of your life. Once again, these chapters are supported by exercises and tools that can be found under “Reinforcement and Bonuses.” Read each chapter, take some notes, and then lock in your learning before going on to the next chapter. Take an active approach to this book. Read it with a pen in your hand and a place to write your own thoughts.
You unquestionably can be, do, and have anything you want, but you can't do it with the thinking you've currently got.
If you want a higher level of results, you must grow into a higher level of thinking. So many personal development books promise “the key” or “the secret” and then just tell you “you can do it!” That's fine, but we're going a step beyond. We're going to teach you how to get from point A to point B quickly, efficiently, and how to have a ball on the way!
Section 1
Your Learning Foundations
Learning Foundation #1
Your Instant Recall Memory
Chapter 1
Discovering Your Memory Power
Think for a moment about how many different ways you use your memory on a daily basis. If you're having trouble coming up with an answer, try this question on for size:
“If you lost your memory completely, what would you be able to do?”
The correct answer is “nothing.” When we're born, we come into the world with a working autonomic nervous system, so our breathing, heartbeat, and other bodily functions work properly. And we have automatic reflexes, like when the doctor hits your kneecap with that little rubber hammer to see if your muscles contract. That's it. Everything else in your life is learned. Even things as basic as what your own name is and how to eat are learned behaviors. So literally everything in your entire life requires the use of your memory.
Extend that out to your life today. At Freedom Personal Development, we will often ask our workshop audiences the question, “Where in your life do you feel an improved memory would help you be more effective, more productive, or reduce stress?” Just a few of the common answers we hear:
From professionals:
“I wish I were better at remembering people's names!”
“I wish I could deliver presentations without looking at notes!”
“I wish I could learn product knowledge quicker!”
“I wish I could remember dates and times for appointments!”
From students:
“I wish I could remember foreign language vocabulary!”
“I wish I could remember math formulas and equations!”
“I wish I could remember things like the preamble to the Constitution, all the presidents, states, and capitals.”
“I wish I felt less freaked out when taking tests.”
Honestly, I could just go on for an entire chapter about all the ways that we get to use our memories as tools for getting through life, so here's the best news:
No matter where you would like to see improvement in your memory or any area of learning, you absolutely have the ability to make those improvements. A significant body of research now confirms that for all practical purposes, your memory is actually perfect; you literally never “forget” anything. Some of you right now might be saying to yourself, “Okay, Roger, you just lost me. I feel like I forget stuff all the time! Why do you think I bought this book in the first place?” And I understand that perception; I get where it feels that way. Fact is, though, that essentially everything—every book you've read, every conversation you've had, every person you've met—everything—is recorded by your brain. Your challenge is actually not your memory, but your recall.
Example: Think back to the last time you bumped into someone you knew (and you knew that you knew), but you couldn't come up with their name. Common situation, happens to everyone. See that instance in your mind. You probably had a reasonably good conversation with that person, right? Five or 10 minutes of “how's it going, how's work, how's the family,” and so on. But the whole time you were talking to them, what was your brain doing? Racking itself with one question: “What the heck is this guy's name?” And it didn't come to you while he was there. But it did come to you later. See, you didn't forget that guy's name, you just couldn't recall it when you needed it.
Again, I could give you tons more examples, suffice it to say that your memory is in fact excellent, it's actually your recall that may be suspect. The reason this is good news is that improving your recall is very much under your control. If you can't recall a piece of information, it is always because the way that you stored it in the first place was accidental, mindless, haphazard, and unconscious. Here's what I mean.
How You Originally Learned to Learn
If you're like 99 percent of the population, back in school you learned to learn through a process called rote memorization. Rote memorization is simply learning through repetition. You got some information (from a teacher or a textbook) and then went over it and over it and over it, until hopefully it stuck in your brain. Sound familiar?
How's that working for you now? Not too well, I would bet. Just to prove the point, take this short two-question quiz:
Question 1: Did you ever take a biology class? Yes_____ No_____
Question 2: Without looking it up, please name all the phyla of the animal kingdom.
In our live workshops, everyone says “of course” to question #1, and then nobody can even begin to answer #2. Which is fine; you don't actually need to know any of the phyla of the animal kingdom. The point is that if you took biology, I promise you were taught that information. The question is “did you actually learn it?”, and the answer is almost assuredly no. You didn't learn that information, you memorized it for the test. Test came, you barfed the information up onto the test, and were done. Which was fine for back in school, but do you see the problem?
By following the process described above over and over again throughout your formalized education, you formed a habit of how you learn everything. My guess is that habit no longer serves you very well. Rote memorization actually can get you a decent grade on a test that you know is coming, but your life doesn't consist of tests that you know are coming, does it? So you'll need a method of learning that serves you a little better, which is exactly what you'll get from the first six chapters of Train Your Brain for Success, if you'll keep an open mind about your mind….
The Teachability Index
There is a specific way of thinking and acting for any result. Our job is to be open and flexible enough to adopt those ways of thinking and acting.
Bill Harris, founder of Centerpointe Research Institute
How much you get out of this book or any learning experience has a significant amount to do with you as a learner. This material will change your life, if and only if you absorb and apply it. So be aware of what's called your Teachability Index. It's a measurement of how ready you are to learn. Whether you realize it or not, the Teachability Index is in play anytime you are attempting to develop a new skill or a higher level of understanding of anything. There are two components of the Teachability Index, each of which can be easily evaluated on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest).
The first component of your Teachability Index is your desire to learn. It just makes sense that if you're going to maximize any learning experience you must want to learn what's being taught. Some of the best news about you as a learner is that your desire to learn is very high, like 9 or 10 on the scale. Congratulations! The reason I can say this with confidence is that even though you and I may have never met, I know for a fact that you've already made an investment in yourself. You've probably invested some money to buy this book (thanks!). Even if you didn't invest your own money for it, at a bare minimum you've invested some time to get this far. You simply wouldn't have made that investment if you didn't have a pretty darn strong desire to learn. So go ahead and grade your current desire to learn from 1 to 10.
Desire to learn score _____
The second component of the Teachability Index is a bit more tricky. It's called your willingness to change, and it cannot be taken for granted, ever. Anyone who attends one of our programs or picks up a book called Train Your Brain for Success inherently has a strong desire to learn. Nobody inherently has a strong willingness to change. It's because of the comfort zone we discussed in the introduction: We are hardwired to stay wherever we are and do whatever we have been doing, even if that behavior pattern isn't getting us the results our conscious mind wants. I'm not saying that you can't have a high willingness to change, because you can. I'm just saying that if you want to boost your willingness to change, you
will need to do it consciously and purposely. It won't happen by accident. So what would you say is your current willingness to change score?
Willingness to change score _____
Now that you have some numbers, the correct way to gauge your Teachability Index is to multiply the two scores. The highest possible score is 100 (10 times 10). So why not do that now, just to see what you come out with.
Desire to learn score × willingness to change score = Total Teachability score
Notice that even if your desire to learn is a 10, if your willingness to change is a zero, your Total Teachability score is zero. For you to really learn, both scores need to be high. Don't just pay lip service to learning, do it! You picked up this book because you want your life to be better: true or false? Of course it's true, so if you really want that, you must do something different. The Chinese actually have defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
Lots of our clients have told us this is a useful exercise, anytime the objective is to learn something new. There's no need to be judgmental or upset, it's just helpful to notice. If someone has a higher Teachability Score than you, it does not make them better than you, but it does mean they will make progress faster than you.
All this is to say that for these chapters on memory training, I have one tip that will help you get maximum value from them.
Tip #1—Don't judge the process; do evaluate the result.
The method you'll learn here definitely produces results, but it is different than what you are accustomed to. Because it's different, your brain will likely give you a thought like “Well, this is just weird.” Everyone who learns memory training goes through at least one phase where they just think the whole thing is just a goofy bag of tricks. It's not. So when you experience that thought, I recommend you check your Teachability Index, get over it, and keep moving forward. So don't waste time or energy trying to pick apart or analyze the process; there's plenty of time for that later if it's of interest to you. You'll learn much more quickly if you don't judge the process.