Positive Brainwashing

Brainwashing is a term perceived in a negative way by most people. But you know what, I think our brains could actually do with a bit of a washing sometimes!

You see, everyone comes into this world with a clear mind, and a belief that everything is possible. All is positive and well. Remember as a child, you could do and become everything, without any boundaries!

As we grow up however, we pick up beliefs, fears and limitations from our surroundings and peers that gradually form the person we are today. A lot of these beliefs unfortunately are negative and as we build our lives they limit us in our actions and being. Very often they therefore contribute to unhappiness or feeling unfulfilled in our lives and business.

It can be the smallest -- seemingly harmless -- remark from a mother like “just let me handle that, you are no good at that” that can convince you that you are not good at a certain task. A teacher who calls a pupil “the clumsy one” can do more harm with this remark than he realizes when repeated often enough. With every remark the belief is harnessed further in the child that it indeed is clumsy. Even though a remark is said with a smile or with the intend to be funny, it still leaves a legacy in the belief system.

This programming of course doesn’t stop at adulthood, it keeps influencing people in all stages of life. We are being influenced by our parents, kids, partner, friends, colleagues, television, newspapers, magazines and so on. Sometimes positive, but very often in a negative way. No wonder we limit ourselves in so many ways! Belief is the key to your success. If you belief you can do something, you can. If you belief you can’t do something, you will be right too.

The good news is: we can “reprogram” our mind and replace our negative, limiting beliefs for positive contributing ones. Positive brainwashing is what I like to call it! This can be done by the use of so called “affirmations”. An affirmation is a positive self talk statement, stated in the present tense that covers a goal you want to achieve and that ‘overrules’ negative beliefs towards that goal.

An example is “I easily do 10 sales calls a day”. Or “I am an excellent negotiator”. By stating this positive affirmation regularly during your day, you will achieve the goal you have set for yourself easier. This positive self talk helps your mind to overcome beliefs that you have about yourself, that limit your success and actions. Compare our mind with a computer: when you change the input, the output will change accordingly.

So if you have the limiting belief that you are no good in public speaking (probably because of negative experiences in the past) you can actually reprogram your mind by stating the following affirmation: “ I am an excellent public speaker. I love to speak for huge audiences and people love to hear me talk”. By affirming this belief over and over, you actually start to believe it and your mind will find a way to make this statement a reality. At some stage, you might decide to do a course in public speaking, or someone might ask you to speak at some kind of seminar, which forces you to work on your speaking skills. Somehow, this positive affirmation help you to reach the ‘goal’ you have set for yourself, and open doors for you that would normally would have been kept closed. And this works for virtually everything. Belief, and it will happen.

Imagine standing for a big river, with a heavy stream. You have to cross it, but you don’t think you can actually do it. Your belief is keeping you from crossing, although you physically should be able to do it easily. It just looks too hard! Then someone else comes up from behind you, and without thinking starts crossing the river and gets to the other side. His belief was positive, and he knew he could do it. The interesting thing is that this will probably influence your belief: “if he can do it, I can do it too” and you will then cross the river without any problem at all. Similar things happen when a group of people is introduced to the phenomenon of fire walking. At first a big group of people will say that there is no way they will walk on fire. Until…other people with higher beliefs go first, then all of a sudden everyone else rushes over to do it as well.

So think about YOUR beliefs, and try to discover which belief are actually holding you back from reaching your full potential in your life. Then, one by one, start eliminating these beliefs from your system. Formulate a positive affirmation that counters your negative belief, and re affirm it daily. Write them in your diary, on your bathroom mirror, next to your computer; anywhere you see it often and say the affirmation out loud as often as possible. You will be happily surprised by the results!

Five Great Mysteries of the Universe

1. The Missing Universe

Everything in the universe is either mass or energy, but there's not enough of either. Scientists think 96% of the cosmos is missing. They have come up with names for the missing stuff - "dark energy" and "dark matter" - but that doesn't really tell us anything about them. And it's not as if they're not important: dark energy is continually creating new swaths of space and time, while dark matter appears to be holding all the galaxies together. No wonder cosmologists are searching for clues to their whereabouts.

2. Life

I know you think you're more than a sack of molecules, but why? Next time you see a tree, ask yourself why that is alive when your wooden dining table is not. The phenomenon we call life is something that biologists have almost given up trying to define - instead they're investigating ways to make different combinations of molecules come alive. Bizarrely, the best hope is similar in chemical terms to laundry detergent.

3. Death

Here's the flip side: in biology, things eventually die, but there's no good explanation for it. There are hints that switching genes on and off controls ageing, but if our theory is right, those switches shouldn't have survived natural selection. Then there's the argument that an accumulation of faults does us in. However, there are plenty of whales and turtles who seem to age ridiculously slowly - if at all. Of course, if we can work out why, that could be great news for future humans (if not for the planet).

4. Sex

Charles Darwin might have fathered 10 children, but he couldn't understand why almost everything in biology uses sexual reproduction rather than asexual cloning - sex is a highly inefficient way to reproduce. We still don't know the answer. The suggestion that sex's gene shuffling makes us more able to deal with changing environments seems plausible, but the evidence is scarce. At the moment, sex only seems to exist to give males some role in life.

5. Free Will

If you want to keep your sanity, look away now. Neuroscientists are almost convinced that free will is an illusion. Their experiments show that our brains allow us to think we are controlling our bodies, but our movements begin before we make a conscious decision to move. Some researchers have already been approached to testify in court that the defendant is not to blame for anything they did. A scary legal future awaits.