Tag Archives: practice

Are You Reciting Magic Words?

When I was a kid my mom would always get on my case.

I’d go to my friends, we’d get into all kinds of trouble, have a lot of fun, etc.

Then my mom would ask me what we’d done, conversationally, and I’d say, “nothing.”

Or when we had something really BIG planned, she’d ask me what I was doing that weekend.

And I’d say, “Nothing. Just going to my friends house.”

One of the things our conscious brains to, to save processing power, is to distort, generalize, and delete.

Imagine if you had a really delicious chicken dinner, with eighteen courses, and waitresses that juggled fire while you ate, all on top of this spinning disk on top of a two thousand story tower.

Now, you could take an hour or two to fully explain your experience to a colleague at work a couple weeks later.

OR you could say, “I went to this chicken restaurant that had a pretty good show.”

Most of the time this works pretty well. It’s a lot of effort to describe everything, and the poor guy who asked you about your weekend doesn’t really want to hang around for three hours while you describe it in excruciating detail.

However, this tendency to WAY oversimplify things CAN get in the way.

Like take somebody who spend ten years building a million dollar business.

They started out trying various things. They tried and failed TONS before they made a nickel. Their friends (who later turned out not to be friends) thought they were crazy.

The friends that DID stick by them turned out to be ULTRA LOYAL.

They lost TONS of sleep worrying about whether or not they’d succeed, felt more anxiety than they thought they could bear.

And then FINALLY they started to become successful. A little bit. Then they got a little bit more.

THEN they got to that magic tipping point where success bred more success.

And let’s say you asked them the secret of their success.

Would they REALLY spend hours and hours explaining everything?

Or would they sum it up in a short, easy to understand sentence? Like these:

Follow Your Bliss

Never Give Up

Have Faith In Yourself

Believe In Yourself

Believe it and You’ll Achieve It

What would you do?

Repeat these as if they were magic words, and then get angry when the success fairy didn’t show up?

Would you “follow your bliss” by watching TV or eating ice cream, since that what you REALLY like doing, and wonder why you’re not rich?

Silly as it sounds, this is what MOST PEOPLE do.

What about you?

Do you believe in “magic” or you relentless drive to succeed no matter what?

It takes time, it takes effort.

But you wouldn’t be reading this now if you didn’t have it in you.

Get Started:

Mind Persuasion Ebooks

Calmly Speak Your Desires

Most people wish they were more assertive.

In fact, most people misunderstand being assertive.

They often confuse it with being aggressive, or being belligerent.

And as I’m sure you know, all of us have shades of both passiveness and aggressiveness.

However, what really IS assertive behavior?

Well, it’s being able to “assert” something.

And what does THAT mean?

Simply stating what’s on your mind, or asking for what you want.

But it ALSO means allowing the OTHER PERSON to be assertive as well.

Say you see an interesting person. You’d like their phone number.

An example of assertive behavior would simply be to walk up, express that you think they are interesting, and ask for their phone number so you can get in touch with them later on. To know more about them. Because they are interesting.

Now, imagine doing that. Imagine walking up and saying that.

“Hi, I just noticed you standing there, and I thought you looked pretty interesting. I’m pretty busy right now, but how about if you give me your phone number, so I can call you later and we can meet up and hang out?”

Or something similar.

Of course, most people wouldn’t THINK of doing this. That is TERRIFYING!

But on another level, you probably realize that if you DID do this, and could say it with complete calmness and confidence, you’d get a lot of good results.

So how can you get to this level of calmness and confidence?

(And in case your wondering, you can substitute sales, or talking to your boss, or discussing difficult things with your partner, etc.)

The GOOD NEWS is that “assertiveness” is a transferable skill.

Like your chest muscles. If you work your chest muscles, ANYTHING physical you do, that involves your chest muscles will be easier.

Assertiveness works the same way.

To get better, all you’ve got to do is practice.

Any time you have an idea, an opinion, a desire, simply state it. Don’t force it on others. Don’t be belligerent with it, just state it as a FACT.

It’s raining out.

Today is cloudy.

I ate a cheeseburger last night.

I grew up in a one story house.

I’d like your phone number.

I didn’t like that movie.

I think that mustard and pizza go great together.

Don’t EXPECT agreement, but don’t EXPECT disagreement.

After all, you’re saying something that is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. For You.

Always look for opportunities to “strengthen” your assertiveness muscle.

Keep score. Write how many times you did it per day.

Try and keep a slightly increasing daily average.

And watch how easy it gets.

Learn More:

Mind Persuasion Ebooks

How Do YOU Spend Your Day?

We humans have a lot of sayings.

Things that sound true. Things that make us go, “Yeah, that’s right!” When we hear them.

But sometimes we say them and feel them as an excuse to not DO them.

It’s like on one level, we know intuitively what needs to be done, but on another level we wish it were easier.

And for most folks, wishing is easier than doing.

Take the old saying, “Genius is one percent inspiration, and 99 percent perspiration.”

Nobody would disagree with this.

Especially when we have examples of old school inventors toiling in their lab for YEARS before finally coming up with something.

But when it comes to our own lives, we tend to look for shortcuts.

We even counteract that statement with examples where it’s no true. Guys and girls who somehow stumbled onto geniusness, and didn’t really do much except get luck.

However, if you were to go beyond the Hollywood stories, and look into these people’s lives, you’ll see that they indeed struggled for a long time.

Only they didn’t see it as a struggle.

Back in their mind, they KNEW that one day they’d succeed.

This is what they mean when they say you’ve got to “believe in yourself.”

It doesn’t mean believing that you’ll get lucky or win the lottery.

It means believing that those boring, daily tasks you do will pay off eventually.

Even when your friends and family are openly doubting you and talking smack behind your back.

THAT is the perspiration. The daily work that will eventually BUILD UP to your genius breakthrough.

Like the story of the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It wasn’t ONE STRAW that did it. It was every single straw laid on their before, and that one “lucky” straw that got all the credit.

That one “lucky” straw wouldn’t have done crap without the rest of the straws.

Your genius breakthrough or achievement won’t come if you don’t do the work leading up to it.

The daily journaling, the daily practice, the daily drills, the things that aren’t fun, but are necessary.

Are you willing?

Really willing?

If you are, you CAN build anything you want. It takes time. It takes persistence. It takes dedication, and it takes belief.

But just like mixing the right ingredients will give you a cake, every single time, so will the above.

Small daily efforts will add up.

What do YOU do every day?

Get Started:

Mind Persuasion Ebooks

Claim The World As Yours

I used to have this weird freezer.

It was at the perfect temperature for a cool effect.

If I put an opened bottle of water in there, it wouldn’t freeze.

But as soon as I took it out, and twisted off the cop, it would freeze in about a second.

It was right at the “phase transition” temperature of liquid to solid.

All it needed was a little air, and movement, and instant ice.

Phase transitions happen a lot. Not just in matter (gas to liquid, liquid to solid, etc.) but in different levels of complexity.

For example, when you move from the stage of “conscious competence” to “unconscious competence.”

When something you’ve been studying or practicing for a long time drops down into your subconscious.

On a conscious level, it feels like magic.

This was the secret of both “Karate Kid” movies.

He trained a boringly repetitive skill until it became automatic.

If you’ve ever learned an instrument, it’s a pretty good feeling.

You’ve been practicing, with a LOT of frustration, and then you finally “get it.”

You can play the piece “by heart” without needing to think.

The trouble with most things we would like to accomplish in life is they require a certain degree of skill.

And those skills take practice.

They aren’t instant.

Only in our world of “instant gratification” things are often taught AS IF we really CAN learn them instantly.

Especially in the world of “self development.” There are TONS of books that give you certain “ideas” or different “frames” or “models.” But unless you PRACTICE those ideas or frames or models, it’s really not that different than reading a book on how to play the piano, without ever really practicing.

This is good news. Because all it takes is a few minutes of daily practice.

You won’t become a super-genius overnight, (at whatever skill you’d like) but it WILL happen, so long as you are persistent.

Unfortunately, most people are NOT persistent. They try once, maybe twice, and then give up.

World class athletes and musicians KNOW that the TRUE SECRET of mastering ANYTHING is daily practice.

Not when it’s convenient, or when you feel like it.

But every single day.

Whatever skills you’d like, to create WHATEVER you’d like ARE within your grasp.

So long as you are willing to do what it takes.

Ten, twenty minutes a day, and the world is yours.

Get Started:

Mind Persuasion Ebooks

Blast Away Your Inner Demons

When I was a kid I was very interested in science.

I was insanely curious about how stuff worked.

When I was in junior HS I had a subscription to Science magazine.

Total geek.

I always liked learning about things like atoms, molecules, and what I understood about quantum physics.

I was even on this book of the month club, and I read a bunch of science books.

I remember learning why the sky was blue.

Because the molecules in the upper atmosphere radiate at the same frequency as blue light.

So of all the light that comes through, blue light comes through the easiest.

Later on, I started studying hypnosis, metaphors and story telling.

Joseph Campbell explained the reasons that most of the myths have the same structure.

Of all the stories that were told over the eons of human history, that particular structure resonated the most effectively with humans.

Kind of like how blue light passed through the upper atmosphere the easiest.

One thing that surprises most people is that we have a lot of common fears and insecurities.

But since we never talk about them, we think we are the only ones that have them.

This is one major reason why there are so many different kinds of group therapies.

Just knowing that there are other people out there, just like you, who are having pretty much the SAME problems, is very comforting.

At our core, we all fear the same things.

Rejection, being kicked out of our social group, making mistakes in front of others.

This is why most people are terrified of public speaking or walking up to an attractive person.

Even the people that “seem” to do it naturally are feeling the same fears.

It’s not that they don’t have those same fears and insecurities, they’ve learned to act in spite of them.

To simply accept them as normal.

What you resist, they say, persists.

When you simply accept it, it is not so bad.

One of the common “themes” of myths is to “face” some demon.

This “demon,” of course, is a metaphor for those SAME fears we all share.

However, there are many ways to face them.

Raw courage and will power is one way.

Using mental practice, on a daily basis, is another.

Or both at the same time.

A little of one on a daily basis, out in the real world, and some daily practice on the inside, in your inner world.

And just like anything else, the more you practice, the easier it gets.

Pretty soon those common “fears” won’t be such a big deal anymore.

Get Started:

Mind Persuasion Ebooks

Practice Your Superpower

The other night I watched the movie “Jumper” on Netflix.

About this kid that learned he could teleport himself everywhere.

Didn’t take him long to start showing up inside bank vaults, taking stacks of cash, and then going back home.

There’s another TV show about these ambulance drivers. One episode they were talking about the coolest superpower to have.

They all ended up choosing the superpower they thought would help them get laid.

There’s this interesting primate called the Bonobo.

One thing they do is have a lot of sex.

Everybody is pretty much nailing everybody else all the time.

They find a new grove of trees, they have an orgy to celebrate.

I recently read a book that suggested the main reason for our human intelligence was a tool to get laid.

It’s our own version of the Peacock’s tail.

If you could choose a super power, which super power would you choose?

The very first book every written about NLP was called “The Structure of Magic.”

It related Noam Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar to the idea of “surface structure” vs. “deep structure.”

What we say and pay attention to is the surface structure.

But what we respond to is the deep structure.

When you learn how to “speak” NLP, you can speak and understand both.

Which means you’ll no longer be limited to seeing ONLY the surface structure of people’s communication.

You’ll know what they mean, know what they want, and what they are afraid of.

And when you can communicate at that level as well, that’s about as close to a super power as you’re going to get.

Funny thing about NLP is it’s usually taught as some kind of “once and done” type of deal.

Go to a seminar, have a bunch of stuff “installed” and then suddenly you’re “trained” in NLP.

Suppose you went to a basketball camp and thought you were “trained” in basketball?

What would happen if you went down the playground and tried some pickup ball?

Do you think it would help if you brought your “basketball practitioner” certificate?

If you want to get better at a skill, there’s two essential ingredients.

You’ve got to know how to do the skill in the first place.

AND you’ve got to practice.

How much?

How much practice would it take before you could stroll onto a basketball court anywhere in the country and hold your own?

How much practice would it take to become a black belt in your preferred martial art?

How much practice would it take to become fluent in a foreign language?

That much!

But here’s the good news.

Since so few people take time to practice ANYTHING related to NLP, most people couldn’t NLP their way out of a paper bag.

So when YOU start putting in the practice, your language will be YOUR superpower.

And it will get you all the things superpowers do.

Get Started:

Mind Persuasion Ebooks

Achieve Mastery In Anything

A have a friend who is an engineer for a company that makes industrial equipment.

Recently he took a trip to South Korea, as a big company there was one of his clients.

Before they let him in the facility, they made him surrender all his pens, phones, and papers.

They were extremely worried about trade secrets, and didn’t want him copying anything.

One of the unknown drivers of the industrial revolution was copyright infringement.

Everybody was copying the crap out of everybody else.

Even entire books were pirated and sold for a nickel.

All kinds of industrial espionage was taking place.

Ever since the first caveman decided it might be easier to throw a rock at a zebra instead of wrestle it to the ground and beat it to death, humans have been copying each other.

This is the heart of progress. Somebody gets an idea and turns it into a business.

Somebody else improves on it. And on and on.

Pretty soon we go from running to riding bicycles to riding on trains to flying in planes.

The process of modeling is the heart of NLP.

The whole set of language patterns was modeled from the some of the greatest therapists.

And then later the modeling process itself became part of the process.

When you were a kid, and you wanted to learn how to walk, you didn’t invent the process on your own.

You copied everybody around you until you could reproduce what they did.

Unconsciously, this is natural. Automatic.

When we get older, and we want to consciously learn things, it’s a bit more involved.

If you wanted to copy somebody playing the piano, you’d have to do more than sit and move your fingers around.

You’d have to copy their understanding of music. What all the notes mean.

One thing that is very helpful in any learning endeavor is to measure your progress.

Try something, see what happens, then step back and take a look.

A great way to do this is journaling. Write down the things you did, what you learned, and what you can do next to do even better next time.

It helps if you have some kind of reference material to help.

A set of ideas of principles to go by. You study them, then go out into the world and apply them.

Then later at home, write down what happened. Then study them some more, think of a different way to apply them based on your experience, and go out and try them again.

And keep repeating the process.

Do this every day, and pretty soon you’ll be an expert.

Of whatever it is you want to do.

Making money. Persuasion. Sales. Relationships. Anything.

Get Started:

Mind Persuasion Ebooks

Turn On Your Natural Learner

I do a lot of walking early in the morning.

Especially when it’s still dark.

It’s a great time to think, and let my mind wander.

Especially when it’s clear and all the stars are out.

You see a lot of strange folks in the morning.

Some out walking their dogs. Some on bikes delivering newspapers. Some people staggering home from the bars.

(Where I live some of the bars stay open past 2 AM).

The bar people are usually pretty obvious. From a ways away. They know the night’s over, but they’re trying to keep the party going.

Walking slowly to the area of town where all the taxis are. Keeping up their “energy.” Not wanting to break up the group, usually a mix of guys and girls who, for some reason, haven’t managed to close one another. Or didn’t want to.

The dog people are also interesting. Some clearly look like they’d rather be sleeping.

Others look like they enjoy it. The dog is not a burden, it’s an excuse to get out of the house.

It’s not a chore, it’s a companion. It doesn’t limit them, by tying them down to a dependent animal, it frees them.

Many things can easily be thought of “good” or “bad” depending on what you do with them.

Or how you think about them.

Take our brains, for example.

They are pretty good at coming up with reasons why we SHOULDN’T do things.

In fact, talking ourselves out of good ideas is something that everybody is an expert at.

That voice in your head just keeps yammering, and won’t shut up.

However, that voice can be your best friend, or your biggest enemy.

Since it’s YOUR voice, you get to choose.

Now, if it’s been talking smack your whole life, it’s going to take a while to change it.

But just imagine if that voice was ALWAYS giving you POSITIVE advice. Always encouraging you. Always telling you that you could do anything you wanted.

How would your life look?

The thing about our brains is we think they are not programmable. That they are the way they are.

This is why many people, including scientists, believe things like “intelligence” is fixed. That you can’t change it.

Or something like “learning.” That once you get past childhood, it’s difficult to learn.

But this is missing out on a LOT of variables.

Like if you were an adult, and your ONLY job was to learn, and EVERYTHING ELSE was taken care of (just like it was when you were a kid) do you think you’d be able to learn?

Of course you could!

In fact, for most people, that would be a dream come true!

The truth is that YOU have a lot more skills that you think.

You just need to “learn” how to “use” your brain more effectively.

Get Started:

Intelligence Accelerator

Jump Over A Tree

When I was a kid I was insanely curious.

As most kids are.

I broke a lot of stuff, just trying to figure out how it worked.

Being curious is a good trait to have.

But, you may say, “curiosity killed the cat!”

Sure, you can be TOO curious. Meaning you don’t know when to quit.

I ran into a morbid website the other day. Pictures of people just before they died.

How did they die?

By taking selfies.

In really messed up places.

It’s important to take risks. But if you take the WRONG risks, or too many risks, then you will end up dead sooner than you should be.

However, many people tend to take TOO FEW risks.

And that is the worst risk of all. Because if you are too risk averse, you’ll end up being USED by other people, or at least by circumstances.

Because if you NEVER take a risk, and ALWAYS play it safe, you’ll largely be dependent on others, or society, or the government, or the gods, or luck.

But the good news is that it’s pretty IMPOSSIBLE to take action, without a little bit of risk.

Nothing you do is certain. If anything WERE certain, that would mean you could predict the future.

And nobody can do that.

The trick (or skill if you prefer) is to always look for BALANCE.

The right amount of risk, balanced with the right amount of caution.

The right amount of curiosity, with the right amount of awareness.

It’s easy to get “stuck” in extreme view points.

But the magic is in the middle. Where the balance is.

Where you’re on the edge of your current level of skill. When you’re just straddling the outside edges of your comfort zone.

Not hiding in the middle, nor blasting away without a second thought. But slowly, carefully and courageously expanding it.

Once upon a time there was a kid, who wanted to become the best jumper in the world.

So he asked his local martial arts guru what to do. The guru planted a little sapling.

And said, “Every day, jump over this.” And left.

He came back ten years later, and that “kid” was now leaping over a huge oak tree.

All you’ve got to do is choose SOMETHING. Something small. Half risky, half safe. Half curiosity, half knowing.

And SLOWLY push out the limits of what you can do.

If you did that with your brain, imagine the life you could be building.

Instead of waiting around hoping for something to “happen,” like most people do.

Get Started:

Intelligence Accelerator

Surgically Precise Language

I used to eat a lot of fast food.

I would usually get a big sack of something once a week, and eat it while watching my favorite TV show.

Often times, I would have a hard time deciding.

After all, with so many fast food places to choose from, all with their own unique specialty, it was hard.

Do I want burgers, or tacos? A big foot-long, or a deep dish?

I know, heavy stuff!

This, however, IS one of the iron-clad, inescapable rules of economics.

If you want THIS, you can’t have THAT.

Everything costs something. Time, money AND opportunity. These are appropriately called “opportunity costs.”

It’s also one of the main, deeply unconscious reasons a lot of guys have trouble committing. If you choose HER, you’re also deciding that EVERY OTHER GIRL on planet Earth is off limits.

It’s also why our brains get so confused.

See, a long, long time ago, we had a decision to make. Our brains could be really, really fast, or really, really accurate.

But NOT both.

And if we DID decide to evolve both (a super FAST and super ACCURATE) brain, we would have had to pay for it somehow. As it is now, our brains take up a LOT of calories.

If it were fast AND accurate, it would take up a lot more. Which means we’d have to eat more. Which means our bodies would be shaped a lot differently. Which means we might not have survived!

So here we are, with pretty FAST brains, that are also pretty inaccurate.

Most of the time, the thoughts we think, the words we use are NECESSARILY vague. We leave out a LOT of information.

If you asked me what I did last night, I would say something like, “I made something to eat, read a few blogs, and watched a movie.”

There is a LOT of information I’m leaving out. If I told you EVERYTHING in excruciating detail, not only would you be bored to tears, but it would take FOREVER!

Normally, this is “good enough.” People have some random ideas, spit them out with some random words, that are necessarily vague.

We sort of understand what each other is saying, at least “good enough” to get what we need.

But just stop and think, for a minute, if you cooked dinner the way you spoke.

You reached in the fridge, grabbed some stuff that looked “good enough,” threw them in some kind of cooking device, for “long enough,” and then ate it.

So long as the base ingredients were what your body needed, you would be OK.

But as I’m sure you know, you can do a lot better than just “good enough.”

Just like you can take the time to become a master chef, you can take the time to become a master communicator.

Instead of randomly choosing words and ideas, you can choose them with surgical precision so people will think whatever it is you are talking about is AWESOME.

So much they’ll be begging for you to continue, and will be much more likely to do whatever you ask them to.

Learn How:

Covert Hypnosis