I think I will always clearly remember the image I saw on CNN of a large group of Haitians singing and dancing in the street amidst the rubble of buildings crumbled by one earthquake after another.

In that moment I had total faith these people WILL both survive and rebuild. Easy? Not by a long shot! But their collective mental outlook will carry them forward, and made me want to donate even more to the rebuilding efforts.

Our Colored Glasses
As individuals we each tend to view life through our own characteristic way. If you wear mental “rose colored glasses,” your mental outlook will tend to be more rosy, or positive. While if you wear blue tinted glasses, the world (and your outlook) will probably tend to be “blue.”

The outward reality is the same in both cases — but its colored by each person’s outlook — their customary mood and expectations.

The problem with a “blue,” or less optimistic, outlook is that it tends to be disempowering. It leads to depression. And what goes hand-in-hand with depression is an inability to take action to improve one’s situation.

A “blue” person may sneer at the optimist wearing rose-colored glasses — but they cannot deny the fact that they are more likely to take a chance and ACT. And action is life embracing!

It’s like that Haitian woman who found a broom and began to sweep the debris laden street in front of what was once her house. Will her sweeping make a difference? It did in her life!

Dealing With Challenges
Most of us are facing one challenge or another today. These are NOT easy times. And the stress of hard times can have a powerful effect on our mental outlook: If you feel worried about something, your brain is then wired to give any related event a worried evaluation. 

And although our feelings are fleeting, our moods are not. Moods are based on a brain-level accumulation of feelings that have been stored on actual physical neural networks.

So if you are in a worried mood, you tend to have anxious feelings. Anxious feelings, in turn, color your evaluations of your options. This is actually brain-based and… And a negative evaluation of a new event will just further strengthen the anxious feeling. This new negative feeling, in turn, helps maintain your worried mood.

This creates a non-productive vicious cycle that will build strength unless broken. Generally such cycles are best broken by changing your feelings, which will in turn change your mood.

Changing a Non-Productive Mood
How to break up such a cycle? One good way to start is to really FOCUS on finding a solution to just ONE of the problems you face. Do not even try to tackle all of it at once — this can just lead to overwhelm, and even more anxiety.

Once you identify one problem you want to solve, allow yourself to sort through your options and actually PICK ONE.

Avoid fence sitting. If you feel a afraid of making a mistake, look at it this way: The sooner you focus and take action, the sooner you will learn from any mistake, and can then take a new corrective action.

Set your sights on a better mental outlook. Life has its challenges — that IS a given. But obviously you have already survived some challenges to get where you are today — and can likewise rise above your current challenges. 

The truth is this: You have the ability to re-create any thought patterns that might be holding you back. Seize the moment, focus, and just go for it.

The author’s popular SUCCESS COURSE is an experience unlike any other. Over an 8-week period you will receive daily guidance and lessons that will truly unleash your personal power and ability to steer your life (or business) in any desired direction.This training is for you if you seriously want to get yourself together, focused, and in action — NOW! Show Me!

So the important issue is how it gets materialized. There are efficient ways and inefficient ways. The most efficient way is shown to us by the mind itself, says Chopra.

Now consider a large intention, such as the intention to go to medical school. Between having this idea in your mind initially and fulfilling it are many steps, and these are not all internal at all: raising tuition money, passing exams, gaining admission, etc.

Yet each of these steps depends upon brain/mind operations being invisibly coordinated. You think, move and act using intention. All events take place in the mind field first and then exhibit their outward manifestation.

You can be detached from how things are going to work out because you have left it to the cosmos. Past success and failure don’t matter since each intention is computed afresh, without regard for old conditioning. You are able to be patient about each step, given that timing is worked out perfectly on another level.

Over the months and years of getting to be a doctor, you remain a silent witness as pieces of the process fall into place. Even as you go through the action, the “doing” of it remains impersonal.

On the ego level you may feel disappointment that event A occurred instead of event B, which you expected, but a deeper level you know that B happened for a better reason.

Your chief responsibility was to have the intention in the first place, to remain as sensitive and alert as possible.

The turning points in life arrive as small signals at first… and only amplify when you choose to follow them. So being vigilant about tiny clues is a major part of your individual evolution.

.Adapted from How To Know God, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2000), available at book stores and online from Amazon.com.

There is strong evidence that certain strategies definitely increase creative output. These strategies include…

Strategy 1. Embrace Your Problems
One of the most fundamental skills of creativity is the ability to recognize an opportunity and seize it. You have countless opportunities to expand your creative thinking skills. Such opportunities present themselves daily at home, while driving to work, during meetings or lunch – or while just hanging out with friends. There’s really no shortage of opportunities to refine and develop your creativity. The most basic approach is to recognize that a problem  may actually be a golden opportunity for a creative explosion – and seize the moment.

Strategy 2. Challenge Your Assumptions
It’s natural and necessary to make assumptions about the reality of our everyday world. We would otherwise spend all of our waking hours performing unnecessary mental analyzes of ordinary things. As a result, many times we see only what we expect to see. Our analysis of a situation or a problem is based entirely on assumptions based on our past experience or accepted knowledge. Plus assumptions can become so entrenched it doesn’t cross our mind to challenge them.

A problem may arise simply because we perceive a situation or condition through a set of false assumptions preventing clear thinking. Challenging your assumptions is an important component of creativity. This allows you to look beyond what is obvious or already accepted. And it leads straight to the creative breakthroughs you’re looking for.

Truly creative people in all fields of interest tend to automatically challenge both their own assumptions, and the commonly accepted knowledge about a problem. This mental attitude is the true source of all of the world’s great inventions and businesses. The moment you choose to challenge one of your assumptions as possibly untrue or incomplete,” you are on the way to discovering something new and different.

Strategy 3. Take Some Risks
A willingness to take risks is at the very heart of creativity. No creative person succeeds without first failing – as failures are part of the process of testing one’s assumptions. There is simply no creativity without failure.

To experience major creative breakthroughs, it’s important to become comfortable taking risks. Each failure you encounter will actually supercharge your creativity by generating new information. If you’re unwilling to take risks and deal with what ordinary people call failure, then you cannot expect to become a great creative thinker.

Modern neuroscience has shown that our brains are literally rewired each time we learn something new by making a mistake. The brain is designed to learn through the trial and error process. 

Strategy 4. Use Alternative Thinking
To come up with a creative idea, you will often need a new vantage point. Creating a new solution to an existing problem, for example, may require looking at the problem from a fresh perspective.

There are many tools used by creative thinkers to create such a fresh perspective, including: Brainstorming, MESV creative visualization, and various other means of considering the problem from a fresh vantage point.

Additionally, a great way to kick start your creativity is to look at your problem from the vantage point of another profession. If you are a mechanical engineer, for example, how would an architect view your problem? Or if you are a product designer, how would an interior decorator approach your problem? This approach can lead to some remarkable creative breakthroughs.

Strategy 5. Accept Ambiguity
Many people prefer that everything be clear and unambiguous. They are uncomfortable with anything that seems vague, or could have more than one meaning or application. As a result they tend to be rigid, highly predictable thinkers.

A touch of ambiguous thinking during the idea generation stage of the creative process has the power to bring out genius-level ideas. People who can think ambiguously are fluid and flexible thinkers. The ability to think ambiguously can yield amazing creative insights. This is ability is experienced (and built) when you indulge in wordplay or humour.

Strategy 6. Expand Your Vision
An excellent way to build your creative muscles is to read and explore outside your normal area of interest. This can be especially useful when you are struggling to solve a creative problem. 

Strategy 7. Massage your brainwaves
Creative thinking best occurs when your brain is in certain states called alpha and theta. You are in an alpha/theta state when your brain is producing a predominance of slower brain-waves, as opposed to the faster beta brain-waves associated with normal waking consciousness.

Alpha /theta brain-waves are the reason many people have creative ah-ha experiences during a nap, a stroll, or some other mentally-relaxing activity. But consciously entering into an alpha/theta state can be a challenge. Meditators spend years learning to initiate this state on will, but modern technology has introduced a much faster method of building alpha/theta expertise – brainwave training. Be sure to check it out – your creativity will never be the same. Incidentally, a great side benefit of entering into the alpha/theta brain-wave state is virtually instant stress reduction.

Supercharge Your Brain
The one thing that robs you of creative energy more than anything else is stress. Bust your stress and you will raise your IQ, develop clear mental focus, study and learn better, and increase your creatuve output.  Click here.

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Nothing really happens “by chance.” We actually CREATE what we call “coincidence.”

When do coincidences happen in our lives? Stop and think about it. When you are focused on something and it has a priority in your life, little coincidences just seem to occur. This is often said to be the Law of Attraction in action.

This works no matter what you’re focused on. If you’re focused on worry and fear, or anger and frustration — you will have coincidental events reflecting what you are worried about. Worry is actually negative goal setting.

The classic example is someone who is looking for success, but just can’t achieve their goals. They might be focused on their goal, and that seems like a good thing. But their unconscious mind might be filled to overflowing with negative thoughts and beliefs.

So what happens? They create negative coincidences that sabotage their efforts. Self-defeating situations are inevitable when your mind is focused focus on fear, worry, or the concept of being somehow limited.

What is Coincidence?
Negative outcomes don’t just happen in our lives. They occur when we refuse to pay attention to warning signs of a probable negative outcome. The same is true for the Law of Attraction.

Let’s run a little test of how you got to where you are today because of coincidences that occurred in your life.

Start with one aspect of your life. This could be love or romance, your career or business, financial success –- anything that has truly special significance to you.

You know where you are today in that area, but let’s step back say three years. What was the situation then? Take a few introspective minutes to recall the major decisions you made in that area of your life as you think forward to today.

Here’s where you’ll begin see how one decision led to another. Pick one major decision. If you had made a different choice, how would things be different today?

So why do you think you made that decision? You were focused on something positive or negative, that focus created your response to an opportunity or challenge — and here you are today as a result of that past focus and action.

If you choose NOT to direct your subconscious mind to create the life you want, everything will remain as it is today — or will go downhill because of building anger and frustration.

Creating Positive Life Outcomes
Here’s how to instead choose to get positive results in your life:

–Begin by deciding what it is that you really want — make it a positive outcome, and not fear based!

–Begin to FOCUS on what you want.

–Continuously reassure yourself that everything in your life IS moving in the desired direction.

–Trust and be patient. Do NOT interpret challenges as evidence of a negative outcome. View them as learning experiences and opportunities to fine tune your actions.

The very moment you adopt the above technique, you have moved from creating what you don’t want… to creating what you DO want.

If you would like to pass this along to friends
or post it on your blog, feel free to so so
here is the link:
http://www.landonyourfeetezine.com/yyc/yesyoucan.pdf

 Your brain’s  cortex, your grey matter, is the source of your analytical thinking ability. Your cortex is naturally divided into two sides that are connected by a very complex mass of nerve fibers called the corpus collosum.

 For most people the left side of the cortex (your left brain) deals with logical thinking — anything connected to words, numbers, reasoning, and analysis. It also tends to generate Gamma and Beta brainwave frequencies.

The right side of the cortex, (your right brain) on the other hand, focuses on imagination, images, color, day-dreaming, visualization, and pattern recognition. It tends to generate the Alpha brainwaves that are so highly developed in meditators and artistic types

Which Side Are You Using?
There’s a common assumption that we each habitually use either our right-brain or our left-brain.  So, if that’s true, then someone like Einstein would have used his left-brain, while someone like the great creative master photographer Ansel Adams would have focused on his right-brain.

Right? But does this assumption really hold up?

Actually Albert Einstein and Ansel Adams’ personal notebooks reveal otherwise. Einstein did not credit his great scientific insights to left-brain logic, but rather to right-brain highly creative daydreaming. And Ansel Adams credited his greatest art photographs not to his right-brain artistic eye, but to his left-brain detailed analytical note taking.

Whole Brain Thinking
If you say you are primarily creative or intuitive (right-brain dominated), or analytical and logical (left-brain dominant), you’re just describing your most highly developed mental skill — and the side of the cortex that is you’ve most highly developed.

Our most powerful mental activities actually use both sides of our cortex simultaneously — generating whole brain thinking.

With the proper training, both sides of your cortex can flourish and develop. Whole brain thinking has the potential to literally DOUBLE your mind power, and increase your ability to do creative thinking like Albert Einstein and Ansel Adams.

Get Immediate Results
There’s an outrageously powerful way for you to immediately refine the non-dominant side of your cortex and experience more whole brain thinking.

Top executives and athletes, entrepreneurs, artists and inventors, and people from all walks of life are excelling in their fields because they use whole brain thinking. who excel in their lives >> Want to join their ranks?

Time travel in the brain

Is Time Travel Real?  Is it?  What are you doing when you aren’t doing anything at all?  If you said “nothing,” then you have just passed a test in logic and flunked a test in neuroscience.

When people perform mental tasks–adding numbers, comparing shapes, identifying faces–different areas of their brains become active, and brain scans show these active areas as brightly colored squares on an otherwise dull gray background.

But researchers have recently discovered that when these areas of our brains light up, other areas go dark. This dark network (which comprises regions in the frontal, parietal and medial temporal lobes) is off when we seem to be on, and on when we seem to be off.

If you climbed into an MRI machine and lay there quietly, waiting for instructions from a technician, the dark network would be as active as a beehive. But the moment your instructions arrived and your task began, the bees would freeze and the network would fall silent. When we appear to be doing nothing, we are clearly doing something. But what?

The answer, it seems, is time travel.

The human body moves forward in time at the rate of one second per second whether we like it or not. But the human mind can move through time in any direction and at any speed it chooses.

Our ability to close our eyes and imagine the pleasures of Super Bowl Sunday or remember the excesses of New Year’s Eve is a fairly recent evolutionary development, and our talent for doing this is unparalleled in the animal kingdom.

We are a race of time travelers, unfettered by chronology and capable of visiting the future or revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged by illness, age or accident, we may become trapped in the present. Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, specifically attacks the dark network, stranding many of its victims in an endless now, unable to remember their yesterdays or envision their tomorrows.

Why did evolution design our brains to go wandering in time? Perhaps it’s because an experience is a terrible thing to waste. Moving around in the world exposes organisms to danger, so as a rule they should have as few experiences as possible and learn as much from each as they can.

Although some of life’s lessons are learned in the moment (“Don’t touch a hot stove”), others become apparent only after the fact (“Now I see why she was upset. I should have said something about her new dress”). Time travel allows us to pay for an experience once and then have it again and again at no additional charge, learning new lessons with each repetition. When we are busy having experiences–herding children, signing checks, battling traffic–the dark network is silent, but as soon as those experiences are over, the network is awakened, and we begin moving across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn–for free.

Animals learn by trial and error, and the smarter they are, the fewer trials they need. Traveling backward buys us many trials for the price of one, but traveling forward allows us to dispense with trials entirely. Just as pilots practice flying in flight simulators, the rest of us practice living in life simulators, and our ability to simulate future courses of action and preview their consequences enables us to learn from mistakes without making them.

We don’t need to bake a liver cupcake to find out that it is a stunningly bad idea; simply imagining it is punishment enough. The same is true for insulting the boss and misplacing the children. We may not heed the warnings that prospection provides, but at least we aren’t surprised when we wake up with a hangover or when our waists and our inseams swap sizes.

The dark network allows us to visit the future, but not just any future. When we contemplate futures that don’t include us–Will the NASDAQ be up next week? Will Hillary run in 2008?–the dark network is quiet. Only when we move ourselves through time does it come alive.

Perhaps the most startling fact about the dark network isn’t what it does but how often it does it. Neuroscientists refer to it as the brain’s default mode, which is to say that we spend more of our time away from the present than in it.

People typically overestimate how often they are in the moment because they rarely take notice when they take leave. It is only when the environment demands our attention–a dog barks, a child cries, a telephone rings–that our mental time machines switch themselves off and deposit us with a bump in the here and now. We stay just long enough to take a message and then we slip off again to the land of Elsewhen, our dark networks awash in light.

Learn more about your mysterious brain here.

By Daniel Gilbert & Randy Buckner
Source: Time Magazine

Stress…stress…stress.

Stress in and of itself is not bad. Stress is to the human condition what tension is to the violin string: too little and the music is dull and raspy; too much and the music is shrill or the string snaps. Excess stress is blamed for many serious physical illnesses ranging from heart disease, early aging, and even Alzheimer’s disease.

Myth: No symptoms = no stress.
An absence of symptoms does not mean the absence of stress. In fact, camouflaging symptoms with medications could deprive you of the signals you need to reducing the strain on your body and mind.

Many of us experience symptoms of stress in a very physical way, even though stress is a psychological effect. Feeling anxious, shortness of breath, or simply feeling run down all the time can all be physical signs of stress. Feeling overwhelmed, disorganized and having difficulty concentrating are common mental signs of stress.

Myth: Only major symptoms of stress require attention.
This myth assumes that the minor symptoms of stress, like headaches or stomach acid, may be safely ignored. But these minor symptoms of stress are actually early warning signs that your life is getting out of hand, and that you need to do a better job of managing stress.

Myth: Stress is just all in your head.
Stress is NOT just imagination – it is what happens to you, it is a psychophysical reaction that occurs in your brain. The resulting chemical and hormonal changes then affect every single organ of your body.
- Forty-three percent of all adults suffer adverse health effects from stress.
- 75 to 90 percent of all physician office visits are for stress-related ailments and complaints.
- Stress is linked to the six leading causes of death–heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide.

A STRESS TEST
Are you moving toward dangerous levels of stress? Here’s a short self-test to help you answer that question:

Just answer each of the following questions with a True or False

1. I often have migraine, tension or painful headaches.

2. I have not taken any time off in a long time.

3. I am often concerned about financial issues.

4. I have too little time with my friends and things I enjoy.

5. I often have a hard time going to sleep, and cannot shut off my mind.

6. I often feel distracted and forget what I was doing.

7. I seem to be losing or gaining weight.

8. I have chronic, ongoing pain.

9. I feel like my life has no purpose.

10. I never seem to reach my goals or achieve my dreams.

11. I often skip meals because I am too busy.

12. I don’t have any family or friends to turn to.

13. I don’t exercise or walk regularly.

14. I take medication for depression or anxiety.

15. My intimate life is not satisfying, or I have performance issues.

Count the number of True’s, and assign one point for each.

Here’s how to assess your stress level:

(a)  Less than 5 points: Well managed low stress level.

(b)  5 – 6 points: Moderate stress.

(c)  7-9 points: High stress levels.

(d)  10 – 15 points: An exceptionally high level of stress.

Here’s a long proven way to instantly learn to manage any level of stress=> Instant Stress Reduction

Disclaimer: This information is educational only. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Consult your medical professional if you have concerns about your stress symptoms.