Archive for the ‘How Your Mind Works’ category

The Focus Factor

December 15th, 2009

  • The Focus Factor – What do you want in relation to your life?

If you are like most people you will have said ‘I want to stop feeling depressed,’ I want people to leave me alone’ or ‘I want my wife/husband to stop nagging me.’

One of the most basic psychological rules in life is ’you always get more of what you focus on.’  Yet in each one of the examples above, your mind has to focus on what you don’t want in order to make sense of what you said – the depression you want to get rid of, the people you want to leave you alone, or the nagging you want to be rid of.   This not only reinforces the image you have of yourself being depressed, harassed or nagged it tends to leave you feeling helpless, hopeless and unmotivated.

When you redirect your focus exclusively on to what you want – to feel vibrant and alive, to enjoy a peaceful life with cooperative people or to have a happy and fulfilled marriage – you are sending a message to your subconscious mind to find and explore every possible opportunity to move towards your goal.  By clarifying and vividly imagining exactly what it is you want for yourself, you are beginning the process of training your mind and body to give it to you.

We live in an Electro-magnetic Universe

December 15th, 2009

There is a mighty force in the world which scientists call electro-magnetism.  Everything in the Universe is electro-magnetic in nature.  The laws of attraction and repulsion operate electro-magnetically; when you assume a positive or negative attitude of mind, you get a positive or negative result.  There is no such thing as an accident in life – everything happens in direct accordance with the laws of cause and effect.

There is nothing new to this apart from it may be new to you.  The same message has been written and delivered many thousands of times in as many ways.  It runs all through the Bible.  It is in the teachings of every single religion.  It exists in the secret orders and every outstanding character of history has been using it whether they knew it or not.

Whatever you picture in your mind and expect clearly, confidently and persistently enough will eventually come to pass in your life. Wake up in the morning expecting good things to happen and they more than likely will.  Wake up in the morning expecting this day to be just another depressing day just like yesterday and that is what will inevitably happen.

Think of yourself as a giant magnet, attracting according to your thoughts and the pictures those thoughts conjure up in your mind.  If you want changes to happen within your life then you must picture what you want.

If you think closely about it you will agree that nothing happens in your life unless you think about it and plan it in some way.  Every morning you wake up thinking about going to work.  If you have been working in the same place for a while the ritual is habitual and so you don’t have to give it much thought.  It’s the same if you decide to make a cup of tea; the whole process is so habitual that, just the thought that you are thirsty sets of the whole action of making a cup of tea.

What about when we have to do something different though?  Even down to making an evening meal.  It has to be thought about, the ingredients have to be there and we will imagine the finished article being served up.  All of this is so natural and habitual that we are unaware of it.  This however is how the Universe works.  We imagine and plan and then the Universe unfolds it.

Don’t forget, any number of scenarios can unfold in any given day according to our thought.  If we decide to take a day off sick then, we imagine ourselves staying in bed, phoning work and telling them and then maybe we imagine we’ll just sit and watch TV all day.  If that is what we decide will happen that is what will happen.

Ever got home to no tea on the table and the person responsible has said, “Oh sorry, it completely slipped my mind, I got busy on something else.”  Maybe not, but I am sure you are familiar with the phrase.  This takes us back to the fact that nothing; yes nothing happens without we give it thought.  But the best thing is that we are free to think anything we want.  We are the only person who is in charge of our minds.

When we think our thoughts and picture in our minds what we want we are sending out signals to the Universe which then come back.  People and circumstances change, according to the new electro-magnetic signals.  The Universe is like a mirror it reflects back to us what we send out.  You wouldn’t expect to see anyone else in the mirror if you were standing in front of it and neither should you expect a different result than what you are habitually affirming.

Power without Direction

November 30th, 2009

Your subconscious mind is simply power without direction.  All of your direction comes from the conscious mind.  Without the conscious mind to give the direction and make choices you would simply be like every other animal with a subconscious mind.  Animals do not have a conscious mind, or if they do it is very undeveloped and they do not have the ability to make conscious decisions.  Animals simply work from instinct.  As a human you also have this instinctual side to you too but with a conscious mind you can override your instincts and you often do.

The easiest way to explain this concept is to think about an ocean liner.  The captain gives directions.  He charts the course the ship will take; he is like your conscious mind.  However, even though his word is Law on board ship, he has no power to make the ship move whatsoever.  No matter how many charts he plots or journey’s he decides to go on he won’t get anywhere without the engine room.

All the power in the ship is in the engine room but without the captain the engine room is useless.  I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed but there are no windows in the engine room so although the ship could move somewhere without the captain they probably won’t get very far and may probably end up crashing into something or going around in circles.

The captain harnesses the power in the engine room by sending down detailed instructions from his vantage point at the top of the ship and together they can travel anywhere they please.

Your subconscious mind is like the engine room.  It has all the power and acts like a radio receiving station, sending out and receiving messages all day long.  Whatever you are focusing on it is busily bringing into your life this very moment.  It is waiting for instructions from you, the Captain, and then either going ‘Full Speed Ahead,’ or crashing into the harbour wall.

When the Captain of the ship speaks to the engine room he gives precise instructions.  Imagine what would happen if he was in Southampton Harbour and he charted a course for New York and then phoned the engine room and said, “We’re not going to India so don’t go full speed ahead.”  There would be more than a bit of confusion in the engine room don’t you think.

Your subconscious mind has no window on the world and has enormous power but it needs to be told where to go.  If you don’t chart a course and tell your deeper mind to head for it you’ll just end up, like an animal, doing what you’ve always done.

Chart your course and set off on a wonderful new journey right now.

Happy Sailing Christine Wesson

How Your Mind Works – The Scientific Facts

October 26th, 2009

Note:  The words subconscious mind and deeper mind have the same meaning and will be used within this report interchangeably.

There are Two Parts to Mind

I’m sure you are already aware that you have two parts to your mind, the conscious and the subconscious.  These minds aren’t really separate, but rather two parts of the same mind, in a similar way to the left and right brain.  These two parts of the mind each have very different functions.

Your Conscious Mind:

The conscious part of your mind has a window on the world and it uses your five senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing to make sense of everything you come into contact with.  Its job is to make choices.  Using this part of your mind and your five senses you are constantly evaluating everything you experience and categorising it according to your likes and dislikes.

If the thing you are experiencing fits in with your belief system, for instance, it is internalised, if not it will be rejected as unimportant, irrelevant or downright wrong.  This is a built in faculty left over from primitive times when early humans had to make instant judgements to decide whether a situation was safe or life threatening.  Its job is to keep you safe.

Hypnotherapists often call this part of mind, ‘the critical factor,’ and that is it’s job.  If you come across something that fits into your belief system you allow it ‘in’ to your subconscious mind and is added to the mounting evidence you have already collected about that particular belief which proves to you that your belief is true.

This is the part of mind which makes you human, the part that differentiates you from lower animals. Science tells us that this part of your mind consists of about 2% of the whole.

Your Subconscious Mind: It’s in Charge of Your Body

Your deeper mind is not only equal to; it far surpasses the most advanced computer ever invented.  It is capable of so much more than man has realised and getting to know how it works can be the key to freedom.

Your deeper mind is in charge of your body, it breaths for you, renews your skin cells, grows your hair and attends to a million other bodily functions.  It digests your food and manufactures the nutrients and vitamins you need to stay healthy.

All this and much, much more is the job of your deeper mind.  It does all this outside of conscious awareness.  After all you never need to think about digesting your food or growing your hair consciously, do you?

Your whole body and all of its millions of functions are controlled by this part of mind and as long as you don’t interfere with the process it is capable of keeping you healthy for a great many years.

Your Subconscious Mind: It’s Full of Programs

When you were born you already had the program within you to run your body.    You were also born with a few other programs such as the suck reflex, the crying program, so you could attract attention, and the grab reflex.  Then as you grew you added more and more programs.

There are mainly two ways of learning new skills.  The first way is passive and in common with all animals you simply copied those around you, mainly your parents and primary care-givers.  The second way sets you above the animals and is learning through concentrated attention which is how you learned to read write, tie your shoelaces and drive a car.

As you grew you added the walking program and the talking program.  You learned to swim and to ride a bike among many other things.  If you were learning a skill that required concentration you first had to learn it consciously and after several repetitions or when you felt competent at performing the new task it dropped down into your deeper mind and became a program.

Any numbers of the millions of programs within your deeper mind are accessed by your conscious mind by the act of choosing.  You decide you want a cup of tea and your deeper mind accesses all the programs it needs to make that happen. It will access your walking program, maybe your’ talking program, your hand eye co-ordination program and your directional program among many others needed for the task in hand.

It does all this outside of your conscious awareness and all because you made a choice.  You never, ever, need to think about how to walk, to talk or to make a cup of tea or drive a car because your deeper mind knows how.  It has the program and you have the choice to access it at any time.

One way to understand these two parts of mind is to liken them to a computer, which incidentally was modelled on the human mind.  Your conscious mind is equal to ‘you’ the operator of the computer and your deeper mind is like the computer which holds all the programs.  Just as a computer depends on an operator to access its individual programs so your deeper mind depends on instructions from your conscious mind.

Your Subconscious Mind: It Holds All of Your Memories

Your subconscious mind is also where all your memories are held and not just the ones you can actually recall either.  In fact everything and I mean everything, you have ever seen, heard, smelt, tasted, felt or experienced is held in your deeper mind.

Every conversation you have ever heard or had, every book you’ve ever read, every television program you’ve ever watched, everything.  As long as you were paying attention to it and not focussing on something else at the time it is in there.

I once saw a fascinating experiment from many years ago where doctors were inserting probes into a patients brain while he was awake and the patient was recalling memories of being age two and sitting in his pram listening to his mother having a conversation with her next door neighbour.

The man was able to remember, word for word, a conversation he overheard between his mother and her neighbour.  He was too young to talk at the time, but he remembered everything in vivid detail, including the colour and feel of the pram blankets, the smell of baby milk and the breeze blowing in his hair.

We may not be able to recall most of the day to day stuff that happened to us in the past but it is still in there somewhere.  One good way of remembering seeming forgotten names or items is by association.  The subconscious does not just allow our experiences to get saved randomly within our memory banks.  Everything is filed for easier recall.

Imagine if you were using your computer daily and you did a lot of work on it that needed saving.  If you just simply saved everything to the same place, over time you would find it increasingly hard to find everything.  If everything was simply ‘dumped’ it would be much more difficult, or sometimes impossible to remember things.

Imagine, just saving every bit of work you do on your computer in a willy, nilly fashion, just anywhere?  Things would become really hard, if not impossible, to find.  Much time would be wasted looking for things without a system.

The sensible thing to do would be to create folders.  You could create a folder for personal stuff, a folder for work related projects and so on and this would make it easier to locate the documents in the future.  When you were looking for something you would first think what it was associated with and then look in the relevant file to find it.

That is how your subconscious mind works too; remember computers were modelled on the mind.  You find lost items using the same process with your mind.  First you think back to when you last recall having the item and this is like remembering which folder they might be in.  Then you mentally retrace your steps, looking in the folder, until you find the item.

If that doesn’t work the next job is to start searching other ‘folders’ memories until something clicks.  You see the stuff you thought you forgot was always there but you simply had no reason to look into it so it just sat there.  We are generally too busy in the present to dig about thinking of everything that went on yesterday.

That is why elderly people often notice that their memories of ‘old times’ get sharper as they age.  This happens just because they have less and less to occupy themselves with in the present which leaves them time to look into their past and is a perfectly normal procedure.

Your Subconscious Mind: It’s the Seat of Your Emotions

So far we have built a picture of your deeper mind, full of programmes and memories and now it’s time to add a third component.

This deeper part of your mind is also the seat of your emotions, every emotion you have ever felt is held in your subconscious mind and all of these emotions are attached to memories.  When something happens that affects you either negatively or positively and you feel an emotion or a range of emotions, the memory, with it’s accompanying emotion, gets trapped in the physiology.

Children are very emotional creatures who can go from laughing hysterically to crying in moments and as children we would have had lots of incidents like this.  Even if you were too young to remember the initial event it’s in there attached to the emotion.  This is often why people, including you, often seem to overreact to a situation.

Let’s just suppose that when you were two years old your Mum disappeared for a while and when she returned she had another baby with her.  Now she hasn’t got as much time for you as she had, you don’t get to sit on her lap any more because she’s always holding the usurper.  You get angry, you get sad, you get jealous, and you want to get rid of this baby.  You maybe even want to kill it.

Your Subconscious Mind: It Holds all Your Emotions

You have no conscious memory of this time because you were too young, but the memory is still there.  Now when you are an adult and maybe have a girlfriend or boyfriend who seems to be paying a lot of attention to someone else, the old program is accessed and you act completely irrationally, just like a little kid you start to scream and shout, perhaps you even attack the other person and then you wonder why you acted in this way.

Although this is an extreme case and I’m sure you have never attacked anyone in your life the same is true for fears of all kinds.  Just imagine if you were a kid at school?  You haven’t been there long and all the other kids seem to be getting along with reading really well but you can’t make sense of most of it.

Teacher is going round the class and asking individual children to read a word each and you feel scared because you don’t think you are going to be able to do it. The more scared you get the less you can make sense of the words on the page and you keep telling yourself, “I can’t do it.”

At this point you are burning this experience into your physiology and without realising it every time you use those words in the future they have the potential of getting you straight back into the original panic you felt on that day as a five year old.

In contrast there were things you were good at, things people praised you for.  Perhaps you were good at football, singing or dressing up and you felt quite confident when doing those things.  When you were doing those things you were good at you used a completely different vocabulary within your head.

You probably said things like, “I can do this, I’m good at this,” or “I like doing this.”  You then had warm feelings, you felt confident.  This too is burned into you physiology as a program and again will be accessed by using those same words.

Your Subconscious Mind: The Effect of Your Words

Now you can hopefully see what an effect the words you use in any given situation have on you.  The words you use make you feel either good or bad, relaxed and at ease or stressed and liable to make mistakes.  I read a passage in a book recently that said, “Those who don’t know the effect of their words are behind the times.” The book I was reading was written in the 1950’s.

The trouble is that whenever some people read about or hear about, “Positive Thinking” it puts them off but I’m going to show you how the “Positive Thinking” brigade have got the main principles correct and I’m going to do it in a way that will make complete sense to you.  You will certainly ‘get it’ and then you can use what you learn to access a successful program with ease.

For now however let’s go back to looking at the subconscious mind.  So far you’ve learned that your subconscious mind is the part of you where all your programs are kept, it’s where all your memories are stored and it’s where all your emotions are stored too.

You actually store nothing in your conscious mind; everything is kept in your deeper mind.  It is your deeper mind that has the ability and power to make your legs move and take you everywhere and it does this by listening to your instructions.  It listens to everything you say and think and then interprets it into action.

Your Subconscious Mind: It Follows Your Instructions

Your subconscious mind doesn’t sleep; it is listening to you 24/7.  Your conscious mind sleeps, closes down and rests, but your subconscious is always awake, alert.  If it closed down at night you would stop breathing and your food would go undigested etc.  In actual fact the bodily functions and the regeneration of your body not only carries on during sleep but actually steps up when you are resting and sleeping.

Your deeper mind also hears and responds to every single thing you say and every thought you have.  Whatever you think and talk about, the subconscious part of your mind assumes you want and its job is to find a way to attract that into your life.  Your deeper mind is always listening and it takes everything literally.

This part of mind is naive and gullible.  It does not question anything.  Imagine once again that it is like a computer and your conscious mind is ‘YOU’ the operator.  Your computer questions nothing; it simply obeys your commands.  You can add any program at all on to your computer and it will accept without question.

This is the reason everyone had different beliefs and ideas from others.  We are all unique because our deeper minds accepted the beliefs of our parents, which were different from family to family but nevertheless taken as true by the children living within those particular homes.

So, although your computer like mind is very clever it has no mind of its own, no power of choice.  If you accept an idea and believe it, it is true for you. I t becomes a belief which is in effect a program and it sits within waiting to be summoned.

Your deeper mind then, listens to everything you say and it follows your instructions to the letter, simple!  Yet what you need to know next is very important, because even though ‘It’ listens intently ‘It’ doesn’t actually understand language.  I’ll repeat that because it is a very important concept, ‘It’ doesn’t actually understand language.

The reason for this is because your subconscious mind was around long before language was developed.  It is a very primitive part of you.  It was in Neathandal man, it was in cave men and I don’t suppose they had language.

Not only that but it is also in every animal; otherwise they wouldn’t breathe or digest their food.  It was in dinosaurs, it’s in fish and none of these creatures have language.

Your Subconscious Mind: Takes It’s Instructions From The Pictures ‘It’ Receives

How does it work then?  This bit is vitally important!  ‘It’ receives the pictures that the languages you use create in your mind. I’ll repeat that, ‘It’ receives the pictures that the languages you use create in your mind.

Think about it for a moment, what is language?  Whenever you speak, think or read a book the language you use creates pictures within your mind.  Whenever you listen to someone else speaking, the language they are using is creating pictures in your mind.  That is how you understand language.

When you were a child you learned to associate words with images, you learned that the word cat meant one of those furry animals and that tree meant a tree of some kind.  From then on whenever someone mentioned cat or tree you had a picture of both in your mind.

First of all you learned tree, then as you progressed you learned to differentiate, oak, pine, ash, plane and so on.  If I told you that I was out walking and it started to rain so I sheltered under a tree you would see your version of events in your mind.

I could make it more specific and I could say that I was out walking in the woods and it started to rain cats and dogs so I sheltered under a huge oak tree.  Still your picture would not be 100% like my version because I was there experiencing it and you are only seeing it in your mind using your own memory bank as a reference.

If someone told you they were going to the Seychelles on holiday you would, I’m sure, get a picture of golden beaches, beautiful blue sky and palm trees.  Even if you hadn’t been to that part of the world you would still have some pictures in mind when it was mentioned.

As humans, even if we have no concept of what the other person is describing we make it up.  Even abstract words will conjure up pictures in your mind.  Take any of the following words and see what pictures they conjure up within your mind.  Algebra, Scientific or Electricity all conjure up pictures for me but I’m sure that they will conjure up completely different pictures for you.

If the words you use didn’t evoke pictures within your mind you might as well be talking Chinese.  That is the reason you don’t understand certain foreign languages because the words don’t mean anything to you.  You haven’t yet learned to associate them with a picture so it’s all just gobbledegook.

It is these pictures which are as a result of your thinking or speech that your deeper mind gets to work on.  Whether you are aware of it or not, when you decide to go to the supermarket and do the shopping, a picture of you doing just that flashes across your mind and this is what your deeper mind works from.

When you sit watching TV in the evening and you decide you’d like a cup of tea, whether you know it or not, you immediately see a picture of having the cup of tea and then your subconscious accesses all the programmes it needs to make that happen.

When, you decide to meet your friend for coffee in town, you see the town, the coffee shop and your friend and your deeper mind accesses the programs needed to get you there.  Even if the place you are visiting is somewhere you haven’t been before you simply make it up.  If it’s a city you see your version of city, attending a lecture in a foreign city will conjure up images of lectures you’ve been to before or lectures you’ve seen on TV.

The subconscious mind then does not understand any individual language; instead, it understands a Universal language.  It works metaphorically, getting its instruction in the form of pictures, a bit like the silent movies of old.  The problem is because no-one ever taught you that, you have probably, inadvertently, been giving it the wrong pictures to work from.

Your Subconscious Mind: Your Faithful Servant

Apart from running your body, which it does with brilliance, and making a grand job of storing all your memories and emotions another function of your subconscious mind is to attract whatever you ask for.  Your subconscious mind is your faithful servant.

Yes it’s true, whatever is in your life right now is something you have asked for either deliberately or by default.  “Not true,” I hear you say, “I would never have asked for this or that.”  However, I am 100% sure that you did invite it in.

How do I know that?  I know it because nothing arrives in our life unless we somehow invite it.  Let’s take a look and see how you might have invited the things you are less than happy with!  One way you may have invited things into your life that you really didn’t want is through speaking about what you don’t want.

Your Subconscious Mind:  Doesn’t Understand Negatives.

Remember, we said your deeper mind files everything away in your memory banks.  To ensure everything gets filed away correctly it has to first make sense of each experience.  Let’s look then at how it’s naivety could be hampering us and what we can do to change.

Try this experiment, “Don’t think of pink elephants.”  Did you notice that you had to think of pink elephants to try not to think of them?  A similar thing happens when we speak in negatives.  Imagine saying, “I don’t want to be poor.”  This statement conjures up a picture of you being poor.

Now try some other statements, like, “I’m fed up of being overweight/fat,”  “I don’t want to get the blame for it,” or “I hope my car doesn’t break down.”  In all of those statements your mind had to picture what you didn’t want so that you could say, “This is not what I want.”

Remember, the subconscious mind works from the pictures we give it.  Remember it’s naïve and primitive, it doesn’t understand the complexities of the English language, or any languages come to that.  That is the job of your conscious mind.  All of that stuff is processed in the analytical left side of the brain.

Of course, we are 21st century humans and our conscious mind lives in the modern age.  Consciously we are up with the times.  We are clever creatures and we understand the nuances of the English language.  We know that when we say, “I don’t want to fail this test,” what we really mean is that we want to pass.  However, even though we know what we mean, and our conscious mind is in the 21st century.  The other half of the equation, deeper mind, is positively Neathandal.

The subconscious mind is simple, childlike.  It is constantly at work, responding to your thoughts and it has no idea whether something is good or bad or whether you actually want something or not.  It can only act from those pictures.  When you are looking at the things in your life you don’t want, when you speak about hard times, debt, illness or loneliness, when you tell yourself and others that you are feeling down, depressed, stressed, overworked or unappreciated guess what?

To get what you want, you need to speak about it, picture it, and daydream about it.  The subconscious mind then has a way to bring it to us.  If your life isn’t as you’d like it you have been inadvertently asking for the wrong things and your deeper mind, your faithful servant, has been working ceaselessly for you without knowing that the things it is attracting are not the things you really want.

The World is Suffering From an Epidemic of Negativity

The world is suffering from an epidemic of negativity and it is all because the majority of the world is unaware of these secrets of mind.  It is the norm, both in private life and public life to talk about what we don’t want.

We say, “I hope I don’t do/say anything stupid,” ” I don’t want to be broke,”  “I don’t want to lose my job,” “I don’t want to be bullied at school or, “I don’t want to fail my driving test.”  We fight against the things we don’t want or like without realising that our focus on them makes them grow.

The war on drugs creates more drugs, fighting crime means crime increases. The war on terrorism creates more acts of violence.  Mother Teresa knew this concept and when she was asked to attend an anti war rally she declined but said she would be happy to join a pro-peace rally if she was asked.

For many years the British and Irish people were against the troubles in Northern Ireland to no avail but when the then Prime Minister Tony Blair went over there to sue for peace things started to change.  Millions railed against communism in Poland without success until Lech Walensa started thinking and talking about how he could raise the standard of living for all his fellow men and women.

Mahatma Ghandi, didn’t fight the system when he suffered racial discrimination in his own country, instead he focussed on how he could free his people.  Simply be changing the focus of their thought and speech men and women throughout the ages have been able to change the world for the better.  Now you can use this power which is inherent in you to make positive changes in your life.

Beware of Using the Word ‘Trying’

I had a client recently who told me she was ‘trying’ to learn to ride a bicycle.  I cautioned her to drop the word trying from her dictionary.  Trying to do something means you might fail.  I asked her if she used the word ‘trying’ when she learned to drive and she agreed she hadn’t.  She had simply said, “I’m learning to drive.”

Yours and everyone else’s deeper mind knows exactly what you mean by trying.  After all you wouldn’t ‘try’ to get up on a morning or ‘try’ to drive to work would you?  Everything you actually do, you do because you say you will do it.  Those things you try to do more often than not don’t get done until you make a decision to actually do them.

Conclusion:

You are now in possession of knowledge which most of the world is ignorant of.  You know how your mind works.  You know that it receives the pictures your words and thoughts form within your mind and you can use this knowledge to improve your life immeasurably.

Of course your thoughts are habitual, they come into your mind unannounced the majority of the time and one thing is certain you never stop thinking.  There isn’t one single waking moment when your mind is still.  Those thoughts race through your mind at hundreds of miles per hour, or so it seems.  So the question is, how do I stop myself from thinking negative thoughts?

The answer is, you can’t!  Trying not to think negative thoughts means you are focused on doing just that, thinking negatively.  Remember we said earlier that whatever we fight against grows and gets bigger.  The more you try to shake something off or tell it to go away the more it will stick to you because fighting it means you are acknowledging it and thinking about it.

The first thing you can do is to become aware of when you speaking or thinking negatively.  Awareness is the first step.  After all before you had this knowledge you had no idea that the way you spoke or thought caused all the problems you were facing.  Now you hear yourself using negatives and you will become aware of others using this form of language too.  You will now hear it all the time, everywhere.

You may hear parents telling their children not to do something like, “Don’t fall off,” or “Stop jumping on the bed.”  The parents have no idea that their children can only turn the words into pictures within their minds and so the actual instruction is, “Fall off,” and “Jump on the bed.”

Next time you are in a supermarket and you see those terrible out of control children, listen to the adults with them and hear them yell, “Stop shouting, stop climbing on the shelves, stop swinging on the trolley and don’t touch the sweets etc.”  In actual fact the children are not out of control at all, they are doing exactly what the adults are telling them to do.  They are actually being over controlled but in a negative way.

Poor children, imagine what it must be like to be in that situation.  Their parents have got into the habit of constantly telling them what not to do instead of telling them what to do, which they would just as easily do if they were given the correct instructions.

Awareness then is the first step and when you become aware of speaking in the negative simply acknowledge to yourself that what you have said is unhelpful and re-phrase the statement to give your deeper mind the correct picture.

Please do not beat yourself up, or ask yourself why you keep doing this as that simply takes your focus back onto what you don’t want.  Here’s an example from my own life to illustrate how to do this.

Changing the Pictures

This was one of the first things I successfully changed when I first learned the power of my words and how my mind worked.  Although I classed myself as having a good memory for certain things I was terrible at remembering appointments.  Then I realised that I was in the habit of saying, “I mustn’t forget this appointment,” or “I hope I don’t forget this appointment.”  I was giving myself a picture of forgetting and so I did, all the time.

Now when I get an appointment I say, “I’ll remember this appointment,” and I do remember my appointments now.

I also used to say, “I mustn’t forget to get some shampoo,” when I was running out and of course I would go shopping and forget to get the very thing I went for.  As soon as I changed it to, “I’ll remember to get shampoo when I go to town/the supermarket,” I started to remember the things I wanted.

However, even though I have been using this new terminology for over eight years now I still often hear myself say, “Mustn’t forget,” both to myself and to others.  Old habits ‘die hard.’  The difference is that these days I am aware when I have used the wrong terminology, I hear myself say it and I immediately change it to, “I’ll remember.”

When someone is telling me not to forget to do something I repeat back to them, “Yes, Ok I’ll remember that.”  It really doesn’t matter if you’ve said the incorrect thing at all as long as you follow it by a statement which paints a picture of what you actually prefer.

You deeper mind will immediately follow the next instruction even if it’s different from the first.  It has no urge to revert to the former or first set of instructions just as your computer has no urge to bring up the last program you were using once you’ve switched to a new one.

To illustrate this imagine you have been planning a meal out all week at your local Indian restaurant so you’ve been giving yourself lots of pictures of going there and eating your favourite food all week.  It’s the evening of the meal and you’ve set off with your spouse or friends to drive their.

Your deeper mind knows where you’re going and so following your instructions it’s accessed all the programs it needs to get you to your destination.  Halfway there someone in the car suddenly remembers a conversation they had at work with a collegue who told them about a brand new Indian restaurant that is supposed to be just as good as the first but who is offering a free bottle of wine with each meal for two.

You make a decision to go to restaurant number two first to see if they can fit you in.  Does your deeper mind quibble?  Does it insist on going where you originally planned because you’ve been telling it that all week?  In actual fact it meekly and simply follows the new set of instructions as if the first had not existed.

You have no need to worry about how long you have been saying one thing as it’s as easy to change direction as in the previous example.  Your deeper mind is amenable and pliable and will change direction without hesitation at any time.  So, when you hear yourself talking negatively stop and change things around.

Ask yourself, “Do I really want to attract this into my life.”  If the answer is, “No I don’t.”  Then ask yourself, “So what would I like instead,” and formulate a statement which forms a picture of what you want in your mind.

How can I stop thinking negative thoughts?

Is a question that I am often asked?  If you have ever asked this question then you will feel such enormous relief in knowing the answer, because it is so simple.  How do you stop negative thoughts? You plant good thoughts!  When you try to stop negative thoughts, you are focusing on what you don’t want – negative thoughts – and you will attract an abundance of them. Remember, ‘don’t think about pink elephants.’

When you think, “Why can’t I stop thinking negative thoughts,” you have to picture yourself having negative thoughts to make sense of that statement.  The same applies with any of the following statements.  “I don’t want to think like this.”  “Why can’t I stop thinking that everything is going to go wrong?”  Why am I thinking like this?”  All of these statements will bring on more negative thinking.

Negative thoughts can never disappear if you are focused on them. The “stop” part is irrelevant – the negative thoughts are your focus. It doesn’t matter if you are trying to stop negative thoughts or control them or push them away, the result is the same. Your focus is on negative thoughts, and this is the picture your subconscious mind is being given.

Even though we like to make things hard, the truth is always simple and it is always easy. To stop negative thoughts, just plant good thoughts!  Whenever you become aware that the thought you are having is a negative one simply say delete and then think of a statement that describes what you do want.  Deliberately replace the negative thoughts with good thoughts!

Another way to plant good thoughts is by making it a daily practice to appreciate all the things in your day. Appreciate your health, your car, your home, your family, your job, your friends, your surroundings, your meals, your pets, and the magnificent beauty of the day.  Compliment, praise, and give thanks to all things.

Every time you say “Thank you” it is a good thought! As you plant more and more good thoughts, the negative thoughts will be wiped out. Why? Because your focus is on good thoughts, and what you focus on you attract.

Don’t give any attention to negative thoughts. Don’t worry about them. If any come, make light of them, shrug them off, and let them be your reminder to deliberately think more good thoughts right now.  The more good thoughts you can plant in a day, the faster your life will be utterly transformed into all good.

If you spend only one day speaking of good things and saying “Thank you” at every single opportunity, you will not believe your tomorrow. Deliberately thinking good thoughts is exactly like planting seeds. As you think good thoughts you are planting good seeds inside you, and the Universe will transform those seeds into a garden of paradise. How will the garden of paradise appear? As your life!

How can I change the circumstances of my life?

If there is anything in your life that isn’t working then listen to the way you speak.  What words are you using, what are you saying and thinking?  When you examine your words and thoughts you will see why you have the problem.  It is a basic psychological fact that whatever we focus on we get more of.  Using the methods outlined above you can make changes to many of your circumstances.

It will be easy to make changes in some areas while in other areas more persistence will be required.  One thing is for certain though; now that you have this knowledge your life will never be the same.  You have tools and strategies for change that have been used by mankind since the beginning of time.

Everyone who has ever been successful has been using these methods whether they were aware of it or not and now you too have been given the success secrets of the ages.

To Your Success

Tel: 01243 841498 /  07747 865982

Email: christine@makingpositivechanges.co.uk

Website: http://www.makingpositivechanges.co.uk

Ask The Right Questions

October 25th, 2009

Asking Different Questions

The human brain is wired up in such a way that whenever you ask yourself a question you have to give yourself an answer.  The very act of asking a question sets up a tension within the mind that must be resolved.

It is arguable that the majority of human thinking, of itself, is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.  Most of what you do day in day out is ask yourself questions.

This is how it works – your subconscious mind does everything you ask it to, I like to think of it as my faithful servant and like all faithful servants if you ask for something they bring it to you.  When you ask yourself a question your faithful servant has to give you an answer, so let’s say you ask the question, “Why am I always feeling down?” Your deeper mind has to find the answer for you – it will do this by attracting to itself the reasons why?

It is doing what you asked it to.  However if you ask the question, “How can I feel better and brighter today?” it will attract the right kinds of circumstances and events to help you to lift your spirits.

Because your brain is so sophisticated and complex whenever you ask a question your subconscious mind always has to give you an answer.  For the purpose of this exercise just imagine that you have this fantastic computer within and you want to know something so you ask a question.  Your internal computer has a search engine just like ‘Google’ and so it goes on the search.

OK, let’s just think of some of the questions we may be asking ourselves that may be unhelpful for us.  Let’s just start with a simple one that is common to lots of people at some time in their lives.  “Why do I always feel so tired on a morning?”

Your computer’s search engine gets onto that straight away and gives you all the answers it can find from your subconscious filing system and these will include things like, “I’m not sleeping very well,” or “There must be something wrong with me,” at this point you may recall a television program you watched or an article you read about someone who was always tired then found out he had some terminal disease.

You’ve got the picture now haven’t you?  These thoughts will all be accompanied by the relevant feelings which will push you into a circle of more negative thoughts followed by more negative feelings which will often result in negative actions throwing you into a circle of self-destruction.  Oh dear, your poor computer was only doing what you asked it to.

Let’s try a different question though, one that is guaranteed to get better results.  “How can I feel more alive and ready for the day in a morning,” again the search engine gets on with its search and gives you whatever it is you’ve asked for.  You will recall times past when you have felt alive in a morning; you may decide that you could go to bed earlier so that you get more sleep.

You may remember that someone told you about a remedy for soothing sleep.  Whatever it is the energy is now better and you are getting something positive instead of negative.

As an exercise I would like you to say the first phrase, “Why do I always feel so tired on a morning,” followed by the second one, “How can I feel more alive and ready for the day in a morning,!” and feel the different energy in them. Think of some questions you have been asking and change them around.

Often the answer doesn’t come from our own minds but instead it comes from a book, a paper, a television program or someone we meet.

Here is a story I tell my clients to illustrate how this works:

Imagine that you are walking down the street today and you see that workmen have dug a large hole in the road.  They have surrounded the hole with safety barriers to keep people out but somehow you fall down the hole anyway.

You are sitting at the bottom of the hole and you ask, “Why did I fall down this hole?”   The answers you may get from your subconscious mind, your memory store, would go something like this, “Because everything is going wrong in my life, because I’m stupid, because I’m unlucky, because if anything bad is going to happen to anyone it’ll happen to me.”

The question is not designed to get you out of the hole in fact it will definitely keep you in there feeling sorry for yourself.  You won’t start to get out of the hole until you start to ask different questions, such as, “How can I get out of this hole,” or “What can I do to get out of this hole.”   Your mind will then start looking for ways to get you out of the hole.

As soon as you start to ask questions designed to look for the solution to your problem your deeper mind will then start looking for the solution.   “Why have I fallen down this hole,” sends you into your emotions and, “How can I get out of this hole,” leads you into inspiration.

You have within your mind a small marble sized piece of grey matter called the Reticular Activating System, RAS for short and its job is to filter through all the information you are surrounded by and bring to your notice those things that are meaningful to you.

The answer to any problem, it is believed, is already there around you but all the while you are looking at the problem and asking questions which only make the problem worse you are oblivious to the answer.  Start to ask the questions designed to find the answer and your deeper mind will find the answer for you.

Whenever you have a problem have a look at what sort of questions you have been asking about the situation and then change the questions so that the answer appears to you.  If for instance you have been saying, “I don’t know what to do about………..,” or “There’s nothing I can do about ………,” or “Why is this happening to me,”  your deeper mind will make that be your reality.

If instead you started to say, “What would be the best thing to do about …………….,” or, “There is a solution to this problem and even though I can’t see it now I’m willing to have it present itself to me,” or “How can I ……….?”

Have a look at each problem area in your life and make up some questions you can start to ask yourself on a daily basis so that you can the best out of your internal computer.  To help illustrate the power of asking the right questions I am adding the story of a man who’s used the right questions that saved his life.

The man’s name was Stanislavski Lech and he was of Jewish origin.  During the Second World War, the Nazis stormed his home and took him and his family to a concentration camp.  Once there, his wife and children were shot before his eyes, and he was put to work in the death camp in Krakow.

One day, he looked at the nightmare around him and confronted an inescapable truth: if he stayed there he would surely die.  He made a decision that he must escape and that the escape must happen soon, very soon if he were to live.  He had no idea how to do it and for weeks he asked the other prisoners, “How can we escape from this place.”  The answers were always the same.  “Don’t be a fool,” they said, “There is no escape.  You’re simply torturing yourself even thinking about it. Just work hard, keep your head down and hope you survive.”

But he couldn’t accept this – he wouldn’t accept it.  He became obsessed with escape; he kept asking himself over and over again, “How can I do it?  There must be a way.  How can I get out of here healthy, alive, today?” It has been said that if you ask you shall receive, and, one day he got his answer.  He noticed the smell first, the sickening smell of rotting human flesh.  There, only a few feet from where he was working he saw a huge pile of rotting bodies that had been piled on the back of a truck.

Instead of asking, “How could the Nazis be so cruel, so inhumane?  How could God allow these things to happen?”  Stanislavski asked “How can I use this to escape.”  Somehow he managed to avoid the attention of the guards and taking off his clothes he dove straight onto the top of the rotting mound.  He hoped that nobody would notice that there was one living man among the dead.

After what seemed an age the truck started up and drove outside of the camp.  He was dumped into an open grave with all the rest of the bodies.  As darkness fell he made his escape and ran, naked 25 miles to freedom.  What saved Stanislavski?  What was the difference between him and the rest of the inmates?  While of course there were many factors, one critical difference was that he asked a different question.

He asked persistently, he asked with expectation of receiving an answer and his mind came up with a solution that saved his life.  But before he could get the answer, make the decisions, and take the actions that saved his life he had to ask the right questions.

Millions complained under communism while Lech Walensa asked, “How can I raise the standard of living for all working men and women.”  Mahatma Ghandi didn’t fight back when he suffered racial discrimination, instead he asked, “How can I free my people.”  All of the most successful people in history have asked the right questions, questions that have helped them to find solutions.  Stop asking why something is happening to you and start from today to ask how you can get what you want.

To your success, Christine

Tel: 01243 841498 /  07747 865982

Email: christine@makingpositivechanges.co.uk

Website: http://www.makingpositivechanges.co.uk

Your Very Own Radar System

September 6th, 2009

Hi there,

I was working with a client today and teaching him why writing down his goals, and reading them or looking at them every day, actually works and thought I’d share it with you.

You see all this Law of Attraction stuff isn’t just mumbo jumbo it’s actually quite scientific and when you ‘get it’ you’ll see the point in committing your aspirations to paper.

It’s all to do with the way the conscious and subconscious mind works and a little gland that’s buried deep inside your brain called the Reticular Activating System, RAS for short.

According to scientific research your subconscious mind is registering at least 10,000 images or impressions a second.  Now that’s an awful lot of material  it’s picking up and as you can imagine you would probably go crazy if you had to be consciously aware of all that stuff.

Every second your deeper mind is aware of the sensations in every part of your body but none of that will come into your conscious awareness unless there’s discomfort or pain.  It’s also aware of temperature and light, but these won’t come into your conscious awareness either unless you get too hot or too cold.

It picks up things in the periphery of your vision but if they aren’t important or presenting danger you’ll just allow them to pass by.  Your ears pick up many things that simply stay as background noise unless you deliberately bring them to the fore.

Consciously you can only cope with between 7 and 12 things a second.  Yes really, and because there’s such a huge discrepancy between the amount of things you do register every second and the amount you can cope with consciously you have an in-built filter working for you night and day.

The RAS is a lump of grey matter about the size of the end of a little finger and it lies deep within the brain stem. It constantly goes through the over 10,000 things per second you could be consciously aware of picking out those things that are meaningful or important to you and bringing them to your attention.

The two parts of your mind work together to keep you safe.  If you had to rely on your conscious mind alone and its inability to cope with more than a dozen things a second you’d have been dead long before now.

And how does the RAS know what is meaningful to you?  It gets its information from the things you continually focus on or talk about.  To give you some idea of how it’s already working for you think back to when you got your last car.  Did you notice that suddenly the road was full of them?  Same colour, same model, everywhere you looked and you hadn’t even noticed them before.  That’s the RAS at work.

Imagine yourself at a party or reception or whatever. You’re in a packed room and you can barely hear the person you’re talking to.  Then, someone over the other side of the room mentions your name and immediately you’re ears prick up.  Again that’s the RAS at work.

Maybe you’ve noticed that if one of your family or friends gets diagnosed with a particular illness it’s suddenly being discussed everywhere.  You’ll start to notice articles in magazines or the newspaper.  You might see TV programs on the subject or overhear conversations about it at work. Suddenly it seems like everyone and his dog has it.

Is that because it has become the most talked about illness in the world or is it because your eyes and ears have become attuned to it now?  The information was always there but before it meant anything to you it was being filtered out.

If you are surrounded and bombarded by 10,000 bits of information a second and you can only be consciously aware of up to 12 maximum, imagine how much is being filtered out.  Most of what is happening around you is being missed.

I read recently about an experiment where 20 people were told to watch a 10 minute video of a netball match.  They were asked to count how many times the ball was passed during the clip.  After counting the scores they were asked to watch the video again this time without any particular instruction.

Every single participant refused to believe it was the same video as this time around they all noticed a person dressed in a gorilla suit walking on to the pitch and moving around among the players.  They’d been concentrating so hard on watching the ball and counting passes they had completely missed the obvious.

So if you really would like to own your own house but all you talk about is how impossible it is because…………………….!  I’ll let you fill in the reasons why but there’ll be plenty of them.  Then all your RAS can bring to your attention on the subject of buying houses is how impossible it is.  Everything you hear, see and read will convince you that you are right because anything to the contrary is being filtered out.

That’s why writing down your goals and looking at them every day helps not only to keep your mind focused on what you want, it utilises your brains natural ability to  bring your attention to the people and things that can help you to achieve them.

The answer to any problem is there, just there within reach.  It’s probably walking around in a gorilla suit but you just can’t see it because you aren’t focussed on what you want, you’re thinking about the lack of it or the reasons you can’t have it.

Write down your goals, make a point of looking at them and thinking about them often and leave your RAS to do its job of drawing your attention to the ways to achieve them.  Allow it to be easy as it guides you to information, people, conversations and anything else you would find helpful to further your career, improve your social or love life and take you where you want to go.

Writing down your goals triggers the RAS, which in turn sends a signal to the cerebral cortex: ‘Wake up! Pay attention! Don’t miss this detail!’ Once you write down a goal, your brain will be working overtime to see you get it, and will alert you to the signs and signals that, like the new car, were there all the time.

I hope this inspires you to act right now and achieve your goals.

To your Success Christine

Tel: 01243 841498 /  07747 865982

Email: christine@makingpositivechanges.co.uk

Website: http://www.makingpositivechanges.co.uk