I’ve written previously about our mind, and it’s role in creating things in our lives that are useful for our business, finances and lifestyle. I’ve recently lined up some interviews with businessmen, Rowan Burn and Kerwin Rae, who have a lot of knowledge and information to share on this subject, and over the course of the next few months as I get the interviews done, I’ll share what they have to say with you.
On Friday, I heard a speaker named John Assaraf explaining the insights he has learned about harnessing the power of the mind to propel him to ever greater levels of success in his business and fulfillment in his personal life. John has built four multimillion dollar companies in the last 20 years and appeared on “Larry King Live” and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” to share his observations and experience of using the power of his mind to help him accomplish his entrepreneurial goals.
More Sophisticated Than An F16 Fighter Jet
He explains why the mind is such an important component in our success by likening it to an F16. He says, “The brain is the most sophisticated instrument we have at our disposal. It’s more sophisticated than an F16 fighter jet, which costs around 50 million dollars. But most of us don’t really know how it works or how to operate it properly.”
This is a really useful analogy for a couple of reasons.
- We all have a mind, and most of us are blessed with a mind that has pretty much the same creative ability as everyone else on the planet.
- This means, everyone reading this post probably has at their disposal an instrument worth at LEAST 50 million dollars. Think about that, you have a 50 million dollar instrument available to you every day in your business.
- Unfortunately, we’re most likely not truly aware of the power and value of this instrument. Instead of using it like the extremely high performance, precision instrument that it is, we often use it like more like a golf buggy. Imagine having an F16 in your garage and only using it to drive – not fly, to the corner store to buy soda, and that’s kind of what we’re talking about.
- Luckily, this thing can be fired up at any time and we can retrain our minds to be high performance, precision instruments that take us to ever increasing levels of success in business and fulfillment in life.
Who Runs This Show Anyway?
I’ve mentioned in the last two articles the importance of intention, consistency and congruency in the creative process. John spoke about the importance of neuro-resonance, which relates to those three elements. What does this mean?
Approximately 2% of our mind is conscious, and approximately 98% is unconscious. The unconscious is by far the more powerful force that drives our thoughts and actions most of the time, and it’s responsible for a lot of our behavior. John has found that in order to achieve our goals, we must have neuro-resonance, that is, our conscious and unconscious minds need to be lined up and resonant. This is when the power of being coherent and consistent in our creative process really kicks in.
One of the big difficulties we face in being coherent and consistent is that our conscious mind will tell us one thing, like “I’d love to be successful in business, I’d love to earn $25,000 in passive income from my blog this quarter.” But our unconscious will be running a completely different story, like, “I’ve got no idea how to do this, I’m freaked out because I’ll have to learn new things and I might mess up and look stupid.”
This kind of thinking will sink our chances of creating that money and experiencing that success quicker than smashing into a giant iceberg. But the problem is, a lot of it is unconscious, we don’t even know it’s going on. It’s a bit like a steady hum of background static, 24/7 in our lives. It’s no wonder the unconscious runs our thinking process that in turn feeds into our actions!
The reason a lot of our unconscious thoughts are designed to keep us in a “safe” place, rather than stretch ourselves to reach those goals, is because we humans prefer to avoid pain at all costs.
I drew the arrow picture last year when I was at the “Mind and Its Potential” conference. I’ve been busting to find somewhere to use it ever since as it’s such a perfect and powerful visual example of why we can struggle with our conscious creations because the unconscious mind can throw a massive spanner in the works. Basically, our unconscious is trying to help us avoid pain, but in doing so, it can seriously impede our ability to bring to fruition the things our conscious mind wants, like a more profitable business.
This is a problem if we don’t address it, because our unconscious will run 24/7 telling us to stay “safe” by having fearful or self-sabotaging thoughts so that we then act accordingly in our business and in our lives. Or don’t act as the case may be. Fear and anxiety shut down our ability to act. As we know, action is a big part of being successful, all great entrepreneurs take massive action every day to reach their goals.
How To Take Back The Controls And Set Your Own Course
John says one of the ways to deal with this is to learn to act in spite of our fears.
We need to learn to act to get beyond our doubts and anxieties and past unconscious blocks. Acting in spite of our fears can be accomplished by setting things up so you can’t back out of them. I agreed to write an article every week, so every week, even though I’ve got my own blocks and interference from life, I make sure it’s done. Same thing with booking interviews or creating launches. If you have a launch or an interview or something when people are relying on you to deliver, you will generally deliver results.
Another way to act in spite of fears happens when life hands you a reason so big and important that you can’t back down from it. A bit like people who let their health go to a critical point, then faced with impending death, do whatever it takes to bring their bodies back to health.
Dr. John Demartini is a big advocate of finding the biggest “why” you possibly can for your life. Rather than waiting for life to give you a reason to act in spite of our fears, find the biggest reason we can that inspires us to go way beyond our comfort zones first. He says “when the why is big enough, the hows take care of themselves.”
There is more to share about how John Assaraf achieves neuro-resonance and it’s role in the creative process, but we’ll continue with this next week. For now, if you think there is a chance you have some conscious goals for your business and your life where your unconscious is running interference, consider ways to set things up so you can’t back out of delivering results. Alternatively find a reason big enough to override procrastination, which is just fear in disguise 
Once again, thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear your comments at the end.
Click here to read / watch Neroli’s interview with John Assaraf
Cheers, Neroli.