If you are like me; you probably started your work experience with a job and were such an innovative thinker, always looking outside the box, you were considered the up and coming star and well rewarded for your breakthrough ideas.  

But if you’re really like the millions of innovative thinkers of this century… you might also have a secret.    A secret those close to you may regard as weird, flippant or perhaps even dangerous.  Yes, it’s alright, many of us suffer from the ever so virulent Entrepreneur’s Curse: “Beware of Shiny Objects!”

That’s right, that high speed brain of yours is constantly scanning the environment for the next best or latest greatest idea of the century.  Of course, you need to try them out to see if they work or make them even better.  No one understands how great entrepreneurs are like great baseball players; our strike-out average is far greater than our home-runs.  But when we hit a home-run, everyone is cheering for more, more, more.  And we always want to please the crowd.

But let me confess something, after years of ridicule from family, friends and associates I finally realized that I wasn’t really that different, I didn’t have A.D.D. nor was I simply someone who lacked discipline.   I just needed to create guidelines and structure that worked with my insatiable appetite for information and discovery.  I created systems and support in my life that directed and focused my imagination, rather than contain and stifle it.

The further you read into this and the more you learn about other entrepreneurs, the more you will soon discover similarities in habits like; half finished projects, piles of ‘waiting to be read’ books, information junkies, eclectic likes and dislikes, and either a string of broken relationships or one very understanding and patient spouse. 

Here’s a few tips for the solo-entrepreneur to remedy some of the above;

1. Get crystal clarity of your objectives.  Short and long term.
2. Find a partner to work with and share the work load.
3. Create a team of support specialists to assist you with projects, you already wear enough hats.
4. Plan your time off and use it.  Get a life.
5. Find or create a Mastermind Team to share ideas with.
6. Step away from doing your work and look at it with a different perspective;
   1. Are you spending your time on the right tasks?
   2. Can more be outsourced?
   3. Are you in love with a failing project and is it time to let it go?
7. Find an accountability partner or a coach to keep you focused and on track.

With this in mind, all we once thought to be odd behavior can now be considered normal traits of the classic entrepreneur.  But in the age of the internet and technology creating more ways to distract us from our priorities, it’s imperative to develop a system that stimulates the mind and still keeps us focused and on track.

I wrote earlier about how neurons in the brain are created and how, like a muscle, they are strengthened through use or atrophy and wither with non-use. 

What kind of neuro-pathways have you developed over the years?  Which ones would you like to enliven and which ones would you like to release?

What if you could rewire them?  What if you could start new neural firing that is designed to reinforce and serve your deepest dreams and desires, rather than default to the less motivating negative thoughts and emotions?

Well you can and it’s easy!

To maximize the advantage of Neuroplasticity you will want to understand the importance of pattern interruptions and anchors.  Although some of you may have an understanding of these processes, please bear with me as I blend their uniqueness with the rest of the presentation.

Pattern interruptions are just that; the interrupting of continuous behavioral patterns you experience daily.  An example would be; (pause) imagine you are at your desk working on a very intense report.  You are concentrating hard on the information you are processing and suddenly the phone rings.  Now you are irritated and your concentration is lost.  You have just experienced a negative pattern interruption.

In this case, Anchors are not something you through into the water.  Anchors are positive or negative behaviors that are linked to a particular action, event or feeling.  An example of an Anchor would be; (pause) again imagine you are driving down the street and for some reason you start thinking about your high school prom.  Good or bad the memory has mysteriously popped into your mind.  Where did it come from?  Then you notice that the prom’s theme song is playing on the radio…You have just experienced an Anchor. 

We can go a bit deeper and determine whether the song triggered a positive or negative mood.  If the song triggers pleasant memories, that’s great!  You may want to think about using it for other pick-me-ups in the future.  However, if it triggers a negative feeling, you may want to avoid it in the future or have it collapsed as an anchor.

Now let’s take both of these scenarios and blend them together into a motivating process.  Once again; imagine you are back at your desk working hard at that same old report and suddenly the phone rings again.  But this time; you experience the same pleasant feeling the song brings you, as it has been previously anchored to the pattern interruption of the phone ringing.  You look at the ringing phone and a gentle smile comes across your face.  Keep on ringing!

There have been a lot of great movies and books that focus on these methods and many have touch on the best strategy to fire the right thoughts and wire them to empowering and motivating emotions using processes like Affirmations, EFT, NLP and Hypnosis. 

The challenge in managing your 50,000 thoughts a day is that for a program to be effective it must be working automatically through the unconscious mind.  We believe that a balanced melding of these types of processes, that is reinforced and supported with a fire and wire mechanism will enormously increase the effectiveness for lasting change and at the same time reduce the time commitment involved.  In other words, trying to fire and wire for an hour a day isn’t very effective, minimally efficient and quite difficult to schedule on a regular basis.  Why not let the unconscious mind do the work for you?

By developing a system for continuous unconscious pattern interruptions and positive anchoring throughout the day, you will have the reinforcement to create stronger pathways that are necessary for effective change. 

A kind of system that gives you the ability to set the pace for ingeniously directing your daily actions by rewiring your neural pathways faster than you may have ever thought possible. Firing off a series of continuous new connections throughout the day so you can embrace the wonders of living your life with even more vibrancy and splendor than you may have ever imagined. Something on that a little later.

I wrote earlier about how neurons in the brain are created and how, like a muscle, they are strengthened through use or atrophy and wither with non-use. 

What kind of neuro-pathways have you developed over the years?  Which ones would you like to enliven and which ones would you like to release?

What if you could rewire them?  What if you could start new neural firing that is designed to reinforce and serve your deepest dreams and desires, rather than default to the less motivating negative thoughts and emotions?

Well you can and it’s easy!

To maximize the advantage of Neuroplasticity you will want to understand the importance of pattern interruptions and anchors.  Although some of you may have an understanding of these processes, please bear with me as I blend their uniqueness with the rest of the presentation.

Pattern interruptions are just that; the interrupting of continuous behavioral patterns you experience daily.  An example would be; imagine you are at your desk working on a very intense report.  You are concentrating hard on the information you are processing and suddenly the phone rings.  Now you are irritated and your concentration is lost.  You have just experienced a negative pattern interruption.

In this case, Anchors are not something you through into the water.  Anchors are positive or negative behaviors that are linked to a particular action, event or feeling.  An example of an Anchor would be; again imagine you are driving down the street and for some reason you start thinking about your high school prom.  Good or bad the memory has mysteriously popped into your mind.  Where did it come from?  Then you notice that the prom’s theme song is playing on the radio…You have just experienced an Anchor. 

We can go a bit deeper and determine whether the song triggered a positive or negative mood.  If the song triggers pleasant memories, that’s great!  You may want to think about using it for other pick-me-ups in the future.  However, if it triggers a negative feeling, you may want to avoid it in the future or have it collapsed as an anchor.

Now let’s take both of these scenarios and blend them together into a motivating process.  Once again; imagine you are back at your desk working hard at that same old report and suddenly the phone rings again.  But this time; you experience the same pleasant feeling the song brings you, as it has been previously anchored to the pattern interruption of the phone ringing.  You look at the ringing phone and a gentle smile comes across your face.  Keep on ringing!

There have been a lot of great movies and books that focus on these methods and many have touch on the best strategy to fire the right thoughts and wire them to empowering and motivating emotions using processes like Affirmations, EFT, NLP and Hypnosis. 

The challenge in managing your 50,000 thoughts a day is that for a program to be effective it must be working automatically through the unconscious mind.  We believe that a balanced melding of these types of processes, that is reinforced and supported with a fire and wire mechanism will enormously increase the effectiveness for lasting change and at the same time reduce the time commitment involved.  In other words, trying to fire and wire for an hour a day isn’t very effective, minimally efficient and quite difficult to schedule on a regular basis.  Why not let the unconscious mind do the work for you?

By developing a system for continuous unconscious pattern interruptions and positive anchoring throughout the day, you will have the reinforcement to create stronger pathways that are necessary for effective change. 

A kind of system that gives you the ability to set the pace for ingeniously directing your daily actions by rewiring your neural pathways faster than you may have ever thought possible. Firing off a series of continuous new connections throughout the day so you can embrace the wonders of living your life with even more vibrancy and splendor than you may have ever imagined.

It’s Happening!

I wrote about this awhile back…so now I’m afraid to say “I told you so!”

“Buried deep within the over 1,000 pages of the massive US Health Care Bill (PDF) in a “non-discussed” section titled: Subtitle C-11 Sec. 2521— National Medical Device Registry, and which states its purpose as:

“The Secretary shall establish a national medical device registry (in this subsection referred to as the ‘registry’) to facilitate analysis of postmarket safety and outcomes data on each device that—‘‘(A) is or has been used in or on a patient; and ‘‘(B) is a class III device; or ‘‘(ii) a class II device that is implantable.”

According to this report, when fully implemented, this new law, frames the making for the United States to be the first Nation in the World to require every one of its citizens to have “The Chip” implanted in them.

OMG I thought I was reading a Scifi book.  This is totally surreal.  They say it’s for the purpose of controlling who is, or isn’t, allowed medical care in their country.  HA! It’s simply the beginning of a much larger scale plan.  What’s that plan? 

At one time or another you may have read one of my quotes; “You can create a herd and lead it, or join a herd and follow it to slaughter.” So the choice is yours, follower or leader?  Which are you?

Looks like we’re about to find out.

Good luck.

Did you know that the simple act of understanding how things work actually accelerates the process and makes it work better?  With this in mind, let’s take a few minutes and step into the workings of the brain to better understand how things operate and why we do the things we do. 

Here we see two neurons connecting, and in essence you are witnessing an idea being born.  Neurons are the core components of the nervous system and 45 miles of them run throughout your body.  Neurons use bioelectrical impulses to communicate with each other throughout the body.  It’s like an electrical circuitry throughout our entire body, controlling movement, reactions and thoughts. 

For this discussion, we are predominantly concerned with the neurons in the brain, which contains an estimated 100 billion neurons with over 100 trillion connections.  Neurons in the brain are basically storage units for information, experiences and memories. 

Each time you access a memory, you are accessing an existing cluster of neurons and each time you learn something new, you are creating new neurons and clusters.  The more you trigger a particular neuron to fire, the memory or thought it’s attached to is reinforced and the stronger the connections to that neuron become. It’s termed “Neurons that fire together, wire together”.

For example; What’s your birthday?

You see you didn’t have to think about that because the connections to that set of neurons have been fired and wired together and reinforced over time, so it becomes an easy to access memory. 

In comparison; What did you have for dinner Tuesday, January 5^th 2008?  Not so easy to remember.  This is because that particular cluster of neurons haven’t been accessed for a long time, if ever.  So they are basically archived.

With all this in mind, let’s think about how this information can be used to your advantage.  Are your primary thoughts positive and empowering, or are they negative and de-motivating?  Regardless of which one, the neurons for these thoughts have been strengthen over time and will be the easiest for the mind to access, thus your primary thinking will be in the direction of how you have been firing and wiring the most.

A bit later one of my blogs will be discussing the exciting new advancements in Neuroplasicity research and how amazing breakthroughs neuroscience prove that Firing and Wiring can be rewritten and directed to work in your favor.

Have you ever experienced a time when you bought a new car and as soon as you drive off the car lot, you see the same make and model everywhere? The car you originally thought was relatively rare, or at least unique is now virtually around every corner. How can this be? Did everyone have the same idea as you and went out and purchased the same car last weekend? Where did they all come from?

Yes, I’m sorry to inform you that the car manufacture “did” build more than one ‘Mars Red Mercedes SLK 350 Roadster’ and the brutal truth is that all the other ones you are seeing have really been there all along.

The good news is that you have now learned a valuable lesson in how to program your mind to work for you! Welcome to the world of your subconscious mind known as the Reticular Activation System - or RAS. Your RAS plays an incredibly vital part in your ability to achieve goals and seek out opportunity.

Your Reticular Activation System is like a filter between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind. It takes instructions from your conscious mind and passes them on to your subconscious. For example, the instruction might be, “I like Mercedes sports cars.” and Whal-la they’re everywhere!

The Partner You Always Wish You Had…and Do!

The true power in the Reticular Activation System is its ability to multi-task and work when you’re not. 24/7 365 days a year, it’s scanning the 4 million bits of information your senses take in every second and sifts through the data looking for pertinent information that will fulfill the objective(s) that have been programmed into it.

By creating a very specific description or picture of your goal/dream/desire in your conscious mind the RAS will then pass this on to your subconscious mind, which will then be programmed to begin searching for specific information that will help you achieve your specific goal.

Perhaps you know people who always seem to find the best deals. An antique dealer who “sees” the exceptional 18th Century French Antique Louis XV Homme Debout that everyone else just walked by. The art collector that “over hears” a conversation about a 1939 rare Picasso ‘Don Quixote Sketch’ for sale, while having coffee at a downtown Starbucks. Or perhaps the real estate investor who drives by an old beat up house and “feels” he needs to stop and inquire about its availability.

You may not have seen the cabinet at the garage sale, or heard the conversation in a noisy coffee house, or cared about a broken down old house, but these individuals had their Reticular Activation Systems tuned in for specific information. Continuously it’s searching and scanning their predominant environments and filtering through the “background noise” for specific cues and details that pertained to their predetermined goals/dreams/desires.

The Other Side of the Coin

So how are predetermined goals/dreams/desires programmed into the Reticular Activation System? With crystal clear clarity! For example, by setting very specific goals, or repeating powerful concise affirmations, or visualizing your dreams down to the last detail, the RAS will begin to respond to the programming you are sending it. I also recommend reading books, watching videos or listening to audios that are congruent with your goals to better stimulate the RAS.

Remember the other side. Your Reticular Activation System cannot distinguish between ‘real events’ and ‘imagined’ reality. In other words, it tends to believe whatever message you give it. Which means that if you are telling yourself you cannot appreciate Picasso, or don’t like antiques or are not interested in real estate, then the RAS will understand that you no longer want to be informed when these things enter your environment and filter them out for you. Thus, these possible opportunities will pass you by.

The Reticular Activation System is your best friend, business partner and confidant. Always at work, listening to your thoughts of your goals/dreams/desires and deciding what you see and what you don’t see, revealing what you want to see, and veils that which you told it you aren’t interested in. So what is your Reticular Activation System programmed for?

A short yet powerful video from the Dalai Lama talking about business.  Can running a successful business be so simple?  Have we gotten so caught up in the idea that everything good needs to be complicated?

This came to me through the Leaders to Leaders Institute.  Thanks  guys!

Here is a great example of what I’m talking about.  This weekend I took a trip from Seattle up to Vancouver BC to attend a small workshop.  It was a very good trip and well worth the my time and investment.  But the event isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about; it is the drive itself.

As I always do, I ran Google maps to get the specific driving directions and estimated trip time to set my schedule accordingly.  As you may or may not know, the driving instructions give you specific turns and the distance between them so you can better judge where you are, to where you are going. 

At one particlar junction I was to make a turn on to Highway 91, travel for 1.7 miles and it would lead me to Highway 91A.  Easy right?  As I’m driving (and listening to a podcast on my ipod) I realize that I seem to have traveled further than 1.7 miles and must have missed my turn off to Highway 91A.  I decide to turn around and go back and see where I missed my turn, so I take the next available exit, just before the Queensborough Bridge. 

That particular exit was probably the worst exit I could have taken to try and turn around.  It was a series of twists and turns that intersected and wrapped around and could be confusing to someone unfamilar with the area and trying to get turned around.

All of a sudden I made a sharp left turn across three lanes to catch a particular off-ramp.  In this crazy manuever, I made a decision to turn, checked my mirrors, turned my head to visually confirm a safe route, made the turn and read the new signs, all unconsciously.  My conscious mind had been instantly taken over by the unconscious mind and was not making any decisions at this point.  Why it did this was unclear at the time.

Well come to find out, I was right back on the original Highway 91 that I had turned off of.  My conscious mind was throwing a fit, telling itself how stupid that little maneuver was, that I was going to be late for my meeting and that I couldn’t turn off again because I was committed to crossing the Queensborough Bridge and had no idea where it would take me.

So onward I travel waiting to come to the next exit so I could try and turn around again and get back on track.  The next exit; Highway 91A!

Besides consciously feeling a bit foolish about this little fiasco, I was completely fascinated and grateful about the way my unconscious mind took over, KNOWING that getting back on my original course would take me where I needed to go.  You see what happened is that my unconscious mind remembered the map of Vancouver I looked at 3 hours earlier.  It determined that my conscious move to turn off Highway 91 was in error and corrected my action before I made things worse. 

These kind of situations happen to all of us everyday, but are you aware of what is happening?  Communication and actions through the unconscious mind occurs every second of the day (95% of the time) and when you increase the communication between the conscious and unconscious mind, a synergy begins to develop between the two and the internal arguments start to diminish.  This is a profound feeling that keeps you on track, stress free and opens your eyes to so many more opportunities that your internal filters would normally disregard.

I will be sharing more and more of these kinds of stories from myself and from those around me.  I would love to hear about your experiences.  Are you at war or at peace with your internal dialogue?

I saw a commercial last year about the guy who walks into the convenience store and begins putting things in his pocket, then leaves and a scanner rings up his purchases and bills his credit card.  Same type of situation, all the credit information was implanted on a chip.

Don’t be fooled that this is science fiction!  Thirty years a go I sat with a group of high level bankers who told me a wild story of driving up to a gas station and pumping your own gas, paying at the pump with a psuedo credit card (debit cards didn’t exist then) and driving off.  Eight years later, I went to my first automated gas station.  Now it’s common practice.  These types of moves are planned generationally, we may fight it now, but that isn’t a concern, the real market is the next generation and the ones after that.

I think what concerns me is that the more information we make electronic and assessable, the easier for ANYONE it is to collect information.  Look how easy it has gotten to crack wifi signals, credit card databases, etc.

Besides, what else does this chip do?

I would really like to hear your opinions about this and how you feel.  Is it cool with you or are you nervous?  What about your kids (whether you have them now or not)?

]]> http://innerarchitects.com/rossnews/?feed=rss2&p=122 http://innerarchitects.com/rossnews/?p=74 http://innerarchitects.com/rossnews/?p=74#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:02:58 +0000 InnerArchitects http://innerarchitects.com/rossnews/?p=74

Science knows a lot about the human body and the brain that controls it, but it seems that the more we learn, the more we realize we don’t know. Although the body is the most advanced mechanism in the universe, the brain that runs it so precisely, is relatively stupid. It really only knows three reactions to any given situation; Stop, Go or Ignore and hasn’t evolved enough to take into consideration the interpretation and execution of the emotions we have been blessed with.

We know how the body is designed as a mega pharmaceutical laboratory and warehouse, creating the needed chemicals the mind tells it to produce for any given situation or event. In turn, these events and sensations are merely interpretations of the Stop, Go or Ignore theme and chemicals are sent into the body, where we interpret (feel) them as sensations of love, anger, sadness, joy, fear, panic, etc.

We know that stress affects two incredibly important systems of the body. In medical terms; they are called the Somatic System which controls the functions of the body’s extremities voluntary muscles and motor functions. Then you have the Viscera System which controls the function of the internal organs and promotes the immune system, healthy healing and growth.

Stress has two basic controls on these systems; on or off. In other words, if one is running, the other is operating at diminished capacity and vice versa. Taking you back to the evolution of the human body, I’m sorry to say it hasn’t come very far in its ability to handle the woes of modern living. The burdens we put upon ourselves on a daily, sometime hourly basis, causes the body to revert back to the fight or flight response from our days as hunter-gatherers, causing the Somatic System to continually click “on” and jeopardizing our other systems the ability to heal and grow.

It is here, where modern man fails to realize our frailty as emotional biological beings. Although not built to handle the burdens of emotions, we are intelligent beings and have developed ways to control these processes. If you choose to.

We at InnerArchitects want you to have the resources to take control of your Mind, Brain and Body. By blending science with ancient techniques, you can alleviate the strain of the emotional burdens you may consciously know about and the more dangerous ones you don’t know of. You will come away with natural and holistic methods for conquering the stress of the day and get back to enjoying life once again. If this is your goal, then get involved with us. We commit ourselves to serving you with concise and sound information that will expand your horizons and stretch your imagination.