I just finished listening to world renowned leader and author of four best-selling books. He runs an extremely successful company, NeuroGym. Today he spoke about how our brain cautions us whenever you have a new idea, new goal or wish. He told us that when you have a goal, the best way to achieve it is to utilize five senses. You write it down, read it, touch your goal, emotionalize and visualize the goal. When we fire together our neurons, we wire them together. When you do this long enough it becomes the default mode network. He said that when we are negative, it is a warning signal that sometimes serves us well by challenging our intentions for danger. It remembers past failures through our memories of being judged, shamed, or shut down, whenever we tried something new. But, we must get beyond the negative emotions and ask ourselves whether these are real or imagined dangers. These feelings of caution stop us from pursuing the goal. The evolved mind will pay attention to the negative warnings but also pay attention to the positive possibilities. We live in a duality world of hot/cold, good/bad, up/down, etc. We must ask ourselves whether our thoughts are fact or truth.
You may remember the story of the grandfather sitting around a fire with his grandchildren. One child tells him he has two voices in his head, one positive and one negative. Which one will win? Grandfather replies that it’s like the two wolves, one positive and the other negative. The child asks which one will win. He replies the one you feed.
John advises us to become child-like in order to be able to explore, play, have adventures and new experiences that we wish for. What’s holding us back is our past traumas of being judged, scolded, shut down, criticized or shamed. Fear of failing is holding us back. However, we know from research that in order to succeed at anything we must fail until we succeed. We have to let go of limiting beliefs which are holding us back. We fear our lack of knowledge and skills, disappointing ourselves, low self-image, being the wrong age, etc. We must ask ourselves is this belief real or imagined. Every brain has genius capabilities. We need to shift from “No I Can’t.” to “I Know I Can.” The most powerful tool is the brain!
