Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (16 page)

One of the more exciting findings of contemporary brain research has been the brain’s inherent plasticity. Neuroscientists have long seen that neurons and their dendrites—the physical structures behind thought and perception—act together to create brain patterns that we experience as thoughts and feelings. What they have now discovered is that this brain patterning is fluid and malleable. Even deeply embedded patterns can be changed through practices like cognitive shifting, and especially through distracting the conscious.

After a few minutes, or longer if you are enjoying the stillness, it is time to make your covenant. Take a pen and pad, and write down your decision.

I, (your full name), from this day forward, take full control of my mentality. I accept responsibility and accountability for my experiences. I intend abundance to flow in my life. I commit to change all patterns of destructive behavior, and to consistently introduce whatever it takes to succeed
.

And then sign and date it.

If the thought of what change means scares you, it is equally important to make a covenant. Don’t stay on the edge of quicksand but secretly wish you had changed or a life of frustration and disappointment is assured. Don’t change but secretly wish you had stayed near the quicksand or a life of failures is guaranteed. Misery is caused by indecisiveness, so you must decide.

Then it is done, and your commitment is noted. Whether you know it or not, you are already among that fraction of people who are happier simply because they have made a decision. You
are also out of the quicksand. Maybe someday you can help some others get out.

If you have been practicing control of mentality, you will already be experiencing delightful changes in your life. Positive thinking is like a helium balloon, and negative thoughts are the ceiling they press against. Remove the ceiling by shutting out all that negative noise, and the balloon soars.

You notice changes in your environment. The sunshine really does seem brighter, the flowers more colorful. You may also notice the stars at night for the first time in ages. People with a cheerier disposition are attracted to you, so there is more laughter in your day. You get compliments out of nowhere and perhaps asked if it is a new hairstyle, clothes, or a diet. When people ask you how you are feeling, you tell them you are feeling great—because you are! You start to feel a buzz inside, the sort of buzz you have not felt since you were a very small child. It is the excitement of a great adventure ahead.

With some degree of control established, we can now work on rewiring your brain so that it can generate the brilliant ideas you need and that you probably thought were the province of only intellectuals and geniuses. The main method is a simple meditative technique that I call
Taking Quiet Time
. It requires no experience, no skill, and anyone from age five to eighty-five can start tomorrow and enjoy the same benefits in their ability to wire a new neural network that will be the source of critical moments of insight.

In the stories of self-made men and women, I was fascinated that most had some method of escaping the craziness of their schedules to sit quietly somewhere just to contemplate. They claimed their best ideas came to them when they stopped pondering the problem. They all had different ways of describing the process, depending on what was acceptable to believe at the time. The common elements for their systems of idea creation were contemplation time taken alone and, where possible, far from the madding crowd, daily practice, early in the day, and informal.

The human brain contains approximately a hundred billion neurons. It’s possible your brain has more neural connections than there are stars in the universe! Neurons in your cerebellum can have one million connections each. The average person fires more neurons in a day than all the cell phone connections on the planet. Your brain is alive and ever changing with neurons disengaging and engaging in new neural networks constantly.

We develop neural networks two ways. When we learn something new, we utilize what we already know to understand better the thing we do not know. Our brain reaches for the familiar. Using the law of association, your brain fires new neural connections to create understanding.

The law of association is a law of psychology that is based on the teachings of Aristotle. Neurons that did not previously connect now do and a new neural network forms. If we do the same thing repeatedly, it becomes familiar, unconscious, and effortless. When you learn something new and repeat it in your mind, you are actually creating a neural network based on the law of repetition, another psychology law. When we build neural networks, a substance called Neural Growth Factor (NGF) actually “hard wires” the neurons
together. Significantly, if an old neural network is not working properly, it may lose the NGF holding it together, and now we begin to see the benefit of mentality control.

In addition,
when we consciously change a neural network through hypnosis or another intervention such as meditation, we break down the existing NGF and rewire the network to new ways of thinking. (Rewire Your Brain; Think Your Way to a Better Life
, by John B. Arden, PhD)

Before we get into this simple technique, I need to address the fact that some of you may already practice yoga, tai chi, meditation, or some other discipline that aims at achieving spiritual and health improvement. Taking quiet time does not have those aims. It is purely a system of problem solving. Its aim is to find your path away from the quicksand. The benefit is the production of new neurons and neural pathways that, once they are protected from negativity and fear via mentality control, are the source of those wonderful, life-changing moments of insight. I am not suggesting you give up or change the other practices you enjoy. Taking quiet time is a separate, necessary step, and for many of you will be an additional activity in your day.

The taking quiet time technique has three parts to it. First is relaxation, second is finding stillness, and third is mental imagery. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes. It requires no skill or experience, and there are no advanced levels. The technique, or versions of it, can be found in most other spiritual and mental practices, but because those activities have a different intention the technique gets absorbed and produces a different result. Think of those practices, such as yoga, as a baked cake. In yoga or any other discipline, there are many ingredients, added in a certain order and baked a particular way to achieve a delicious, airy sponge. With taking quiet time, what we are doing is taking a couple of the same ingredients and using them differently to get a result that is as different in texture and taste as an omelet is to a cupcake.

Be careful not to confuse quietness with silence. Silence is hard to achieve. Sound is the brain’s interpretation of the vibrating cilia in the ear in response to airwaves. Unless you remove all air from your environment and within your body, you cannot find silence. So don’t try. Emotions are also a form of noise. By quietness, I mean a sense of calm or stillness. Stillness, like the still of the night, is a calm, motionless existence, devoid of thought or emotion. It is emptiness. It is close to nothingness, and the closer we get to that, the closer we get to all of our potential and the more ideas we will have.

In life, we get infrequent reminders of what this stillness feels like. It is that nanosecond of magic when a baby’s hand closes around your extended finger or the sense of infinity as the sun slips below the horizon or knowing eyes briefly connect across a crowded room. We barely notice ourselves disappear in those times, but we do.

The insanity I prescribe is that taking quiet time needs to become a daily habit, and it requires you not to switch on the computer, radio, television, or cell phone first. It is contrary to how we have learned to behave in this time and place. Taking quiet time becomes the number one business growth tool in your arsenal, and the aim is to make it one of the first things you do every day. Here is the technique I recommend:

        
Taking quiet time must be a technique you practice alone. You might currently enjoy meditating with a friend, partner, or group, but with this second step you must be alone. We are aiming to return to the nothingness of the newborn individual, and that requires you to separate from the powerful energy of other people’s thoughts and intentions. You would never think of having both radio and television volumes on at the same
time in the same room. It would sound chaotic and probably irritating. With taking quiet times, thought energies would mingle and cause destructive interference. Solitude is essential.

        
Because our days are filled with sensory input right up until we fall asleep at night, this process is best undertaken early after waking. Where and when possible, it should be among the first things we do after waking. Quietness is only achievable while our minds are not yet fully awake, and we can tap into the inherent stillness of the dawn hours. To emphasize the importance of timing, we need to digress a moment to consider how men and women think differently.

        
Men tend to process thought in a linear way, taking one thing at a time. Our brains are like clipboards with a list of items and checkboxes. When we complete one task, we tick the box and move on to the next. Hence, taking quiet time first thing in the morning gives it the necessary priority and guarantees it gets done. Do it, check it off. Move on.

        
Women have the capacity to multitask mentally. All in the same moment, they can be thinking about what to wear, what to put in the kids’ lunch boxes, how much milk is left in the fridge, how they should approach the issue of a raise with their boss, whether to ask the neighbors over for dinner on Friday night, what would be the best time and menu, and what did their husband really mean by that comment last night in bed. (I, of course, had completely forgotten I made the comment, and never meant anything by it in the first place, but that explanation will never make her thought go away.)
Therefore, if a woman tries to take quiet time at any time other than early in the morning, it will be harder for her to shut the left side of the brain down.

        
If you can find alone time and space where you live, then no matter what time you get up now, set the alarm clock to wake you thirty minutes earlier. If you live in a busy household, you should strive to be the first person up or else the distractions will destroy the process. Sounds are not so much an issue as the emotions they carry. Quietness requires emotionless contemplation.

        
Of course, reality is not so straightforward. There are other things we might do after waking, and this is not intended to be a military discipline. You may have valid reasons you can’t get up half an hour before anyone else wakes or steal away to a private place. The imperatives are that you take quiet time alone and as early in the day as you can manage.

        
Choose as silent a place as you can find, one away from as many interrupting sounds as possible. There are always distracting sounds including internal ones, so don’t stress about it. The hum of electricity is almost always in the air, and our stomachs might growl for breakfast. That does not matter. Wherever that place is for you, try to make it comfortable so you look forward to being there every morning. A comfy chair in a quiet corner, with a towel or blanket to keep you warm, is sufficient. Think minimalist here. A chair, a cushion, or a sofa in a corner of a room is fine. If you have a room with a window that looks out onto something natural like a tree, you are golden.

        
Sit comfortably. Don’t lie down because at that time in the morning, it is too easy to fall back to sleep. A little extra sleep cannot harm, but we are aiming to achieve something powerful here. It sounds like an oxymoron, but we need to focus on nothing. For that, we need to be awake enough to control our thoughts. It doesn’t matter how you position your legs so long as you are comfortable. It is what we do with our mind that counts, so all we aim for with the body is to get it relaxed and comfortable so it does not interrupt us for the next twenty minutes with aches and pains. I like to place my hands touching together in my lap. Feet can be apart but resting in contact with the floor. It is simply a relaxed sitting position.

        
It can help if you clear the energy around you before you start. If you had unpleasant dreams or feel weary, rub the palms of your hands vigorously together until you can feel the heat energy being exchanged between them. Place a palm on each side of your forehead and drag your hands down your cheeks. Shake your hands as if air-drying them. Do this three times. Repeat for the crown of your head three times. Then cross your arms and brush your hands over the opposite shoulders and upper arms.

        
This technique seems a little “out there,” doesn’t it? Have you ever noticed, however, stressed workers or entrepreneurs sitting at their desks, overwhelmed by a challenge? Don’t they, at some point, put their heads in their hands? Have you ever seen them then brush their hands through their hair and sigh out loud, and then rest their interlocked fingers at the back of their necks?

        
The next time you watch something scary, like a horror movie, perhaps you might also notice that most people hide their eyes behind their hands, and then drag their fingers down their faces when the scary moment passes. It is a form of stress-energy clearing. We do it without thinking and also without knowing why we do it. It is ancient medicine, hardwired into our subconscious. There is nothing “new age” about it at all. The more detailed suggestion I have here was actually a common Native American practice performed by all members of a tribe before starting a meeting or ritual. When no one is looking, I do this several times a day and always find it refreshing. All we are doing is wiping away stale energy. It feels like wiping away the tiredness from our eyes, and it is rejuvenating.