Life Enhancing

Sweet Dreams - The Messages in our Dreams

2012-08-12T19:48:00.001+10:00

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

"When you find a dream inside your heart, don't let it go. For dreams are the tiny seeds from which beautiful tomorrows grow."

In my blog post on 'Life Enhancing Dreams' I talked about how we direct our life through our dreams, desires and outcomes, explored the difference between dreams and outcomes and described how to integrate the head, heart and gut (enteric) brains to help you begin to create the life you dream about. In today's post however...

"Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions."

"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you."

I want to explore dreams and dreaming from a different perspective. I want to describe and share evidence and ideas about dreams as messages from our multiple brains; dreams as deeply intuitive communications from our heart and gut brains. But first a true and chilling story...

Dreams that saved a life!

In early 2011, Oprah Winfrey decided she wanted to run an issue of her magazine solely devoted to the power of intuition and how to tap into gut instincts. Her magazine editors and researchers began searching for true and verifiable stories about people whose lives had been saved by hunches and messages from their deep intuition. What they found are some amazing stories, and these are detailed in the August 2011 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, but the one that really stands out is the experience of Trisha Coburn.

Trisha was 46 years of age and living a successful, healthy life, when one night she had an intense and disturbing dream that ultimately saved her life. In the dream she was standing at a barbed-wire fence and a group of frail and scary people on the other side were trying to tell her something in a language she couldn’t comprehend. For the next couple of weeks she had the same dream recurringly, and each time the number of people in the dream increased and looked more and more desperate. The dreams were so disturbing she would wake up crying. She knew something was wrong.

So Trisha called her doctor and scheduled a full physical workup. But the results came back negative and her doctor was convinced Trisha was healthy and over-reacting. Still the dream came back, this time with 100 people, all wailing, screaming and pleading in their strange language. A few days after that, the same dream occurred one last time, but in this dream the fence was empty, there was no one there.

This was so disturbing to Trisha she went immediately to her doctor again and asked him what he thought was the deepest place in the human body. After he told her it was the colon, she demanded a colonoscopy. Even though her doctor was against it because she had no symptoms and no family history of colon cancer, Trisha insisted.

And fortunately for Trisha, she listened to the messages from her dreams. During the colonoscopy the gastroenterologist found aggressive and fast moving cancer throughout her colon. Her life was saved. A message from her gut brain that all was not well, communicated via dreams, allowed her to find the cancer and have it removed before it killed her. The surgeon later told her if she’d waited another two months, the prognosis would have been grim.

What a chilling and powerful story about the power of dreams for tapping into your deep gut wisdom!

The gut dreaming...

Every night, as you sleep, your head brain goes through periods of what is known as REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. REM sleep is a normal stage of sleep, occurs approximately every 90 minutes on average, and is associated with the act of dreaming. It’s believed by many neuroscientists and sleep researchers to be an integral part of the learning process and plays a major role in the integration of memory, experience and knowledge. A recent study at the University of California, using brain scans, showed that during REM sleep, memories are being reactivated, put in perspective and integrated. It was demonstrated that REM sleep acts like a form of overnight balm, soothing the emotional experiences of the previous day.

Fascinatingly, the gut brain also goes through a process akin to REM sleep, only in the gut this is known as RGM (Rapid Gut Movement) sleep. Approximately every 90 minutes, while you sleep, the gut goes through periods of RGM. It is suggested by some researchers that this is a time when the gut and head are communicating and integrating the knowledge and experiences of the day. It has also been noted by researchers that people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and other inflammatory bowel disorders suffer from poor sleep patterns, experience abnormal amounts of REM and RGM sleep periods and report more intense and prolific dreaming compared to control subjects.

Based on these insights, it is likely therefore that dreams are important ways in which the gut brain communicates to the head brain and allows intuitions and ‘gut wisdom’ to surface into consciousness. As the esoteric wisdom traditions maintain, your dreams contain messages from your gut and heart. For example, in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) it is suggested the gut communicates about its state through dreams and when it’s infected with intestinal parasites the dreams have specificity about what sort of parasite exists in the gut. Ancient Taoist TCM texts say that, “When one has small intestinal parasites, one will dream of crowds; when one has long intestinal parasites, one will dream of fights and mutual destruction.”

Messages from the heart...

Now here are some more amazing and somewhat 'spooky' pieces of evidence about messages received from dreams. These however, are about dream messages from the heart and what is most fascinating is the level of specificity that must be contained in heart brain memories for the messages to contain such incredible details. I hope you find them as intriguing as I did when I first read them.

As described in my book 'mBraining', after a heart and lung transplant operation, dancer Claire Sylvia discovered that her new organs were not the only thing she inherited. As detailed in her fascinating biography ‘A Change of Heart’, one night, five months after her operation, Claire woke from a vivid and entrancing dream. In her dream, she met a man named Tim L. and formed a strong bond with him. As the dream unfolded, it became time for Tim to leave, and just before he did, Claire and Tim kissed and during the kiss, Claire inhaled Tim into her and awoke, knowing that she and Tim would be together forever.

This dream was so vivid, unusual and exhilarating that on awakening, Claire felt as if she’d finally integrated her new heart and lungs within her. She says she woke up knowing that Tim L. was her donor and that parts of his spirit and personality were now within her. This deep sense of knowing started her on a quest to find out who her donor really was and after months and months of frustrated research and searching she finally made contact with his family. And the kicker to the story… the donor’s real name was Tim LaSalle.

What an amazing story! Definitely worth reading. It’s also backed up by medical research that shows that severed vagus nerves can, after several months, reconnect and re-innervate the cardiac nervous system of the new heart. Obviously, in Claire’s case, her new heart connected strongly and was able to send messages in her dreams to help her accept and integrate her new heart brain.

Finally, here’s another heart chilling and incredible story from the literature on personality changes after heart transplants. In this example, an eight year old girl received the heart of a ten year old girl, but sometime after the transplant, the young recipient began to have vivid nightmares about an attacker and a girl being murdered. Concerned about her young daughter, the mother took her to a psychiatrist who became convinced that with nightmares so detailed and real they appeared to be genuine memories. The psychiatrist recommended they contact the police, and presciently, it turned out the ten year old donor had been murdered.

According to the literature, the recipient’s violent reoccurring dreams were so vivid and accurate, and she was able to describe the events of the horrible encounter and the murderer with such detail, police were able to apprehend and convict the killer. An incredible story that makes you wonder just how much intelligence and specificity the heart brain and its memories have.

Dreams as communications...

So it would seem that dreams can serve as messages from our multiple brains, that dreams can sometimes be deeply intuitive communications from our heart and gut brains to our head brains. This is probably why we say things like 'Sweet Dreams' when we wish someone to have a good night's sleep. What the neurolinguistics of this common saying indicates is that we are future pacing the gut brain to do a gustatory experience of 'sweetness' (taste is a key sensory modality utilized by the enteric nervous system - we have taste buds not just on our tongues, but spread throughout our GastroIntestinal system) and thereby send positive messages in our dreams rather than messages of fear and anxiety that can lead to nightmares.

As you know from my last post on the Prime Functions of the multiple brains, the gut brain is responsible for monitoring safety and threats, both external physical threats and internal ‘semantic’ or psychological threats. So if, before sleeping you put yourself into a hyped up vigilant state, if you ruminate over perceived injustices, or focus on upcoming fearful events, you’ll find that your gut brain will kick into threat monitoring mode and your brains won’t be able to do deep high quality sleeping. You obviously also shouldn’t eat rich and complex meals just before sleeping. Anything that disturbs or distracts the gut brain from calm sleeping can detract from how restful and ‘sweet’ your sleep and dreams can be.

Instead, as you lay in bed, just before drifting off to sleep, do Balanced Breathing and fill you heart with peace, love and compassion. Then breathe these up into your head and down to your gut. Fill all your brains with calm, peaceful love. Talk kindly and lovingly to your brains and ask them to do high quality and integrative sleeping. Directionalize your brains respectfully and then filled with warm feelings of safety, love and peace, gently drift off into a refreshing night of health-filled sleep. And pay attention to your dreams, especially the vivid and memorable ones. They are likely to be important messages from your multiple brains and you ignore them at your peril. Indeed, listening to the messages from your dreams just may save your life...

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Learn more...

If you'd like to learn more about how to communicate with and integrate your head, heart and gut brains, grab a copy of 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff'. In it you'll find simple and powerful techniques for tapping into your intuition and using sleep and the wisdom of your heart and gut brains for integrated decision making.

smiles and appreciation,

Grant

Using the mBIT Prime Functions of the Head, Heart and Gut Brains

2012-08-01T13:55:00.000+10:00

If you follow this blog you'll know that over the last 2 years I've been productively busy researching and developing a new field of personal development called mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) and time-binding the models and distinctions from this field into a new book titled 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff'.

The Prime Functions of the Head, Heart and Gut Brains

One of the key insights from mBIT is that each of your brains (head, heart and gut brains) has its own 'Prime Functions'. Each brain has a fundamentally different form of intelligence; they utilize different language, have different goals and operate under different criteria. In other words, your head, heart and gut have different ways of processing the world, of communicating, operating and addressing their own concerns and domains of expertise.

mBrain Prime Functions

Heart Brain Prime Functions

· Emoting

· Relational Affect

· Values

Gut Brain Prime Functions

· Mobilization

· Self-Preservation

· Core Identity

Head Brain Prime Functions

· Cognitive Perception

· Thinking

· Making Meaning

About the head brain…

In many ways the prime functions of the head brain are obvious, they involve the mental cognitive functions of logical thinking and include the processes of reasoning, perception and how we make meaning. Thought processes involve mental imagery, language expression, abstraction and symbol manipulation. The main job of the head is to intellectually make sense of the world and to provide executive control.

About the heart brain…

The heart is the seat of love and desires, goals, dreams and values. When you are connected to something you feel it and value it in your heart. When you hear that someone ‘wears their heart on their sleeve’ you intuitively know that this does NOT mean that they are too logical. Instead, this is saying that they show their emotions, desires and intentions too obviously and readily.

If you say something is heartfelt, you aren’t saying it’s intellectually concise. And when you look at the language patterns of the heart, they express notions of love, connection, kindness and their converse. The prime functions of the heart intelligence involve salience, affection and relational issues such as a deep sense of moral rightness as compared to rule based ethics.

About the gut brain…

Due to its evolutionary history, the gut brain is responsible at a core level for determining what will be assimilated into self and excreted from self. It must determine what is required to maintain health and wellness in the system and decide whether molecules ingested into the stomach will be absorbed or excreted. Indeed, research has shown that more than 80 percent of our immune cells are located in the gut, and the enteric brain is intimately involved in managing immune function.

The prime functions of the gut are around protection, self-preservation, core identity and motility. Back when evolution was at the stage of complexity of sea cucumbers and worms, organisms only had a neural processing system of an enteric brain. This intelligence was used to detect threats and food in the environment and move away from danger and towards food. The gut brain maintains boundary detection and mobilization. In humans it is expressed as motivation, gutsy courage and a gut-felt desire to take action (or not).

Using the Prime Functions as life enhancing diagnostic tools

One of the most powerful and useful things you can do to gain more personal control in your life is use the mBIT Prime Functions as life enhancing diagnostic tools. Using the Prime Functions as a set of filters you can begin to track and change which of your multiple brains are operating in any given situation or context. Of course, all your brains and neural networks are operating all of the time, however, focus and control moves throughout your brains and knowing which brain is the prime controller at any point in time can really provide leverage for change.

Let me share an example from my own personal experience to make sense of this... I had been expecting an overdue delivery of the very first printing of my mBraining book, and contacted the courier to find out why the delivery was late and when I could finally expect to receive my books. I eventually managed to speak to a customer service representative of the global courier company used to deliver the books and was informed that due to various organizational issues, they would not be able to deliver the books to me for another 4 weeks. I got off the phone and found myself feeling both angry and incredibly turmoiled. The book was important to me and I had various commitments and timeframes that relied on having stock of the book on hand.

As I sat there fuming over the crap service of this big-named courier company, that promised swift and efficient service on their website and advertising, I realised that feeling angry and upset wouldn't help me or help resolve the situation. I stopped focusing on the issue for a second, and instead did an inventory through my body and noted where and how I was feeling and representing the issue. I noted that I felt anger in my heart region, tension in my forehead and shoulders, but most strongly and overwhelmingly, I felt the issue deep and viscerally in my gut. This told me immediately that I was representing the issue at a gut level and that it was a gut prime function that was driving my response. The gut is responsible for core identity and threat detection. I was obviously treating the book and the missing delivery as if this was a part of 'me' that was under threat. The gut brain was then communicating the message of threat to the heart and head leading to angering and repetitive negative cognitions and ultimately tension around the head and face region.

As soon as I realized that I was representing the book as if it was part of me, I was now immediately at choice. Did I really want to see the book as 'me', was it really part of my core identity, or was it just something I valued highly as a process and an artefact of the production of my creative abilities? Naturally, the book is not 'me', it's just something I produced. And as soon as I acknowledged that, and breathed the message of that from my heart, into my head, and down to my gut, everything shifted. I belly laughed, with a big smile of inner realization on my face. The anger in my heart dissolved immediately. And I was able to get a much more useful perspective on the situation. With a light-hearted attitude, I was then able to track down someone within the courier company who really wanted to help and delightfully my books were delivered within the week. Problem solved and done in a compassionate and creative way. By using the Prime Functions as a diagnostic tool and thereby realizing I was treating the book as 'me' I enabled a wiser choice in how I responded to the exigencies of life and that truly is life enhancing.

So I trust that from the above example you get a sense and idea of how to use the Prime Functions as filters and diagnostic tools. Start to notice where and how in your body you are representing and reacting to each situation. Are you fundamentally processing the situation with your heart? Your head? Your gut? And what prime function(s) are thereby being expressed by the neural network that has prime control? Once you've gained meta-awareness of how you are processing and creating your awareness and reality, you can then use the mBIT Foundational Sequence and Highest Expressions techniques explained fully in the mBraining book to produce a more generative and wiser response.

So start now to notice how you are mBraining your life, which of your brains is operating in which sequence with the others, which is in control, which can provide the leverage point for change, and what prime functions are operating as you respond to and create your world.

with appreciation and smiles,

Grant

I give a shit! -- Scatalogical Marking and the Enteric Brain

2012-06-18T19:13:00.001+10:00

“The world is not a problem; the problem is your unawareness”

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

I trust and hope that you find today's blog post fascinating, edifying and entertaining in equal measure :-) and I also hope you aren't easily offended by swearing or scatalogical language, as it's going to form the basis for what we are exploring here today...

Scatalogical Marking

In ethology (the study of animal behavior), scatalogical marking is the act that animals undertake to mark out or define their physical or spatial boundaries -- the space they consider to be 'theirs', that they own. To do this they 'scat' around their boundary by depositing their shit or by urinating. This marks out their territory and sends a clear olfactory message to other animals or rivals of their own species.

In mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) terms, scatalogical marking is an obvious manifestation of the prime functions of the gut brain. The gut (or enteric) brain is deeply involved in protection, threat monitoring and control, in spatial motility and in maintaining core self. In a sense, the spatial territory that an animal controls is like an extended part of itself and is crucial to both its foraging/food control and its threat/safety control. So the gut brain naturally uses the parts of the anatomy it controls (the bowels and bladder) to deposit strong messages about its domain. Notice also that the gut brain is strongly linked to the senses of taste and smell, so it's part of the language of the gut brain to speak and communicate with strongly smelling substances, and all animals (including humans) are attuned to this. [BTW, if you haven't already, grab a copy of my new book 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff', and you'll learn all about the prime functions and core competencies of the head, heart and gut brains and how they communicate and how you can align and integrate them for wisdom and success.]

Who gives a shit?

Now this is all very interesting, but really, who gives a shit? (so to speak) -- What has this got to do with you and with enhancing your life???

Well, as we evolved higher functions and more complex brains, our gut brain not only became responsible for physical territory maintenance, it was also co-opted for 'semantic' territory maintenace. With our complex head brains and advanced language centers and frontal lobes, we have evolved to be semantic and meaning binding creatures. We live and create our lives and sense of self through the processes of abstraction, symbol manipulation and linguistic meaning. We construct our complex world views through language, beliefs, values and the semantics of identity. And all of this forms our 'semantic territory'. So guess what... when someone transgresses your semantic boundaries, when they 'shit' all over your values or beliefs, when they act like 'turds' or 'assholes' and threaten the meaning you are making in your life, it typically 'pisses' you off and gives you the 'shits'. Indeed, if they piss you off enough, you are likely to haul off and beat the 'shit' out of them, either physically, emotionally or intellectually.

Now isn't that fascinating. Our common parlance reflects the scatalogical marking we do within our semantic territory. And this is a direct example of cognitive linguistics, of how the metaphors we use in our every day language are deeply embodied and reflect our underlying unconscious processes.

The reason I share this with you is to begin to attune your mind and ears to mBIT Predicate Tracking -- to noticing and listening for words that indicate heart, gut or head processing and the prime functions of each of those neural networks. Knowing which brain is functioning within any element of human behavior puts you at choice and control for leveraging generative change. And that is certainly life enhancing!

I give a shit!

Courtesy of my good friend and colleague, exquisite cartoonist, corporate speaker and organizational leadership guru, Colin James, I'd like to share the following cartoon that Colin drew for this blog post.

It highlights the idea that each of us has things that we give a shit about, and that we metaphorically mark our semantic boundaries with respect to. And based on this idea, here's a little exercise that I'd like you to play with...

So I'd like you to take a moment, and think about something that you 'really don't give a shit about', something that you could care less about, that really doesn't affect you in any meaningful way. For me its football and other organized sports. I really don't give a shit about them at all. If football was outlawed tomorrow, I wouldn't lose a jot of sleep over it. Wouldn't care less. It's neither a value for me, nor part of my identity. Once you've thought of something you don't give a shit about, I'd like you to get a sense of how that feels within your body, what your visceral experience of it is, in your heart, chest, gut, torso etc.

Now moving on with the exercise... I'd like you to think of something you value, something that's important to you, you care about, but is not part of your identity. In other words, something that you like, but if you weren't able to get it anymore, or if you lost it, then it wouldn't particularly rain on your parade. For me its my drive day car. I like it, I value it, but you know, if something happened to it and I had to replace it, I wouldn't be bothered. A car is a car. No probs. So take a moment, reflect and come up with something you value but that isn't vitally important to you. Once you've done that, notice your felt sense around it. Where do you feel and represent this within your body? For most people, it will be in your heart region. Notice this.

Now, think about and focus on something you really give a shit about, something that is vital to your sense of self. Something that defines you. For me, an example would be my motorbike. As I've written about in this blog, I believe motorbikes are Life Enhancing Devices (LEDs). So for me, my bike is like an extension of my self. I love it. It's linked to my core values. So think of your equivalent, and as you bring it fully to consciousness, notice where in your body you feel and represent the meaning of this. For most people this will be felt viscerally in the gut. You may also feel some heart response due to the values and desire for this person/place/thing/process. But the core feeling will be in the gut.

When you experience something as core to self, the gut kicks in. Your enteric brain has a prime function around core selfing and protection of core self. The ability to notice this and become mindful and aware of where and how you are representing things is key to being able to shift and control your life. I'll speak more about this in upcoming blog posts, and of course, the mBraining book teaches you cool techniques for powerfully utilizing this. But for now I really wanted to bring to your attention the notion that semantics and meaning are embodied and that various functions and aspects of these are processed preferentially and differently in each of your brains.

You can begin now to notice over the coming days, where in your body you are feeling and processing each experience and work out whether you are representing something as core self or just as a value. Notice what figuratively (and sometimes literally) gives you the shits, pisses you off or impacts you viscerally. Notice what stinks in your life (so to speak) or conversely smells sweet. And start listening for scatalogical marking in the conversations around you and in your own internal dialog. Mindfulness is life enhancing, as is choice and control. And control starts with awareness!

“Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.”

Stephen R. Covey

with life enhancing appreciation and smiles,
Grant

mBraining - Compassion, Creativity and Courage

2012-05-27T17:42:00.000+10:00

"In the 700 year old Soka Gakkai Buddhism teachings of Japan there is a mystic truth known as the ‘Buddha state’ or ‘Buddha wisdom’ that acts as a reservoir through which anyone can take control of their lives and fulfill their greatest dreams. According to these ancient spiritual beliefs, this state of wisdom involves a melding of Compassion, Creativity and Courage."

mBraining, Grant Soosalu & Marvin Oka

The highest expressions: A powerful insight

Years ago, whilst researching esoteric wisdom practices, I came across a powerful insight from the Tibetan Bonpo tradition. It suggested that a person could be considered to have truly lived a wise and beneficial life if they’d mastered three core competencies: Compassion, Creativity and Courage.

"The heart is a sensory organ and acts as a sophisticated information encoding and processing center that enables it to learn, remember and make independent functional decisions."

Dr. Rollin McCraty

After deeply exploring the neuroscience behind the heart, gut and head brains, completing a huge body of behavioral modeling research and then factor analyzing the core competencies of the three brains, I was fascinated to notice that the Bon insight highlighted a key and generative competency from each brain:

Heart brain – Compassion
Gut brain – Courage
Head brain – Creativity

As I continued the mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) research I discovered very similar advice from other spiritual and philosophical disciplines. Although slightly different words were used (e.g. kindness instead of compassion, bravery instead of courage, etc.), they all conveyed core competencies that were similar in their qualitative nature.

I therefore became even more curious and intrigued by these three Tibetan Bonpo core competencies and began to look for structures that could explain the consistency of these prescribed core competencies across so many different philosophies, practices and cultures. The question became: “From an mBIT perspective, what is so special about these competencies?”

I discovered three key qualities that make these competencies particularly generative. First, if you look them up in the Core Competencies Framework from Chapter 3 of my book 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff', you’ll notice they’re all highly coherent states. Second, in actual practice, these ‘virtues’ are neurologically integrative by their very nature. Each of these competencies requires the engagement of the other two neural networks in order for them to fully manifest in behavior. This is explained in more detail in the book. And third, the behavioral modeling research found that the interdependent and integrative nature of these three competencies enables the emergence of a higher order level of consciousness and way of being. In other words, they collectively enable and facilitate the Highest Expression of a deeper more integrated 'self'.

Subsequently, these three competencies became what we respectfully call the mBrains’ ‘Highest Expressions’, and I’d like to suggest that of all the competencies each brain evinces, these ‘three C’s’ (Creativity, Compassion and Courage) are the most generative and defining of them all. They’re certainly the most integrative to work with for attaining greater levels of wisdom and personal evolution. Indeed, from our behavioral modeling and action research work, we’ve found these three competencies, when aligned together are able to produce a synergistic magic that is incredible to experience.

"Courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin. Compassion without courage is not genuine. You may have a compassionate thought or impulse, but if you don’t do or say anything, it’s not real compassion."

Daisaku Ikeda

In upcoming blog posts, I'll explore each of these highest expressions in detail. But until then, may I highly suggest you grab a copy of the book and begin to explore these key competencies in your own life. How can you align more wisdom in your life through Compassion, Creativity and Courage? How can you amplify Compassion in your heart, your thoughts, your life and your actions? How can you creatively Create a life that is more brilliant, more enhanced and more generatively wise? And how can you motivate more gutsy Courage and action into your world?

What would your life look like if you lived through these highest expressions? And how life enhancing would it be for both yourself and the people you love?

life enhancing thoughts,

Grant

mBraining - Balancing your ANS

2012-05-20T19:03:00.004+10:00

As you know... Over the last decade, the field of Neuroscience has discovered we have complex and functional brains in both our heart and gut. Called the cardiac and enteric brains respectively, scientific evidence is emerging that these neural networks exhibit intelligence and wisdom. In my book with co-author Marvin Oka, 'mBraining', I've described how to communicate with and harness this intuitive intelligence of your multiple brains, and in the post below, I'll share one of the ways you can begin to control what mode your brains are operating in.

The role of your Autonomic Nervous System

In order to do effective mBraining -- to work powerfully with your multiple brains (head, heart and gut brains) -- it helps to understand the role of your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and how it affects the quality of the way your brains function.

For example, your heart brain may be attempting to fulfill its prime functions in a particular situation by emotionally expressing either sadness or joy. These are two very different expressions that are based on the same prime function. What accounts for the difference? And what can we do to shift from a debilitating expression to a more empowering one? To answer these questions, we need to look to your ANS.

Your nervous system has two major divisions, the voluntary and the autonomic. The Voluntary System is mainly concerned with movement and sensation. The Autonomic Nervous System on the other hand is responsible for control of involuntary and visceral bodily functions. The functions it controls include:

•    Cardiovascular
•    Respiratory
•    Digestive
•    Urinary
•    Reproductive functions
•    The body’s response to stress

It’s called ‘autonomic’ because it is operates largely automatically and outside of conscious control. It’s divided into two separate branches — the sympathetic and parasympathetic. These two branches work in a delicately tuned, reciprocal and (usually) opposing fashion.

The sympathetic system can be considered to be the ‘fight or flight’ system. It allows the body to function under stress and danger. The parasympathetic system is considered to be the ‘feeding and fornicating’ or 'rest and digest' arm. It controls the vegetative functions of feeding, breeding, rest and repose. The parasympathetic system also provides constant opposition to the sympathetic system to bring your total system into balance or homeostasis.

In times of danger or stress, the sympathetic system, which has a very fast onset and response, kicks in and gets you moving to handle or resolve the situation. The slower acting parasympathetic system begins to operate after the danger has passed, and brings you back to a normal state. Without the opposing function of the parasympathetic system your body would stay amped up, burning energy and fuel and eventually exhaust itself.

[BTW: an easy way to remember which of the two systems is which, is to remember that ‘para’ means beside or beyond, and therefore the parasympathetic system works beside or beyond the sympathetic to bring it back to alignment. So just remember, sympathetic does fight/flight and the parasympathetic kicks in beyond the stress to bring you back to normal.]

Why is this important?

The reason you want to know about the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems is because they innervate the heart, gut and head. There are major connections between the head brain hemispheres, the cardiac brain, the enteric brain and these sympathetic and parasympathetic arms of the ANS. And as the two ANS components work in opposing ways, the dominance of one or the other leads to very different modes of processing throughout our multiple brains.

In the gut, parasympathetic activity enhances intestinal peristaltic movement promoting nourishment during quiescence, whereas sympathetic activity inhibits such activity during times when physical exertion requires catabolic (energy) mobilization. Parasympathetic activity generally slows the heart, whereas sympathetic activity accelerates it.

You’ll notice here that a powerful functional principle of opponent processing is operating for autonomic control across your total system. Your brains can function in ways that are sympathetic dominant, parasympathetic dominant, or some combination of the two, but that each of these systems typically opposes the other.

So what?

The really interesting thing about these sympathetic and parasympathetic activation processes is that while they normally operate in opposition to each other, they don’t always have to. In certain circumstances they can operate in patterns where one, the other or both are dominant in chronic patterns. What you’ll also see shortly is that when your brains are operating in sympathetic or parasympathetic dominance, they have access to differing psychological qualities and core competencies.

Physiological coherence – balance between the systems

The diagram above summarizes the four modes that your system can operate in. In the top mode, when your two systems are in balance and harmony, when you are in a powerful state known as physiological coherence (more on this coming up in a future blog post), you are able to respond optimally to the world. This mode is connected with feelings of joy, happiness, peace and relaxation.

Sympathetic dominance

In the next mode, your sympathetic system is dominant. This is the stress and danger response and in this mode you have access to competencies that typically serve you to respond via fight and flight processes such as anger, aggression, defensiveness and avoidance. It can be linked to lifestyle patterns of stress, such as taking on too much work, or worrying excessively about things you can’t control.

Parasympathetic dominance

In the third mode, your parasympathetic system is dominant. As we’ve seen above, this is the mode that quietens and settles your neurophysiology. It’s normally designed to bring you back to homeostasis after a sympathetic dominant experience. However, in certain circumstances parasympathetic dominance can be chronically activated and lead to withdrawal, depression, despair and down regulation of all your vital functions. People in this state have essentially given up and are living with a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. Poor diet, toxic metals and chemicals in our food, water and air can lead to issues of parasympathetic dominance.

Parasympathetic over-dominance can also activate in acute stress situations as an overreaction to an intense sympathetic response, and lead to what is called parasympathetic rebound. This leads to the ‘freeze’ response and in really extreme cases can cause the heart to stop completely and result in death. This is what causes people to literally die of fright, fear and shock.

Mixed dominance

In some cases, a person can have both sympathetic and parasympathetic systems operating in high states of activation. When these are in relative balance, the snapshot that the person presents is somewhat similar to the first mode described above. However, with this mixed dominance mode, the system is in what’s called a ‘meta-stable state’ and can flip rapidly from one state to the other. The two systems are in effect maxed out and fighting one another. So the dominance can rapidly oscillate from one extreme to the other. Some researchers suggest this mode may be associated with bipolar disorder and involve rapid changes from a manic phase to deep depression. Certainly this mode is not a healthy one and is representative of diminished control in the system.

|| Cool Fact: The sympathetic and parasympathetic dominance of your ANS controls the operating modes of your three brains and influences the core competencies they evince.

So the mode in which your brains function is determined by the state of your ANS. For example, neuroscience research over the last decade has shown that the head brain's processing mode is influenced by sympathetic and parasympathetic dominance so that the left hemisphere is dominant when the nervous system is under parasympathetic control, and the right hemisphere is dominant when the sympathetic arm is in ascendance. And the two hemispheres, left and right, have very different ways of processing, thinking and responding to the world. When you shift dominance from one to the other you shift into a very different state of mind. Equally, the heart and gut brains respond and process very differently depending on ANS mode.

What you can learn from this

What you need to know is that Autonomic Mode is the controller of your state of being and the controller of the competencies and functions you are able to express. And the most generative and life enhancing mode is when the two arms of the ANS are in balance. There are simple and powerful techniques for bringing your ANS into balance, and that's what you'll learn in my new book 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff'. So if you haven't already, pop over to the CreateSpace eStore (or Amazon for the ebook version) and grab a copy.

with life enhancing appreciation,
Grant

mBraining - Digest this idea...

2012-05-09T19:57:00.000+10:00

Here's some interesting food for thought... A fascinating TED talk 'How do we consume data?' by technologist JP Rangaswami, who muses on our relationship to information and offers a surprising and sharp insight: we treat it like food.

Click here to view the vid on TED

Now if you've read my and Marvin's new book, 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff', you'll know that our gut brain is deeply involved in assimilating knowledge and information. The following story explores the neuro-linguistics of this.

Knowing in your gut

It is known from ancient Chinese historical records that the great sage Li Shizhen, a famous physician from the Ming Dynasty, was a skilled medical practitioner with a great love for medical books. Now, it’s said that in his home town there was a rival physician who was both incompetent and ignorant, but who owned a huge collection of medical books he used to show off his supposed wealth of knowledge.

As the story goes… one day at the end of a long and wet rainy season, the rival doctor ordered his servants to lay out his collection of medical books in the courtyard to dry. Pacing back and forth in front of the collection he primped and preened in an all too obvious display of both himself and his knowledge.

Passing through the courtyard, Li Shizhen stopped, loosened his clothing and dropped down next to the books. The physician, seeing Li Shizhen laying with his belly exposed to the sun, rushed over and asked, “Hey, what are you doing there?”

Li Shizhen responded, “I also want to get some sunshine for my books.”

His rival asked, “But where are your books then?”

Li patted his belly and said, “All my books are in here.”

Li Shizhen’s humorous yet insightful rejoinder tells us a lot. It talks deeply about how true knowledge depends not on how many books you own, but on how much knowledge you have digested. Now isn’t that interesting…

It is a common expression to talk about ‘digesting an idea’. You often hear people say things like “I need to digest that fact,” “I can’t swallow that notion.” What’s that about? Why is knowledge and understanding linked linguistically and metaphorically to gustatory experience? What’s going on here? As you’ll see, these are not just figures of speech.

Deep insights from neuro-linguistics

In the early 1970’s, John Grinder and Richard Bandler based at the University of California, and drawing on work from a diverse range of fields including General Semantics, Transformational Grammar, Ericksonian Hypnosis and Systems Theory, created a powerful synthesis they called Neuro Linguistic Programming or NLP for short. Using the methodology of Behavioral Modeling (more on this below), NLP developed models for human communication, learning and behavioral competence amongst others.

Science Digest reported that NLP: “could be the most important synthesis of knowledge about human communication to emerge since the explosion of humanistic psychology… It may be the ultimate behavioral engineering tool.”

NLP provides a set of models, skills and techniques for thinking and acting effectively in the world, through which you can change, adopt or eliminate behaviors in yourself and others. Most importantly for us, one of the many principles that NLP provided is the insight that how people use language is a direct representation of what is happening in their neurology. As NLP points out, “very little of human communication is metaphorical, language is a literal description of deep unconscious process.” What this means is that we can listen to natural and common expressions and unpack the underlying neurological processing represented within.

In terms of evidence for multiple intelligences outside of the head brain, common expressions such as:

“Listen to your gut wisdom”
“Trust the intelligence of your heart”
“Follow your heart”
“Use your gut intuition”
“Trust your gut”
“Be true to your heart”
“My gut is telling me there’s something wrong”
“Deep in my heart I know”
“Go with your gut response”

These expressions all indicate in their neuro-linguistics that intelligence, wisdom and intuition are occurring in the regions of the heart and gut. This is a powerful insight and backs up the message from ancient esoteric traditions.

Cognitive linguistics

In 1980, at the University of California, two young linguists published a book that rocked the field of linguistics to its core and created a whole new and exciting field called Cognitive Linguistics. In their book, ‘Metaphors We Live By’, Professor George Lakoff and Dr. Mark Johnson demonstrated that much of language and thought is grounded in metaphor and that metaphor and associated aspects of mind are embodied. What does this mean?

When Lakoff and Johnson claim that mind and language is ‘embodied’ they are saying that human cognition depends on and deeply uses the sensorimotor system and emotions. An example might help explain this more simply. According to Lakoff a statement such as “She gave me a warm greeting” is based on an underlying conceptual metaphor that ‘Affection is Warmth’, and that this cognitive concept is embodied in an actual physical experience and a corresponding neural network mapping. We literally feel and experience affection as warmth. So the linguistic expressions we use to communicate and make sense of our world are representations of our ongoing unconscious experience of the world. As Lakoff puts it, “We are neural beings. Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything — only what our embodied brains permit.”

[BTW: Notice the similarity here to the powerful ideas from NLP, cool hey, science meets the progeny of behavioral modeling.]

Lakoff and Johnson’s insights and theories were initially controversial and at first hotly debated throughout the halls of linguistic and psychological science. However, in the intervening period since 1980, and with the use of brain imaging tools, neural network simulations and other powerful technologies, the ideas from Cognitive Linguistics have been largely proven out. Metaphor and cognition really is embodied. And in the case of our example above, researchers at Yale University recently found that subjects holding a warm cup of coffee in advance were more likely to evaluate an imaginary individual as warm and friendly than those holding a cold drink. This of course is predicted by the conceptual metaphor that affection is warmth.

"Thought and language are largely metaphorical and embodied. Our language deeply represents underlying neural and behavioral processing."

Ok, that’s interesting, but really… so what? Well, here’s what’s really cool and useful about this: you can use what’s called ‘linguistic corpus analysis’ to unpack and infer the underlying neurological processes and competencies that are being referenced by the words people use. You can take common expressions and parlance, folk-wisdom if you will, and use it as a tool to guide behavioral modeling. And this is one of the many methodologies we’ve employed to create the new field of mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) and to discover what the core competencies of the gut and heart brains are.

And linking all this back to the TED talk above, you can see and hear the connection of how we process and consume knowledge -- we digest it, chew it over, use it as food for thought and learn by assimilating it into our core selves and our lives. When an idea doesn't sit right, we feel it in our gut. And this really is a deep and important insight.

with appreciation,

Grant

Aligning your multiple brains - mBraining

2012-05-05T17:24:00.003+10:00

"You have a brain in your head, heart and gut. Generative wisdom comes from aligning your multiple brains through their highest expressions."

As you know, my colleague Marvin Oka and I recently launched a new book called 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff', and I'm pleased to be able to tell you that the print version of the book is now available at Amazon CreateSpace: Get your copy here

I'd like to share with you some of the key insights and findings from the book and from our last 2 years of behavioral modeling research on the multiple brains and how to align them and harness their intelligence, intuition and wisdom.

Aligning your multiple brains

We have three separate intelligences operating in our bodies and these can end up in antagonism to each other, can have various patterns, habits and learned propensities, and can be aligned or not aligned. How our brains communicate and operate with each other is vital for success and happiness. It can be life denying when our brains fight each other or ignore each other and alternately, it is incredibly life enhancing when our multiple brains work harmoniously together to produce generative wisdom in our lives.

So how do you know when your mBrains are NOT aligned?

In our action research and behavioral modeling work we found that the following clues will often alert you when your brains are not aligned or integrated:

You experience internal conflict within yourself between your thoughts, feelings and actions
You’ve not acted upon your dreams, goals and plans
You do unwanted behaviors or habits and don’t know why or have difficulty in stopping
You find it difficult to make a decision(s)
Something within you is making it difficult for you to motivate yourself to take action
You sabotage yourself from achieving your goals
You chronically experience disempowering emotional states such as frustration, depression, anger, anxiety, etc.
You suffer from chronic health issues, especially those to do with the heart or gut region

So any time you find elements of these experiences in your life or behavior, then it's time to reach for the mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques) Toolkit and use the mBIT processes we've detailed in the mBraining book, to repattern how your brains are working together to support you and enhance your life.

The mBIT Roadmap

One of the models we’ve developed during our work is the mBIT Roadmap. It is an explicit framework that outlines a clear developmental path when working with your three brains to bring them into coherence and alignment and produce generative wisdom in your life.

Alignment and integration of your multiple brains requires a number of steps and functions. To start with it needs communication between your three brains and this must be performed in an optimal sequence. The three brains need to then be brought into congruence and this is done through what we call the ‘Highest Expression’ of each of your brains’ prime functions i.e. through Compassion, Creativity and Courage. All of this needs to be facilitated within a framework of wisdom, and there are specific steps and techniques to do this.

Communication

Assuming you have recognized the need and value of aligning and integrating your three brains, the first step is to establish communication with your brains and facilitate communication between each of the brains. Remember, each brain speaks to you in different languages and in different ways as related to their prime functions. In order to facilitate communication with and between each of the brains, you’ll need to develop the skills detailed in the mBraining book and that I'll introduce you to over upcoming blog posts.

Congruence

This is about alignment between the brains. The flip side of this is to eliminate any conflict between the brains, and ensure they are in agreement and supporting each other in their functions toward a common agreed outcome. In order to facilitate this, you will need to work with NIE’s (Neural Integrative Engagements) and NIB’s (Neural Integration Blocks) — more about this in the book and in upcoming blog posts.

Highest Expression

Now that all of the brains are in alignment from the Congruence stage, you want to ensure each neural network is functioning in its most optimized state. We call this optimized state the ‘Highest Expression’ of each brain’s intelligence. Note that there isn’t a single, definitive Highest Expression for each brain that is universally true for everyone in all contexts. However, we have found that the following generative set serves as a powerful foundation from which you can start to explore, apply and work with the majority of life issues.

The Highest Expressions of the three brains are:

Head brain – Creativity
Heart brain – Compassion
Enteric brain – Courage

Wisdom

This is the payoff for working with your three brains to get them aligned and integrated. This stage is about the practical applications of mBIT to the issue(s) you are working on. Wisdom is not a specific thing but rather an emergent quality that is the result of harnessing the perspectives and insights from all of your brains when they are functioning at their Highest Expressions of intelligence.

The wisdom that emerges from aligning and integrating your three brains is now applied to your issue(s) in areas such as decision-making, action-taking, problem-solving, harnessing your intuition, reflection and learning, etc. Remember that a major contributor to the emergence of wisdom at this level is not simply due to the Highest Expressions, but comes from aligning and integrating your brains in an optimally effective sequence which we have called the mBIT Foundational Sequence and I'll describe that in a later blog, or you can check it out and learn about it in your copy of the book.

Wrapping it up

So in summary, the mBIT Roadmap is a simple yet powerful framework for aligning and integrating your three brains. It enables you to quickly harness their intelligence for wiser and authentic living at your highest level of being.

The mBIT Roadmap provides a structure for the process of:

Establishing communication with your three brains
Aligning them so each is fulfilling its prime functions congruently as appropriate to the task-at-hand
Ensuring each is operating from its Highest Expression, and
Applying those Highest Expressions for greater wisdom in decision-making and action-taking

I hope you've found this as fascinating and intriguing as we have as we were discovering and researching it. Once you know how to, and are skilled in, aligning your multiple brains, life really starts to flow more easily and things that were previously difficult become so much easier. You are no longer fighting yourself or undermining your deep intuitive intelligence. You open up to the inherent wisdom of your deep inner self and become one with your core values and core authentic self. You also open up new possibilities in how you are creating and authoring your life. And that is truly life enhancing.

So do yourself a favor, and if you haven't already, pop over to our CreateSpace eStore for a physical copy of the book, or Amazon.com for a copy of the kindle ebook (and you can read it on the iPad too with the free kindle reader app). And check out our website: http://www.mbraining.com for more info on our fascinating work on mBIT and mBraining.

smiles and appreciation,

Grant

So what's mBraining about?

2012-04-21T13:27:00.002+10:00

Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff

As you know from my last post, over the last decade, the field of Neuroscience has discovered we have complex and functional brains in both our heart and gut. Called the cardiac and enteric brains respectively, scientific evidence is emerging that these neural networks exhibit intelligence, memory and wisdom.

Neuroscience meets ancient wisdom

What's most fascinating about this is that current scientific knowledge is finally catching up with deep insights from esoteric and spiritual traditions informing us for thousands of years about the three powerful intelligences of the head, heart and gut. Take the following quotes as an example:

“And wanting what’s precious
you do what distorts your being.
The sage knows this in his gut,
And is guided by his instinct
and not by what his eyes want.”

Tao Te Ching

“Knowledge coupled with a warm heart brings wisdom.”

Dalai Lama

“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.”

Buddha

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”

Aristotle

“That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquility.”

Rumi

“The body is the instrument of the mind...
The mind is an instrument of the heart.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Now isn't that amazing! We've known at a deep and intuitive level, across the ages and within our own lives, that our intelligence, wisdom and core life competencies are not just embodied in the head...

The power of NLP and Behavioral Modeling

So... Over the last 2 years, using methodologies from NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), Cognitive Linguistics and Behavioral Modeling, and informed by the latest Neuroscientific discoveries, my co-author Marvin Oka and I have been researching, modeling and documenting the newly emerging field of mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques). In mBIT, we have codified a powerful system for communicating with and integrating the wisdom and intelligence of your multiple brains, and we've called the process of working with and aligning your multiple brains: mBraining.

I thought it would be life enhancing and add some value if I started by giving you a summary of what we've uncovered in developing mBIT and what we've explicated in our new book. So here is a quick resume of what's covered in 'mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff', and in the coming weeks I'll blog in more detail about some of the key insights, some of the powerful and simple techniques and a bit about the underlying principles of how our multiple brains work together to either produce amazing wisdom and success, or to rob us of our peace of mind and create problems in our lives when our brains aren't aligned and working together.

What you'll discover in the mBraining book:

The 6 Prime Functions of your head, heart and gut brains, and how each provides you with a different ability and talent.

The 5 classes of mBIT Neural Integration Constraints that give you deep insight into how your three brains may produce internal conflict within yourself, and what you can do about it.

How to recognise and interpret the different languages of your three brains when they are communicating important messages to you.

How your gut brain is able to learn and grow new neural pathways, and how you can actively educate it for greater ‘gut intuition’.

How to balance your autonomic nervous system through the mBIT Balanced Breathing method to quickly relieve stress and gain access to the innate intelligences of your three brains.

How to work with the Core mBrain Competencies Framework to quickly diagnose any unresourceful states, and to discern what is needed to bring your nervous system back into balance for optimal functioning in all three of your brains.

How the technique of mBIT Neural Syntax Mapping can explicitly reveal the functional or dysfunctional sequence in which your three brains are working together or conflicting with each other.

How to do the mBIT Foundational Sequence for yourself to ensure you are working with your three brains in the optimum sequence for generative results.

How to work with mBIT Neural Integration Engagements to significantly amplify the effectiveness and power of your techniques whenever working with your three brains.

How to recognise and overcome 15 types of Neural Integration Blocks that prevent integration between your three brains.

How to use the mBIT Roadmap as a tool for self-evolution by harnessing the intelligence and wisdom of your multiple brains.

If you are interested to learn more, you can get a copy of the book here:

http://www.mbraining.com

smiles and best wishes,

Grant

mBraining and the exciting new field of mBIT

2012-04-12T20:28:00.006+10:00

Hey there,

Well, it's been quite a while since my last blog post... and if you are wondering why, it's because I've been incredibly and hectically busy enhancing my life by writing a book with my good friend and colleague Marvin Oka, about an exciting new field we've been researching and developing over the last 2 years: mBIT (which stands for multiple Brain Integration Techniques). Marvin is considered to be one of the top NLP Trainers in the world and is sought after as an international keynote speaker specializing in Organizational Leadership and Behavioral Modeling Research.

mBraining - Using your multiple brains to do cool stuff

Our book is called 'mBraining' and is about this new field and about how to use your multiple brains (your heart brain, gut brain and head brain) to do cool and life enhancing things in your life!

We finally got the book finished over Easter and the ebook has been uploaded to Amazon:

You can read more about the book and the ideas and concepts behind mBIT and mBraining at www.mbraining.com. (The print book is with our Publisher and should be coming out in a few weeks time.)

So what is mBIT really about?

I'll be blogging more about the ideas, concepts and techniques of mBIT over the coming weeks, but in a nutshell...

mBIT is a suite of tools and techniques for communicating with, integrating and harnessing the power of your multiple brains (head, heart and gut brains).

In developing mBIT, what we discovered in essence, is that each of your brains has a series of core competencies and that in particular each brain has a competency that is its 'highest expression'. What's more, the three brains, when operating via these competencies, produce synergistic effects and bring greater wisdom to decision making, relationships and life. The highest expressions are Compassion (heart), Creativity (head) and Courage (gut). When all three work together they produce amazing results!

Well, I hope that whets your appetite to learn more. I can tell you that mBIT and mBraining really are incredibly life enhancing. The techniques are powerful and can be life changing. People we have coached using the system have reported amazing transformations in their daily lives. We all know we have intelligence in our hearts and guts. We talk about gut instincts, heartfelt intuitions, messages from our hearts and guts and times when we just knew from a deep visceral feeling that something wasn't right. What we've discovered over the last 2 years is that there is a structure to how our multiple brains communicate with one another, and that you can learn to tune into your heart and gut brains, to align them and to amplify their intuitions and messages.

I trust you'll check out the website and book, and keep following along over the coming weeks as I share insights, tips and techniques from this life enhancing new field.

smiles and heartfelt wishes,

Grant

[I selected this post to be featured on Healthy Living Blogs. Please visit the site and vote for my blog!]

Uplifting your heart

2011-10-21T13:59:00.001+11:00

"Best of all is it to preserve everything in a pure, still heart, and let there be for every pulse a thanksgiving, and for every breath a song."

Konrad von Gesner

Today's post is inspired by a gift I received this morning... Fellow blogger Susan Meyerott, who writes a great blog called 'Lightarted Living' (which I highly recommend), used one of my ideas and both created a cool blog post about it and also created some beautiful artwork inspired by it. So I thought it life enhancing to share her delightful artwork with you here, and write some more about the ideas behind it.

Communicating with your heart and gut brains

Over the last year or so I've been doing a lot of research on the enteric (gut) brain and cardiac (heart) brain and how they communicate and integrate together with the cranial (head) brain. I've been determining what the core competencies are of each of these neural networks and how best to work with them to align them.

[I've blogged in the past about the heart and gut brains, and you can read more about them here:

]

Together with a great friend of mine, Marvin Oka, one of the top NLP trainers in the world, we've developed a field we are calling mBIT (multiple Brain Integration Techniques), and we are currently running Action Research Workshops to codify our research and findings. mBIT is based on behavioral modeling informed by the lastest neuro-physiological and neuro-psych research about the heart and gut brains.

One of the simple yet powerful techniques I've created for communicating with and aligning your heart and gut brains based on mBIT is the one that Sue blogged about and created her delightful artwork for.

The idea behind this technique is to use focused breathing, along with metaphor and positive emotion, to send messages to your heart and then your gut. This leads to a re-balancing of your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), from Sympathetic dominance, back to coherence between the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic arms of the ANS.

I'll be sharing more about mBIT over the coming months. Marvin and I have scheduled a 10 day writing sabbatical next month to begin work on our book about mBIT and the science and techniques involved with it. (Stay tuned and let me know if you're interested in hearing about when the book will be released. Let me know too if you're interested in attending any workshops or webinars that we'll be running later this year and into the next. You can contact me by leaving a comment or emailing me at: grant @ soosalu . com)

So what's the 'Uplifting your heart' technique?

Well, it's really amazingly simple. Whenever you are feeling stressed or in need of some uplifting or calming, simply take a few minutes to sit and breath in and out calmly and evenly, taking approx. 6 seconds on the inbreath and 6 seconds on the outbreath. Make sure the in and out breaths are of the same duration. (There's a reason and science behind this.)

As you breath in, imagine that the breath is uplifting your heart. Feel that uplifting feeling. And smile as you do this. Smiling makes a key difference. Really feel your heart being uplifted as you do this. You can imagine a color or light filling your heart with uplifting positive energy and love. And you can take that light, color and feeling and experience it going all the way from your heart to your head, taking these uplifting feelings and messages from your heart into your mind.

As you breath out, imagine your breath going down from your head/heart to your gut, taking with it calming feelings and messages. Really feel that letting go, relaxing, calming sense fill your belly.

Breath in 'uplifting your heart', breath out and down 'calming your gut'. Continue doing this, as you smile, and feel so aligned and calmed.

It's really that simpe! Try it now. Practice it every moment you get a chance and it will serve you well in the stressful moments in which you might need it. There's a lot of science and logic behind what appears to be a very simple process. The heart leads the head and gut, and the heart itself can be guided through breathing and positive emotion. So use the 'Uplifting your heart' technique to guide and integrate your multiple neural networks and gain congruence and alignment in your life.

life enhancing smiles,

Grant

Eliciting Your Values

2011-10-09T16:34:00.005+11:00

"Cheshire Puss, asked Alice. Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? That depends a good deal on where you want to go, said the Cat. I don’t much care where, said Alice. Then it doesn’t matter which way you go, said the Cat."

Lewis Carroll

Ok, in the last few blog posts we've been exploring the importance of values and how in times of massive change we need to prioritize and simplify where we can...

Prioritizing your life

One of the keys to prioritizing your life, is to get clear about your values, get clear about what’s most important to you and focus your energies and time there.

Most people don’t know explicitly and specifically what’s vitally important to them. They don’t know their hierarchy of values. And without that explicit knowledge, how can they effectively track and focus their time and life?

In today's post, we are going to fix that by getting you to map your hierarchy of values - your list of values sequenced in importance to your life.

Mapping your hieararchy of values

Grab a pen and some paper, and write out what you think and feel are the most important things in life for you. Is it health? Love? Adventure? Learning? What are the things that make life worthwhile for you? Brainstorm this. What do you want out of life? What do you want with others? What is the sweet taste of success for you? What is important to you? What makes your heart and mind sing?

Get your values on paper. Make a mindmap. Write them in whatever order they come to you. There's no right or wrong in this. Just make sure you capture them onto paper or computer.

Content versus Process Values

Note the difference between Content Values and Process Values. Content Values are the ‘things’ you want in life, like love, health, friends, family, wealth, adventure etc. They are the ‘whats’ of life.

Process Values are the 'qualities' by which you want to achieve the ‘whats’. They are the ‘hows’ of life. For example, honesty, integrity, courage, flexibility are all ‘hows’. They are the qualities you want to bring to the way you live your life.

I like to make two separate lists. One for the Content Values and a separate one for the Process Values. The more distinctions you make about your values, the better you are able to articulate the whats and hows of your life, the more powerful they become as tools for change.

List the hieararchy

Once you have your list(s) it’s time to prioritise your values in a hierarchy. Ask yourself:
“If I could only have one thing in life, what would it be?”

Circle it on the list as number one. Then ask, “If I could have 2 and only 2 things, what would the second value be?”

Continue till you’ve prioritised your list(s).

Then re-write the lists so that the number one value is at the top, and so on.

Listen to your heart and gut. You'll feel the importance of each value in your heart. Your heart brain knows what's important. Your gut brain will concur. Tracking goals, dreams and values is a core competency of the heart brain. Your heart's desires often guide your mind and spirit and manifest in your thoughts and ideas.

Put your list where you will see it every day

Now memorise your hierarchy of values. Put your list(s) up high on a wall somewhere in your house or office. Make them bright and bold and colourful. Refer to them often and keep them updated as you grow, learn and evolve through life. You can even make a visual collage of them. Collect images from magazines and books that represent your values and that make your heart sparkle when you look at them.

And most importantly, use your values hierarchy to organise your life and make decisions. If health is on your list as one of your highest values, and adventure is a lower value, then make sure that none of your adventures do damage to your health. Use your values as a filter to decide where to prioritize and place your time, skills, behaviours, attention and energies.

The clearer you are about your values and their relative importance, the more your conscious and unconscious decision making will align with them. Your RAS (Reticular Activating System) is powerfully linked to and influenced by your values, so the clearer you are on your values, the more it will work to serve you.

Value your life

Values are life enhancing. Use them as powerful tools to ensure you get the most of your life limited time, resources and energy. Align your decisions, choices and behaviours with them. Become a master of articulating and choosing what's important to you. Other people will support your values only as much as you know what they are and as much as you hold them strongly aligned in your own life.

"The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values."

William S. Burroughs

life enhancing thoughts and wishes,

Grant

Intelligencing

2011-10-02T11:47:00.000+11:00

"Whether you think you can or think you can't -- you're right"

Henry Ford.

I came across the following life enhancing research report today from ScienceDaily ‘Science News’ that I’d like to share with you:

“A new study, published in the journal Psychological Science, has found that people who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistakes than people who think intelligence is fixed.

In this study, Jason S. Moser of Michigan State University and his colleagues gave participants a task that was easy to make a mistake on. While doing the task, participants wore a cap on their heads that recorded electrical activity in the brain.

When someone makes a mistake, their brain makes two quick signals: an initial response that indicates something has gone awry -- the ‘oh crap' response -- and a second that indicates the person is consciously aware of the mistake and is trying to right the wrong. Both signals occur within a quarter of a second of the mistake. At the conclusion of the experiment, the researchers surveyed whether participants believed they could learn from their mistakes or not.

The results show that people who think they can learn from their mistakes do better after making a mistake -- in other words, they successfully bounce back after an error. Their brains also react differently, producing a bigger second signal, the one that says ‘I see that I've made a mistake, so I should pay more attention’.

The research indicates that these people are different on a fundamental level, Moser says. ‘This might help us understand why exactly the two types of individuals show different behaviors after mistakes.’ People who think they can learn from their mistakes have brains that are tuned to pay more attention to mistakes, he says. This research could help in training people to believe that they can work harder and learn more, by showing how their brain is reacting to mistakes.”

The power of attitude

Now isn’t that fascinating and life enhancing! Your attitude and beliefs about mistakes, learning and feedback makes a huge difference to how you respond to the world. Remember the blog post I wrote about ‘Learning from Feedback’? In it we explored how there is no such thing as failure, there’s just powerful and useful feedback. In light of the above research, you might want to give it a quick read to refresh your mind about this cool and life enhancing distinction.

Thinking Tool – Feedback

"No failure, only useful feedback!"

The process of Intelligencing

All of this comes together in what I like to think of as ‘Intelligencing’. That is, I believe that intelligence is not a fixed commodity, it’s not an object, but instead is a process, a set of skills and unconscious competencies. Your attitude to feedback and ‘mistakes’ is a core competency of intelligencing.

When you setup your unconscious filters to be able to use and appreciate the learnings and feedback of so called ‘mistakes’ then your brain reacts more intelligently to the information and rather than cognitive dissonance kicking in and limiting your learnings, instead you are able to intelligently use the feedback to learn and improve your self and your life. This creates a positive self-fulfilling cycle of ongoing learning and improvement. It generates more intelligencing.

It’s a cool distinction and powerful concept to apply in your life. I hope you find it as life enhancing as I do.

So embrace the research and the thinking tool above ‘No failure, only useful feedback!’ and turn all your ongoing mistakes into great opportunities for learning and improving your life.

many life enhancing smiles,
Grant

Simplifying and Valuing your Life

2011-09-26T19:05:00.001+10:00

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

Henry David Thoreau

As we've discussed in the last couple of blog posts, we now live in times of massive and accelerating change, and it's both necessary and life enhancing to embrace and lead that change. However, unless you embrace change intelligently, you can end up swamped and overloaded by all the newness that this brings.

In such times of overload and with so much happening in our lives, we need to learn to simplify where we can. Yes, you need to embrace change but that doesn’t mean you have to fill your life with noise, chaos and clutter.

Prioritise you life

In fact, one of the keys to coping with massive change is to prioritise your life, get clear about your values and what’s most important to you and focus your energies and time there.

Most people don’t know explicitly and specifically what’s vitally important to them. They don’t know their hierarchy of values.

So what are Values?

Values are those things you’ll spend time, energy, resources and money to move towards or away from.

The majority of people cannot consciously tell you their top 10 values in life.

Think about this. Your values determine what you’ll focus on and what you’ll do in life. Values help you make decisions. They direct your life. Yet can you tell me right now what your top values are, and in what order they lay in terms of importance?

You obviously can’t prioritise your time, energy and life if you haven’t decided what are the most important qualities and things you want in life. Priorities imply values. To be able to simplify your life and get the most beneficial use of your limited time, money, attention and resources you absolutely need to ‘value your life’. You need to get clear about your values and what the hierarchy is for them. Decide what’s the most important value, the second most important and so on.

Articulate your Values

The clearer your values are to you, the more conscious you are of them and the more able you are to articulate them, the more power they’ll bring to your life. In modelling successful people, the field of NLP found that successful people are incredibly clear on their values and the order of importance of them.

Clarity of values directionalises your unconscious mind and leads to what appears to be magical effects. It’s not voodoo or magic. It’s the power of the Reticular Activating System (RAS) – your mind’s attentional filtering system – to directionalise your energies and resources in achieving your values and outcomes. [You can read more about the RAS in a previous blog post here: Are there rocks on your beach? ]

It’s also the power and effect of self-fulfilling prophecies. Many, many books have been written about the 'secret' power of clarity and focus on values and outcomes. So make use of this to help you to remove the clutter and overload from your life.

It’s really very life enhancingly simple:

Identify what’s most important to you
Eliminate everything else

Start right now.

life enhancing thoughts,

Grant

Changing to stay the same

2011-09-03T09:38:00.002+10:00

Have you ever noticed those people who seem to be mired in the past? At one of the organisations I’ve consulted in over the last 15 years, there’s an individual who is exactly the same today as he was when I first met him. He dresses the same, talks the same, acts the same and has the same haircut. It’s amazing. In a world of massive change, he has managed to remain as if he is chained and locked in a time-warp.

In a world of massive and accelerating change

Now think about this... In the last 20 years, the world has changed massively. In my short lifetime I’ve seen milk and bread being delivered to our door via horse and cart when I was a child, through to the dying off of home delivery of these commodities and processes. Now we have racing cars that can do 0 – 100 mph in less than 3.6 seconds. A world wide web of interconnected information. Mobile devices that allow me to communicate instantly almost anywhere in the world. And I can order my weekly organic groceries via the internet and have them delivered free of charge to my door by courier. All in less than half a human lifetime. It’s a world of amazing and accelerating change!

And with all this amazing change, the individual referred to above has managed to ‘change to stay the same’. Yes, that’s right. For him to be able to stay locked in the past, in a world of massive change, he has to actively (though unconsciously) change to stay the same. It’s an incredible skill.

A change master!

Really, he is in some senses a change master!

The only thing is… he doesn’t realise that he has incredible skills at changing to stay the same. What’s more, he uses his unconscious competence in change mastery to stay locked in to a past that is no longer relevant. The truth is, where once he was a key player in the organisation, now he commands little respect. He is sidelined in a dead-end role and has spiralled down in self-respect. He is bored and is given no opportunities for change and advancement because he has made it obvious to management that he is not someone who embraces change and growth.

Yet, he is capable of making amazing changes in order to stay the same. It’s like an old guy I saw the other day in the centre of the City. He was a wizened little fellow in his 70’s, attired in an old suit, with his hair slicked back with hair-oil. Now, when I was a young child, back in the 1960’s, it was the fashion for men to use hair-oil to slick back their hair. It was the cool thing to do. This guy has continued to follow the same fashion and pattern for the last 50 or so years. Incredible! I didn’t even think you could buy hair-oil anymore. Think of the skill this old guy needs to be able to continue to source and use the same product for all those decades. All so he can stay the same.

Are you changing, evolving and moving forward?

You know, these are more than just funny stories. I use them to remind myself to keep changing, evolving and moving forward.

It's about ensuring you are leading the change! Rather than using your skills as a change master to stay stuck in the past, how about using them to break those chains and lead the changes that are happening in your world! Change is going to happen, so anticipate those changes by leading them. Whether it’s at work, in the clubs and organisations you are a member of, in your circle of friends or at home, continue to lead positive, generative and life enhancing change. And actively look for those areas where you are changing to stay the same and let them go. Change mastery! -- It’s an orientation and attitude that reaps many, many rewards and brings newness to your mind, life and spirit.

life enhancing smiles,

Grant

Overcoming Stress - Choice and Control

2011-08-21T18:58:00.000+10:00

"We have two choices: continue to blame the world for our stress or take responsibility for own reactions and deliberately change our emotional climate.”

Doc Childre & Howard Martin, HeartMath Solution

In today's post I want to explore some ideas and distinctions on 'stress' and how through the life enhancing skills of choice and control we can learn to master change and overcome stressing.

Choice and Control

We now have more choice than we’ve ever had before. We live in a time of massive and accelerating change. As the world changes and expands we end up with a huge range of options and opportunities. Research shows that paradoxically this increase in choice is making people:

Not choose
Regret their choices
Feel depressed
Feel overwhelmed

There are a couple of issues and insights from these findings.

Firstly, recognise that stress is an unconscious personal reaction to what’s happening to you. If a wide range of choice is stressing you or overwhelming you, notice that it is you who is stressing yourself over having to do the choosing. You create the stress, not the situation. Sure, you don’t do it consciously or deliberately. Nevertheless, it’s your brain and multi-mind (head-brain, heart-brain and gut-brain working together or working in opposition to each other) that’s generating the stressing response.

What this tells you is that you need to learn new strategies for coping with choice and control. That’s what this blog is about. Helping you learn and practice new skills for gaining more choice and control in life. That’s what life enhancing is all about.

Secondly, stressing over a large range of choices is indicative of a poor decision making strategy. It’s a signal that you aren’t clear about your values and outcomes and how to make a useful choice to satisfy them. We’ll deal with this in more detail in an upcoming blog post.

Before getting into decision strategies and values however, I really want you to understand the insight that you don’t ‘have’ stress. Stress is another of those nominalisations – a verb disguised as a noun. There’s no such ‘thing’ as stress. Instead there’s just the process of stressing.

The benefit of understanding this is that stressing is an action, it’s a process. It’s something you are doing. You have control over it. Or more to the point, you can learn to have control over how you are stressing and how you are relaxing. It’s your choice.

As Dr. Hans Selye, the father of modern stress research points out “Adopting the right attitude can convert a negative stress into a positive one”. We’ll be exploring this in more detail shortly. Once you understand that the process of stressing is something you can learn to control, you are firmly at a point of choice in your life. Now you can begin to gather the knowledge and skills you need to control how you respond to what happens in life. Remember the Law of Requisite Variety we discussed in earlier blog posts?

It says that the more choice and flexibility you give yourself, the more control you get over life. There is a sister law from Cybernetics that goes hand in hand with this law, and it says that for true control you need knowledge. So the formula can be written as:

Choice + Knowledge = Control

This explains in part why people who are given lots of choice end up in ‘overwhelm’ rather than feeling in control. They’ve got lots of choice, but they don’t have the right knowledge about how to do excellence in choosing. We’ll remedy this in upcoming posts by learning about values and decision strategies.

The formula also shows why it’s important for you to understand that stressing is a process you can learn (knowledge) about how you are choosing to respond to what is happening to you in life (choice). Get it! You are now on the road to controlling stressing in your life because you are learning both of these skills.

Yes it's certainly true that we live in a time of massive and accelerating change. Instead of being a victim of that change, you can learn to master change and lead it rather than being run over by it. You can learn to become energised by the sea of information and change rather than being swamped and overwhelmed by the waves of change. I personally find this life enhancing and something to be very happy about. We live in an amazing time on this planet and by using appropriate skills and attitudes we can live an awesome life of adventure, learning and happiness’ing. Now how cool is that!

life enhancing best wishes,

Grant

For more info on the process of Nominalisation and how you can use it to make powerful changes in your mind and life, check out my previous post: De-nominalising your world

Just say YES!

2011-07-18T19:24:00.000+10:00

We all have the extraordinary coded within us... waiting to be released.
Jean Houston

What powerful and simple advice "Just say YES to everything!"

Years ago, when I first started my Consulting business, I was earning great money and doing fun and interesting work. But a good friend of mine was earning four times what I was earning from the same type of consulting work, and winning clients and opportunities I could only dream of. In the spirit of behavioral modeling, I asked him what his secret was, what was it that he was doing that generated his incredible success, and what I could do to emulate this.

His answer to me: "Just say YES to everything!"

Yes, it was as simple as that. The key to unlocking the extraordinary, was to say YES to every opportunity that came along, to say YES to every thing that was suggested or offered in any way. At first I thought it too simplistic. How could just saying 'Yes' create such amazing success? So I gave it a go, to see if it was true.

Amazing. When you start to say YES to everything, new doors and opportunities begin to open. It's like you're sending a positive message out to the universe. An unconscious message to clients, colleagues, family, friends, the world, that you are a positive and 'can do, will do' sort of person.

People respond. They start to offer things they previously never made available to you. You get invitations you've never got before. It's an incredible self-fulfilling prophecy effect. A snowball effect. Success builds on success. YES builds on yes!

The Yes Man

The powerful and life enhancing effects of saying YES to everything are superbly told in a wonderful and deliciously humorous book I've just finished reading called 'Yes Man: One Little Word Can Change Your Life...' by Danny Wallace.

Danny's book tells the true story of how 'one little word can change your life.... forever!'. It's the story of how, on the advice of a stranger, he decided to start saying YES to everything, and the amazing events that unfolded. His life changed over night. Amazing things started to happen and have continued to this day. [They even made a movie out of the book and the story of his adventures.]

It's a wonderful story that had me rolling on the floor with laughter at times, and deeply contemplating the philosophy of yes at others. Quite a roller-coaster of a book. Definitely worth a read! Something worth saying YES to :-)

Say YES to this

So there it is. A simple, powerful and life enhancing strategy. Start saying YES to the positive opportunities and life enhancing offers that life brings. Don't say no. If you hear yourself being negative or responding with a no to an invitation, turn around and say YES! Watch what happens in your life as you send out a clear and congruent message that you are YES! kind of person.

And let me know how you go and what adventures and experiences unfold as you bring out the extraordinary in your self and your life through the power of YES!

Remember: Just say YES to every life enhancing thing!

life enhancing thoughts,

Grant

ps As Danny found out, there's a caveat to this strategy, make sure you only say YES to those things that meet your values. Don't say yes to anything that transgresses your values, involves unacceptable risk, is illegal or might hurt you. Only say YES to those opportunities that enhance your life!

Failing the Failure Formula

2011-07-07T19:50:00.000+10:00

“Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.”
Jim Rohn

You know, it takes more work to fail than to succeed. Failing is a skill. There is a structure to failure and it is encapsulated by the following formula which turns the NLP Success Formula on its head:

The Failure Formula
1.    Ignorance – Don’t know what you want or what’s important to you.
2.    Don’t do anything about it – don’t take congruent action or take inefficient or meaningless action.
3.    Ignore all feedback – don’t learn from experience.
4.    Don’t change – be very inflexible, keep doing what doesn’t work.

It’s really obvious!

It’s obvious really… repeated failure comes from being very skilled in one or more of the steps above. You can easily sabotage success by not knowing what you want, or following poorly-formed outcomes; by not taking action or taking incongruent and ineffectual action; by ignoring feedback or advice; and by being stuck or inflexible and not changing as required. Oh, and remember: make sure you complain and whinge about how cruel life is to make all this happen to you...

The wise aphorism of ‘a stitch in time, saves nine’ expresses quite well the fact that failing creates more work and requires more energy from life. If you are clear on your outcomes and proactively do the ‘stitch in time’ to fix things before they fail, you’ve only invested a small amount of energy to succeed.

However, if you neglect to get clear about what you want and need in life or fail to take action in time, then you’ll end up having to do ‘nine’ times the work to remedy the failure. You will constantly be expending far more energy, time and resources just to get by.

A cool idea…

And here’s a cool idea… If you are skilled at failing, then why not fail at failing? Just stop failing. Fail at following the Failure Formula. Hmmm, obvious really: Turn failure around and do its converse – success.

Yes, failure takes work and is a skilled incompetence. Anytime you find yourself not getting what you want in life, examine your behaviour to see if you’re unconsciously following any of the steps of the Failure Formula. Look for examples of the Failure Formula in your life. Then assiduously and passionately pattern interrupt them and do the converse.

Place your focus and motivation onto the steps of the Success Formula. Get clear about your goals, values, strengths, outcomes and dreams. Prioritise and focus your well-formed outcomes. Take congruent action and follow through. Learn from the feedback life provides as you take action and then change flexibly to keep adjusting your behaviours till you’ve achieved your desired results.

If it’s possible in the world, then it’s possible for you. It’s never a question of ‘if only I could do it’, it’s simply a question of learning ‘how’ to achieve your desired success. Learning comes when you are open to feedback and open to advice. Look for role models – people who have already achieved the results you desire. Then learn from them and model their actions.

Invest in your Self

This life is yours! It’s the life you lead! So lead it well. Your life can be fantastic if you stay strong, stay focused and put action to your dreams.

Invest in your life, your future and your self. Build up your knowledge and skills. Determine your strengths and then build on them. Focus your life. Gain as many and as varied experiences as you can.

Educate yourself. The more you invest in your self and in creating a meaningful life, the more you’ll be able to live great dreams. Life is a wondrous adventure and there is nothing like living an amazing dream to create an amazing future now.

So Take Action! Follow the Success Formula. Be the changes you want to see in your world. Watch out for the Failure Formula in your own life and those around you - Pattern interrupt it whenever you see it. You can do it! You really can make a life enhancing difference!

smiles and life enhancing wishes,

Grant

The hidden power of smiling

2011-06-17T17:42:00.000+10:00

Heya, here's a short life enhancing video that my friend Mike shared. In it, researcher Ron Gutman reviews a raft of studies about smiling, and reveals some surprising results.

[In case the embedded vid doesn't work for you, here's the link:

TED: The hidden power of smiling ]

And if you'd like more info about the power of smiles, check out my post Smile about this it'll put a smile on your face :-)

life enhancing smiles,

Grant

The power of words...

2011-05-30T20:01:00.000+10:00

Words can change your life. They are the tools you use to construct your reality and your connection with others. Here's a short and powerful vid that both uplifts and demonstrates the amazing power that words can have. As the description to this vid says "This short film illustrates the power of words to radically change your message and your effect upon the world."

Let me know what you think.

[and here's the youtube link to the vid in case the embed above doesn't work for your browser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzgzim5m7oU ]

If you'd like to learn details about the neuro-linguistic effects that words have on your mind and body, check out my previous post: Life Enhancing Language

smiles, Grant

The kindle is cool

2011-05-24T19:14:00.001+10:00

I recently purchased a Kindle and thought I'd share my experience with you about how it is such a Life Enhancing Device (LED).

Apropos of my last post about the importance of learning and gaining myriad life experience, the Kindle opens up new possibilities and more cost effective and easier access to books, reading and learning.

The Kindle is Amazon.com's foray into the eBook Reader market. With the Kindle 3, it's now at the third version of the device. And most techo companies require three versions to really begin to get their technology matured and close to functional usability. The Kindle 3 has now reached that point, and with a price that equates to a couple of tanks of petrol (or for those in the USA 'gas'), you're crazy if you don't get yourself one.

The Kindle 3 comes in a 3G with WiFi version, that has international free roaming over the 3G network worldwide. Free that is for purchasing and automatically downloading books from Amazon.com, along with browsing wikipedia.com. It also allows you to email pdf's and MSWord .doc files to a free.kindle.com email address that automatically converts the files to .mobi format, the native format for the Kindle, and downloads them for free to your Kindle via any WiFi connection.

With thousands and thousands of free and inexpensive eBooks available at sites like ProjectGutenberg.org and Amazon.com, you can now fill your Kindle with more books than you'll ever be able to read. And if you want to buy a new book from one of your favorite Authors, you'll find that you'll recoup the price of the Kindle with the purchase of your first few Kindle versions of the books, compared to the inflated prices being charged for dead-tree books these days. Browse online with the Kindle, click to purchase and the book is downloaded, ready for reading in seconds. You'll never be without something to read again!

The device is thin, light, brilliantly easy to read with it's cool e-ink screen technology. And the battery lasts for weeks between charges (providing you turn off the WiFi when not requiring it). This means you can take your Kindle on overseas adventures and not worry about trying to find a place to recharge it.

As my friend Ryan said recently, after he'd purchased and used his new Kindle, "I love the Kindle, it's the best thing I've ever owned in my life". Which is a BIG claim given he is a techo from way back and is definitely not gadget challenged. Yup, I do totally agree with him, the Kindle is a Life Enhancing Device. It's cool.

smiles and life enhancing wishes,

Grant

Think about this...

2011-05-14T10:08:00.000+10:00

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Here's some some thought provoking ideas and life enhancing logic explorations I've been playing with today:

What differentiates people in life and largely determines the results and outcomes they achieve is their actions and behaviours
Actions are predominantly created and generated by attitudes, beliefs, and decisions
Attitudes, beliefs and decisions are in turn engendered through thoughts, ideas and intuitions
Thoughts and ideas are guided and triggered by knowledge, learning and experience

It's kind of obvious when laid out like that... what differentiates the quality of your life over the long term is the quality of the knowledge, learning and experience that you build into your life. It really all comes down (and up) to knowledge, learning and experience.

Your thoughts guide your decisions and behaviors, but you can only think with the tools you have available in your mind. The more ideas, experience and wisdom you have in your toolbox, the greater the chance you'll think intelligent thoughts, have intelligent and life enhancing attitudes and beliefs, and correspondingly the greater the chance you'll do intelligent and life enhancing actions and behaviors. Hmmmm, simple really!

So here's the logical conclusion... If you want an intelligent and enhanced life, you need to fill it with intelligent learning, experience, knowledge and awareness. The more of that you do, the better you'll differentiate your life.

So that's my thought for today... What can you do to make a difference to your life? What books are you going to read this week? What online articles will you google and read? What learnings are you going to put into your life this week? Ongoing? How specifically are you going to learn and experience more in your life? What are you going to do to enhance your life today?

You learn something every day if you pay attention.
~Ray LeBlond

life enhancing thoughts,

Grant

ps in my next blog post, I'll share with you a cool life enhancing device that I've been using to do more reading and learning with!

Looking past limits

2011-05-04T20:48:00.001+10:00

Here's an incredibly inspiring and life enhancing video that is well worth the few minutes of your time to watch it now.

It's about believing in yourself and looking past limits to create an enhanced and enhancing life for yourself and others.

[here's the link to the talk if the embedded vid doesn't work for you: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/eng//id/1116 ]

I hope you enjoyed the video and found it useful and life enhancing.

smiles, Grant

Adventuring

2011-04-17T18:14:00.001+10:00

Hey there,

Adventuring is life enhancing!

I've just recently returned from an incredible month of snow adventure travels in the USA, and thought I'd share with you how life enhancing adventuring can be and encourage you to do more adventuring in your own life.

I feel so refreshed and alive! So filled with a renewed sense of how magical our world truly is, how wonderful it is to meet new people, see new places and deeply connect with nature.

We started our adventures with a couple of weeks snowboarding and skiing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. What an amazing place it is! Incredible snow and incredibly friendly people. Fresh powder falling from the sky most nights. Blue sky days. Stunning views of the Tetons. It was so much fun that you'd wonder if it's legal :-) I have to say, as I've said before in this blog... snowplay is incredibly life enhancing! If you love the snow, then make sure you get out and play in the fluffy white slippery stuff this year. And if you haven't ever availed yourself of the magic, then let me say, you really owe it to yourself to give it a go. Snow creates a fresh palette of beauty to explore, play and adventure in. It opens up new ways to move through gravity. It facilitates immediate flow state. Meditation in motion. Fun! Exhilaration! Incredible!

We followed this up, with 10 days in Togwotee, Wyoming. An amazing place, where back country snow-mobiling is king! Here we enjoyed sled trips out to Yellowstone's Old Faithful and Grand Canyon regions. Such a stunning contrast of volcanic activity, steaming guysers and the pristine beauty of ice and snow.

Snow-mobiling is an incredible way to explore the wilds. The power is awesome! Snowmobiles really are Life Enhancing Devices! And going backcountry on 160HP freedom machines is a whole 'nother way to mix adrenalin with passion and scenic beauty. I was in petro-sexual heaven :-D

We also went dog-sledding. Gliding along the trails in sleds pulled by 12 trusty and ever-willing hounds. What a hoot! It's also a wonderful way to explore the back-country. And boy do those doggies love to run! They are ever so eager and wag their tails the whole way there and back. Hearts of gold and boundless energy. After a day of dog-sledding I felt uplifted and inspired by both the experience and the role-models set by our team of dogs. They know how to make exercise fun and how to pull together to achieve. Wonderful.

Finally we hopped across from Wyoming to Minnesota for 10 days of snow adventures with our good friend Thomas 'Sully' Sullivan. Sully is an amazing person. So full of life and passion for making the most of every single day. He is a writer with some 80 published novels and short stories and his work broadly ranges from the excellent and Pulitzer nominated literary satire THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON through to sci-fi and thrillers, including his latest paperback release THE WATER WOLF (free chapter on his web page). If you haven't already, check out my blog posts on some of Sully's takes on life enhancing: Inspiring your Soul and Freedom is life enhancing.

Sully invited us over to the States to stay with him and go x-country skiing under the stars in the back trails around Elm Creek and Crow Hassan. He was the impetus and seed crystal for our snow-adventure holiday. An incredibly generous and gracious host, he took us out snow-shoeing and x-country skiing in all his favorite places, where we got to appreciate his fine culinary treats (raisin bread peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with melted coffee blast ice cream...) and all the fractals you could ever desire in the starkly contrasted decidous trees silhoutted by the moon or sun, depending on the time of day we were out adventuring.

Along the way we got to do an ice fishing adventure, and serendipitously connected with some of the wonderful people we met on our travels.

Adventure is life enhancing!

Yes, adventuring is truly life enhancing! New things, new people, new places. It connects you with a deeper sense of self. Connects you with the world. Opens your horizons. Suffuses your life with freshness, passion, adrenalin and energy. Adventuring makes you feel alive in ways that normal day to day life just can't provide.

So here's my gift to you... a question...

What adventures can you bring to your life now? What adventuring could you do tonight? this weekend? this month? Soon. Now!!!!

Adventures don't have to be huge or involve overseas travel. They can be as simple as a walk in the park at sunset. Or a ride on your bike along a new pathway you haven't yet explored. A visit to a beach or forest you haven't been to in a while. Getting out with some friends to a new restaurant. Going away for the weekend. Anything that you find fun, different and inspiring. And even better if it involves being out in the natural world.

As Sully reminds us "The cues to magic are all around you... The magic is in the effort".

So make the effort and go adventuring. It's truly wonderfully life enhancing!

smiles and cheers,

Grant

Self-Reflection and Meta-Emoting

2011-03-18T11:21:00.000+11:00

"Resentment, anger, frustration, worry, disappointment—negative emotional states, justified or not, take a toll on your heart, brain and body. Don't let justified emotions rob your health and well-being."
Doc Childre and Howard Martin

In today's post I want to explore the incredibly important skills of meta-cognition and meta-emoting...

So what is Meta-Cognition?

Meta-cognition is cognition about cognition. It's thinking about your thinking. It's an important part of self-reflection.

Self-reflection involves processes such as feeling an emotion, experiencing it and taking the time to think about and understand it.

Thinking about your feelings and thoughts, reflecting on your behaviours and emotions and deciding whether you support them or want to change and improve them is key to life intelligence. You can produce amazing results in your life by thinking positively and generatively about your emotions and behaviours and then using the NLP Success Formula to change and adjust:

Clearly know your Outcome
Take congruent Action
Sensory Acuity – Learn from Feedback
Behavioural Flexibility – Change and adjust to achieve your Outcome

Creating your reality...

You can create hell on earth in your own life in the same way. It's the same process, just different content. For example, if you feel angry about something -- that is, if you do angering of your self over something -- and then you get angry about the anger, you set yourself up to spiral out of control. The angering about anger is a meta-emotion - an emotion about an emotion. You need to be very careful about the meta-states you are generating in your mind and body. On the other hand, if you were to feel entertained by the anger, you would find the anger dissipating and not so impactful on your mind, body and behaviour. It's a much more useful meta-state to be in.

As highlighted in previous posts, it's all about outcome and purpose. What and how do you want to 'do' yourself? Stop, self-reflect, and get clear about how you want to think and feel in your life, on a moment by moment basis.

The capacity to do meta-cognition is vital for success, life enhancing and deep happiness’ing. Going 'meta' to yourself and observing your behaviour, observing the patterns and quality of your thinking and emoting, is a skill you want to practice and practice and hold as a high process value.

Really value this and make it salient in your life. Make the time and space in your life to think about your thinking and feeling. It's a key strategy for enhancing your life.

life enhancing smiles,

Grant

Values In Action - Strengths and Virtues

2011-03-02T13:17:00.000+11:00

“Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses”
Marilyn vos Savant

One of the key insights of Positive Psychology is that happiness and satisfaction are markedly increased through the exercise of virtues and strengths.

Positive Psychology has identified six core virtues:

Wisdom and knowledge
Courage
Love and humanity
Justice
Temperance
Spirituality and transcendence

These core virtues in turn are comprised of 24 strengths or 'Values in Action'. The research has shown that each of us has relatively enduring preferences and propensities for certain of these strengths and that satisfaction and happiness are increased whenever we utilise these strengths and values in our daily lives.

The creators of the field of Positive Psychology, Prof. Martin Seligman and his colleagues, have developed a test to measure your key or signature VIA (Values In Action) strengths. You can access the test from the following web page:

http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/

once you have registered, select ‘VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire’.

Take a moment to complete the test and determine your top 5 or so strengths. Alternately, look through the following list of strengths and pick out 5 that really speak to you; that you consider to be the most important and valued for you.

VIA Strengths

Creativity
Curiosity
Open-mindedness
Love of Learning
Perspective
Bravery
Persistence
Integrity
Vitality
Love
Kindness
Social Intelligence
Citizenship
Fairness
Leadership
Forgiveness & Mercy
Humility & Modesty
Prudence
Self-Regulation
Appreciation of Beauty
Gratitude
Hope
Humour
Spirituality

By focusing on these and other strengths and virtues in your life you can build emotional resources and resilience. Using these will increase and strengthen your ability to enhance your life and create happiness both in your own life and the lives of others.

Strengths based living is definitely a crucial step to life enhancing, so add it to the tools you use to make the most of your life. Look at all the contexts of your life and find ways to enhance them using your key strengths and values. You'll make a positive and fantastic difference.

life enhancing smiles,

Grant