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
