Mentor Path

The Neuroscience Of The Secret

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One of my clients talked about her daughter leaving home for college. She was aware that her daughter had had a very sheltered and privileged existence when she called home after her frst week in school and said that she missed the Pineapple Fairy. My client asked, "What do you mean?"

"Well, it always seemed that there was a fresh pineapple in the corner of the kitchen counter when I was home. Now, I've been here a week and there is no Pineapple Fairy. In fact, if I want anything, I have to go get it," she said in mock desperation.

Many viewers of The Secret have assumed that it can generate the Pineapple Fairy. But just focusing your attention on what you want is not magical. If it were, the world wouldn't be so crowded with wishful thinkers. Focusing on what you want is not wishful thinking, and it is more complex than positive thinking. Disappointed practitioners ask questions about how long it will take for their desire to become a reality.

The phenomenon of the flm The Secret speaks to a secret that a small segment of the population has known about and prospered from for thousands of years. The secret is really not so secret. It is the Law of Attraction: you create in reality what you focus your attention on. Your life story is the outcome of where you focus your attention.

Focus is not enough. Action alone, for its own sake, is not enough. Focusing— and wishing—do not create and develop skills that people value in the world and will pay money for.

So here are the secrets behind The Secret: what it leaves out, why it works, and four principles to empower its application.

Why It Works

The Law of Attraction is based in neuroscience. Your mind is an energy feld and responds to focus. Where you focus your attention creates brain connections. Quantum physics tells us that each of us generates energetic frequencies or vibrations. We project energy in our emotions and thoughts that are the source of what and whom we attract, as well as the basis of our sense of well-being.

If you lay a nail and a paper clip side by side, nothing happens. When you take a magnet and stroke the nail several times from head to point, the nail itself becomes a magnet; it can then pick up the paper clip. Why? The molecules of the nail are aligned in the same direction, creating a magnetic feld. When all of you is going in the same direction—and focused—you have power.

The secret, rather than being about wishing for something and getting it, is about understanding and refocusing personal energy.

There is a subtle but signifcant difference between this principle and the notion that where you place your attention you manifest in reality. Magic is the backdrop of the latter concept. Your mind is a powerful goal-seeking mechanism. When you focus on a goal, your mind begins to fgure out how to get it. Your mind takes the focus as instruction to attract. The diffculty is not a lack of ability to focus, but a diffculty with intentional and conscious control over what you focus on. Your mind is preset to focus on certain things, and it makes that focus unconsciously and unintentionally. The automatic pilot of your mind—what it is preset to focus on—has to be consciously redirected.

The mental act of focusing attention activates brain circuitry. Paying attention over time keeps the brain circuits open and active. Focused attention plays a crucial role in actually altering the structure of the brain. With repetition, these chemical links actually become stable changes in the brain's structure.

This concept explains at a brain level why a solution focus is more effective than a problem focus. Focusing on possibilities creates new neuronal networks and pathways, while focusing on problems deepens—further etches—the already existing circuitry. These brain connections literally become mind-maps that subsequently infuence the reality that we see.

The real secret behind the secret is to ask the question, "How can I create …?" This "How can I?" question focuses attention on precisely what you want and enlists your full energy to fnd an answer and a pathway to achieve it. Thus the real secret moves from imagining and wishing to doing.

When results seem to be coming to successful people easily and quickly rather than by sustained action, you make your assumption by comparing your inside to their outside. Not an apples-to-apples comparison.

How to Make The Secret Work

1. The Power Is in the Focus

Here's The Secret deconstructed: Focusing on a vision will create structural tension in your brain—the tension between where you are now and where you want to be.

Dissonance can create motivation. And your brain, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Your brain will conspire to close the gap between your vision and reality.

The paradox is that we do not attract what we want, we attract what we focus on.

Your unconscious doesn't register + or –. It just registers the focus. A print or negative is the same image; your unconscious is the image.

The power of focus is that whatever you attend to or focus on, you align yourself to bring about—like the magnetized nail. Be specifc about what you do want— not just what you don't want in disguise. "I want to get out of debt" focuses on debt. "I want a reliable car" focuses on the idea that the car will break down and need repairs. Everyone wants more money, so wanting is not the key to having it. Focusing on scarcity attracts scarcity. Focusing on prosperity aligns your energy to pursue prosperity.

2. Know How to Ask and Align

Since the Law of Attraction is a law of energy, if you have shortages or struggles in your life, you need to ask two questions:

1. Do you know how to ask? To align yourself with the ABCs: Ask. Believe. Create?
2. Are you resisting in some way? That is, do you place resistance in a natural fow of energy—the harmony with yourself and what you want, including how you proceed to get it?

Thoughts or feelings that focus on these and other negatives can generate resistance:

• Doubt
• Unworthiness
• Questions of self-worth
• Limitation
• Fear
• Scarcity

If you are not generating what you really want, consider whether you're automatically focusing on what you don't want. This unconscious focus is often informed by the beliefs from childhood experiences that ghostwrite present storylines.

Alignment includes letting go of negative emotion and thoughts. When you suppress negative feelings or thoughts, they remain in the background, generate and subvert their own energy, and sabotage attempts to polarize yourself to positive experiences. When you release negativity, you dissolve the emotional charge. Then you're free to align yourself with feelings of joy, happiness, and peace. You reconnect with the positive energy without the impediment.

3. Take Strategic, Planned Action

The Law of Attraction won't give you what you want, but it will give you the energy to sustain the process to create what you focus on. It won't send a Brink's truck up your driveway, or align the Lotto balls for you. The magnetized nail just lying on the table does not get anything done. However, you can align your internal molecules by focus and purpose, to point the energy feld of your mind to specifc goals. It's a way to use your power to write the story you want.

If you want to attract a pizza, you can focus on a pizza, think about having it, and wish to manifest it. But just sitting there visualizing the pizza without doing something about it is relying on magic. If that's all you do, you won't manifest a pizza. If someone happens to walk into the room and offer you a pizza, it is not because of the Law of Attraction, it is because of what scientists call coincidence.

Sometimes people who have a strong belief in and need for magic convert coincidence into magic or into synchronicity. Synchronicity does exist, but the pizza's appearing isn't an example of it. People who need to believe in magic convert a coincidence into evidence. Luck is narcissism meeting chance.

When you focus on a pizza, you need to hatch ideas about what action to take in order to make your idea a reality—in other words, how to get that pizza. Focusing on what you want generates a motivation to act, coupled with the sense of how you'll feel when you get it, and together both elements can sustain the motivation to act. Then, a hard-work "miracle" occurs. As you become focused on what you want and think about the benefts and experience of having it, you will persist in the focus of your attention, the discipline, and the strategy to sustain efforts to pursue it. By this focus you will both have ideas and notice (manifest) people and resources that can help you achieve your goal. Sustaining motivation to act and developing internal qualities will help you act in an informed way.

The pen is in your hand to write your story. The world will not pay you for what you know. It will pay you for what you do. It rewards action. You need to believe

• specifcally
• strategically
• systematically
• consistently

Then, have a plan, and act on it. Once you act on a plan, you can always self-correct.

This particular secret behind The Secret is also ancient wisdom, captured best by my grandmother who said, "Wishes don't wash dishes."

4. Be of Value to Others

Your focus and your actions must bring value to others. This is the Law of Attraction applied: You have to give value in order to get value. You get back what you put out. to the universe" were enough, no one would still be wishing for more money.

5. What You Attract is Equal to What You Provide

The mantra of The Secret, according to the flm, is: Ask, Believe, Receive. You will have much more success by converting it to the ABCs: Ask, Believe, Create. The amount of beneft you receive depends on the amount of energy you dedicate to it.

An example of this truer secret behind The Secret is that the amount of money you make depends on the amount of value you provide. And, of course, you have to ask for and collect what you're worth. While there is no Pineapple Fairy, you can create immense success with planned, strategic, consistent action that is of value to yourself and others.

6. Pay in Full for Your Success

A secret to success is that you have to pay in full for that success. If you get something for which you haven't provided value or beneft, you will still have to pay in some way. If you incur debt in order to purchase something before you've earned the money, you simply end up paying more for it.

So you might as well fnd out what the price is, pay it in full, pay it as soon as possible, and then enjoy the benefts of success. The price is always an energy, whether that energy is money, time, work, or experience.

7. The Secret behind the Secret to The Secret

People who truly enjoy getting what they want are those who have discovered how to enjoy paying the price. The enjoyment makes paying for it easy. The essential Law of Attraction is that the price is whatever you must give in order to create or attract exactly what you want. The antithesis is hoping and wishing with no energy input, which of course doesn't work.

Intention is a good start, but intention is not all there is to the Law of Attraction.

Here's the secret shortcut to The Secret: Find people who are already successfully doing what you want, getting what you want, and research what they are doing in order to do your own version of it. Ask. Learn. Question. But make it your story.

TOWARD BRAIN HARDWARE OPTIMIZATION

Understanding Six Learning and Performance Styles
David Krueger MD

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Scientists used to believe that brain cells and the connections were set early in life and did not change in adulthood. In the past decade, that assumption has been drastically disproved. Through advancement in brain imaging and other techniques, we now know that the brain as well as behavior can be trained, physically modified, and functionally transformed. The inner workings and circuitry of the brain change with new experiences.

Neuroplasticity and behavioral change occur within the context of individual styles. Some of these styles that appear more or less hard-wired need to be taken into account for optimum learning and performance.

Learning and Performance Styles

Self-management involves understanding yourself quite well: your strengths, weaknesses, learning style, working style, needs, and values.

Optimum learning and performance occur when you are in a specific state of mind matched to what you are doing. When you operate from your strengths, you optimize the potential for excellence.

In addition to recognizing strengths, knowing how you learn and perform is crucial for success. These learning and performance characteristics are styles; they can be slightly modified, but ultimately must be respected and strategically planned.

• Readers

Some people learn best by reading, and need to see a text or pictures in order to really comprehend material. President John Kennedy was a reader who assembled an outstanding group of writers on his staff. Part of Kennedy's brilliance was in using these people and what they wrote to informat his decisions.

• Listeners

President Johnson had attained his reputation and success as a listener. When Johnson kept the same people on his staff after he succeeded Kennedy, they kept on writing. Johnson derailed his presidency by not recognizing that he was a listener, not a reader.

• Writers

Some people learn best by writing. Beethoven kept copious notes and amassed an enormous numbers of sketchbooks, yet never looked at them when he composed. When asked about this practice, he said, "If I don't write it down immediately, I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook, I never forget it and I never have to look it up again."

• Talkers

Some people learn best by hearing themselves talk. This is a style I am quite familiar with. A significant portion of the material in my books comes from what I later jot down from teaching, presentations, and supervision of professionals— things that came to me in a different way from what I had previously thought or written out. "I don't write because I have something to say, I write to see what I have to say."

• Collaborators

Some people work best in collaboration with others. Creative pairings and the dance of ideas are common for those who perform best in conjunction with others. Some collaborators work best as team members, succeeding in a system where ideas and implementation occur as part of a group.

• Loners

Some people work best alone, preferring the purity of concentration and focus that they can achieve only in the quietness of working alone.

These predominant styles of learning—and none of them is all-or-nothing—constitute an important piece of self-knowledge and a way to facilitate performance for clients.

You become what you think and feel. Beliefs become reality.

A farmer and an anthropologist pass through the same terrain of undeveloped land. The farmer sees the soil and envisions growing crops. The anthropologist sees signs of an ancient civilization and reconstructs its history. Both are right. The data viewed validates each individual's story.

Using beliefs and assumptions, you create your own personal story and the themes of that story. The plot that you create defines and orients you in the present and guides you toward the future. The stories you tell about your life becomes your life.

Similarly, internal beliefs determine perceptions, including how you select, register and process everything you encounter.

Scientists went to a lot of trouble to discover what mothers have always known about banishing closet monsters that a placebo generates the effect of the accompanying story. The inert pill is really a story of expectation, taking the form of a medicine to work its magic. The patient is also prescribed some expectations, and in the majority of cases, they manifest. The effect validates the power of story. The story generates a truth so powerful that it can even reverse the pharmacological effect of a real medicine. The placebo is a white lie, a fiction that creates a truth. Someone can even create an experience by anticipating it.

Your experiences are always consistent with your assumptions.

Change begins with the recognition that you are the author of your own story. People perceive and remember what fits into their personal plot--an internal model of oneself and the world. Beliefs and assumptions dictate what you look for, and attribute meaning. You always find or create that which validates those beliefs, and ignore, mistrust, disbelieve--or more likely don't notice--anything that doesn't fit into that pattern.

People see what they look for. And what they look for that which appears on the radar screen--is determined by belief and assumption.

Such influential beliefs must be fully and consciously known in order to revise the ones that don't work, and to create new ones for personal and career growth. When you stop telling yourself all the things you should say and cease listening for what you ought to hear, you can begin to more fully craft your own story.

Half of the struggle is becoming tired of that old story: the one with too many work hours, constant themes of pressure at work, shortness of time, or personal neglect because of caretaking others. Or insisting on being in love with who you hope someone will become, rather than who they are.

4 BASIC INQUIRIES FOR STORYLINE EVALUATION

1. What do you want to change?
   If there is a personal problem, barrier, or obstacle, it is not a simple matter of getting over it, countering, or adapting to it: It is not there until you create it. Consider creating something else instead. For example, convert a fear of public speaking into an intention with a specific commitment.
2. What do you want to let go?
   The bottom line, no matter how entrenched the process or strong the hope, is "Does it work?" Emotionally, it is not so easy to let go of a hope without it being fulfilled. The most difficult goodbye is to what might have been are you tired of trying to work harder at getting someone to respond in just the right way?
3. What do you want to avoid? There is always the pull of the old and the fear of the new. Yet there is no future in repetition. For example, to avoid engagement with someone who is draining protects your energy for a more productive choice.
4. What do you want to keep and enhance?
   Your life is the manifestation of your beliefs. Changing your mind changes your life, as beliefs, goals and visions drive action. Choose carefully what you engage.

The best way to escape an ongoing problem is not to create it.

Recognizing constraint and limitation, coupled with the desire to change, may give rise to the question, "How do I get out of the story?" The question assumes the story is there, a given in the universe. The story (the proverbial "box" of the familiar and accepted) becomes the obstacle, yet it is not there until created. To recognize yourself as the author--the creator of the story--challenges an assumed model, usually your own. The question may then become "How do I create something else instead?"

If you want to change your life, first change your mind.

The first step of change involves determining where you are now, deciding where you want to go, and figuring out how to get there. Creating a plan and plotting a course allows you to stay on track, recognize and avoid detours and tangents, and move more effectively toward goals. Without a plan, you can't know where you are, and cannot strategize to get to where you want to go. If you don't know where you want to go (a goal), you can't figure out how to get there. Once you create a plan, be loyal to it.

People are always free to change their minds, always free to change beliefs and core assumptions.

A new story must contain the desired storylines. To stop doing something is not complete change -- a new story incorporates new behavior and beliefs. You have to embody -- actually live this story you want. Abstaining from an old story--such as excessive drinking or eating--is a beginning. But you have to have a new story to be in before you can give up an old story.