Even if you have an idea of how you’d like your business and personal life to be, you may have no idea how to go about achieving it.
wake up and live
This book (also available as an Ebook) will alleviate your restlessness and frustration that comes with not living your Life Purpose.
wake up and live
Following 30 years plus of research and practical application of many techniques, this unique, proven 5-Step LifeMap™ System will help you break out of life’s monotony and give you control of your life back!

One of these websites is Credence run by Phillip Day of the UK – go to Sitemap and check out ‘Latest’ for past newsletters. We had the pleasure of attending one of Phillip’s information sessions during one of his frequent visits to Brisbane. If he ever comes to where you live, do go and hear him, you will be amazed. You can find his speaking schedule by going to his website.

One of his latest newsletter articles contains a link to a video which is a must-see for everyone. I’ve taken the following verbatim from his newsletter. Here is the link for the video. If you are having trouble with the link, here is the URL:

 

http://www.3news.co.nz/Living-Proof/tabid/371/articleID/171328/Default.aspx
vitamin C
The Weekly Health Tip
LIVING PROOF
by Phillip Day 

When New Zealand dairy farmer Alan Smith contracted ‘swine flu’ and was admitted into intensive care, his condition deteriorated rapidly, he contracted leukaemia and was placed on life-support. With his lungs unable to operate, and with no hope of their patient making a recovery, it was determined by his doctors that the equipment artificially sustaining Mr Smith’s life should be switched off. 

Faced with the appalling prospect of losing a loving father and husband, the Smith family met with the doctors and requested that they give Alan high-dose intravenous vitamin C. The doctors refused, stating that there was no proof vitamin C did anything. The incredible story of what happened next should be broadcast far and wide across the planet to the execrable shame of the medical personnel concerned.

A new study published in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Neuron, has identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, leads to greater spirituality.  Researchers measured subjects before removing brain tumors – and then after.

I can get more into the study on my blog, but it does bring up a myriad of questions about the nature of self and spirituality, and more importantly – the effect of the brain on stable personality traits.

According to Dr. Salvatore M. Aglioti from Sapienza University of Rome (one of the researchers):

“If a stable personality trait like self transcendence can undergo fast changes as a consequence of brain lesions, it would indicate that at least some personality dimensions may be modified by influencing neural activity in specific areas,… Perhaps novel approaches aimed at modulating neural activity might ultimately pave the way to new treatments of personality disorders.”

Want to know why this image of the brain is here?  Read on.

All I know is that I have at the top of the page “Follow Us”.

I must say, I have got a lot better at identifying where I am when I take notes, what the name of the course is, or what CD/DVD I am taking notes from.

As you can see, this was not always the case

These notes go into a more general concept of filtering than we having been doing with the previous three posts, but I feel that it places filtering in a very practical scenario.

1. The first note is a quote from Dr Edwin Louis Cole: “How well we leave a crisis will determine how well we cope with the next one: to move in, we first need to move out.”

Now, if that isn’t true!

Do you wallow in the misery, unfairness, drama of a crisis OR

Do you see what learning you were to get from the crisis?

Do you appreciate that learning?

Do you acknowledge that you will learn from it?

Do you ‘move on’ and grow as a person?

To leave a challenge behind means not taking the ‘excess baggage’ with you, baggage such as

• Negativity
• Criticism (of others and self)
• Loneliness
• Betrayal

Failing to leave the baggage means dragging it through life.

2. Next note: ‘Ignoring or dropping issues will not solve them.  It’s running away, not leaving them’.

 Can you see the difference? 

 In the first part of the sentence, you are applying primitive ‘fight or flight’ behaviour.  In the second part, you are using your frontal lobe, the part of your brain that differentiates you from ‘animalistic’ behaviour; only humans have this part of the brain, our thinking and discerning, choice-making brain.

The green part at the front.

You see, you can’t run away from YOU.  Where YOU go, YOUR problems go.

Leave them, rather than get bitter.

That’s not to say, you can’t feel hurt. Sure you can, it’s not wrong to feel hurt; it’s HOW you respond that makes a difference.

REMEMBER to always follow your dream; don’t get stuck in the odd nightmare.

3. William Arthur Ward said: “Real optimism is being aware of problems but recognising solutions.”

Just like diamonds, gold and silver, we are refined by the heat and pressure of life.

In conclusion, to aspire to greatness, we need to discipline our time, activity and ourselves.

We need to be teachable.  Two of the most detrimental words in the English language are “I KNOW”. 

They are a barricade to learning, growing, evolving and transforming ourselves to our true potential.

We can always learn.  Even if we have information before

• We haven’t heard it said in the same way
• We may not have been ready for the deeper meaning/s
• Can we teach it to others to spread the gift around and show that we really get it?

We will all go up to the top of our potential, but only if we,

• Look up
• Give up (baggage)
• Fire up
• Show up

Now, I can tell you, after writing this posting, I’m ALL FIRED UP.

HOW ABOUT YOU?

All the very best.  Thanks for being a part of our world.  Have a Health, Happy and Propserous 2010. 

This is inevitable that we do, as we each have our own model of the world.  AND, for each of us, our model is right…

Last time, we established that we receive multi-million stimuli from our external world through our five senses.

So what happens that we choose to accept certain ones and not others?

Located at the base of the brain is the Reticular Activating System (RAS) (See image – (inside the red circle *).

A brief explanation of this makes fascinating reading.

Clusters of brain stem neurons called the reticular formation communicate with the spinal cord and many other parts of the brain. Some form the Reticular Activating System (RAS) which helps arouse the brain into alert consciousness.

RAS neurons become more active when activated by input from our five senses.  Naturally, this activity slackens off when we sleep.

Before we understand experiences, we have to internalise the events.

When we do this through our five senses, we form International Representations (IRs) based on past recognizable experiences.

This means, that unless we choose to evolve and grow, outside the inevitable by interacting with other people, we will continue to stay within our comfort zone.

The subconscious mind will see to that.

We need to learn things outside our comfort zone, do things outside our comfort zone, mix with different peoples, experience different things, and so on, if we wish to begin making internal shifts from where we are to where we want to be.

This is, of course, a rather simplistic way of expressing it, but it is enough for the purpose of this article.

So, to protect the brain from overwhelm, the RAS, in nano-seconds, has to choose what information it will allow into the conscious mind, what to not allow in, and what to store in the filing cabinets of the subconscious mind.

Now these Internal Representations (IRs) are made up of internal pictures, sounds, sensations, self-talk, and feelings that our subconscious mind believes we want – that it has stored from previous experience.

This external information is then reconfigured as an internal experience, your IR.

 Before ending this article, it will be useful to go into a bit more detail about the five senses.

VISUAL

• External sights of the world around
• Internal  sights in your mind’s eye

AUDITORY

• External sounds heard
• Internal dialoguing, self-talk 

KINESTHETIC 

• External sensations felt on the skin
• Internal sensations felt, emotions

OLFACTORY

• External smells
• Internal smells stimulated by your imagination

GUSTATORY

• External tastes
• Internal tastes stimulated by your imagination (you can start to salivate just by thinking about a certain food, especially when you are hungry)

Notice that there is always an external and an internal component to each of the five senses.

I know that you must be finding this interesting, and the more you delve into NLP, the more you will see how it will add to the quality of your life.

Till next time, be aware of your five senses, and how much they enrich your daily experience.

Also, be aware of how often you use a word from the five senses in your everyday conversations.

(* The Illustrated Atlas of the Human Body, Beverly McMillan)

We have seven major filters that create our reality.  Each person’s reality is as unique as her or his thumbprint.

These seven major filters are:

1.    Values
2.    Beliefs
3.    Attitudes
4.    Memories
5.    Decisions
6.    Language, and
7.    Meta Programs

Not a single person has the same reality as another.  Sounds odd, doesn’t it?

We can view the same incident as someone else, but we will give a different account of not only the less dominant aspects of the incident, but even dominant aspects and sequence of events.

Why is that?

Each second, we have multi-million bits of information coming into our conscious awareness.

Yes, that’s right – multi-million.  Some say 20 million, others say 100 million.  The exact amount isn’t important.

What is significant is the incredible number that we attract via our five senses.

It’s really exciting stuff, isn’t it?

It also indicates what amazing creations we humans are.  Personally, I believe that we are all walking miracles.

When you consider our anatomy, brain, memory, the complete package that makes up who we are…..

Are we not a miracle? Would that not suggest that we should respect each other for the amazing creatures we are?

We take our humanness for granted, emphasising only our differences instead of our similarities.

Okay, back on track, I can get carried away with this topic of our brilliance.

As I said, these bits of information approach us through our five senses.

So we can either see them, hear them, touch or feeI them, smell them or taste them. 

These are our physical filters; they come to us from the outside world.

All these bits of information are raw data from our external world which we need to prioritise before we allow them into our inner world, that is, into our minds.

By the way, all this raw data has no intrinsic meaning, it only takes on the meaning that we choose to give it through our mind.

At the same time, we decide whether what we allow in is going to go into short-term or long-term memory.

That is, what are we going to remember more on a conscious level and what are we going to allow to enter our subconscious level and, therefore, have a more permanent effect on our thoughts and subsequent behaviours.

Therefore, if we are to be in control of our preferred outcomes, preferred results, we need to understand our mind’s Filtration System

In other words, how we receive external information, why we internalise some and not other bits, to create experiences.

These experiences, which we allow to become more permanent in our subconscious, will form a type of template or reference point from which we will adjust our thought and behaviours with future similar experiences.

What we allow in and how we interpret that external raw data will determine the life we live.

Every habit we have, every thought process we have has given birth from how we’ve viewed our external world.

This is so important to remember.  The reality we are so sure about is not reality itself.

More next time.

In the meantime, be aware of how you see what is going on around you and how it differs from others you interact with.

Have fun with it.

Awareness = Empowerment

This is well done.

You know the type, notes and more notes from seminars, book summaries, quotes, and so on.  All just put in that special place to file later.

The amount of gems I came across was amazing.

I’m now going to share some notes I took so long ago that I don’t remember whether they were from a seminar, something I read, or something I listened to.

On second thoughts, these notes can’t be from a seminar as I would have a date and title at the top of the page.  So, they must be the other options.

Does this ever happen to you? 

However, when I read these notes as I was tidying up, I realised that they are so relevant for any time, for now or in the future. 

My past would certainly have been an easier journey had I taken note of the points raised.

So, let’s start.  Here are my first three points

1. Always manage your mental and emotional state – powerful, eh?
2. Prepare yourself to learn, get involved, sit alertly on your seat with an air of anticipation
3. Your filters define what you reality is – that is big

Then came an important question: “How do we learn in the most effective ways?”  That’s interesting, isn’t it?  Have you ever taken the time to work out, how you learn best?

Suggestion made included,

1. that you will tend to start with a sense of fascination
2. which moves to intense curiosity
3. followed by focus
4. leading to a sense of understanding, and then
5. you will know that you have learnt something
6. and so, you will go through that cycle again and again

Isn’t that beautifully said?

1. When you go inside yourself, you realize that anything is possible

You can create new emotions, new beliefs, new behaviours which you can test out before you make them permanent, ie before you make them into a habit.

2. You have an inner voice

You just need to listen to it.  It talks to us through our emotions, and we know this because, when we feel good about something, it’s something we should be doing more of, BUT when we don’t feel good about it, the message is loud and clear – stop doing whatever it is you are doing or thinking

Our filters are:

Sight

Hearing

Touching

Smelling

Tasting

However, Pantagali and Hindu literature talk about another sense, the mind.

The mind is a filter; it holds our beliefs, our habits.

Just imagine, if you have no filters, how would you experience reality?

If you experienced reality directly and not have it pass through our filters, how would you feel?

Overwhelmed, that’s for sure!

For example, one of the filters your mind creates is your perception of time.

Does everyone have the same perception of time?

No, you can be frantic, and in the same situation, another person is quite calm.  Why?  Different filters about time.

It’s not a question of who is right or wrong.  It just is.

I leave my sharing of my notes at this point, and continue next week.

Till then, have a splendid week.