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How to Grow Your Business

Meditation. Daydreaming or Useful Business Tool?

In the last issue we looked at the power of positive thinking. As we discussed, our psychology is absolutely key to our level of success. We also identified that positive thinking is not so much about being happy while the world caves in around us, but more about being focussed on our goals regardless of current circumstances. In other words keeping our eyes on the prize.

Meditation has been used for centuries in many parts of the world to help people clear and focus their minds. Can meditation be used to help focus our minds to keep our attention on our desired end result, to lift us out of our current circumstances and into the future we want?

Many outstandingly successful people believe so. Larry Ellison of Oracle, a multi-billionaire, insists that his top executives meditate 3 times a day. Bill Gates is known to meditate daily.

So is meditation just a way to waste time daydreaming or can hard science back up the claim that it can help us to improve our levels of success.

Neuroscience points the way
Neuroscience tells us that there are two key parts to our brain. The conscious and the non-conscious. While the conscious mind is incredibly sophisticated it is nonetheless the poor relation of the two. The non-conscious mind works 800 times faster than the conscious mind and never loses focus - it's always working perfectly. The conscious mind on the other hand loses focus on average every 6 to 10 seconds!

However where the conscious mind's real power lies is in it's ability to reason. The conscious mind is subjective, which means it has the power to attach meaning to something. The non-conscious mind on the other hand is objective. The conscious mind is the programmer (or gatekeeper) of the non-conscious and this can work to our favour or to our disadvantage. Without being aware of this and living in a predominantly negative environment the chances are that it's so far worked to our disadvantage.

Our conscious mind chooses the meaning of an event (generally by the level of emotional intensity we attach to it) and decides if it should be passed through to the non-conscious mind. The non-conscious mind creates a log of it, a neural pathway, a program. The non-conscious mind is our auto-pilot and it works based on these neural pathways we've created. This is a defence mechanism and it's there to protect us - but it can also jail us.

96-98% of our brain power is non-conscious
The non-conscious represents 96-98% of our total brain power. That means 96-98% of your actions are automatic. so in a straight-up fight between your conscious and non-conscious mind there is only ever one winner - the auto-pilot.

It has been scientifically proven that our non-conscious processes information at 4 billion bits per second! It is so powerful that it notices everything in your environment, nothing escapes it's attention. However our conscious mind can only process 2,000 bits per second. To filter the information that can be passed to the conscious mind we have what is called the Reticular Activating System (RAS).

The RAS decides what to bring to the attention of your conscious mind by filtering out what it considers irrelevant information. It decides this based upon it's pre-defined neural pathways. So if you have a belief or a chronic thought process of "Everything I do is a failure", that is what your sub-conscious is looking for and through the RAS it will bring anything that looks like that to your conscious mind's attention. Your conscious mind experiences it and reinforces it's meaning back to the non-conscious which strenghthens the neural pathway. It's the neural equivalent of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and it's result will inevitably show up in the real world.

That is why once we've persistently thought one way about something it is extremely difficult for us to think any other way. That is why most people bang their heads against the wall trying to make a change. They may succeed for a short time but it's inevitable that they're going to go back to their old habits in the end.

The gatekeeper
As we mentioned earlier our conscious mind is the gatekeeper to the non-conscious, it has the keys to the castle. It can change any meaning it likes to anything it chooses which is where our power comes from. No matter what your current situation this is actually the only real power we human beings have. We cannot 100% control anything else in our lives except the thoughts we have and the meanings we attach to them.

By controlling and focussing our thoughts we can weaken and ultimately destroy existing neural pathways and create new ones to help us. Rather than fight our non-conscious with sheer conscious will, we have the power to bring it on side and for it to work for us. Which is what it's there for in the first place. We have to learn how to tell it what we want. We need to work on changing the cause not the effect.

You get what you're looking for
Once we can do this, our non-conscious mind is on-side for what we really want. As mentioned earlier our non-conscious doesn't miss a trick, it notices everything in our environment. If it's knows to look for things that will help us succeed it will pass that through to our conscious minds. That's when we start to "get lucky" or to be in the right place at the right time to pick up on the right opportunity. Your non-conscious ensures you always get what you're looking for. We're dealing with a power far beyond our conscious comprehension which could and should be working for you to be successful. How?

That is where meditation comes in. Meditation is the perfect way to focus our minds on what we want, what meaning we attach to it and to let that into the non-conscious mind. By meditating for a few minutes at least once a day we can consciously begin to program our non-conscious to the way we want. So how do we do it?

1) Sit down in a comfortable chair for a few minutes and simple breathe. The key is to focus your mind entirely on your breathing. If you find your mind wandering simply bring it back to focussing on your breathing. Try to breathe through your nose if possible. It has been proven scientifically that this changes the frequency of your brainwaves to be in almost perfect resonance with your non-conscious mind.

2) After a few minutes start to think about your objectives as though they had already been achieved. What they would look like, how they would feel. Don't focus on how they are going to be achieved, simply focus on the end result. Get a crystal clear picture of your vision and try to attach as much emotional intensity as you can to it. The non-conscious cannot determine between an actual event or your imagination. It also only understands present, not past or future. By spending a few minutes doing this you are telling your non-conscious what you want to see now. Remember it will always go looking for what you want.

The downside is you won't see immediate results. Your habits may have been ingrained for several years and one session of giving your non-conscious a new objective won't be very effective. Neuro-scientists tell us that 28-30 days of consistantly implanting a different vision daily is enough for your non-conscious to have learned a new habit, new neural pathways and a new vision and begin moving you in that direction.

If you want really effective results try doing this twice a day, preferable once in the morning soon after waking up and once at night shortly before sleeping.

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