Tell Your Brain What to Allow

To change your life, you must tell your brain what to allow to filter into your conscious awareness. It is your reticular activating system in your brain that continually scans through the sights, smells, sounds, and data that surround you and makes subconscious decisions about what to catch and filter up to your conscious awareness. The exciting news is that you can program your reticular activating system to notice and make you aware of advantageous information, people, and resources that will help you experience the meaning and fulfillment you desire.

We program our reticular activating system with what we think, write, and do. We must consciously focus our attention on what we think, on what we write, and on what we do. The process of “think, write, do” will allow you to turn up the volume on what you want to pay attention to.

We experience life through our thoughts. By shaping our thoughts into words—even if those words remain unspoken—they become real to us. You do become what you think about moment by moment, day by day, year by year. The pathways in your brain are created by the thoughts you have.

Through neuroplasticity, the more you concentrate your attention on a specific thought, the stronger and deeper those connections become. The stronger the connections, the more efficient your brain becomes at processing them; that is how new habits and attitudes are developed.

Thought is important, but creating some way to capture and clarify your thoughts is possibly a hundredfold more important. Your thoughts need a framework, a structure, and a place to be written down. You must translate and capture your thoughts by writing them down.

Finally, you have to do it. Nike made a fortune with the advertising slogan “Just do it.” The 7 Minute Solution slogan is “Did I do it?” Every day, consider the choices and the actions you took that day and ask, “Did I do what I said I would do today?”

Perseverance in business separates you from where you are today and where you want to be in the future. How many projects in life have you started but not finished? How many times have you been swept away by the novelty of a new marketing concept, only to find the file sitting on your desk six months later untouched?

Why is perseverance in business important? Because half done is not well done. In football, if you can run the ball from your end zone to the one-yard line of the opposing team, you have done a great job of moving the ball ninety-nine yards down the field. Unfortunately, landing on the one-yard line is meaningless unless you have the perseverance to move the ball the final thirty-six inches into the end zone. Being left on the one-yard line of life is a terrible place to be. You can see your destination. You have overcome all of the obstacles to get you this close. You have persevered to this point, and you don’t want to settle for almost making it!

This last push is where we experience new growth and where we engage in powerful emotions of meeting challenges head-on with everything we have. The one-yard line of life is taking the next step and taking one more step and again one more.

To push through the one-yard line of life, you must begin by recognizing where you are stuck and what is holding you back. You may feel stuck because of your life circumstances. You may feel that you need additional education or a new skill set. Regardless of why you feel stuck, part of becoming unstuck begins with honestly acknowledging what you are thinking and feeling. Only then can you evaluate whether your thoughts and feelings are valid or are simply old, outdated cognitive models that need to be replaced.