Are you where you want to be? Do you know how to get there? The human brain is the most complex and wondrous thing you will ever own, and you do own it. When it comes to understanding our consciousness, however, we often feel lost. We simply haven't read the owner's manual. If you're not finding the answers, rewrite the questions. BE by Design can show you how to get the most out of life by handing over the controls and making you accountable for your own existence. Using a four-phase process that draws on a blend of modern psychology and eastern wisdom, this journey to self is full of easy-to-use, practical tools and stimulating strategies to help you unlock your full potential in everything you intend, think, feel, say, and do. Make every day amazing; be the best you can be. Love, family, health, life purpose-these are the things to define us, not confine us. By pausing, stepping back, and examining your relationship with yourself and those around you, you can break free of habits and beliefs that are holding you back. Like a GPS for your soul, this book can help you get from "A to Be"-navigating a path to your chosen destination. Devoting time and energy in your well-being is always a rich investment, and the rewards are unlimited. Happiness, empowerment, focus and confidence-they all await when you take charge of your life and design how you want to BE.
BE by DESIGN
How I BE Is Up to MeBy Christine McKeeBalboa Press
Copyright © 2012 Christine McKee
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4525-0515-2Contents
A Note from the Author.........................................................................................xiPreface........................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction...................................................................................................xvWhat to Expect When You Embrace These Concepts.................................................................xviiPhase I: Awareness.............................................................................................1Chapter 1: Why We All Perceive the World Very Differently: A Mini-Tour of the Brain............................3Chapter 2: Your Manual of Life.................................................................................17Chapter 3: Unhealthy and Healthy Response Options When Feeling Negative Emotion and Stress.....................27Chapter 4: Accountability Versus Non-accountability: You Are the Creator of Your World.........................40Phase II: Focus................................................................................................55Chapter 5: Intention Model.....................................................................................57Chapter 6: Personal Power: Control Versus Influence............................................................68Chapter 7: Mood Control........................................................................................76Chapter 8: Choosing the Now: Each Day Is a Series of Once-in-a-Lifetime Events.................................86Phase III: Maximising Potential................................................................................93Chapter 9: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Relationships Are Your Mirror......................................95Chapter 10: Building High-Quality Relationships by Choosing to Communicate in the Moment.......................103Phase IV: Choices..............................................................................................119Chapter 11: Your Mental Diet: Choosing High-Vibrational Words..................................................121Chapter 12: Power of Gratitude and Finding Beauty Daily........................................................129Afterword......................................................................................................137Conclusion.....................................................................................................139About the Author...............................................................................................141Bibliography...................................................................................................143
Chapter One
Why We All Perceive the World Very Differently: A Mini-Tour of the Brain
The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. ~ William James
To begin this section, I'd like you to consider this scenario:
A policeman was walking down a steamy suburban Brisbane street when he heard a woman cry out, "Don't shoot me, John, don't shoot me!" The policeman ran into the house, where a distressed woman was cowering in the corner on the floor. Inside the house with her was a doctor, a priest, and a lawyer. The policeman immediately arrested the priest. Why?
Make a note of your answer to the question, and then turn to the end of this chapter to find the solution before you continue reading.
How many of you weren't sure of an answer because you assumed the doctor and the lawyer were also males? This is the most common response, by the way, based on past experiences and social conditioning that tell us most doctors and lawyers are males. Therefore, our brains stop searching for alternative views, because the current view matches our reality. The way you perceive, interpret, and give meaning to a situation, event, experience, relationship, or interaction is unique to you—it is your map. It is your version of how things are, how the territory you call life is. What you will discover in this chapter is that your map of the territory of life will always be unique and never the same as anybody else's. Let's explore what this actually means by taking a mini-tour of the brain.
Why, you may ask? Three key reasons:
1) You will get to know more of why you do what you do and why that it is not the same as what everyone else does. This can be evidence that you are quite normal.
2) You will understand where your habits, attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions of all things originated from. Once you know this, you can make conscious choices moving forward about which of these still serve you right here, right now, and which aspects you may wish to leave in the past. Additionally, this awareness creates the space to appreciate more of who you are without judgment, which opens the door to being able to see others for who they are, without judgment.
3) By getting a little more knowledge of how your brain works, you will understand that you are the creator of your world, and with that comes a lot of personal power. You can exercise this power every time you notice you've kicked into autopilot, enabling you to stop and refocus your mind to be fresh and creative in each and every moment.
We'll begin by briefly exploring three key functions of the brain: the conscious mind, the unconscious mind, and the RAS (reticular activating system).
The Conscious Mind
Inthesimplestofterms,theconsciousmindisthe"stuff"orinformationthat you are aware of in this very moment. That is present-moment awareness. Your brain only has the ability to process a very small amount of information in any moment, only about seven (plus or minus two) chunks of information. "Chunks" are logical groups of information that your brain is familiar with, and this enables you to make sense of the present moment. So let's use the example of you reading this page right now. You may be aware of the individual words that make up each of the sentences. Each word is a chunk of information—a chunk of letters strung together to create a word that you are familiar with. Because you are familiar with it, you can interpret the meaning of each word and therefore the sentence.
Now, as you keep reading, the previous sentences will be out of your conscious mind, and only the current words and sentences you are reading will remain conscious, in this very moment.
The Unconscious Mind
All of the "stuff" or information that is stored away for you to access when you need it (such as memories, habits, knowledge, and skills related to how to do things) lives in the unconscious mind. In their book Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming, Richard Bandler and John Grinder state that "conscious" is whatever you are aware of at a moment in time; "unconscious" is everything else.
So right now, put this book down and recite out loud to yourself the ten-times tables. Ready, go! I am imagining you all saying "Ten times one is ten, ten times two is twenty, ten times three is thirty," and so forth. Tell me, where was that information before I asked you to recite it just now? It was in your unconscious mind. By reciting it, you have just moved it into your conscious mind. You do this thousands of times a day, whenever you complete tasks that you have done many times in life.
The unconscious mind has many unique responsibilities. I will share seven with you.
1) It stores all of your memories from the moment the "record" button started back in utero. That is a vast amount of information.
2) It houses all of your emotions and how you choose to feel about things, people, events, and situations.
3) It runs your body for you—regulating heartbeat, oxygen flow, digestion, blinking, growing hair and nails, hormones, the immune system, and so on.
4) It follows whatever orders you give it—whether they are good for you or not. Your unconscious mind has maturity similar to that of a five-year-old. As a result, it wants to please and does not discern that information is good or bad. Basically, it does not have an understanding of the quality of information you feed it. Using a commonly used computer term to explain, GIGO. If you put garbage in, you'll get garbage out. Similarly, if you put good in, you'll get good out. For example, if you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, "Oh no, not another day going to work for Company X. I wonder what will go wrong there today," your unconscious mind will happily go about bringing into your awareness all the things that are not great about being there. Alternatively, if you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, "Oh good, another day of unlimited positive possibilities today at Company X," your unconscious mind will just as happily go about bringing into your awareness a variety of positive possibilities. We'll explore the skill of setting clear and joy-filled intentions in Chapter 5, and the power of your mental diet in Chapter 11.
5) It creates and installs new habits based on repetition. For example, if you decide to learn to ride a motorbike, you'll need a lot of practice in order to perfect riding and operating all the parts of the bike so you can ride smoothly, safely, and continuously on the highway. At the start, learning to ride will be a very conscious process. Once you have repeated the motion of riding over and over again, it will become an unconscious process—a habit. You have thousands of habits stored in your unconscious mind, based on all of the skills you have learned over the years. You take action based on your habits approximately 96 percent of your day. Essentially, you are in autopilot most of the time. Examples include driving a car, cleaning your teeth, writing, using cutlery to eat, parenting your children, showing love and affection, and tying your shoelaces.
6) It maintains instincts. By this I mean you are hard-wired to react to events in life by following the fight-or-flight philosophy (described in point 7, below). That is, of course, unless you choose to exert mental energy and respond to each moment of time fresh, free of your habits and memories of past experiences. I will show you how to do this fully in Chapters 3, 6, and 8.
7) It operates from the Principle of Least Effort. Your unconscious mind is all about energy conservation. Why? Well, as humans, we dominate the world. We are at the top of the food chain and shouldn't really be there. We don't run fast, whereas the cheetah is extraordinarily swift. We are not the strongest animal on Earth—I mean, look at apes, elephants, and lions. We need instruments to eat food, whereas the rest of the animal kingdom come fully equipped, thanks to Mother Nature, with claws, beaks, and designer teeth.
The reason we dominate the world is the complexity of our brains—we are blessed with a frontal lobe that allows us to forward plan, set goals, formulate actions, and follow through on these actions. For example, we have developed fighting tools like knives, guns, and bombs because our hands are not effective enough. Because of our lack of speed, we have designed machines like cars and planes to make us go as fast as we like.
Yet because we have a spinal cord, we also have what we can call a limbic, reptilian, or primitive brain. As a result, we still operate according to the Four Principles of Life rule, what we know more affectionately as the four Fs: fleeing, fighting, feeding, and f— ... procreation. Bottom line: we are still hardwired to respond to the fight-or-flight response when faced with dangerous or potentially threatening situations. When we believe we are threatened, the brain releases chemicals like adrenaline, noradrenalin, and cortisol, which create a very potent cocktail for our brains. It gives us superpowers. It would be like putting nitrous oxide into our car's engine. Our pupils dilate, blood flows to our leg muscles, and more blood flows to the heart. The brain sends signals to draw blood in from the extremities to enhance our heart and lung capacity, to allow us to either stay and fight or have enough energy to flee. This process takes a lot of our brain's energy. Even though in modern civilised Western society we are not faced with an overabundance of situations that are life-threatening, our brain still abides by the principle of fight-or-flight, and therefore wants to conserve energy at all times in case it needs to go into survival mode. A more detailed discussion of fight-or-flight is given in Chapter 3.
Your unconscious mind is designed to conserve energy whenever it can. It really only wants to use enough energy to just get by. Because it operates from the Principle of Least Effort, we can say that it is quite lazy. It will put energy into creating habits, because it can use those as shortcuts in life.
The RAS (Reticular Activating System)
The RAS is a small set of cells in the brain stem that determines which "stuff" or information you need to be conscious of right now and which "stuff" or information can be filed away for later. Think of this set of cells as a gatekeeper between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind that is constantly deciding which, if any, incoming data you will become aware of.
You are more likely to become aware of data that meet certain criteria. For example, you will become conscious of things in your environment that may harm you over less risky stimulus. Say you are walking in your local botanical gardens and a person comes up behind you and places a hard metal object against the back of your neck—you will become very aware in that moment. Also, you are more likely to become aware of data that you find important to you, such as your name being called across the room in your local pub. Suddenly that chunk of information will be in your conscious mind rather than the chatter of strangers around you. Why? Because your name is important to you. Also, if data in your environment is pleasurable or interesting to you, you will focus some attention on it. If you find flowers to be particularly beautiful and pleasurable, then when you are out walking, your RAS will bring into your awareness lovely flower gardens. On the other hand, if you find flowers boring, you will walk past the same gardens with no awareness at all.
One additional point that is important to know about your RAS is that it selects what goes into your conscious mind by following programming set down in your first seven years of life. Basically, the habits and patterns created during those years—and stored in your unconscious mind—act as guides for your RAS to figure out where your attention goes. If you have distorted views of people and situations, you will feel that is the "real" picture of the world. The good news is, you can choose to challenge and change anything in your unconscious mind with a little mental energy and a desire to live in the moment. You have the power to use your RAS as a wonderful GPS system—your own personal TomTom or Garmin—to get outcomes you want in life. In Chapter 5, you will discover that by using powerful questions, you can set your RAS on a course to delivering possibilities into your conscious mind for succeeding at anything you intend for yourself.
The Brain Model
Now that you have some of the brain basics covered, it is time to share with you the Brain Model. Here are three reasons it is useful to know this model:
1) It shows you how your RAS takes in information from the outside world, reduces it based on your past experience and unique beliefs (things embedded in your unconscious mind), and gives you energy to speak and act in a way that matches your perception of the information (makes it available in your conscious mind).
2) It clearly shows that you do not see things as they are—you see things as you are.
3) It offers evidence that no one is ever "right" or "wrong," as when we operate from habit, we never get enough information to have a full, unbiased picture about what is happening or has happened, or who someone is. This is the unconscious mind's Principle of Least Effort in action.
Basically, we all allow our brains to adopt some efficient strategies for taking shortcuts when drawing conclusions about what events, experiences, interactions, and relationships with different people in our lives mean. Let's explore this.
To begin with, just take a moment now to read this paragraph, and then place the book down and complete the exercise for yourself. I want you to close your eyes and think of a cat. As you think of the cat, observe the thoughts that you are having. Monitor one thought to the next, to the next, and so on.
Okay, put the book down and complete the exercise.
Welcome back! Take a minute to jot down the string of thoughts that you had.
________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________
As you read over these thoughts, notice whether they possibly tracked from topic to topic based on memories or beliefs that were handed to you as a young person about cats. For me, I always had beautiful pet cats as a child, and now, wherever I go, cats gravitate toward me; I am like a magnet to them. Neighbours' cats often come into my home and make themselves comfortable. If I am out on my morning jog, cats will come out to be patted. If I am at friends' places, their cats will come and snuggle within moments of my arriving. So for me, when I think of a cat, my thoughts drift back to a time when I was a small child playing and caring for my cats ... and then to photos I have and the fun times they created with my family ... to making toys out of newspaper ... to the sadness I felt when one would go wandering for a few days and I was frightened it was hurt ... to the negotiating skills I had to try on my dad to let me get my first kitten and be sole carer for it ... to the disbelief I would feel when someone would tell me that the only good cat is a dead cat. From there my thoughts drift to wondering how someone could not love them, and so on. Now, I'll bet my thoughts do not match your thoughts 100 percent. Why? Because what I have stored in my memory bank about cats, and everything else for that matter (my unconscious mind), is different from yours. BE by Design
So let's unpack the Brain Model in detail.
We experience thousands of events every day. For the purpose of explaining this model, let us assume we are all attending the same event: a BE by Design: How I BE Is Up to Me workshop. If there are four hundred people at the workshop, we can be certain that there will be four hundred different versions of how the workshop was, the value attained, perceptions of the facilitator, and ability to draw on the concepts and easily apply them to life.
Here is how your brain makes a decision about the BE by Design: How I BE Is Up to Me workshop: Every second, information is coming into your RAS from the five main senses of sight, sound (external sounds and internal self-talk), taste, touch (internal feelings and intuition about the workshop and sensations you feel on and within your body), and smell.
For example, you may see the facilitator at the front of the room facilitating; you may hear the sound of his/her voice and perhaps the sound of things like the air-conditioning unit humming; you may feel excited and curious, be warm or chilly, sense your lower back pressed into the chair; you may smell freshly brewed coffee or the scent of your neighbour's perfume or aftershave; may have the lingering taste of spearmint gum in your mouth; and may have a great feeling about the value of the workshop.
However, the 399 other participants would be focusing on looking at and hearing different things based on what their RAS finds harmful, important, or pleasurable and interesting; they will not have consumed the same food or drink as you; they may well be smelling their own perfume or another's deodorant or perhaps the scent of their shampoo; and they may have open-toe shoes on while yours are closed, so they feel different. You may be sitting near the air-conditioning vent and they are not, so the temperature they feel will not be the same. Not all will have the same past experiences of personal-growth workshops. So you can see that before we even start to look inside the unconscious mind, none of the other 399 participants are experiencing the same event at the same sensory level as you or anyone else.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BE by DESIGNby Christine McKee Copyright © 2012 by Christine McKee. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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