Rewire Your Brain to be Positive and Achieve Success
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Let’s cut through complexity to the heart of your power, your potential, your ability to negotiate change, challenges and see the opportunities before you. The following guest post by international leadership guru, author, and speaker, Professor Rao, speaks to our ability to rewire our brains for increased positivity and success. It is a topic that I am passionate about as it is the foundation of my work, mission and 3Q model/philosophy. Change is not the problem, it’s the answer and it is our ability to change and adapt that has paved the way for our growth and survival from our earliest historical beginnings to the present. (Scroll to the bottom for a link to Cool Tools, exercises you can do in 10 minutes or less a day to recharge, refocus, and rewire your brain for positivity and success!)
How to Rewire Your Brain to be Positive and Achieve Success by Professor M.S. Rao, Ph.D
“Leadership means building a new bridge, a stronger bridge between what is and what can be because the future lies in the courage, integrity, and wisdom of those who dare to lead, learn, and succeed forward.” —Irene Becker, Just Coach It, 3Q Leadership Expert
Most problems in the world are the result of negative thinking and lack of empathy. Research shows that humans produce approximately 70,000 thoughts per day and most of them are negative. We often find television channels and media bombarding with loads of negative information to pollute the minds of the viewers. The media highlights negativity to invite the attention of the humans quickly and exploits their weaknesses to ensure their survival. Even the people with positive thinking develop negative thinking assuming that the world is negative. It is only exceptional individuals and intellectuals who understand these facts and combat negativity. In this regard, we will explore tools to rewire your brain to be positive and achieve success.
Tools to Rewire Your Brain
“You cannot sit back and wait to be happy and healthy and have a great thought life; you have to make the choice to make this happen. You have to choose to get rid of the toxic and get back in alignment with God. You can be overwhelmed by every small setback in life, or you can be energized by the possibilities they bring.” ― Caroline Leaf, Switch On Your Brain: The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health
The people with high EQ (Emotional Quotient) are more successful than the people with high IQ (Intelligence Quotient) because they successfully rewired their brains by getting along with others and exploring opportunities with an open mind. Hence, developing high EQ helps greatly to rewire your brain. Here are some tools to rewire your brain to be positive. Strengthen your subconscious mind with a positive frame of mind. Give positive commands to your subconscious mind to evolve as a healthy individual. Practice for 21 days. Think positive instead of negative. Don’t look at the future based on your unpleasant experiences and events. Learn lessons from failures instead of brooding over them. Develop confidence and optimism. Believe in yourself. Change the way you perceive the world. Surround with positive people to create positive vibrations. Reflect your thoughts regularly. Go for a walk or gym to energize your body and mind. Clear your mind from clutter through meditation. Be creative by following a different path or route. Avoid complaining, criticizing and condemning others. Instead, see positive in others. Praise people liberally. Make them feel important.
John B. Arden, in his book, Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life offers four-fold sage advice as follows: Feed your brain now that you have a better idea of how the brain works, let’s focus on a method of rewiring your brain that involves the following four steps: Focus, Effort, Effortlessness and Determination (FEED). Focus allows you to pay attention to what’s happening here and now, and this starts the process of neuroplasticity. Effort shifts your attention from perception to action. Making a focused effort activates your brain to establish new synaptic connections. In the beginning, it takes focus, effort, and more energy in your brain, but after you make the swing or say hello enough times, it becomes effortless. Thus, to rewire your brain you’ll have to stay with the new behavior long enough to make it become fairly automatic. In time, practice will make it effortless. Your brain won’t have to work as hard once you reach this level. The final step in feeding your brain is staying in practice. Do the activity again and again. Being determined in this way need not be tiring and painful. If you practice the other three steps in feeding your brain, by the time you get to this one, it should come easily. That’s because effortlessness precedes it. Thus, determination simply means that you stay in practice. By being determined, you’ll complete the feeding process to rewire your brain.
Irene Becker, in her article titled, ‘Building And Sustaining Great Leadership In Disruptive Times Possibility Thinking, Communicating, And Doing: A 3Q Leadership™ Solution’ in Wiley’s Leader to Leader Journal offers some simple and powerful cool tools that you can easily integrate into your day such as identifying the path (walking/driving) you prefer, then taking a different one; experimenting with taking one old habit every week and tossing it out the window or changing it in your personal life; walking down a street you are familiar with and searching for something you have never seen or noticed before; uplifting your posture; stretching your strengths by applying them in new ways; writing a few sentences in the reverse direction, or with your opposing hand; embracing new experiences; changing at least one routine every day; pausing for ten seconds before you respond, taking your ego (need to be validated) out of the equation and refocusing your objective; taking charge of tension by releasing it, fast; clenching whatever part of your body is tense, and release it; practicing mindfulness for five to ten minutes a day; sipping ice water; moving more; and laughing more, and smiling more because laughing gives your brain an aerobic workout and is an excellent stress reliever and mood booster and smiling automatically elevates your mood.
Overcome your psychological and physical limitations by rewiring your brain. Some people are hardwired with superstitions. They find it difficult to overcome them. It is possible to overcome by rewiring their brains. Take up one bad practice in a day and rewire your brain with good practice. After achieving success, take up another bad practice to overcome by rewiring. In this way, you can get out of your bad practices to excel as a healthy individual. Remember, rejections make you stronger in life. Just because people failed, they should not give up on their passions and endeavors. Eminent inventors and entrepreneurs are smart in rewiring their brains. That is why they succeeded in their lives and made a difference to the world. For instance, Edison invented the bulb and Colonel Sanders founded KFC by rewiring their brains.
Conclusion
“By focusing on possibilities, you can see more than a potential light at the end of the tunnel. The light doesn’t have to be at the end of the tunnel; it can illuminate an opportunity wherever you are.” ―John B. Arden, Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life
People often complain that they cannot break their bad habits which is a myth. Breaking bad habits helps you unlock your hidden potential and acquire knowledge, skills, and abilities effortlessly. It is rightly remarked that below average people talk about individuals, average people talk about issues and above average people talk about ideas. Rewire your brain to explore ideas and insights to excel as a role model for others and stand out as a leader. Everything is possible in this world and everything can be changed in the world by rewiring your brain. To summarize, don’t be influenced by outdated dogmas. When you want to overcome your bad practices, you must rewire your brain. When you want to learn, unlearn and relearn, you must rewire your brain. When you want to grow as a leader, you must rewire your brain.
“You are not a victim. You can control your reactions. You do have a choice.” ― Caroline Leaf, Switch On Your Brain: The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health
References
Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life by John B. Arden (Wiley; 1 edition, March 22, 2010)
Building And Sustaining Great Leadership In Disruptive Times: Possibility Thinking, Communicating, And Doing: A 3Q Leadership™ Solution by Irene Becker (Wiley; Leader to Leader Journal, March 2017)
Professor M.S. Rao, Ph.D., is the Father of “Soft Leadership”, Founder of MSR Leadership Consultants, C-Suite advisor, international speaker and the author of 37 books including the award-winning ‘21 Success Sutras for CEOs’ He is passionate about serving and making a difference in the lives of others, he shares his wisdom and his 4 blogs and wants to build one million students as global leaders by 2030 Contact: msrlctrg@gmail.com.
Irene Becker, Executive Coach irene@justcoachit.com