Reflections

It’s the age old argument: Are people essentially good or bad?

The need for this argument has always been a source of bewilderment for me. People behave differently depending almost entirely on their environment. This is so obvious if you just look for it.

If you woke up and everyone was shooting each other, and you had a gun, you would probably shoot people just to defend yourself. If someone shot your family, you’d almost certainly be filled with hate.

Now imagine if you woke up and everyone was being friendly to each other. Would you grab your gun and go around shooting people? Of course not.

Most people have been on a city train. Much of the time, nobody will be talking to anyone, they’ll go out of their way to ignore everyone around them. This is of course because they are surrounded by strangers.

Now imagine you’re on a course, say, for work. You are in a waiting room with all the other people who are doing the course – strangers. Yet you know you have to spend 2 days with them all. What do you think will happen? That’s right, most people will start talking to each other. It’s quite unlikely that one of them will pull out a knife and start waving it around.

These are just examples. This evidence of how our environment shapes our behaviour is all around us, every day, in everything we do. Now here’s the crux – we can shape this environment.

If you want, you can get on the train, push people out of the way and be rude. You might get a seat, but eventually, everyone will become rude like you, and before long, everyone will be pushing each other out of the way and fighting over seats. There will be aggression, anger, and selfishness everywhere. Negativity escalates.

Alternatively, you can stand aside and let someone else on before you. Give up your seat. The recipient of this good deed might even be surprised. What is for sure, though, is that they will be less aggressive about getting on the train. They’ll likely pass on this good deed to someone else. Positivity escalates.

Really, there is no difference between positivity or negativity. Kindness spreads just as easily as hatred. Good or bad – what you put out into the world is reflected.

Of course, the extent of this reflection depends largely on the size of the community you inhabit. The more people, the harder it is to make an impact. However, that’s not to say things won’t change because of what you do. Never underestimate your own power or the impact a simple action can have.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” … Mahatma Gandhi

You’ll be amazed how quickly people’s frowns disappear when you’re happy and smiling. It is impossible to be angry with someone who has just made you laugh.

People’s negative actions will be their shame when you respond with kindness. This is very powerful.

Even if your positivity is still met with further negativity, never stop. Stopping negativity is not always possible. What’s important is how you deal with it. You just have to be happy in yourself that you do what you feel is right. Be mindful of your environment and how it is shaping your behaviour.

I’m not suggesting that the world will turn into one big hippy commune if we all just “Be Excellent to Each Other”. But one thing is for certain: If we all go around being horrible to each other, the world isn’t going to be a very nice place to live.

Be what you want to see.

Brain Mechanics Two-4-Too

Continued from Brain Mechanics One-oh-Won.

WINNER!

In what areas were you a winner today? It’s up to you to decide if you are a winner or not. Even if you have won a tiny bit, acknowledge that. Be honest with yourself, even if you were a loser today. Hopefully, you’ll get another chance to try again tomorrow!

Training to be a Winner

Keep yourself trained as a winner in your chosen field, whether that is sports, creative endeavors, or business. By continually training yourself, you keep your mind honed in performing the steps necessary to keep you a winner.

As mentioned in Brain Mechanics One oh Won, balance your primary field of expertise by perfecting yourself in at least one other area and up to four different areas. Depending on how versed you are in other areas, you can add other areas in which to practice as long as you put in enough time with each area at least several times a week. At the minimum, spend thirty minutes in each area. But of course, the longer you spend practicing in each area, the better. The main idea is to keep your secondary trainings diversified which will force your mind to handle various types of requirements and increase your potential for winning in all areas. Focusing in other areas will definitely add to and affect your primary area of focus.

Mix It Up

If your primary field of study is physical in nature, such as sports, then balance that by training your mind to think in different ways intellectually, such as learning to play chess and reading books. Reading about other people’s experiences in your chosen field can be huge benefit of course, but also read other things to cause your mind to think of things you don’t normally hear about, including fiction and non-fiction. We live in a remarkable age where huge amounts of information are available instantly. There is such thing as information overload, so learn when to stop gathering information, when to switch to something else, and when to simply take a break.

Mix in other types of sports training that are different from your chosen primary area of expertise.

Entertainment

Entertainment is good but be aware as to how much passive entertainment you are experiencing on a daily basis. Interactive entertainment such as computer games will definitely train your mind to think in different ways, but never substitute that type of entertainment for physical activity. Get at least an hour of physical activity in a day, such as bike riding, walking, hiking, swimming, or any sport.

Keeping your imagination active can lead you to new insights and new approaches. Keeping your mind open and remaining rational about new information will increase your ability to sift through what works for you and what doesn’t work. Bending and pushing your imagination and forcing your brain to perform in new ways will add to your arsenal of abilities.

Mind Bending Exercises

Repeat all these steps every few days and then every few weeks to months to keep yourself proficient in doing these exercises.

1) Put something with a paragraph or two of your language of choice on the table in front of you. Read it normally for a few sentences, then rotate what you are looking at 180 degrees so that the text is essentially up-side-down to your point of view. Try reading the text as far as you can. Practice this enough by using text you have not read before and you’ll be able to easily read in this orientation. Also try positioning the text at ninety-degree angles to normal, i.e. text rows of words straight up and down so you are forcing yourself to read at any angle.

2) Hold up printed text in a mirror and attempt to read it. As with exercise 1, rotate the text 180 degrees and read it, then try the text rotated 90 degrees both ways. This will train your mind to recognize and function with reflections.

3) While staring straight ahead at a fixed point in front of you in the distance, use your peripheral vision to notice objects to the sides of your direction of view. How far to the sides can you recognize objects, movements, lights, or colors while staring straight ahead? Extend either arm to the side and experiment by wiggling your fingers and moving them forward and backward in and out of peripheral view.

4) Try anything that you’ve never done before, such as board games and crossword puzzles — anything that will cause your mind and thus your brain to be pushed to their limits. Accuracy games such as darts or archery are even more activities that will bend your mind beyond its limits. Practice skipping stones or throwing rocks at targets and even switch up your throwing arm and get that other less-functional limb honed.

Your Winning Conclusion

You now know what it takes to remain a winner. Extend that winning attitude into every area of your life — including love, business, friendships, and activities. Keep in practice. Letting yourself slip will cause you to lose abilities, so stay trained if you want to keep your skills at those winning levels. Spend the time and your mind will surely do what it takes. Motivate your time and you’ll find a new future that you’ll make.

Written by Maxwell Jennings

Brain Mechanics One-oh-Won

Be Your Own Mechanic

How can you work on your brain and win back abilities, win new functionality, and even increase your intelligence? By being your own brain mechanic. You at least have the basic tools already — the most important being your mind. This mini-course is designed to at least help you get started in those winning directions and will help you acquire new abilities, skills and tools.

So pull your mind into the garage, get it on the proverbial lift, and get ready to delve under the hood. Brain Mechanics 101 (won oh one) is about to begin!

Win Back Your Life

It is time to evaluate your life and to win in the areas that are important to you and to win back in the areas you’ve lost or have diminishing abilities. Are you where you want to be in all areas, such as love, family, financial, work, education, or your chosen sport? You may be proficient at what you do in select areas of your life, but what about the other areas where you want to be proficient and truly win? Are you winning in every area that is important to you? Regardless of all the media hype and what your family and friends tell you, only your judgment of yourself and where you are at is important here. You win already by simply wanting a winning mind and brain!

The first step at winning back your life is to know what your current reality is right now. We suggest that you create a written list of the most important areas in your life and rate them on a simple 0-to-10+ scale – where 10 is optimum-winner based on your own judgment of yourself and the plus (+) means you’ve exceeded your win-expectations.

Zero to Ten-plus Rating Guide

0 = nonexistent, extremely lacking, not winning, I want major help in this area.
1
2
3
4
5 = I’m average in this area but I know I can be better and I want to be a total winner.
6
7
8
9
10 = Winner! I have met my expectations of myself in this area.
10+ = I have exceeded my expectations of myself! The winning keeps getting better!

Test Topics to Win

As a guide, test yourself on these topics:

Love — 0 (= nonexistent, I need major help in the area of love) to 5 (= I’m okay with love but could be better about it) to 10 (= Winner! I’m in love, I feel really good about all my relationships). For those of you who think you’ve exceeded your win-expectations on love, tack on a plus sign to that 10, 10+ = far exceeded what I think it takes to win in the area of love.

Rate these areas as well:

Family
Friendships
Living my Passion
Business/Job
Education
Life Experiences
Hobbies
Bucket-List
(add your choices to this list)

Prioritizing Your List

What do you want to focus on first? Write out your list in order of importance to you.

Prioritizing with a written list gives your brain the task of prioritizing internally. Your list will become a part of your psyche and this will help you in creating an activity schedule to which you will be more likely to follow and with which to win.

Again, your goal should be to become a winner in your chosen areas, not just one area.

The Concept of Brain Mechanics

Whatever you put into your mind, your mind will try to reconstruct that desire at least in your mind. Focus on your desire enough and your mind will actually rewire your brain to accommodate for the desire. Focus enough and your mind will guide your choices to match the end-result of your goal. Much of this guiding is subconscious but don’t leave that part to chance. Use your conscious mind to guide you too.

The Adapting Brain

Although the old adage of too much of anything is not good is subjective in that people differ in how they adapt to situations, as humans, too much of anything for anyone can cause big changes in the mind/body systems. Whether it is a winning situation for you is up to you to determine.

The mind/brain will try to adapt to the stimulus at hand, and if that stimulus is particular and repeated often and for extended periods, then the mind/brain will dedicate itself to performing that particular task. The brain will actually rewire itself. Brain cells will grow in the required areas but the brain will also allow brain cells to not be replaced in unused areas, effectively killing off abilities.

Hone Your Skills

Being super focused is great for training in sports and academics. It is also very good to keep your other skills honed as well, at least skills you want to keep. Sometimes it’s okay to let yourself lapse in areas that you probably won’t use again.

However, the only way to keep up your abilities with skills you’ve acquired and want to keep is to refresh your mind and body in those areas often by actually doing those activities. Get out the sports equipment or whatever it takes to keep in practice, and do it!

Include as many of your goal areas in your regime and train the mind in as many different things for which you have the time. Balance out physical skills with mental skills and mix it up.

Multiple Stimulation

Make sure you’re stimulating your body with movement and coordination, such as sports, riding a bike, or even simply running and walking. Gravity and inertia are good ways of letting your mind-brain system know that action doesn’t just mean sitting and watching action movies or playing computer games. Teach your brain that the norm is never the norm and it will wire itself to adapt quickly to an ever changing sequence of activities.

Continued at Brain Mechanics Two-4-Too…

Written by Maxwell Jennings

Positive Thinking for a More Powerful You

Finding and building on your personal power is something you can begin right now through the habit of positive thinking and a positive mindset. Positive thinking is a deliberate choice that needs to be consistently applied. It is a way of life, a way of approaching all of the things that life throws your way.

Knowing and embracing your personal power is made stronger by positive thinking. There is a saying that life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% what you choose to do about it. You are not the victim of circumstance, but a powerful person who can determine your own reality. Choose a negative reaction and you will sow the seeds of more negativity. Choose a positive reaction and you will soon find the sun beginning to peek out from behind the storm clouds. However, must remain optimistic without denying reality.

We have heard much about the Law of Attraction and the Abundant Thinking over the last few years, yet if you think back to your own life, you will likely discover that you had been putting these theories into practice long before you knew their name. Through your education and career, you kept your specific goals in mind over the course of years, and accepted that there would be many obstacles and difficulties along the way. The challenges you faced did not deter you from seeing the value of what it was you were setting out to achieve. When you adamantly base your thoughts on reality, it will seem like everything is being attracted to you. But this is due of course to your own actions forging this path.

Here are a few tools to aid you in positive thinking:

• Consciously choose to block negative thinking and replace it with positive thoughts
• Visualize your success – when we have a clear picture in our mind of what we want in life, our mind works toward making it happen, and we begin to draw to ourselves exactly what we need when we need it
• Obstacles are a healthy part of life and help us grow – view them as such
• Understand yourself –knowing what triggers a negative reaction for you is the first step in changing it
• Take stock of all that you have in your life to be grateful for and keep these things in the forefront of your mind.

What you focus on will determine the course of your life. See the negative and you will be drawn to more of it, see the positive and your life will take on a new meaning and purpose

Positive thinking is a deliberate choice, and when applied with intention to all areas of your life – money, career, love, family, goals – you will become more powerful than you ever imagined. Positive thinking is a way of channeling a powerful energy within you that you can use to your advantage. It is your lens and will signal your body how to react to situations to achieve optimal results. Challenge yourself to make this a new and strong habit that is based within the frame of reality, and witness the way you attract those things in your life that you truly value. A more powerful you awaits…

.

This article written exclusively for Power Essence by Jason Blacker
Photo courtesy http://freedigitalphotos.net.

Upgrade Your Mind

You can upgrade your mind by learning a simple technique. Mastering this technique will upgrade your mind to another level. We are going to teach you how to create something called “super concepts”.

Upgrade Your Mind

What exactly are Super Concepts, and why do we need to create them?
Super Concepts are ideas that are so far ahead of their time that you will stand above even the most powerful entrepreneurs. We will teach you the techniques needed to solve seemingly impossible puzzles, and think up amazing creations. As a result, your mind will become super-fast, and you will become a powerful genius.

With these incredible techniques, you will not only be able to predict the future, but create the future. And it will be your future, not one dictated to you or created for you by someone else.

It’s to your advantage to learn how to create them so that you will be that much more advanced than the people that have not yet learned about Super Concepts.

First understand that the conscious mind exists because it turns percepts, which are experiences you perceive, such as heat or brightness, into concepts. For example, you will think it’s a sunny day.

This is what sets us aside from animals, our ability to put perceptions together to form concepts and super concepts. However, we do not do this all the time, and we often slip into an instinctual animal-like, or bicameral mentality, where we merely respond to outside influences, or percepts. No concepts are created in our head when we are in that bicameral mode. It’s all reacting and responding with no depth of thought.

Super concepts are where we combine many concepts in our head, and come to educated conclusions. Most super concepts are solutions. Ultimately they are represented by visions. They are seemingly conjured up by the great thinkers of the world. However, the end vision itself is just that, a vision. It is the detail that turns the vision into a reality.

For people examples, look to Benjamin Franklin, one of the most prolific inventors of his time. Also, many of the early scientists such as Galileo and Newton were adept at thinking in super concepts.

For a more current example, think of the space shuttle. The concept was previously a vision, foreseen by people like Jules Verne. Today, it is a reality.

You must appreciate the enormity of the project. Thousands of the greatest minds in the world came together to create a world changing creation. It didn’t come from nothingness, it evolved, from many, many concepts. Engineers in all fields came together to create the body of work that takes so many factors into account. The computer hardware, the software, the transporting equipment, the logistics of the project were a few of those factors. It’s an enormous achievement of humanity to bring that all together into a magnificent creation.

However, it started with one vision. A simple but profound vision: Fly a craft into space. Whoever thought of that idea did not concern themselves with the details. Nevertheless, the project would have been nothing without the details.

Someone, or more likely in this case, a group of people had to turn this vision, something that could be expressed in one sentence, into a reality. In doing so, they had to draw upon entire industries and even create new industries.

Many problems were found along the way and solutions had to be created. Thousands of ideas had to go into making that one vision. All these ideas integrated together to form a super concept.

The assembly line, invented by Henry Ford, is a super concept. Mr. Ford saw that much time was being wasted when people changed jobs, so he made them repeat the same job over and over again. Obviously this didn’t just happen, many issues were brought up by this idea that had to be worked on. The idea revolutionized business.

Most of humanity’s great achievements are super-concepts. Yet there is no specific criteria defining super concepts, you will just know one when you see one because of the enormous impact it will have on society. Remember, they all begin as just ideas.

Super concepts are not limited to achievements. For example, the theory of the world being round was a super concept. It helped humankind to better understand the universe, which is obviously a huge benefit.

The reason it is a super concept, however, is because it is based on pure, true concepts. It ignored the false concepts derived from lies and information blown out of context. It was based on reality — not what someone thought up or ideas that were irrelevant. Just facts.

This is why theories like this, like the theory of evolution and the idea that the Earth went around the sun and not the other way around, were so controversial. They went against conventional thinking that was not based on reality.

We talk more about reality in other articles, but I just wanted you to understand that for super concepts to work, they must be firmly grounded in reality. They cannot exist in false contexts. You can upgrade your mind by ensuring your thoughts only operate in reality.

For example, scientists that use metaphysical concepts to run their experiments or prayer to help guide them to discovery are not using reality. The only reliable sources of knowledge are facts and proven concepts. Only by systematically proving and disproving, and basing all research and development on reality can you possibly derive any worthwhile ideas.

So how do I think up my own Super concepts?

There is no technical secret to upgrading your mind. It just involves hard thinking. Our minds are only used to thinking with a few concepts at a time. We often don’t even do this. Most the time we make decisions based on what other people tell us to think and do. That is why creating super concepts will make you intellectually superior to most people.

However, it really is within your grasp. First, you need to have the vision. This is not as difficult as you may think. You probably have ideas all the time.

The difficult bit, the bit that is rarely executed, is turning the idea into reality. This involves breaking it down to the smallest components. In doing this you will build up the puzzle and make the idea real.

Of course, you need to stay aligned with reality the whole time. You may find that once your life is more aligned with reality, you will have visions that are more powerful. As you begin to eradicate non-realities from your life, ideas that are more profound will present themselves to you. Ideas to which the majority of people will be blind.

This is the next step in our human evolution. Master reality-aligned super concepts and you will have evolved to a new level.

Upgrade your mind: Summary:

You can upgrade your mind by learning to understand super concepts. Super concepts are grand ideas that are based on a number of reality-derived concepts. First, learn to align yourself with reality, rejecting bad concepts. Then, learn how to integrate good concepts together.

Realize that all big ideas are merely a collection of small concepts. These smaller concepts can be integrated with any number of other concepts, maybe even ones that don’t seem relevant.

This is from where radical ideas come.

Recognize the potential of super concept formation.

Always keep yourself aligned with reality and you will create powerful visions.

Learn to create super concepts and evolve yourself for the new era of thinking.