Change your brain, change your world

Change your brain, change your life

“I am your constant companion. I am your greatest helper or your heaviest burden. I will push you onward or drag you down to failure. I am completely at your command, half the tasks you do you must just as well turn over to me and I will be able to do them quickly and correctly. I am easily managed; you must merely be firm with me. Show me exactly how you want something done and after a few lessons, I will do it automatically. I am the servant of all great men and women and alas, of all the great failures as well. Those who are great, I have made great. Those who are failures, I have made failures. Take me, train me, be firm with me and I will put the world at your feet. Be easy with me and I will destroy you”.

Who am I?

The answer is “I am your brain”.  This paragraph written by Wendell Noble years ago sums up in a very effective manner the power of your brain.

The brain is involved in absolutely everything we do. How we think, feel, act and interact with other people. It is the organ that determines who you are as a person, spouse, parent, child, employee or boss.

If you have a good brain, you have a good life if you have a bad brain you have a lousy life. When your brain works right, you work right, when your brain doesn’t work right, you can’t work right.

What is most interesting is that this three pound lump of wrinkly mass is the most complicated thing in the whole universe and yet it is 75 to 85% liquid with the consistency of butter.

I find it so interesting that the brain generates nearly 25 watts of power while you are awake, which is enough to light up a light bulb.

Some scientists say that the brain generates more electrical impulses in one day by only one human brain than by all the telephones in the world.  This is difficult to believe until you realize that it is made up of 100 billion neurons, the same amount as there are stars in our galaxy. You can find 30,000 neurons on the head of a pin.

What I want to emphasize here is that every time you have a thought, your brain releases chemicals.

Every bad thought releases chemicals that make you feel bad and every good thought releases chemicals that make you feel good.

In Dr. Donald Goff’s Ph.D. dissertation he observed that the negative activity taking place in his students was significantly related to the combination of three negative feeling states:

1.       Not feeling loved, cared about or liked.

2.       Generally feeling sad and or angry.

3.       Not feeling good about themselves and life.

He asserted that negative feeling states represented the strongest statistically significant relationship to harmful and unproductive behavior, more than any other identified factor.

The productive students on the other hand, felt good about themselves, liked themselves, felt life was good and worthwhile and felt good about the rest of their lives and their future possibilities.

These good feelings were significantly related to other constructive and positive attitudes and behaviors.

As a general principle, if you feel good about yourself, you will do well and if you feel bad or have bad feelings, you will do badly.

The often quoted scientist Albert Einstein wrote: “There are two ways to live life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is amazing and truly beautiful”

Think about it, what would be the consequences if you lived your life being full of amazement, wonder and awe?

It doesn’t take a genius to know that your life would be very exciting, fun and you would be constantly challenged by what you discover on a daily basis.

What we must keep in mind:

What you think about, you bring about.

What you resist persists (Carl Jung)

The difference between a man or woman of weakness and one of power lies not in the strength of the personal will, but on what you focus on.

When the marshmallow experiment with the four year olds was performed (you can see the video on www.ted.com then type my name) some of the children that were able to delay gratification, did so not because they had a stronger will power but because they took their attention away from the marshmallow and directed it someplace else. That as they say, took away the temptation.  They focused on something else, not on the marshmallow.

Whatever you steadfastly direct your attention to, will come into your life and dominate it.  Understand that attention is power, energy goes where attention flows and what you focus on, will determine your reality.

If you focus on what you need, not on what you have, what you are not instead of what you are, what might have been instead of what is or what you are doing without instead of what you are doing with, you have an attitude problem that will close doors and opportunities all your life.

We know times are tough; you must keep a positive attitude and look for opportunities with an open mind and focus on how you can best serve society. If you do that, money will follow.

I end with a beautiful quote by Melody Beattie:

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow”.