It seems it is video-day here in my house… today. Mind you, I am not quite doing it for entertainment, I am looking for some solution.
In my coaching calls and even watching, observing myself, I have realized that some foundational skills are missing. They are the kind of foundation without which you simply can’t have what you want, you can’t feel better about yourself, and you can’t accomplish much of anything worth writing home about.
So I have to either find a way or make one, to teach you the missing skills.
In this case I’d prefer to find a way, after all if someone is already teaching it, why invent the wheel.
One of the videos I found is a TEDx talk by Barbara Arrowsmith-Young, the founder of the brain plasticity based brain training center.
Barbara was learning disabled, seriously learning disabled. But he had the ambition and the willingness to invent and make a way to improve her brain and become a fully functioning adult.
Most of you has some disability, born with or acquired.
- When you can’t control your attention and it is pulled away by the highest bidder (flashier noisier thing), I consider that a disability.
- When you only understand something on the level of storage device… mind, no ability to actually use the knowledge, I consider that a disability.
- When you think that you should just know something, without investing energy, time, practice into the learning: I consider that a disability.
- When you think that everything is about you: I consider that a disability.
- When you resist, and resist, and resist: I consider that a disability.
- When you don’t listen, just talk talk talk: I consider that a disability.
- When you can’t get a concept, like context, I consider that a disability.
- When you can’t tell that your mind will never shut up, when you listen to everything your mind says as if it were the truth, as if it were a commandment, not just noise: I consider that a disability.
- When you hide from your thoughts, emotions, feelings, instead of including hem in your life as passengers in your bus… who don’t call the shots, don’t set directions, just make noise, like a school bus full of rowdy kids… I consider that a disability.
- When your life is becoming smaller because you think the fear you feel when you want to do something new is relevant: I consider that a disability.
So you see, you have plenty of disability, and unless YOU do something to encourage the brain to work on it and change itself, you are going to get only worse, not better.
Consider that your brain, at the present time, only has the capacities and the skills that you have been using, and if you want to change your life, you need to challenge the brain to build new cells, new habits, to use its plasticity to serve you better.
How it’s done? With exercises done day in and day out.
One of my students uses getting up early, feeling foggy and groggy, to learn how she can accommodate that and not resist. How she can use this exercise to grow a new brain for herself.
I use lying perfectly still to increase my self-discipline. It also helps me fall asleep a lot faster.
I am not a full-fledged expert at this, other than I have made myself regrow my brain after two massive brain damages, taught myself to see, taught myself to read and write articles in spite of severe dyslexia, taught myself to recognize emotions I had only heard of… and more.
And we can all do it.
The first is to start with the ability to control your attention. Without that I can’t promise you anything. Even ADD people can learn it.
