Mind Mangement- Brain Training

Over the past 30 or so years, I have read a mass of educational, health, professional and self development books. Back in the 90s, I read Covey’s highly effective habits and since then I have lost count of all the texts, my last read was Robin Stuart-Kotzes “The Secrets of Successful Behaviour”. All of these self-development texts have a commonality that is important to discuss. They all in one way or another talked about or told us what we need to do to be successful. Many of these behaviours we consider to be elite, the actions of our most successful, the secret behaviors of our winners. The real problem is although I can read about empathetic listening or stress management; it doesn’t necessarily make me a good listener or a calm confident person. And by now you will most likely be nodding your head if you have been down a similar path.

Reading about a topic doesn’t give you those skills; learning is so much more than just reading a good idea. You may already know; it is engaging with the idea, imagining it for yourself, and rehearsal from approximation to personal best. If like me you have tried to do this and still find somehow those ‘secrets’ don’t stick you may now be wondering if those secrets don’t themselves have a secret. Something special that is not written down and that you need to know so those ideas can work.

My own research in this area proves the answer is yes. Real personal development happens on many levels and requires an approach based on brain design. I realized something very important about how brain design related to life stress and that therapy skills could be matched to the design and functions of our brain.

I also came to realize, there are mental roadblocks that both prevent the behaviors of success and instead produce the behaviors that hold us back. These roadblocks and the fixes that go with them is the secret of the secrets. You simply can’t behave like a winner if mental roadblocks are stressing you out.

Calm Confident Me, is based on thousands of pages of research and training with recognized experts in their field. These include: Michael Yapko, Charles Figley, John Joseph and Roy Sugarman among many. The books, journal articles and training although essential are not the whole story behind the program.

Early on in my counseling I learnt the importance of asking clients what worked for them and what did not. One of the key findings was the importance of simplicity. You won’t find complicated language in this program or burdensome lists of information. You will however get the advantage of more than fifteen years of refinement.

Complicated approaches don’t work when we are under pressure. We know that even as we start to become stressed, our brain automatically starts to shut down higher order thinking processes. An everyday example of this is having a run-in with someone and thinking afterwards, well that’s what I could have said. We don’t think of the right reply until afterwards when we have calmed down. While we think of our arousal mechanisms as like a switch they are actually a sliding scale. The emotional volume controls of Calm Confident Me will help you maintain your higher order thinking processes. The simplicity of the thinking fixes is an elegant way to keep you in charge of your own behavior so you can use the elite behaviors of success.

Just a couple of years ago, I still had not put all the pieces of the puzzle together. I had my therapy training, client feedback and a neuroscience approach to teaching the key lessons of therapy. The question was- what exactly were the key lessons to teach and the answer came from an unlikely source, the media. Newspapers, magazines, television and all forms of news helped me understand how powerful and common the psychic roadblocks to success were. Client feedback is never organized so it was difficult to make the intellectual leap to the simple everyday reasons we hold ourselves back. The answers were in front of me in my morning newspaper. The most common mental roadblocks are all around us.

Therapy training taught me to listen for rigid, non-factual interpretations of past, present or future events. Clients told me the problems that came from things they must do that they failed too; they beat themselves up by leaving out the good stuff about themselves and often predicted disaster. Reading the newspaper I found the same pattern of thinking faults. We are exposed to the absolutes, deception by omission and dreadful things sure to happen every morning. These thinking faults are the mental roadblocks that stress us out.

It is a chicken and egg question, do newspaper reports teach us to make the same thinking mistakes or is it because newspapers are written by people they have these errors. Either way our culture teaches us the mental roadblocks. It’s not your fault that you do this, it is something most of us absorb from the world around us.

You may have jumped ahead and thought to yourself, what makes them errors, haven’t people always thought like that? They are thinking faults not just because they inhibit our ability to use the elite behaviors of success but also because the consequences of thinking that way can physically hurt us or others. Consider for example, rigid absolutes of what we must, should or have to do, this might work for robots but they certainly do not work for humans. The consequence of thinking someone or something must or should be doing is often high level frustration or at worst dangerous and destructive acting out behaviors.

In real life, think what would happen if you were to ask some friends: what should the government be doing or the coach of their favorite sports team or the church and you will most likely get an unresolved emotional response. When this type of thinking fault pervades your thoughts it becomes almost impossible to maintain an emotional state that allows anyone to

think, Win Win or any of the other proven winning behaviors. Over time it can also become drinking problems, stomach ulcers, comfort eating, heart disease, and sleepless nights. The mental roadblocks often manifest in stress management issues.

This form of beating the drum to sell newspapers is as old as the press and is often used by politicians to create fear. Being able to identify when this is happening and put it into perspective with simple mental tools, stops us from stressing out with possibilities we often can’t change. Instead it allows us to concentrate on achieving our life goals.

Because of all of this, I hope you have also realized that you do not need to have a problem to benefit. A preventative approach to teach anyone with regular life stress a common set of brain strategies to improve their resilience and with that build confidence and increase their everyday feelings of calm works for almost everybody. The knock on effect of being more in charge of your emotions is the ability to make other important changes in your life.

If you are still not convinced, ask yourself where you would be if you stopped doubting yourself and felt more calm and relaxed. How would your relationships and promotions at work look if you could feel more confident, for example feeling more comfortable speaking to and leading groups? Avoiding public speaking is so common we consider it normal. You don’t have to be like that, you can learn to identify and fix the mental roadblocks to your success and you can start right now!