I used to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day.

I wanted to quit. It’s hard to quit, even though research shows that the physical addiction is gone after several days of non-smoking.

Why do so many smokers go back to smoking after quitting?

Because even though they have given up smoking, they still hold the image of themselves as smokers.

I quit smoking by
becoming a non-smoker first.

I spent months visualizing myself without cigarettes, even though I still smoked. I pictured my life without smoke, without dirty ashtrays, without a cigarette between my fingers, even while I was smoking.

And I adopted the attitudes of a non-smoker. Smoking is awful, it pollutes the air, kissing smokers is like licking an ashtray. The usual stuff.

The problem with most people who quit and still crave cigarettes is that they are still smokers who aren’t smoking. The outer picture may have changed, but they still hold onto the subconscious picture of themselves as smokers. And so they still crave cigarettes.

The Adaptive Unconscious tries to resolve the conflicting pictures by creating the craving.

When I finally quit, I didn’t crave cigarettes because non-smokers don’t crave cigarettes. And I was already a non-smoker.

I worked daily to create a new inner picture, one that ended up being so strong that the outer Reality had to change.

What kind of person are you?

What ways do you picture yourself that hold you back from what you want to be?

There is rarely an easy way to change, and not everything will submit to your efforts.

I know this sounds simplistic. But you have nothing to lose by becoming aware of the processes involved. And trying a few experiments. You might be surprised at how you begin creating your life.

If you have the discipline
and are willing to do the work.

from Creating Your Life

A truly creative person rids him or herself
of all self-imposed limitations.
Gerald Jampolsky

Your mind has a powerful filtering system that creates blind spots.

Have you noticed how when you read a book and the story fills your imagination, the outer world begins to fade away? You don’t hear the traffic outside or someone calling for you. They have to speak more loudly just to get through to you.

Have you noticed how you can be at a party with everyone talking and you can hardly understand what anyone is saying? But when someone mentions your name, that gets through to you?

Have you noticed how when you fall asleep your senses slowly shut down, your body loses sensation, and then you are off to sleep? Then almost nothing gets through to you?

Our senses take in 11 million pieces of data in each moment, but we can only consciously process up to 40 pieces per second. The part of your brain working as a filter to manage sense perception is called the Reticular Activating System (RAS).

If the mind didn’t have the RAS, you’d go crazy. Think of all the information coming in through all your senses. The sights, the sounds, the tactile sensations.

Think of all those little hairs on your body. If you focus on any part of your body, you would become aware of the sensation there.

The RAS is a network of cells in the center of the brain associated with waking, sleeping, attention, and focus. It physically filters irrelevant sensory input.

The RAS allows you to focus. It functions like an executive assistant, a kind of censor of what’s not important. It screens out the junk.

The RAS determines what information
gets through to you.

What you Value,
or what you think is a Threat.

As we focus on something important, things that are less important, things that we Devalue, fade away. Important information gets through, whatever we consider valuable or threatening.

This explains why teenagers can be watching TV or playing a video game, and a parent can call them to dinner and not be heard. The Value of the parent’s voice goes down in proportion to the importance of the TV.

This explains why eight people at a large dinner table can have cross conversations with each other and still carry on. As you focus on something important like your own conversation, the others nearby fade because they lose Value to you.

This explains why a new mother sleeps through the alarm clock going off, the jet flying overhead, and the truck driving by, but when the baby starts crying, she wakes up right away. The other sounds are not a Threat so they don’t get through the censor, but the threatening sound of the baby gets through.

What you Value gets through.
What you Devalue gets filtered out.

I knew a couple with a barking dog that kept half the neighborhood awake. The owners were never bothered by it. However, the barking threatened the neighbors’ peace of mind so it got through their mental filter.

But the owners loved their dog and were comforted and felt protected by its barking. They would have no problem sleeping through the night. Their neighbors may also have slept better if they understood that any burglars in the area would be warned off by a barking dog.

Once I worked at a company that decided to move my group to a different building. I was placed next to a service elevator.

You can imagine what that means. All day long, every day, I would hear that elevator opening and closing, opening and closing.

What did I do?

Because I knew about the RAS, I immediately told myself, “That elevator doesn’t matter to me.” When people asked me, “Isn’t that elevator going to bug you all day?” I’d answer, “No, I won’t even notice it.”

And almost from the beginning my RAS screened it out. It never bothered me.

A colleague who used to have an office was now in an open cube. He did not know about the RAS. He was used to closing the door and having quiet.

He would hear me talking on the phone over two cubes away and he would stand up and say, “Mark, you are talking too loud.”

Every sound was a threat to him, so every sound got through.

The key is knowing that you control what gets through.

It depends on how you
psychologically evaluate the sensation.

This fact is particularly important to teachers.

How often do we accuse a child of not paying attention to the teacher? But what if the teacher is not making the history lesson, or math lesson, or science lesson interesting to the child?

The teacher and the course material
fade away.

The child can be looking right at a teacher as the teacher explains something and not get it. (We all have experienced this. We lose interest, our minds wander, the filters kick in because we become interested in our own thoughts or daydreaming. And minutes go by where nothing the teacher/boss/television/ politician says gets through.)

What happens when the child sees no Value in what the teacher is saying?

The child’s RAS screens out the teacher. It’s the teacher’s job to make sure the class material is perceived as valuable by the child.

So the question is, what do you Value in life? And what do you Devalue?

Because now you know that if you devalue important things, they will not get through your mind’s automatic filter.

What do you Devalue?
Could what you Devalue actually hold Value?
How will you know if you are blind to it?

***
from Creating Your Life

*****

One of the things that the Power of Positive Thinking crowd often fails to mention is that whenever you try to make a big change in your life, your life can sometimes enter a stage where it seems everything is falling apart.

When you want to take your airplane to a new altitude, put on your seatbelt because you may experience some turbulence on the way up.

Making a major change in yourself or your life is like kitchen remodeling.

You have your old kitchen. You’re content with it out of sheer habit.

Then one day you visit a friend who has remodeled their kitchen. New granite counter tops, fresh matching appliances, new tile floor. You decide to remodel your kitchen.

Unfortunately, the transition to the new vision or goal is not immediate. There is a dismantling period where your kitchen must be removed. You have a less than functional kitchen.

You enter a kind of Dark Night of the Soul.

A less-functional or gutted kitchen means hard times. And there is always danger that if the new vision hasn’t fully taken hold, you will hang on to the old kitchen rather than move forward into the new kitchen.

The new vision has to be stronger than
the current picture to get you to act.

This happens whenever you set a vision or goal and work to make it happen. The key again is that whatever goal you set, you must hold it strongly in mind.

If you hold the goal strongly in mind,
if you daydream about it and feel it,
you are more likely to achieve your goal.

Your enthusiasm for the new vision
carries you through the tough transition.

You inspire yourself with it continually, and sustain the vision and energy through the rough times. Your old “anchor points,” those fixed pictures that anchor your vision of reality, will get pulled up to make room for the new vision. You hold the vision in order to have the energy to carry your goal through to completion.

You want to become a chemical engineer. You are not one right now. But you know some chemical engineers, and their work fascinates you. You think you can be good at it and have fun with that kind of work.

So you hold a new vision of yourself that does not match your current picture. What do you do? You motivate yourself to go to school, do the work, get the degree, search for a job, go to interviews, accept a job offer, learn the job, grow in your new role. The vision manifests.

You have given up your old picture and adopted a new, more professional and experienced one.

The mind is easily distracted. Therefore, one has to work hard to keep the mind focused and disciplined. This is why people work with positive statements and affirmations.

from Creating Your Life

Beware of the negative effects of false assumptions:

The Nocebo Effect

—In a 1970s study doctors diagnosed man with end-stage liver cancer. They told him he had just a few months to live. The patient died. An autopsy showed no cancer.

A —1992 study demonstrated that women believing they were prone to heart disease were 4-times as likely to die.

—In a 2009 study, participants were told they were given drugs with bad side effects. They were told the bad side effects for their particular drug, which was actually a placebo. They experienced burning sensations outside the stomach, sleepiness, fatigue, vomiting, weakness and even taste disturbances, tinnitus, and upper-respiratory-tract infection. These “Nocebo” complaints were not random; the side effects experienced were specific to the type of drug they believed they were taking.

Beware of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies. See more on the Creating Your Life channel on YouTube:

The Creating Your Life Checklist

The world is but a canvas to the imagination.
Henry David Thoreau

Take charge of your thoughts

__ Imagination is the tool with which you architect your life.

__ What you think, say, and feel creates your life.

__ Don’t focus on the rocks in your life; aim for the ways around the rocks.

__ Let go of negative, angry, sarcastic, cynical, and self-negating thoughts.

__ Think of the end result without being concerned how you will get there.

__ Aim your arrows, relax, let go, and trust they will hit the target better than you can imagine.

__ Exercise choice: Choose your state of consciousness.

Inventory your potential blind spots

__ Pay attention to what makes you emotionally reactive and twitchy.

__ Think about those things you automatically reject as “crazy” or “insane,” especially if you see these things in otherwise sane friends.

__ Note what others seem to see that you can’t see: in religion, politics, business, science, and personal relationships.

Get in the habit of doing affirmations daily

__ Start right now: make your first affirmation “I love writing my affirmations every day.”

__ Write every day, and apply imagination exercises.

__ Remember the Change Formula: Imagining Vividly with Feeling results in Change.

__ Try affirmations for 100 days: Give them a chance to work…if they don’t, you have lost only time…if they do, you will have entered a completely new world.

Download a printable PDF of the 100-Day Imagination Exercise Workbook at MarkAndreAlexander.Com.

__ Focus on the present and write what you are aiming for (not the rocks).

__ Trust that even if what you are trying to change grasps you harder, it will let go and you will be free.

Embrace change and flexibility

__ It’s time to allow your dreams to enter into your life.

__ It’s time to see yourself as worthy of your dreams.

__ Set goals that stretch yourself: Be realistic but challenge yourself.

__ Be the creator; no need anymore to allow others to create your life for their benefit.

__ Every day your goals become a reality.

__ Be an empowering wizard who builds up everyone you meet.

Your success and happiness lies in you.
Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form
an invincible host against difficulties.
Helen Keller

Go to MarkAndreAlexander.Com to access a free 36-day course on Creating Your Life.

*********

from the book Creating Your Life