Train Your Brain For Success

by Roger Seip

  You get to choose—how awesome is that?

  How important is this choice?

  Nobody reading a book like this would say that the thoughts and the attitude we choose are unimportant, but I'll take it a step further.

  Your attitude—how you choose to view your world—is literally a matter of life and death.

  When I say it's a matter of life and death, I don't mean just figuratively. I mean that at least once in everyone's life, everyone will make a choice in their mind that literally either kills them or saves their life.

  My friend Mike was the clearest example I can think of. Mike worked with my company, and the first thing you'd have noticed about Mike when we worked together is that he's 6′9″, about 260 pounds of lean muscle—he's a big boy. The second thing you'd notice is that he had an aura of positive energy that just surrounds him. If you've ever known anyone who makes you feel better just by being in the same room with you, Mike was definitely that guy—always smiling, always elevating other people. You could just tell that he wakes up in the morning and says, “This is going to be a great day.”

  Well, Mike suffered a terrible accident. Without giving all the gory details, he sustained a head injury that caused significant bruising to the frontal lobe of his brain. He got knocked into a coma-like state and the doctors had to perform a “burr hole for subdural hematoma”—also known as “they had to drill a hole in his skull to relieve the pressure.” If you need this procedure, you haven't had a good day. Your life usually hangs in the balance.

  Some of us who worked with Mike got to visit him a few days after he sustained the injury. He was still unconscious, and we asked his doctor for the prognosis. Please keep in mind this isn't actually me speaking here. This came from one of the most highly trained brain surgeons in the world. Pay close attention.

  The doctor said, “I don't know what's going to happen with Mike, because I don't know Mike. I've seen cases much worse than Mike's where the individual returned to a perfectly normal, productive life. I've also seen cases much less severe than Mike's where the individual died very quickly. A person's chances of surviving through and then thriving after an injury like this have a lot to do with the individual. Specifically, it has everything to do with the individual's attitude.”

  It has everything to do with the individual's attitude.

  That's what the doctor said. Fortunately for Mike, as we mentioned, he was the king of attitude. The facts are that Mike began his recovery process shortly after that and was able to leave the hospital about 75 percent faster than even the most optimistic projections, and has done quite well since. His recovery was miraculous enough that the medical community made a study of Mike's case. The interesting thing they discovered was that, other than his height, there was nothing genetically or physiologically different about him that would indicate the remarkable speed of his recovery. The only thing they could find that separated Mike from every other case? That's right, it was his attitude. The way Mike chose to view his world literally saved his life.

  When I say that your attitude is a matter of life and death, I'm not exaggerating.

  The Big Problem with Your Mind

  With literally your entire life hinging on the quality of your thoughts, you must be aware of the big problem. It's found in your brain—remember the reticular activating system (RAS)? Again, that's the part of your brain that, as soon as you decide you're going to buy a red BMW makes you start noticing all the red BMWs. When that thing is tuned into success characteristics or a success vibration, it's great because it will automatically create positive thoughts and pull you toward successful situations and outcomes. So it would be great if the RAS's default setting was hardwired for success—but it's not. Your RAS—your whole brain really—is not hardwired for success. It's hardwired for survival. Your brain is fantastically efficient at keeping you alive, so over hundreds and thousands of generations it developed some wiring that worked well for survival in the wilderness, but nowadays just makes you negative and drains your energy. Somewhere along the way, your reticular activating system developed a profoundly negative tilt. It overemphasizes negative and deemphasizes positive.

  This tendency used to be a tremendous asset, when survival was the whole game. Again, the RAS is essentially pattern recognition software. To have this part of your brain be hypersensitive to negative or threatening input is extremely valuable when your survival is at issue most days. The guy that either didn't notice or didn't care about the sabertooth tiger stalking him or the neighboring tribe that wanted to take over his village didn't make it very long. So back then, you really needed an early-warning mechanism that picked up on threats very early so you could avoid them or fight them. Back in that day, a hypersensitivity to negative patterns was actually more urgent to survival than the ability to recognize positive patterns like food and medicinal plants. So again, this survival mechanism in your brain is awesome if survival is the main issue.

  The deal now though is that you don't really care about just survival. If you have the inclination and the time to read a book on how to Train Your Brain for Success, your thinking is well past survival. You want to go beyond; you want to thrive. A survival mentality won't create the breakthroughs you are looking for. A survival mentality by definition is conservative, safe, and will cause you to contract your thinking. This is the very opposite of a breakthrough or even a thriving mentality, which is growth-oriented, expansionary, and somewhat risky. What this means is that if you want your brain to get you where you want to go, you must override this survival mechanism. This is a big problem—your mind will hold onto what works for survival very tightly.

  The Good News about Your Mind

  The good news is that this survival mechanism and its negative thinking definitely can be overridden—you absolutely can do it! Again, it will not happen overnight. Your brain has some habits that it is very comfortable with even if those habits don't actually work. To retrain your brain is not an easy task. It will require diligent, persistent, intelligent work on yourself, and it will require an investment on your part. It will also take some time. To permanently reset the thermostat of your mind cannot happen in less than three weeks. It takes a minimum of 21 days to form a new habit or replace an old one. But you can do it—it will just take some work.

  Go back to the story of my friend Mike, the young man who bruised his brain and then recovered so well. The real lesson from Mike's story is that he didn't magically develop the attitude that saved his life while he was lying unconscious in the hospital. He developed it day by day. His mindset was, as Earl Nightingale said, a “habit-knit way of thinking and doing.” How do we know this? You could tell by the way he came out of his coma. When Mike woke up he had a very specific reaction that he had trained into himself on a deep level. Anyone who knew him could have spotted it. For several years, Mike had cultivated the habit, immediately upon waking in the morning, of smiling and saying out loud,

  “It's gonna be a great day.”

  And when he came out of his coma-like state —disoriented, in pain, and on life support—it was the most natural thing in the world for him. It was a trained-in, automatic anchor that set him on his way. He opened his eyes, looked at the hospital bed he was in, saw his family in the next room, and the very first words from his mouth were:

  “It's gonna be a great day.”

  That doesn't happen by accident, but it does happen. And it can happen for you. Do you want the kind of resiliency that pulls you through tough times, even life and death times? Do you want the kind of energy that makes you unstoppable? Do you want a genuine internal smile that attracts the people and the situations that make your life rich? All of those are possible, and they are among the greatest gifts you can give yourself. These gifts will not be given to you by the world—it's not the world's job. But you can give them to yourself, and it only takes a little bit of retraining of your brain.

  How to do it is covered in the next two chapters.

  Rei
nforcement and Bonuses: This chapter has been Memory Optimized™ for your benefit. For your brief lesson and some great bonuses, visit www.planetfreedom.com/trainyourbrain with the access code in the About the Author section. Enjoy!

  Chapter 16

  Your Energy Management Tools

  We finished the last chapter discussing the big problem about your mind (that its powerful survival mechanism will keep you stuck if left to its own tendencies), and the good news about your mind (that you fundamentally have the power and authority to override this survival mechanism). The really good news in this area is that you also have built into you five terrific tools for accomplishing this override. Let me stress that everyone has these tools, including you. You always have access to them, and for the most part they don't cost a penny. You can use any or all of them at any time, and the more you use them the better you will get with them. I'll help you understand what they are and how they can help you train your brain.

  Tool #1: Your Ability to Laugh…

  Your first energy management tool is your ability to laugh. Have you ever noticed how a good laugh just makes you feel better? There's a reason for it—laughter actually affects your brain in much the same way as good drugs. Now I'm not advocating recreational drug use, but I am advocating recreational laughter use as a way of managing and amplifying your energy levels. A good laugh does so many good things for your body and brain, and the results are well documented. Here is a quote from Science Daily (April 2010):

  Norman Cousins first suggested the idea that humor and the associated laughter can benefit a person's health in the 1970s. His ground-breaking work, as a layperson diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, documented his use of laughter in treating himself—with medical approval and oversight—into remission. He published his personal research results in the New England Journal of Medicine and is considered one of the original architects of mind-body medicine.

  Since then the number of medical conditions that have been found to positively respond to regular laughter has absolutely skyrocketed. From diabetes and obesity to any number of cardiovascular problems to (in some cases) even cancer have all been documented to be positively impacted by regular laughter as part of the treatment. Day to day, some of the benefits of laughter are:

  It burns calories.

  It stretches your muscles.

  It feels great.

  It releases a number of terrifically healthy hormones—endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and HGH, to name a few.

  It makes you more attractive.

  It reduces or alleviates negative stress.

  A good laugh is among the best energy boosters we have available to us, and the great news about this is that we all have the ability to laugh! I spent eight years doing professional stand-up comedy, but I want to stress that you do not need to be a comedian to access and use this tool. It's not necessarily your ability to make other people laugh, it's your own ability to laugh, in three specific ways:

  …At Yourself

  Start with your ability to laugh at yourself. I've often thought that one of the major causes of the negative stress we experience is that we just take ourselves too seriously! We think that whatever problem we're experiencing right now will:

  a. Ruin us forever.

  b. Never be understood by anyone else.

  c. Never end.

  And most of the time, you know that it just ain't true! I've found that we always have the choice, in any given situation, to decide how seriously we'll take ourselves. The ability to laugh at ourselves is never about can versus can't. It's always about will versus won't. If you're somebody who won't laugh at yourself, I'm just obligated to make you aware of two things. First: If you won't laugh at yourself, other people will feel the need to do it for you. Second: It's my observation that those who don't laugh at themselves find themselves in situations where they look more ridiculous than average, more often than average, until they learn to lighten up.

  I'm not saying that you shouldn't take your life and your work seriously, and I'm certainly not saying that you shouldn't take the needs of your family or your clients seriously. I'm just saying don't take yourself too seriously. Placing yourself at the center of the universe requires an enormous amount of energy. That's energy which can serve you much better if directed elsewhere.

  …With Other People

  Next, learn to laugh with other people. Not at other people, with other people. All of us are involved in building relationships with other people—we need help to make our lives move forward. And the ability to laugh with other people is one of the fastest ways to break down barriers that keep us apart.

  In my sales career, I got some great advice early on. I actually got the same advice twice in a three-week span from two very different sources. In a sales seminar, an instructor said that, “If you can laugh with your customers, they will buy from you. End of story.” I thought this was sound advice. Slightly oversimplified, but sound nonetheless, so I took it to heart. I may have actually taken it too much to heart, because three weeks later, one of my customers gave me the same advice, but in a very different way.

  I was selling educational books door-to-door in western Pennsylvania. After making a sale to a family, the father took me aside and said “Roger, I've been involved in sales and sales management for 25 years, and there's something that as a salesperson, you do better than I've ever seen.” Feeling very cool, I said “Really! Well, what is it?” He looked me dead in the eye and said:

  “Roger, I've found that it's nearly impossible to say no to a smiling idiot.”

  Looking back, I'm pretty sure this was meant as a compliment. And it's been very helpful advice in my sales career.

  …About Negative Situations

  Listen, we all have problems. You can call them challenges, situations, and opportunities if you like (terrific idea—more on your language in a bit), but fundamentally we all have negative situations to deal with. People who don't like us, obstacles to our achieving our goals, terrible market conditions, competition we didn't ask for, and the list goes on and on. The faster we learn to laugh about our negative situations, the faster we elevate our thinking and develop the key to solving our problems and perspective. Einstein said that, “We cannot solve problems on the same level of thinking that created them in the first place.”

  Have you ever had a seemingly enormous problem that you looked back on and laughed? It's extremely common, so why not try laughing about it while it's happening? Again, I'm not trying to belittle your problems—just try it out. The next time you've got something bad happening, why not look for the humor in it? I can't tell you how many times just looking for something funny in a bad business deal or a tough audience or a big mistake was the thing that helped me reframe what was going on in a way that sparked the solution in my mind.

  Here is a tip for cultivating your ability to laugh:

  Learn to think like a four-year-old—preschoolers are the happiest thinkers. They:

  a. Say what's on their mind, immediately.

  b. Never carry a grudge for more than about five minutes.

  c. Are always looking on the bright side.

  d. Think creatively.

  e. Are endlessly amused by the simplest things.

  We can do all of these things if only we choose them.

  Tool #2: Your Ability to Practice Gratitude

  Perhaps the fastest energy booster is the emotion of gratitude. My business partner Eric Plantenberg said it best:

  “It's impossible to be grateful and negative at the same time.”

  This quote has been so useful to me. If I'm feeling low, I have found that the simple act of taking one moment to focus on what I am genuinely thankful for produces an instantaneous boost of energy. I've also found that focusing on what makes me grateful for a few minutes causes that boost to last for several hours. If you're looking to boost your mood quickly, the antidote to negativity is gratitude. Do yourself a favor right now—answer this question:

&nbs
p; Do you have at least one thing in your life that you are genuinely thankful for?

  Of course—I've never met anyone who doesn't have at least one. Take a moment and focus on whatever it was that just popped into your mind. See it as clearly as you can. How do you feel right now? Better, yes? The emotion of gratitude, even in very small amounts, causes a pretty specific neurological/biochemical chain reaction that does great things for your energy. Best part: It does these things instantaneously.

  Now let's take it one step further. Practicing gratitude on a regular, systematic basis actually trains your brain to seek out and attract positive inputs, which positively alters your whole world. In every moment we have a choice of where to place our attention. Think back to the introduction to this book—remember the principle of what you see is what you get? Remember how the pictures that we see in our minds tend to be the results we get? Watch this. You just identified at least one thing that you're thankful for. A little while ago we discussed how we all have problems as well. So if the principle of what you see is what you get is true at all, when you focus on your problems what will your mind attract more of? You got it, problems. If you will train yourself to focus regularly on the things you are thankful for, your mind will see them more often, and when you do that, guess what? Right again—you actually attract more things that you will be thankful for. Your focus determines and creates your reality.