Category Archives: Feedback Loop

Do You Take Magic Pills?

When I was a kid I used to love the Brady Bunch.

There was one episode where they were at some amusement park.

The mom told the two youngest kids they could go off on their own, but not to eat anything.

Otherwise, they would spoil their dinner!

So every opportunity they could, the kids ate. But they didn’t call it “eating.”

We’re not eating, we’re “tasting.”

We’re not eating. We’re just putting the ice cream in our mouths, and it’s going down our throats on its own.

Etc.

The truth is that any kind of meaning we put on anything is INCREDIBLY flexible.

Of course, our brains are hard wired to see danger in many places where it doesn’t exist.

Those that didn’t have this “danger around every corner” gene were removed from society.

Even if they were “wrong” one time out of a hundred, that was enough to end their genetic lineage.

Which is why some things are harder to “reframe” than others.

Like when there’s any question of social safety, your automatic brain response is “better safe than sorry.”

Only we don’t live in a society where getting any kind of social disapproval is dangerous. Sure, in our ancient history maybe, but not any more.

Which is why a lot of NLP “tricks” don’t really last. Imagine you’ve got two circuits in your brain.

One for “fear.” One for “pleasure.”

Sure, you COULD do a Swish Pattern, and practice replacing your “fear” response with “pleasure.” And it might feel cool when you do it.

But unless you drill it into your brain, several times, it won’t stick.

Imagine thinking that all you had to do to lose weight was to do ONE sit up.

Or if you were training for a marathon you only needed to go jogging ONCE.

Or if you wanted to learn how to play Moonlight Sonata, you needed to watch it on YouTube a couple of times.

But for some reason, this is how a lot of people “do” NLP.

Some kind of “once and done” magic fix.

Remember, we’re talking about rewiring ANCIENT brain patterns that’s kept us safe for MILLIONS of years.

Before we were even humans.

It’s going to take a while!

But each time is easy. Five minutes a day. A little journaling. A little daily introspection.

Make this a daily PRACTICE, rather than a magic pill, and you’ll be on the path to greatness.

And since most people are WAY too lazy to do ANYTHING other than take a magic pill, you’ll be WAY ahead of the game.

Get Started:
Frame Control

Do You Know What You’re Creating?

Four Quadrants Of Learning

If you want to learn something, you can find plenty of helpful tutorials online.

For example, I’ve got a friend who into knitting. She wanted to learn this new stitch or weave (or whatever they call them) so she just looked it up on YouTube.

If you want to learn Photoshop, there’s no shortage of tutorials, free and paid.

Most skills are like this. Figure out what out you want, find the best way to learn it, and get started.

Generally speaking, with skills (that aren’t part of our jobs) we have an outcome in mind. If you wanted to learn how to reproduce a certain photo effect, you’d know when you were finished.

Of course, you can still learn skills without knowing why you want to learn them. I’ve studied all kinds of different software, and software techniques just for the fun of learning them. Sometimes I’ll figure out a way to use them, sometimes I won’t.

The process of learning, however, is enough to be an end in and of itself.

You might say there’s four quadrants of learning. You know what you want, and you know how to get there.

You know what you want, and you don’t know how to get there.

You know how to get somewhere, but you aren’t sure want to go.

You don’t know where to go, and you wouldn’t know how to get there if you did!

Of course, this last one is kind of funny, especially when we consider that’s how plenty of us live our lives.

Sure, we somehow muddle through day by day. Sure we know we want something more. More money, more friends, more time off, more sex, etc.

But what specifically do we want, and how specifically we’ll get there is something we’d rather not think about.

At least today.

Maybe tomorrow. Or when we finally finish cleaning out our closet. Or maybe after…..

The problem is that by doing this, we run the risk of being near the end of our lives and thinking, “What happened?”

Imagine, now, if you can, you are now at the closing chapter of your life. And you are looking back at all your accomplishments.

What are you most proud of? What things were the most difficult to achieve, but the most rewarding when you achieved them?

What things do you wish you did more of? What things do you wish you did less of?

Now come back to the here and now, and imagine your life ahead of you.

What do you want to build? What would you like to accomplish?

Whatever quadrant you’re in now, you can easily shift to a more useful one.

As soon as you choose a specific desire, out there in the future, all you’ve got to do is get started in that direction.

You’ll figure out everything you need along the way.

These will help:

Mind Persuasion

Your Pre-Built Dream Machine

Unleash Your Genius Entrepreneur

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur?

Many people imagine some kind of well funded inventor launching the next billion dollar start up.

Others may imagine some guy in his garage searching for that one invention that will save the world.

In reality, EVERYBODY (including YOU) is an entrepreneur.

What’s the structure of an entrepreneur? They think of something that may make them some money. They take action based on this idea. They get feedback from the marketplace. They adjust their ideas based on this feedback and try again.

This is the same process behind all human action.

You take a quick inventory of your state, right now.

Then you imagine a future that is better than now. Then you take action to attempt to create that future. We get a result, which gives us feedback. If we’ve improved our state, great. If not, we take action again.

The human mind-body-system is hard wired to operate on this behavioral structure. From the most basic movements, like shifting in your seat, to creating your biggest dreams, it’s the same.

Sometimes it’s unconscious, sometimes it’s conscious.

Sometimes is very small, and the outcome is almost guaranteed. Sometimes the actions are HUGE, and the absolute best we can do is move step by step toward our goals. Getting valuable feedback along the way.

Sometimes it CAN feel very magical. These are times when we’ve taken HUGE leaps, but they were unconscious, so we really didn’t know we were taking leaps.

There are ultra lucky people who live their whole lives like this. They never really try, they just do what comes natural, and get paid, get famous, and take their places in the history books.

The biggest mistake you can make is in thinking that if it’s NOT going to happen naturally, (or magically) that it’s not going to happen.

Since this strategy is build into every single human, all you’ve got to do is bring it up to the conscious level.

Choose your dreams, and then do something. Anything. Did you get closer? Great! Do more!

Did you move further away? No problem! Do something different!

However, this ONLY works if you CHOOSE your goals. Own your decisions. If you wait for it to happen magically, it most likely won’t. The dream fairy’s not going to show up to hand you the goods.

But if you own your life, own your behaviors, and own all the feedback, you can create anything you want.

ANY THING.

Get started:

Prosperity Generator

Are You Selling Out Or Starving?

Find The Magic Middle

I watched a pretty good movie on Netflix the other night.

It was a good metaphor for the difference between “selling out” and “following your dreams.”

Many people abhor the idea of “selling out,” meaning ONLY doing something to make a buck.

Anyhow, the main character in the movie was a chef (also the name of the movie.)

He had a job in a pretty popular, high-end restaurant. But he felt he was “selling out” as the owner wouldn’t allow him to “experiment” with different dishes. They had a fight, he quit, and bought a food truck.

Even though he was selling stuff on the side of the road for 4 or 5 dollars a pop, they were HIS creations, and he didn’t have a boss telling him to only follow the money.

Naturally, since it was a movie, everything worked out. He made a ton of cash, got his gorgeous ex-wife back, and reconnected with his kid.

Life, however, is far from a movie. If you follow your dreams, there’s a chance you won’t make a lot of money. (Starving artist.) At least at first.

On the other hand, if you ONLY “follow the money” you might get rich, but you’ll feel empty inside.

Are these the only two options?

Luckily, whenever we’re presented with two complete opposite scenarios, they are really extremes on either side of a continuum.

Which means if you put some effort into it, you’ll find a some good middle ground.

Where you can follow your dreams, AND make a ton of money in the process.

Problem is many people aren’t so patient. It’s easy to “sell out” and get a job you hate, and figure “that’s the way it is.”

It’s also pretty easy to just give up and become a “starving artist” with the attitude that the world just doesn’t “get it.”

It takes real effort to take your passions, and cultivate them into real skills that people will pay real money for.

It’s not easy, which is why you’ll find most people in the “starving artist” category or the “sell-out” category.

You look up the personal history of ANYBODY who made it big, in ANY field, and you’ll find that it didn’t come easy.

In fact, many great creators went through plenty of struggle, in the beginning.

You might consider that to be the very purpose of your life.

To first identify your passions, and then do whatever it takes to cultivate them into something magnificent.

Something people will appreciate.

And something that will generate real wealth.

Get Started:

Prosperity Generator

Unlocking The Mystery Of Money

My Apple For Your Potato Chips

Next time you buy something you want, pay attention to the energy of the transaction.

This is good to do with food, especially when you’re hungry.

Think of the food, and think of the money you’re about to spend.

Instead of thinking of it as a “purchase,” or a “transaction,” think of it as exchange.

A straight up trade. Like back in elementary school.

Take a moment, and imagine whatever you did to get that money.

If it’s five bucks for a Happy Meal (or whatever) just imagine what it took for you to get that five bucks.

Then imagine trading your efforts for your food, rather than the money.

This can be a helpful exercise for a lot of reasons.

Sure, we all love money, but only because we can trade money for the things that we want.

I used to find it helpful to think of what I could buy with the money I was about to earn when I had a particularly unpleasant job ahead of me.

When the Beatles (John and Paul) would sit down to write a song, they would literally say, “Let’s write ourselves a couple of new cars.”

The truth about money is that it’s only an intermediary step between two actions.

Your action which you trade for money, and the action of somebody else, who is producing what you want to buy with that money.

This seems pretty basic, but it can be easy to drift up into the upper metaphysical atmosphere when talking about “money energy.”

Boiled down into it’s most essential components, money is the potential or stored energy that exists between two people that are making things that each other wants.

So when people talk about “money energy” they’re really talking about human effort.

When people say “resonate with money energy” what they really mean is to resonate with other people.

Both what they’re doing to produce the stuff you want, and what you’re doing to produce the stuff they want.

When everybody is “resonating with money energy” meaning everybody is doing their part producing and trading, based on what everybody else wants needs and appreciates, that’s when society really starts to take off.

This is natural because humans are social creatures. It is deep in our nature to participate in a diverse society with many different people from many different backgrounds.

With everybody making or helping make what everybody else wants, everybody’s happen.

The good news is that with the whole world kind of linked together, economy wise, it’s easier than ever to get in and get some.

Get Started:

Prosperity Generator

Fire Or Water – Your Choice

Success Is An Inside Job

There’s a very old Sufi poem (by Rumi, I believe) I like.

The gist of it is that if we step through fire, we’ll end up nice cool water.

But if we go straight to the cool water, we’ll end up in the fire.

This, of course, is a metaphor for life.

The things we think are easy are only easy in the short term. They generally build up into HUGE long term problems.

That ice cream may taste good, but if you eat it every single day, you won’t feel so great.

On the other hand, it may seem like the worst idea possible to go for a walk when you’re favorite TV show is on, but once you make it a habit, you’ll feel pretty good.

And that “good feeling” that comes from doing things that aren’t so great in the now, but build up, is a much, much different “good feeling” from doing those things in the present.

Those “present only” good feelings (like sleeping in, eating cheeseburgers for breakfast etc) are pure pleasure. There’s no feeling of accomplishment built in. These pure-pleasure feelings come from the outside.

On the other hand, that feeling you get when waking up early every morning has become a habit, or going for a walk at night instead of eating ice cream is a good feeling that comes from within, and is based on your own accomplishments and actions.

One of the ways this paradox manifests itself is when we want somebody to “tell us what to do.”

Sure we’d like to meet that special someone. Sure we’d like a much more fulfilling career. Sure we’d like to achieve self-actualization. If only somebody would tell us what to do.

The only problem is that all the REALLY good things in life, things that last, like wealth, relationships, REAL happiness, HAVE TO come from within.

Nobody can tell you any step by step procedures or paint by numbers steps.

You HAVE to work it out on your own.

Sure, you can learn the basic structure, just like you can learn how exercise and healthy foods will help you get in shape. But the SPECIFIC exercises, and the SPECIFIC food, are up to you to figure out. Some things work for some people, others work for others.

Creating relationships is the same. Talk to enough people until you find somebody that spins your propellers. HOW and WHEN you do that, and what you specifically say is up to you to figure out.

The good news is that there are NO shortcuts.

Why is this good news?

Because if there were, then EVERYBODY would be on them.

Since there’re not, every single path you find to any kind of success will be YOURS.

Your creation, your dreams, your results.

Nobody else’s.

Get Started:

Prosperity Generator

Are You Truly Open To Receive?

Ditch Those False Fears And Receive Truth

There’re a lot of ways we humans deceive ourselves.

In order to protect our egos, we tend see things that aren’t there, and not see things that are there.

One thing humans are pretty terrified of is risk. We don’t like doing something when we don’t know what’s going to happen.

It’s very common to think about doing something, or maybe even start doing something, and then the doubts start.

We start to worry about what people will think when they see us.

To be sure, the opinion of others is a HUGE motivating factor in pretty much everything we do.

Even when we’re alone, we can imagine that people are watching us and judging us.

Like if I told you right now the secret of getting rich quick was to hop on one foot in your room while slapping your belly and singing happy birthday in the highest voice possible, you wouldn’t do it.

Even if you saw video proof of money magically appearing, you’d start to do it, and then suddenly “feel stupid” as if the whole world was watching you.

Now, I’m not saying there’s any kind of magic money secret, but I’m sure you know the feeling of “feeling stupid” as if somebody were watching. Even when you’re all alone.

The truth is that social pressure can be wonderful and terrible.

Long long time ago, our “tribe” was crucial to our survival. So if they started to gossip about us, or talk smack about us, we were in very bad shape.

And if they thought we were the bomb, we could get a lot more stuff (resources and love).

So Mother Nature gave us this super-hyper-sensitivity to the opinion of others. (Gee, thanks!)

This can be hard to shake.

So in order to avoid this at all costs, we tell ourselves all kinds of lies to keep us safe. To keep us from taking any action that might bring us some negative feedback from our peers.

From looking stupid.

We even spend thousands of dollars on seminars, techniques and secret methods passed down through the generations to avoid taking any kind of risk.

And looking stupid.

But here’s the thing. Most of your fears are false. Meaning that unless you are jumping off a cliff with a bunch of flying rattlesnakes chasing you, what you’re afraid of isn’t real.

And here’s another thing. Usually, when we’re scared of something that’s not real, we imagine something horrible happening.

But when we embrace our fears, walk right through them and do the thing anyway, usually the OPPOSITE of our fears take place.

In our minds, we are terrified of feedback.

But in reality, feedback is essential to our success. It tells us what works, so we can do more. It tells us what doesn’t work, so we can do less.

When you “open yourself to receive,” what you’re telling the world is that you’ll not only accept good feedback, but “negative” feedback as well.

When that happens, wonderful things happen.

Get Started:

Prosperity Generator