I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of cults, and our inherent vulnerability to the influence of charismatic leaders. The topic also touches on another personal interest, the human desire and ability we have to embrace supernatural and unsubstantiated beliefs.

My personal definition of the term cult is:

A derogatory term for any religious or philosophically-based minority group whose core beliefs and values you don't personally agree with.

Yes, I know it's a little different from the wiktionary definition, but I want to emphasise that cultness is in the eye of the beholder. It's a derogatory term, rarely used by the members of the cult in question, although they may use it freely referring to other cults; just not their own. When you're in a cult, you don't see that it's a cult. So when someone else uses the word cult, what they really mean is that they don't like the other group and don't agree with their beliefs or values. And they probably aren't that happy about the whole mind-control thing, indoctrination processes, people devoting their lives to lost causes or cult leaders getting rich and/or famous at the expense of their members. I get that.

So why do people join cults, and why do they stay?

Successful cults seem to have these attributes:

• A charismatic leader
• A belief system that offers hope
• A strong sense of community
• Disincentives for leaving

Despite the emphasis our society places on rational thinking, we are emotional creatures deep down. We make all our decisions based on how we expect the outcome will make us feel, then we create rational justifications for why we've made a good choice. People join cults because it makes them feel good; at least initially. Once they're there, they may stay because they think they will feel bad if they leave. Which is probably true. I felt pretty bad when I gave up Christianity; and then there's the whole deprogramming and admitting you got it wrong thing. The fear of feeling bad if you leave is quite well-founded.

Take as an example Harold Camping from Family Radio. It would be easy to write people like him off people as nutcases, but he's hardly an isolated incident. This guy has made millions from his prophetic pronouncements of doom and it doesn't matter that he said the world would end on May 21, 2011 and yet it clearly didn't. He just makes a new pronouncement that reinterprets this apparent failure as if everything is still going to plan for the real end of the world, on October 21 when:

“...we can be sure that the whole world, with the exception of those who are presently saved (the elect), are under the judgment of God, and will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on October 21, 2011”.

As a retired engineer, he gets rich and feels powerful like never before spouting this kind of crap. People listen to him. They pay attention to his every word. Engineers don't normally get that kind of respect. I'm a retired engineer too, so I can relate. I want people to listen to me too. But is the world really going to be annihilated later this month?

Yeah, right. I'll stick my neck out and prophesy that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary will happen on October 21, and come October 22 or so we'll have a new pronouncement from Mr Camping claiming that the world actually did end but we just didn't notice. Along with a new end date. Of course if you keep prophesying disaster long enough, eventually you'll land a date where some natural disaster actually happens by sheer coincidence and ignorant people will think you foretold it, because matching coincidences is how our brains work. The interesting thing about failed prophecy is that some followers actually strengthen their faith and allegiance to the cult leader in an attempt to avoid their uncomfortable feelings of having obviously backed the wrong horse.

People inside cults are always the last to acknowledge that it's a cult. Scientology is a classic example. I have to be careful what I say, because Scientoligists are litigious and have no sense of humour. I bet they try to prove me wrong with a lawsuit, forcing me to explain the concept of irony to them. Anyway, their religion is the perfect example of how people are willing to follow a leader without questioning or researching the basis of his teachings. All it takes is a quick trip to your local library or Google search to discover that Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, was a science-fiction writer. So he creates a religion using the latest teachings of the human potential movement mixed with some loopy alien schtick, and amasses mega-rich followers. He makes a fortune and a few hundred lawsuits later, his cult is well established. Clearly what Scientology teaches works to some degree; the Dianetics audit process sounds like cross between hypnosis, Rogerian and Narrative therapy. But you can learn everything you need to know about healing the emotional baggage from your past down at the local library without buying expensive Scientology training packages.

Mormonism is another great and relatively recent example than reeks of being made-up. The story of Joseph Smith acquiring the Book of Mormon has holes in it you could drive a Mach truck through; yet millions believe it without question. Another fun thing about cults is the way they point fingers at each other, without noticing the flaws in their own belief system.

People's Temple leader Jim Jones and the Jonestown massacre is a frightening reminder that our vulnerability to cult leaders can end horribly. The Branch Davidians and the Waco seige is another. Need I mention Charles Manson or Heaven's Gate?... Hey, who did they leave behind to keep the website running? It would be easy to write these off as isolated incidents only affecting very vulnerable people, but they keep happening. A lot of it comes down to the hypnotic effect that charismatic leaders can have on any of us. Adolf Hitler managed to hypnotise millions of ordinary Germans into supporting unspeakable violence against marginalised people. Unless we acknowledge our personal vulnerability to this kind of influence, we remain vulnerable too.

I've been interested in personal development for a long time, searching for some kind of cure for the low self-esteem and anxiety that seemed to cut right to my core. One of the most powerful courses I've done is The Landmark Forum, which often attracts the cult label. Landmark's teaching is based on taking full responsibility for your life, creating amazing possibilities for yourself, inspiring other people and then using peer pressure to keep you accountable for making it happen. It's pretty amazing stuff, and I still use some of the distinctions I learned there from time-to-time: Am I a spectator, or am I in the game? Am I being responsible here? Am I blaming others and running a racket on them? I'm currently doing their Living Passionately Seminar to get a sense of purpose and to live my life with ease and grace. It's only week 1 but I'm starting to feel more excited about life already. And I can relax now because I even just did this weeks homework!

As my first Landmark seminar leader said: “It'd be a weird cult that keeps telling you to get in touch with the people in your lives”. One of the most powerful things I learned at Landmark was to stop being defensive. When people start slapping derogatory labels like “cult” on your latest thing, don't get all reactive; just ask what they mean by that and look where else in their life cynicism, resignation and fear might be hurting them.

But some of the people I meet at Landmark act like robots; always busy applying distinctions and thinking thinking thinking. Totally out of touch with their emotions. Not really in the present, as Eckhart Tolle would say. Ultimately, the idea is to internalise the concepts and be responsible, be powerful, be present; not to think about it all the time. Depending on how you use them, the same tools that can make you more present and deepen your communication with others can also make you less present because you're thinking about the tools all the time. That leaves you more detached from your emotions, and hence your personal power.

Another amazingly powerful course I've done is called Path of Love. Their process is awesome for dealing with troubling emotions like guilt, fear, and shame. I've done it twice, and I highly recommend it. The process is heavily based on the teachings of Osho, previously known as the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He had an amazing ability to mix Eastern and Western philosophy and teach it in a hypnotic manner that made many of his followers fall in love with him. His teaching contains much practical wisdom: he invented dynamic meditation, because he recognised that the Western mind was too busy to just sit and that we needed to move our bodies in order to break the constant cycle of nervous thinking. His advocacy of open sexual relationships also appealed to the generation who just missed out on the whole 60's free love thing. And he was funny. Everyone loves that.

Yet Osho's foray into setting up an ashram in the U.S. showed that all was not well and something had gone amiss, at least for some Sannyasins. Back when I was in high school, the Orange People scandal broke when his sidekick Ma Sheela ran off with buckets of the faithful's cash. You could blame her, but what on earth were said faithful thinking; didn't they notice their guru's penchance for expensive Mercedes' on his daily drive-bys? Why did they keep giving him money? When interviewed by Australian current affairs program 60 Minutes, Ma Sheela's response to the scandal was: “What can I say. Tough titties”. This legendary answer got a picture of her giving us all the bird plastered across the front page of the daily newspaper, and thence across the folder for my Year 12 Economics notes. I had no idea that 20 years later I'd come full-circle and find myself at a course inspired by the teachings of the very guru she betrayed. I don't care about Year 12 Economics now, but I sure wish I'd kept the folder. Yet despite the scandal, I find the process the Bagwan inspired tremendously powerful.

At one of the emotional healing bootcamps on the life coach training course I did run by Beyond Success, Paul Blackburn jokingly described the community surrounding his successful personal development company as “It's a cult, but it's a good cult!”. He probably also said we shouldn't quote him on that; I can't remember. Well at least he has a sense of humour about it.

Most recently, I've begun to start my day with a series of Yoga, Meditation and Breathwork that I learned from the Art Of Living foundation, in an attempt to deal with the stress and anxiety that I experience from chronic fatigue syndrome. I wouldn't say I enjoy it, but I do feel better afterwards and it seems to be helping. Art Of Living appears to be dedicated to noble goals like world peace through inner transformation, yet even it has its detractors. There's a charismatic leader, a belief system mixing Hindu & Buddhist ideas, a strong sense of community, and disincentives for leaving; like only being allowed to do the full Sudarshan Kriya in groups with other followers led by an officially sanctioned teacher.

Seems like just about any organisation can be considered a cult. Some people even wonder if public speaking and leadership training organisation Toastmasters is a cult.

Nowadays, I like to joke about the cults I join. Not take it all so seriously. Almost any group you hang out with has cult-like followers avoiding dealing with feelings like loneliness and powerlessness. Even the volleyball crowd I used to mix with had a coach with some followers who played and trained with religious zeal. Every major religion has teachings to help followers avoid anxieties like our primal fear of death, and religions share many of the cult attributes I mentioned earlier: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism, etc etc all have a charismatic leader, belief systems, communities and disincentives if you up and leave. But they're too mainstream to be considered cults by most people since they're not small minority groups.

I've decided to start my own cult. I'll be a witty, engaging, entertaining and charismatic cult leader. A cut above the rest. My followers will love me, and they'll know how to show it. Women will throw themselves at me, and men will throw their money as I dispense indispensable wisdom. I found this great video to help get me started:

Ultimately the thing that really interests me about cults is how the leaders became so persuasive that people were willing to follow them no matter what. I've just read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Persuasion for some tips, and it said that when our willingness and ability to think is low, people are easily persuaded by ideas that are fun, easy and popular. That must be what it is.

Cults are Fun, Easy and Popular is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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Over the last few years, I've inadvertently adopted a strategy for dealing with troublesome neighbours based on the theme of the reality TV show Survivor: Outwit, Outplay, Outlast. Well, maybe not so much outwit and outplay, but outlast seems to be working for me with these people:

Cranky Old Men

First up was nasty neighbour Charles. I first met Charles while exploring the common property soon after buying my apartment. He a relatively short man around his mid 70s, with dark black hair, and a slight arch in his back which suggested that he was past his peak and was now growing shorter rather than taller. At first, Charles oozed charm and smarm: he was very friendly and welcoming in a rather disarming kind of way.

But things turned nasty only a couple of weeks later at the first body corporate meeting. The hot item on the agenda was wrestling control of the gardens on the common property from Charles, and employing a professional gardener to do the job instead. It was obvious as a newcomer that there was considerable conflict over the way the gardens should be managed, and agreeing to get a proper gardener in to do it was a no-brainer. Charles had been doing the gardens forever as though they were his personal property, and there was some suggestion that he'd been billing the body corporate for materials that didn't exist and that he wanted to be paid for his efforts. The problem was that his efforts weren't what the rest of the owners seemed to want, and this was generating conflict.

Now you might think "What's the big deal, it's just a garden, right?" Well, yes and no; yes, it was just a garden, but it was also a symptom of a deeper problem in the way Charles got on with the other owners and residents in the building. As the meeting degenerated into a slanging match over past grievances, I decided that being super-assertive might be a nice way to introduce myself:

"Look, as a new owner, I have no interest whatsoever in what has happened in the past. It's really very boring, and frankly I'm not interested in listening to you guys argue. What I am interested in the current situation, and how we're going to fix it. If you want to discuss the past, do it after the meeting when I'm not here. Clearly there are problems with the garden, and it's obviously causing conflict on the body corporate. I can't even open my garage door properly because there's a tree planted too close to it. Getting a professional gardener in to fix these problems sounds like a great solution to me."

The chairman of the meeting and most of the other owners appeared relieved, but Charles was incensed. I didn't even know exactly which parts of the garden we were arguing about, so I suggested we go outside and inspect it. As I led the group around the grounds, I pointed out the tree blocking my garage, and the noxious plants growing up over my balcony. "We're going to fix this", I said encouragingly with the unbridled optimism of the new kid on the block, not yet jaded by body-corporate shenanigans.

This made me Charles's mortal enemy. From that day on, he sent me vitriolic letters full of hatred, interspersed with newsletters from his church which he popped under my door. For a while he had me hooked, sending him courteous replies attempting to correct his misconceptions about me. I was determined to set him straight.

Silly me. Charles was never going to be set straight. Really I was just playing out a pattern of wanting people to like me. Plus the aggression that he used in his attempts to control other people really made me anxious. He lived in his own world of paranoia, and was so easily triggered to anger and spite it was just ridiculous. As an ex-journalist, you would have thought Charles would have the communication skills to get his needs met without so much hostility; but he either didn't have them, or chose not to use them. He was lonely because he had no friends, and he managed to alienate everyone in his life. Especially his neighbours.

Eventually I gave up trying to make amend with Charles, and just stopped replying to his letters. I felt rude at first, but it was clear that the more energy I put into engaging with him, the more vitriol I got in return. It was a completely lost cause. Charles clearly hated me, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Finally Charles fell down the stairs one day, breaking his collarbone, and his spirit. He moved into a nursing home about a year later. Then he died. People usually imply that I'm a bad person when I point out that Charles's death led to a net increase in the sum of human happiness, but I'm afraid it's true. There's a lesson in that for all of us, and it's not just to be careful on the stairs.

The new owners of Charles's old unit are really friendly; they even lent me some carpet cleaner the other day when mine ran out, saving me a trip to the shops. Swapping Charles for them has raised the friendliness of the whole building.

Neighbours From Hell

But then there were the neighbours from hell who moved into the apartment directly above me. I swear, these people came straight out of a boiling pit of low self esteem hell, and inflicted it on everyone around them. They were a young couple, with a 2 year old daughter. Let's call them Rod and Natalie, and their daughter Minnie; I tried to wipe them and their real names from my memory. I'm only revisiting the trauma here as a lesson for you, so I hope you're grateful.

Rod and Natalie combined the worst aspects of passive aggression with active rage, anger and abuse; making as much noise in the process as they possibly could. Their conversations and arguments were laden with more expletives than a gangsta rap song, fired out thick and fast without even thinking. In fact, there wasn't a lot of thinking going on from what I could hear; it was just pure nastiness.

Rod's temper was completely out of control, and he unleashed it on his wife at a moments notice. She'd work herself up into a frenzy and respond in kind, and then they'd slam their doors real hard just to make sure they got the point across how pissed off they were. The two of them kept me up late at night with their arguments, woke me early in the morning slamming doors, and distracted me from my work during the day with their, and their daughter's, screaming. Their arguments were demeaning, insulting, and laden with words starting with F and C. It took me straight back to childhood and my anxiety about my own parents' vicious verbal stoushes. And on the odd occasion that Rod and Natalie weren't hurling abuse at each other, they'd keep me up late at night with loud sex in the bedroom immediately above mine; which was particularly annoying when I wasn't getting any myself.

I knocked on their door, and rang the police regularly. It would shut them up for a brief while, but they'd start up again the next day. They just didn't give a damn. And their daughter was living in sheer hell; I'd think "She's gonna be really damaged. As if having their genes isn't bad enough, she's growing up in a minefield." One day when she was angry, I overheard her say to her mother Natalie "Shut up you fu_k_ng c_nt." Obviously she'd learned that's how you deal with anger from her father Rod's example. She was less that two years old at the time. I started ringing the Department of Community Services Child Protection every time they started yelling, in the hope that enough reports would stack up for someone to take some action to help this poor kid.

One day as I was going out, I bumped into Rod storming down the stairs in a rage hurling expletives of abuse at his wife as he left the building. "Rod, you're an adult now mate. It's time you started acting like one", I said to him as he passed my door. "F_ck you, you c_nt! Mind your own fucking business", he replied gracefully. Well, I would have minded my business if they didn't keep screaming theirs into my home all the time. When I returned home that evening, in the split-second before I grabbed my door handle to put my key in it I noticed a huge gob of spit coating the entire door handle and hanging down below. Oh, gross. I managed to unlock and open the door without contacting the offending ectoplasm, reached for the rubber gloves and disinfected my door handle.

The next day, Natalie knocked on my door, looking even more sullen and submissive than usual. She always came across as the classic abused wife with low self-esteem. Barely made eye contact with me. "Can you help me please?", she asked, "I've locked myself out of my apartment. I need to call a locksmith, or get up to the real estate agent or something. Can I borrow your phone please?"

“Well this was bizarre”, I thought, “The wife of the guy who covered my door handle in spit yesterday is asking me for a favour today.” Still, I like to help people, and she's not responsible for his stupidity. Although by staying with him, she's coming pretty close in my books. "Sure.", I said, "I hate it when I lock myself out too".

I lent her the phone. She called someone. Got it sorted out. "Thanks", she said as she left.

Later that day at the clothes line, I bumped into Natalie again. No eye contact. Head down. Battered wife syndrome. "Natalie, do you know what Rod did yesterday after he stormed out?", I said.

"Umm... no?...", she replied sheepishly.

"He spat on my doorknob. As he left yesterday I told him he was an adult now, and it was time to start acting like one. He told me to F_uck off. When I came home, my doorknob was covered in spit. Huge gobs of spit."

"Oh, he wouldn't do that."

"Well, I don't think it's just coincidence that we had a brief encounter and I came home to find spit on my door. That's never happened before."

"But he's a good guy really."

"No Natalie, he's not. I've heard your arguments. He abuses you all the time. You don't deserve that. And what do you think it's doing to Minnie? You guys disturb me all the time with the door slamming and your arguments. When I knock on your door in the midst of it, you act like nothing's going on. I'd move to get away from you both if I could, but I own my place. Moving out just to get away from you and Rod would cost me a lot of money."

"I'm sorry, really."

Well, what was she to do, really? Her husband's a moron. The police told me not to knock on their door because he was considered dangerous. They wouldn't tell me whether he had a firearm or not; but they said to stay away from the guy and just call them instead. Eventually I got tired of calling the police and Child Protection, and decided to take my case to the man upstairs. Or rather, the woman... the owner of their unit.

So I started calling Martina regularly to let her know what was going on. She was a little old lady in her 90's who didn't want to cause anyone any trouble. She had heard that Rod and Natalie were causing problems, but was terrified of Rod. She was too afraid to even visit the apartment she owned to inspect it: she thought Rod would kill her. It didn't help that she was too tight to employ a managing agent who would normally deal with evicting troublesome tenants. Martina mentioned that Rod & Natalies's lease was up for renewal soon and although she knew they were causing problems, she was going to let them renew because she thought that if she didn't, they'd just stay anyway.

Oh no. That would be bad. I realised that if I could get Martina to terminate the lease when it came up for renewal, I might get some peace and quiet back. She lived in a house on the other side of the suburb, so I dropped around to visit. I may have taken chocolate; I can't remember. My aim was to sweet-talk Martina into standing up for herself and kicking Rod & Natalie out. She was very worried about how they would react, and that they might just stay without paying any rent. It turned out their rent was being paid by some government agency; my hard-earned taxes keeping a roof over an idiot like Rod's head because he was too stupid and violent to get and keep a real job. When I told her that the police would help her evict them if they overstayed, it occurred to me that Martina had grown up in communist Romania and her notion of police was quite different to mine. It reminded her of the secret police, and they just weren't on her side.

Nevertheless, the sweet-talk worked. After many phone calls and friendly visits, Martina decided to get her daughter to help her with the legal side of terminating the lease and evicting the troublesome tenants. Rod and Natalie were finally out of my hair. I can only hope they've set up a trust fund for Minnie's future therapy and legal bills, and that Child Protection take action to rescue her at some point.

And after all that time I put in developing a good relationship with her, Martina died of old age a few months later.

Couples Who Argue A Lot

The building I live in was built in the late 1960's, when the idea of talking with your neighbours wasn't quite so ludicrous. Each pair of units share a laundry, so if nothing else you've got a reason to co-operate on who uses the washing machine and when. Before I bought my place I'd knocked on the door opposite to ask what it was like living in the building, and met Michael & Lesley's. They seemed a little reserved but otherwise appeared as though they'd make decent neighbours.

However, Michael & Lesley had a stormy relationship. She had a quick temper and it didn't take much for bursts of expletives to come from her mouth. But she also seemed to calm down pretty quickly too. Fortunately I could block the noise out just by keeping my door closed, and occasionally upping the volume on the remote. Since I shared a laundry with them, I made a special effort to get on with them. It's pretty simple really: if you want a happy life, try to get on with your neighbours. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Offload your excess steam elsewhere. Try to make peace with the people you live near, not war.

Fortunately Lesley's aggression was never directed at me. Well, there may have been one incident, but I've forgotten about in now, and so did she. I was happy to do my laundry during the week, leaving the washing machine free on weekends. I'd stop to chat whenever I could. Michael was very reserved, but Lesley was quite friendly really. I stayed well out of their arguments. They were happy to collect my mail for me whenever I was off gallivanting around the country, and I was very grateful.

Eventually the global financial crisis hit, and they both lost their jobs. With no income, they decided to move back to New Zealand, where Lesley owned a house; so they wouldn't have to rent any more. On the morning of the day they left, I managed to drown out their latest argument by meditating with a few extra-loud "aum"s.

Goodbye Lesley and Michael, I will miss you; though possibly not as much as I miss Charles.

It's worth the effort to try to get on with your neighbours. But if that fails, while I don't recommend doing a Richard Hatch, if you can't outwit or outplay them, see if you can simply outlast them.

The Survivor Approach To Dealing With Difficult Neighbours is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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I won the Best Speech award (again) at my Toastmasters club last meeting, for a humorous speech entitled Share The Love. I love delivering funny speeches, because I get to make people laugh, I'm able to live in the moment, and I get distracted from self-consciousness by the story-telling. In short, I get to feel free. Plus I can tell immediately that the audience is engaged when they laugh. Even if they're not laughing, they seem to be paying attention, and either way I'm in the zone having fun.

Now I know it was just a regular club meeting; it's not like I won a humorous speech contest or anything yet, that's coming up in a few week's time. But here's my process for writing and delivering a humorous speech:

Pick A Painful Story

The essence of public speaking is to tell a story, and make a point. Story-telling is the basis of the craft. So I generally start with a painful personal story from my own life which I've emotionally dealt with sufficiently to be able to laugh at myself. Being able to laugh at yourself is essential. The story needs to have a happy ending in which the pain is resolved in some way. If you're still traumatised by the story, the audience won't find it funny. If you can't think of a painful story, or you're just not ready to go there yet, pick a story about a situation you were in that you found genuinely hilarious. You need to be in the story; don't tell someone else's story.

If you don't think you have worthy personal stories of your own, you just haven't looked hard enough yet. Your personal pain is a goldmine of comedic material, and stories that may not have been funny at all for you at the time can be hilarious when told later. The more prepared you are to plumb the depths of your psyche and expose your pain and inner conflict, the funnier you'll be.

Run your story by a friend in normal conversation and see how they respond. Chances are that if the story meant something to you, you'll tell it energetically and get a positive response. Don't abandon the story if it falls flat first time; perhaps your friend is in a bad mood. Try it on someone else. After a few goes if people don't seem interested, pick another story. Don't tell your friends that you're testing a story on them. I told the story behind Share The Love to the friends from my public speaking practise group over coffee, and when they described the conversation as "very entertaining" I figured I was onto something.

Preparing The Speech

You want to be well enough prepared that you aren't likely to lose your place when delivering the speech, but not so over-prepared that your delivery looks staged and stilted. Professional actors spend years developing the skill of being able to deliver a monologue from a script as though they were sharing their own current thoughts and feelings. Trying to memorise your speech word for word like a script will kill your delivery; don't do that. You're telling a personal story that you've already lived, so you're not likely to forget the most important and impactful details, and that's what's important. This is another reason you should be telling your own stories.

I never write out the full text of a speech; partly because I'm too lazy, and partly because that way I avoid the perfectionistic tendency to try and memorise and deliver it word-for-word. I broke this tradition slightly with Share The Love and did write the whole story out because I wanted to post it on my blog. It also helped me get the story straight in my head, but the written story isn't the same as the speech. Even though I'd written the whole story out, I then broke it down into bullet points to create the speech from.

However, you do want to memorise your opening and the closing statements word-for-word. The opening is important because it's where you grab the audience's attention and let them know what's in it for them. It's also where you'll be the most nervous, so you want the opening line to be so deeply embedded in your psyche that it'll roll off your tongue no matter what happens.

For everything in the body of the speech, the important thing is that you cover the key scenes or events of the story, while remaining connected with the audience. You'll do this by reliving the story emotionally as you tell it. Break the story down into three major bullet points describing each key scene or event, and note them down on a small piece of paper. If you're giving a long speech or your stories are very short, tell more stories and bullet point each story. All the stories should have a common theme that aligns with the point you want to make in your conclusion. Generally speaking, you're better off fully fleshing out an interesting story than doing a half-baked job of trying to tell several stories in one speech without enough time to do each justice.

Make your speech conversational. Use the same words you would use if you were talking to a single person. Imagine yourself telling your story to a good friend. Asking questions helps engage your audience; use language that works one-to-one like "Have you ever felt so angry, you thought you might explode?", rather than one-to-many like "Who here has ever felt so angry, you thought you might explode?" One-to-many statements are common in public speaking, but you lose a personal connection when you use them.

Emphasise the dialogue in your story, rather than narrating all the time. Rather than saying:

"I told her that I wanted her to leave",

say:

"I said to her: 'I want you to leave!'".

Telling stories in dialogue makes an enormous difference: it makes you relive the scene better, it helps you emphasise the traits of your characters, and it brings the audience along for the ride with you. Giving dialogue for your internal thoughts is particularly powerful. Instead of saying:

"I thought that I just wanted to kill her.",

say:

"I thought: 'I just want to kill her!'"

This distinction may seem subtle when you read a story, but it makes a huge difference when telling a story on stage. Check out Craig Valentine's Edge Of Their Seats Storytelling program for more on this.

Your closing statement is the thing your audience will take away with them, so you want to memorise it too. The closing statement should make some point that links to the themes in the scenes and events in your story. I don't always know the point I want to make when I start working on a story; often the point becomes apparent the first time I tell the story to one of my friends, or in my practise group. Other people can give interpretations we didn't think of, which is another reason why it's good to run stories by friends before we tell them on stage.

Rehearsing Your Speech

To get good at anything, you have to practise. I tend to leave rehearsing my full speech until the day I'm giving it. Leaving everything to the last minute is a bad habit I picked up at Uni, but it seems to work for me. By this time I'm been thinking about the key events of the story for a few days, and visualising myself up on stage deliving it and getting lots of laughs; now it's time to tie the whole thing together and work right through it.

I rehearse in my lounge room, talking to my sofa. I pretend I'm at the real venue, starting from when I've been introduced. I try to ignore the voice in my head that tells me, "The neighbours will think you've gone crazy if they hear you!" My sofa has heard all my speeches numerous times, and is now a world-renowned expert on my personal neuroses. PS: Notice how I gave that internal voice in dialogue just there?

I generally rehearse each complete speech a few times, recording it on my Olympus digital voice recorder or my Sony Walkman MP3 player/recorder. Check the time to see if you need to leave things out, or expand on points in your story to fill the allotted time. I've never had to expand when preparing a typical Toastmasters 5-7 minute speech; I always end up with points I really wanted to keep that I had to leave out due to time constraints. The audience never notice the omission, and it's important not to go overtime. So long as you've include the key events, they'll get the connection to the main point that you end with.

Work from your bullet points here. If you've written the entire speech out, put it aside and work from your memory, jolted by the bullet points if necessary.

Again, don't overdo your rehearsals or try to memorise it word-for-word. Perfectionism will kill your delivery and you'll end up taking ages between speeches, slowing your learning rate. Seasoned actors know that there's a sweet-spot at which a show is ready to go on-stage: rehearse beyond this, and enthusiasm, motivation and performance quality actually drop. It's better to give 5 imperfect speeches than 1 perfect one, because you learn the most when you're actually up there delivering it. Besides, the perfect speech is one that connects deeply and impactfully with your audience, and reciting a memorised speech word-perfect rarely does this.

Delivering The Speech

Make sure someone is recording your speech. I leave my voice recorder on a nearby desk or use a lapel microphone, and my club videos speeches so I can review it later.

When it comes to delivering the speech, you're likely to be nervous. Take a deep breath, think about what the story means to you, and how you'd like to convey that to the audience in a way that's fun and engaging. Your aim is to enjoy yourself as you entertain your audience. Focus on connecting with them and giving them something of value. Take your focus off you, and put it on the story and the audience.

If you don't feel confident going on stage without notes, take the bullet points of the key events and scenes in the story with you, not the full text of the speech. You can't remain connected with your audience if you're reading from a script, and if you lose your place up on the podium you'll find it remarkably hard to pick things up again on a page full of tiny text. Bullet points are the way to go, memorised if possible.

After you walk on stage, pause as you glance around making eye contact with a few members of the audience. Don't forget the people down the back, if there are any. We're all inclined to rush at this point; pausing builds anticipation and the eye contact builds connection. Then, deliver your memorised opening line as you continue to make eye contact with the audience.

Next, dive into the story. Relive it as you tell it. Move around as you move from scene to scene; don't move on stage unless it's purposeful. Like an actor, you should only move when something in the story makes you move. Same deal with hand movements and gestures; they should arise from the story, not from nervousness or from arbitrary rules in the Toastmaster's manual.

Don't try and make your speech funny... the humour should arise naturally from the story. Emphasise the painful parts of your story, or the parts that you found funny. Exaggerate a little if you like, particularly with your descriptions of things. I generally find that the slightly paranoid interpretation of things that popped into my head naturally when the actual events occurred does just fine when told without much exaggeration. You'll be exposing part of your psyche by doing this, but the audience are likely to find it piss-funny when they discover what actually goes on in your head. If it's embarrassing, you can always say that you exaggerated for the purposes of better storytelling. We'll know the truth though, and to be honest, the more paranoid and embarrassing, the funnier you'll be.

Work on being present, rather than being perfect. Leave pauses for laughs. Timing is hugely important in a humorous speech, and the worst thing you can do is talk over your audience's laughter. Pay attention to how they are responding, especially if they laugh when you're not expecting it or at times that seem inappropriate. Don't get defensive if this triggers embarrassment for you; you wanted to make them laugh, right?

Afterwards

Go easy on yourself. Developing a great story takes time. You can't expect to totally nail it the first time you tell it on stage. Be patient with the process. I am my own worst critic, and really need to be reminded of this a lot.

Listen to the feedback you get, and take note of the points you find helpful. Keep in mind the calibre and attributes of the person giving the feedback. Take on feedback that is congruent with attributes of the person giving you feedback that you aspire to. For example, if a comedian gives you feedback on your use of humour, you might want to consider it more highly than feedback from someone who doesn't see themselves as, or aspire to be, funny.

Professional public speakers tell the same stories over and over in front of different audiences, tailoring and improving them each time. They prepare enough that they know they can confidently deliver the story without becoming bored with it, and each presentation is slightly different.

Listen to the recording of your speech a few days later to see what things you would do differently to be more present and connected with your audience, and to improve your comedic timing. Also listen for key points that you may have missed or forgotten; but remember that chances are something you thought was a vital omission actually didn't make that much difference to the audience.

Down the track when you want to deliver the same speech again, or to tell the same story in the context of a different speech, listen to your previous performance to remind yourself the main points, scenes and events. By listening to your old storytelling efforts and working on the rough parts, you'll naturally refine and improve each time you tell the story. I keep a directory on my PC for each story, complete with MP3's, videos, text and other material related to that story. I'm building up a library of developed stories that I can slot into speeches whenever I want to illustrate a relevant theme. Your stories are your intellectual property, and companies take intellectual property very seriously. Only you can deliver your stories most effectively since you've lived them, and they're what distinguish you from other speakers. Don't treat your stories as one-off disposable items that you're done with after each speech.

Now of course there's always more to learn, and I didn't come up with this process all by myself; it's a combination of what I've learned at Toastmasters, and from world-class public speakers Craig Valentine, Darren Lacroix, and Paul Blackburn. If you want to really advance your public speaking ability, the most powerful training material I've come across, which I highly recommend you get your hands on, is Craig and Darren's Own The Stage program.

How to Write and Present a Winning Speech is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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1. How to Write Damn Good Fiction by James N. Frey

Have you ever noticed that in any reasonably large group of people, there's always one person who you just don't seem to get on with? One person who gets in your face, and just doesn't seem to agree with you or like you, no matter what you say or do? How do you deal with them?

Earlier this year I went to a Shamanic Practitioner's training course, up near Byron bay. The purpose of the course was to learn shamanic healing techniques for dealing with spiritual, emotional and sexual problems. I had been lured by the promise of dealing with three of my biggest bugbears: guilt, fear and shame. It was one of those courses where you just know everyone's going to wind up getting naked.

This was a residential course lasting 6 days, in the beautiful, warm Byron hinterland. There was a lot of stomping, pillow-hitting, tantrum-throwing and other techniques to deal with the range of emotions that came to the surface. There was a lot of discussion and practise of setting boundaries, learning to say "yes" and "no" to what we did and didn't want, learning to ask for what we needed, and recognising when we were playing out old patterns in the way we related to other people. We learned some extreme healing techniques, and then practised them with each other. It was intense, and I was way outside my normal comfort zone.

Anything that happened during the week was considered part of the course, whether it happened in a formal training session or not. I stayed in a 6-share mixed dorm room, and took an immediate mutual dislike to the woman in the bunk bed directly above me. Let's call her Bertha. Bertha was a large Germanic woman with a thick accent and short black hair. During the night she would toss and turn every 30 seconds. Being in the bed beneath her felt like trying to sleep in an earthquake zone. I was fatigued and exhausted pretty much the whole time, and after the second night of being kept awake I decided I was going to have to practise asking for what I needed.

So I said to Bertha in the morning:

"I'm finding it really difficult to get to sleep at night. The bunk really rocks whenever we move, and it keeps waking me up when you move around suddenly. Could you please be aware of this when you move?"

"Well, I can't help it if I turn in my sleep!", she screeched back, "There's nothing I can do about it! Why don't you sleep somewhere else?"

In hindsight, that mightn't have been such a bad idea, but I didn't know if there was anywhere else; certainly all the bunks in our room were full and as far as I knew the place was booked out. But the next night was much better: Bertha didn't move nearly as much or as violently. In the morning I thanked her, saying "I had a much better sleep last night, thank you". She merely grunted in reply.

Nevertheless, I was still exhausted most of the time and desperately needing rest. I spent every lunch time in bed hoping to catch some sleep in the hour or so we had free. Right next to my bed was a small wooden table with a few small meditative ornaments on it. During lunch time while I was in bed, Bertha came in to our room and set up her laptop on the table only a foot away from my head.

She was relatively quiet, but nevertheless the gentle tap-tap-tap of her keys on the keyboard and the occasional Windows login sound so close to my ear was distracting. It felt like she was right in my space, and I just couldn't fall asleep. "Can't she see that I'm struggling with exhaustion?", I thought to myself as my frustration slowly grew, "Why doesn't she just leave me alone? Does she really have to do this right here, right now? Can't she go and do it somewhere else? And what is she doing on her computer anyway? Surely that's not part of the course."

I was desperate for rest, and Bertha was keeping me awake. "How can she be so uncaring and insensitive?" All these angry, paranoid thoughts were buzzing around my head, making it even more difficult to rest. I hate conflict, and the idea of asking for what I need from a potentially hostile person dosen't thrill me. But it's all part of the course, and I was here to learn to deal with these kinds of things.

So I figured I'd better risk it:

"Do you have to do that right here?", I enquired.

"What?", she said acting suprised

"I'm exhausted and I'm trying to sleep, but you're keeping me awake."

"I'm not making any noise.", Bertha snapped back.

"Well, it's disturbing me. Your laptop is right next to my head. I really need to rest."

"Well, I'm doing my work."

"But you're in my space. Do you have to do it right now? I'm really struggling here."

"I have to do my work!!!"

"But we're on a course. I'm not here doing work. I'm trying to rest so I can get everything I can out of the coure."

"Well I'm doing my work."

She was adamant that her work was more important, and she couldn't possibly do it anywhere else. No matter what I said, she was staying.

"So your work is more important than my need to rest?", I said angrily.

"No, I'm not saying that. You're saying that."

"Oh come on! If you're going to disturb me because your work is more important than me getting the rest I need, you could at least acknowledge that."

Now I was incensed.

"Look, could you please just leave?", I asked with increasing fury.

"It's my room too! I have every right to be here."

"Well yes it is your room, but do you have to work right next to me when I'm trying to sleep? I'm really struggling here."

No good.

So much for asking for what I need. How could this woman be so insensitive to another person's needs? I was furious. She was determined to do what she wanted regardless of how it affected me, and wouldn't even acknowledge that. For all I knew, perhaps her work was saving the building from imminent destruction... but I doubted it. I was livid. Instead of getting the rest I needed, I'd spent half of lunch time arguing with this woman who I just couldn't reason with. It felt like arguing with my mother. Eventually when lunch time was almost over anyway, I got up, and stormed out:

"I don't want to be around you; you've got a real 'F_ck-You' energy. I just don't want to be anywhere near you."

I was angry. Really angry. I could see that being unable to reason with an emotionally insensitive woman who always put her own needs first was just replaying the pattern with my mother that I grew up with; but how was I going to break it? Normally I'd try to fix things by appologising, trying to talk to them, and working to smooth things over. Play the nice guy. But it never seemed to work; I'd just end up giving away even more of my power, and Bertha clearly wasn't in the mood for compromise.

Cranky as all hell, I went down to the main hall and did some stomping, threw some tantrums, and bashed some defenceless pillows in an effort to get it out of my system. But I was still angry. Every time I saw Bertha, it reminded me of how little she seemed to care. I'd see her showing love and grace to other people, but cold indifference towards me. It really pissed me off. I tried not to think about it, but the unpleasant thoughts and feelings kept coming back. "How can someone be so insensitive?" It was pushing my buttons, big time. I wanted her to suffer, like she'd made me suffer. Now in addition to being exhausted, I was suffering inside because I felt so angry.

Later in the afternoon, I found myself chatting to Caroline, a drop-dead gorgeous young woman with a pretty face, cheeky smile, long brown hair, tall and slim, with subtle female curves in all the right places. She was a Gestalt therapist who had done a lot of deep inner healing work and had got to the point where she was in an almost constant state of bliss. The weather was warm and Caroline wandered around totally naked and blissed-out pretty much the whole time. So when I bumped into Caroline in her natural state, I asked her what her secret was.

"It's love", she said in a starry-eyed, spacious kind of way. "Everything is about love. I send people love, no matter what. Love love love."

Maybe Caroline was onto something.

Later that evening I was back in the room when Bertha stormed in and grabbed her sheets and blankets. "I can't stand being around you", she cried, "I'm sleeping somewhere else tonight! Tomorrow night, you can move."

She was angry. Angry women freak me out. But I didn't want to keep replaying my mother-pattern of giving in to an angry woman just because I was afraid of conflict. And I didn't want to stay feeling angry myself, either.

"I'm sending you some love", I said.

"I don't want you're love!", Bertha shrieked back

"Well I'm sending it anyway!", I replied as she slammed the door on her way out.

Oh well, at least she wasn't in my face any more. Over the next few days, those feelings of anger kept coming up in me from time to time. Each time, I'd consciously think "I'm sending you some love.", occasionally along with "You sure as hell need it!"

I'd had a lifetime of repressing my anger, and I knew that wasn't the solution. Anger had empowered me to speak up for myself and ask for what I needed; but if I was to hang onto it, the only person who really suffered was me. No doubt Bertha had her own reasons for being so easily triggered by a man who just needed his space from her, and I probably pushed her buttons just like she pushed mine. I never really found out. For the rest of the course, she ignored me. She never came back, and she didn't say goodbye to me or give me a farewell hug like everyone else on the last day. But I was able to sleep better at night, and to rest during lunch time. I was able to ask for what I wanted, survive conflict, and even end up getting what I really needed.

So when uncomfortable feelings of anger at someone who has done you wrong come up, firstly stand up for yourself. And then if the feelings persist, just do what I do: visualise blissed-out naked Caroline, remember her wisdom... and share the love.

Share The Love is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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1. Path of Love

One of the greatest challenges of my life has been the journey of discovery that led me to abandon the religion of my upbringing, and the core beliefs about myself and the world around me that went along with it. Although tremendously challenging, the journey has also been one of the most rewarding; which isn't surprising since it's when we step outside our comfort zone and encounter challenges that we truly grow.

I was raised in a conservative church-going family in middle-class Australia. Every weekend my parents would take me and my two older sisters along to our mildly-progressive local Christian church. I went to Sunday School every weekend where I learned stories from the bible, learned to close my eyes when I prayed, heard about Jesus, sang cutesy Christian songs, and generally ran amok as often as I could. I was an energetic little boy, and the thought of sitting still in Sunday School every Sunday morning really didn't appeal to me. But at least it meant I didn't have to sit through the long church service my parents went to at the same time though, where they sang boring hymns and listened to sermons that didn't make much sense to me.

The stories they taught me in Sunday School seemed a little odd: God turning Lot's wife into a pillar of salt just for turning around at the wrong time. Jonah being swallowed by a fish; I doubted a person could survive long in a fish... how would they breathe? And Jesus being crucified for my sins and rising again, all before I was even born. The New Testament turned out to be almost 2000 years old; that's hardly what I considered “new”. Even as a kid I could see that the technological and scientific progress since then probably shed a new light on the interpretation of biblical events.

Every week I would be told to confess my sins in prayer and ask God for forgiveness. Often I would struggle to think of something to confess; surely I couldn't just keep confessing every week that I hadn't cleaned up my room like my mother was always asking me. Even when I did do it, she was never satisfied. I felt like a bad person for having so many sins that I didn't even know about, and having caused Jesus to die that horrible death on the cross. Something didn't feel quite right about all this, but over time I learned to suppress my intuition and came to believe that the problem was something wrong with me.

My parents were extremely private people, which is another way of saying that they withheld their feelings and had dreadful communication skills. They never talked directly about anything personal, especially not about how they felt or what they believed; as a result, they had a stormy relationship. I was a sensitive kid and found their arguments tremendously scary and traumatic; I could sense the tension in the house and often felt like I was walking on eggshells at home. My mother was stubborn and highly critical, and my father often seethed with resentment he couldn't express. They were so stoic, I never saw either of them cry, nor express affection towards each other and I thought they just didn't love each other. Although they were very involved in our local church and took us along every week, they never talked about their faith in God or Jesus at home. I grew up feeling uncomfortable and awkward, ashamed of who I was and what I believed.

During adolescence I started attending more senior fellowship groups at the church, and had a fairly close-knit group of church friends. I also did other activities such as Boy Scouts, and had friends from school; but these separate worlds never collided. I was a highly sensitive kid with mediocre social skills and a total lack of self-confidence, which made me an easy target for bullies at school. At high school I kept my faith under wraps most of the time; I had enough attention as it was from the local bullies without needing to be teased for being Christian. Looking back, I think I sensed at the time that the whole Christian thing wasn't really defensible, but I suppressed my intuition and kept going along to church, fellowship, and bible study groups. I loved going on church camps, getting away from home and hanging out with my other Christian friends. The friendships I made at this time have become some of my longest and most enduring.

On many occasions, I specifically prayed to ask God to forgive my sins and accepted Jesus as my personal lord and saviour. I can't say I ever felt the presence of the holy spirit, but it wasn't for lack of praying for it. I tried to read the bible every day, but frankly it was pretty boring. I went to regular bible study groups with other Christians which helped to assuage my doubts, but I often felt frustrated with a lack of guidance from God and always seemed to have to make decisions on what to do myself.

After leaving high school I went to university to study Computer Engineering. I was extremely busy studying part time while working a full-time day job, but I maintained and even deepened my involvement in the church where I grew up. I served on the Youth Ministries committee, became a steward to welcome people and help run the evening services, and later became an Elder. I was about as involved in church as a lay person could possibly be. For several years I dated a girl from my social group at the church, ultimately breaking up because I didn't want to marry her; at the time, this was the most painful experience I had ever been through. I was devastated and felt the most excruciating emotional pain I'd ever felt. It took at least two years to get over. She left the church and three months later got engaged to another guy. Ouch.

Shortly after graduating from university I took up regular volunteer work at a Christian-based telephone crisis counselling service. We were trained to be non-judgemental, to get callers to talk about their feelings, and to avoid shoving Jesus down their throat. I liked this approach, and got heavily involved in the counselling service assisting with training, taking calls, and even seeing clients face-to-face. While leading a small group on one of the counselling training courses, I met a sprightly young woman who quickly became one of my closest friends. She was disillusioned with her church, so I invited her along to mine and she became a regular attendee. She had a tempestuous relationship with her boyfriend, and when they eventually split up we started dating.

A few years later she was keen to get married, but I was not. History repeating itself painfully. She convinced me to go and see a counsellor, where I started dealing with my terribly low self-esteem and revealing the emotional impact my parent's fighting had had on me. I was so ashamed that it took months for me to open up and talk about how scared I had felt as a kid when they fought. Even just being able to cry freely in front of the counsellor was so shameful, it felt like having broken glass stuck in my eyes. I had a deep-seated fear of showing how I was feeling to other people.

At the same time, I began to question whether the God I had believed in for so long was actually real; and this frightened me. I had serious doubts and felt very uncomfortable being an Elder at the church, so I resigned but kept attending as a regular lay person. I was overloaded anyway and on the road to a serious burnout given my heavy involvement at both the counselling centre and my local church. Something had to give. Eventually my girlfriend and I split up because I didn't want to marry her either, and this breakup was even more painful and devastating than the previous one. I had no idea that a human being could feel so terrible. It took at least another two years to get over, and was worse this time around. The guilt I felt was overwhelming. My family were less than supportive, and as many of my friends had also become her friends, socialising with my friends felt painful and awkward.

After a lifetime of attending the church where I grew up, I decided it was time to leave. My ex-girlfriend was now a regular member there and it was just too painful to keep showing up and feeling awkward. I didn't want to repeat what had happened after my previous relationship where I stayed and the girl left. I was also losing interest in my job, and one of my flatmates treated me like I didn't exist. My life was a painful mess and I needed to sort it out.

My counsellor was, by his own admission, a slightly crazy off-the-wall minister from a related church with a degree in psychology. Although I was a counsellor myself, I felt terribly ashamed about needing to go to therapy and having to walk my own talk. I wasn't real keen on debating existential questions that have entertained philosophers for centuries at $120 per hour, so I started talking to the minister of my local church about what I actually believed regularly. At one of our sessions tears ran down my face and my whole body shook nervously as I revealed my true inner thoughts: “You know... I think God might not exist”. I was thoroughly distraught at the prospect. If God didn't exist, Christianity was a sham. I wouldn't be going to heaven. Death was the end of the road. That prospect scared the living shit out of me. I had only one life to live, and I'd messed an important part of it up. The repercussions were enormous.

The more widely I read, earnestly I prayed, and deeply I contemplated the teachings in the bible, the more Christianity began to unravel. My church had always taught that the 7 day creation story wasn't meant to be taken literally, so that wasn't a problem for me. What about the rest of the bible though? I discovered that the story of the virgin birth is the result of a simple misinterpretation, leading to the obvious explanation for how Mary became pregnant. I started thinking more about the historical context of the bible, the limited knowledge that its author's had and their primitive understanding of themselves and the world around them. Poorly educated fishermen make great followers, but may not be the most discerning when it comes to interpreting events. I had learned in my counselling training that people often experience hallucinations during intense grief, but since most people don't know this they think they're going crazy when it happens. It seemed quite plausible that the resurrection and Jesus's reported appearances afterwards were hallucinations and never actually happened.

The minister was open to an honest dialogue, which was a tremendous help to me. He suggested I read some relatively liberal Christian literature that had a slightly different perspective from the mainstream conservative evangelical books I'd been devouring; but I got a sense that even these authors were avoiding a fundamental obvious truth. I kept reading more and more widely, including more radical Christian authors, agnostic and atheist philosophy. For a while I felt agnostic; unable to decide whether it was all true or not. One day during our conversations he asked me “Are you still sitting on the fence Graham? Because sitting on a fence is pretty painful, isn't it?” He was right; I had to decide one way or another.

At the same time, I went church hopping. I used the opportunity to visit a wide variety of churches from conservative to pentecostal, and to ask people what they really believed. People were falling down and lying on the floor in the middle of the service at one; it was quite a spectacle. I was no longer the responsible Elder who felt that I had to have the answers; I could be the one asking the tough questions. Few people had answers I found satisfying. Most people seemed to be avoiding fear of one thing or another: feeling unloved, death, loneliness. I went to an introductory Christianity course called Alpha, and didn't hold back on expressing my doubts. I sensed that people were looking for community more than they were looking for truth, and would believe pretty much whatever they were told in order to get it. I wanted to know the truth, goddam it, I didn't want it sugar coated. I decided that truth was more important than happiness, and I would pursue the truth whatever it cost me.

I was tired of superficial Christian small-groups that never got down to reality. One night I was at a bible study where we were discussing the finer points of interpretation of a Paulian epistle, when I said “Look, what does it matter? This is just Paul's personal opinion. The God he's talking about probably doesn't even exist!”. I felt everyone was missing the forest for the trees. The group leader was perplexed and responded “Well... I kind of wonder why you're in a Christian bible study if you don't even believe in God”. Good point, I thought. It was time to give up the charade.

I quit going to church, stopped reading the bible, and kept expanding my world view even more widely. If God didn't exist he couldn't have created the universe, so I wanted to know who or what did. I read widely on the topic of creation, cosmology and evolution until I felt I had a reasonable understanding of a better explanation for how I came to be here than the simplistic one Christianity offered. I found many inconsistencies in Christian doctrine that I'd been prepared to overlook before, and realised how naïve and closed-minded I had been. It was fascinating to consider that a universe like ours could spring into existence in an uncaused quantum mechanical event without a God behind it. I found it remarkable that the very brain we use to ponder the question of the origin of the universe is a product of that same vast, incomprehensible universe. Little wonder ancient people came up with the notion of a God to explain so many things they couldn't understand. As an engineer, I'd always had a great respect for science and now this considerably outweighed my diminishing respect for religion. I felt fortunate to live at a time when we understand so much more about the world around us than the people who wrote the bible did.

Around the same time I was going through this faith crisis and relationship breakup fallout, I switched jobs in the hope of finding more inspiring work. A few years later, I was thoroughly burned out. I quit full-time work with no idea where to head. I started my own consulting business, which was fun for a while but my heart wasn't really in it. I had been passionate about computers for much of my life, but looking back I can see that in a way I was just avoiding the pain that I felt in relationships with people. Being highly sensitive and insecure, I hurt easily and criticism from other people stung deep. Computers didn't do that to you. But you can't relate emotionally to one either, so something inside me was being left unfulfilled. I became more and more interested in personal development work, emotional healing and finding deeper ways to connect with other people. I began exploring art , music, dance, theatre, writing and other creative endeavours now that I wasn't working.

Giving up the belief system behind Christianity was one thing; reversing the deep-seated emotional impact that its teaching had on my neurology was another. It wouldn't be fair to blame Christian teaching entirely for my chronic low self-esteem, since most of that was probably inherited from my parents and goes back several generations. Christianity just reinforced this dysfunction with it's notions of sinfulness, the need for salvation, labelling pride a sin, shame about sex & sexuality, and avoiding dealing with the finality of death. Over the years since declaring myself an atheist, I've healed many pockets of emotional damage deep in my psyche that held me back from being free to be my true self. This is a work in progress, and I'm not yet where I want to be... but I'm on the journey.

The underlying issues that make us want to bow down to a God that someone else invented don't just go away simply because you recognise that man made God in our own image, rather than the other way around. I still have a fairly deep sense of powerlessness, unworthiness, not being good enough and shame about who I am and what I want from life. Gradually this is being healed through meaningful, emotionally open relationships with loving people who don't have an agenda of spreading the Christian gospel.

I've often felt that I lived in a prison of my own inhibitions, and now I'm doing whatever I can to break out of that cage: acting courses, public speaking courses, spiritual, emotional & sexual healing courses. I'm making inroads into the heavy layer of guilt, fear and shame I still carry from my past. I realise that people respond to me in the way they do because of the way I communicate, so I'm learning new ways of communication which are more powerful. My self-image is gradually changing in the process, but it doesn't happen overnight. I'm aware that many people suffer the effects of religious indoctrination and may never overcome it, but I figure that so long as I'm alive, there's hope.

I sometimes wonder whether people are happier when living in reality, or when living in denial; if they're happier in reality, why do so many choose to live in denial? Research shows that religious people tend to be happier on average than those who don't believe and the most obvious payoff is the connection you get with other people from living in a faith community. I'm a little less attached to being right nowadays, but authenticity is still important to me. I can't profess a belief that doesn't ring true to me. On the other hand, I've believed plenty of negative beliefs about myself which feel true but actually aren't really, for a long time. Now I'm gradually letting them go. I'm also connecting more deeply with many people outside of the narrow and often judgemental confines of christendom, and I no longer feel the need for a church community to sustain me.

I now believe that human nature is not as fundamentally flawed as Christianity suggests. We are not going to hell if we don't repent, and never were. Believers are not going to heaven either. Jesus didn't die for our sins, and we don't need salvation. That anxious feeling of abandonment that we all get at times, which Christians relieve by believing in a loving personal God, can be relieved more fully by healing the emotional wounds which cause the anxious feeling in the first place. Connecting with other real, live people helps too; it just requires better social skills. The relief from guilt and shame that we get be believing in redemption via Jesus can be felt more permanently by finding less judgemental people to hang around with until we learn to forgive ourselves, take responsibility for our lives, and make amends for the things we regret. This is better because it goes deeper, it's based in reality, and you don't take on someone else's control agenda ending up with more guilt and shame in the process. The feeling of connectedness we gain from communities with strong us-and-them boundaries defined by doctrinal differences can be gained by learning to communicate with people from the heart, and finding social groups defined by something other than a common belief system that must go unchallenged. All these things are more difficult initially, but ultimately more rewarding than importing an invented belief system into your life wholesale.

Giving up the belief system of my childhood was hard, but it's one of the most important things I've done to be more true to myself. My family are mostly still church-goers and I'm something of the odd one out; letting go of the need to fit in has been difficult and speaking the truth in front of them still causes me anxiety. The great challenge for me remains overcoming the sense of guilt, fear and shame I inherited while growing up. Connecting with loving, supportive, non-judgemental people is helping, as is speaking out against religious indoctrination.

I think the antidote to all forms of bogus religiosity, from conservative Christianity to Islamic terrorism, is education. Fighting deeply entrenched religious beliefs head-on just reinforces them and causes further division. We need to give everyone a better understanding of how our brains work and why we are susceptible to taking on superstitious beliefs in the first place.

Ultimately discerning the truth has been the most liberating thing I have done in my life, and I am tremendously glad that I am travelling this difficult and rewarding road. I no longer bow in submission to a God that doesn't exist, but there are still relics of cultural, religious and emotional baggage to deal with. Although I would no longer turn to it as my first port of call, there is still some wisdom in the bible: as Jesus is reported to have said, “The truth will set you free”.

I'm interested in your story too... please leave a comment with your thoughts.

How (and Why) I Went From Christian to Atheist is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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Given that our brain is where the thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs and decisions that guide our whole life arise I think it's helpful to have a rudimentary understanding of how it works so we can use it more effectively.

Your brain is the most complex system in the known universe. Over eighty billion massively interconnected neurons form the most complex parallel-processing biological computer imaginable, and it's right there in your head controlling your every move. Nobody fully understands how it works, which isn't at all surprising when you consider that we're using our brain to try to understand itself. That's like a computer trying to understanding itself. So I can hardly do it justice in a single article but here's a rough guide to the features I think are most important.

Consciousness and The Mind

The mind is a function of our brain. When people talk about “the mind”, they are usually referring the conscious mind. Consciousness is that sense that we all have that we are awake, aware and alive. It causes us to notice the passing of time. We lose it when we are asleep or unconscious, like when we faint or are in a coma. Conscious thought has such a dominating influence on us that we naturally overlook the fact that most of what goes on in our brain actually happens unconsciously.

The way our brain regulates our heartbeat and most internal body functions is totally unconscious. Other functions like breathing are mostly unconscious, but can also be controlled consciously. Memory and emotions operate subconsciously, until specific memories and feelings are brought into conscious awareness. Our subconscious has a massive impact on the way we think and act, without us being aware of it.

We assume that other people experience consciousness the same way we do. There's no way to tell for sure, because we can't get into someone else's head, and consciousness is difficult to describe. Other animals clearly also experience consciousness, which is why we anaesthetise them at the vet for operations. The more developed the brain, the more deeply they are likely to experience consciousness. Apes certainly have it, bacteria probably don't; in between is a spectrum.

Pattern Matching

At all levels, our brain is as a massive pattern-matching machine. The way our neurons are wired together, the way they fire in response to input from our senses and from other neurons, and their ability to learn from previous input creates a pattern-matching system which operates at all levels in the brain and the central nervous system. The optical character recognition (OCR) software that came with your scanner is based on a simplified model of the neural networks in our brains.

This pattern-matching ability is going on both in our conscious mind and our subconscious all the time. It is key to our survival, and is particularly attuned to identifying danger. Subconscious pattern-matching filters the massive amount of information from our senses down to a manageable level so that our conscious mind isn't constantly overwhelmed. For the most part, we don't notice this. Our conscious thoughts are capable of pre-programming our subconscious pattern-matching abilities to look for danger or opportunity. This is why we start noticing red cars everywhere as soon as we go to buy one, even though the red cars have been out there all along. It's also why the law of attraction described in The Secret works. It's not that the universe provides for us magically, it's that we program our subconscious to start recognising opportunities that have always been there.

Co-incidences have a profound effect on us because they make it through the pattern-matching filter all the way to our conscious mind where they take precedence over our current train of thought. This leads us to infer a connection between co-incidental events simply because the occurred together. We end up believing that unrelated events are connected, which can have unfortunate consequences. One example is the myth that childhood vaccination causes autism, because the symptoms of autism appear at approximately the same age as the vaccination is done; and given the emotional charge associated with this, and you have all the ingredients for a deeply held yet false belief.

The flip side of this is our ability to ignore patterns which don't match, without even noticing. Our brains are wired to alert us to things which are dangerous or interesting, and to let everything else pass us by unnoticed; when in fact there is an overwhelming amount of stuff going on around us constantly. We think of someone we haven't spoken to in years, and they ring the same day. Amazing? Not really; we're actually thinking of other people constantly, but most of these thoughts are forgotten almost immediately. When a pattern matches in our brain, it reinforces our memory of it. We forget that we even thought of the many people who didn't happen to end up ringing that day.

Most of us vastly underestimate the power of our subconscious pattern-matching abilities, and attribute seemingly extraordinary coincidences to some higher power or external supernatural force. This explains why prayer seems powerful: it raises our awareness of both the situation we pray for, and the outcome. We routinely downplay the ordinary (the person we pray for dies of cancer), and highlight the extraordinary (someone else makes a miraculous recovery), when in fact these are all natural occurrences. All supernatural phenomenon and even the most mind-boggling of coincidences are really just the result of underestimating our brain's amazing pattern-matching abilities.

Emotions and Thoughts

Emotions are deeply wired into our brains and have a powerful effect on us. They exist in our subconscious, and are our its way of notifying our conscious mind that there is something we need to pay attention to. We don't think our emotions; we feel them. Their impact on our thoughts and behaviour is enormous. They are key to our survival, our social success, and our ability to reproduce.

Western society places a huge emphasis on our ability to think, and we spend many years at school and university learning factual information and developing our analytical thinking skills. We learn little about dealing with our feelings. We become self-conscious about them and many of us tend to bottle up and internalise them, contributing to the epidemic of depression and anxiety in western societies.

Our brains' ability to think analytically is a relatively recent evolutionary development. It's what sets us apart from other animals, and has led us to the top of the food chain even though we're slower and weaker than some of our potential predators. This rational ability is built atop a more primitive and powerful emotional brain. Our thoughts are able to suppress our emotions to some degree for short periods. Do this consistently, and we end up repressing our feelings. But emotions are more primitive and ultimately more powerful than thoughts. Emotion will always win over thoughts in the end.

Powerful emotions can arise spontaneously and often unexpectedly from our subconscious. They are poorly understood and their effect can be overwhelming. This is why some people attribute their effects to “energy” forces that don't really exist, or give a supernatural or spiritual interpretation to strong emotional experiences. Strong emotions like grief release natural narcotics in the brain which can lead to hallucinations, causing people grieving after a death to think they see their loved one everywhere.

We tend to feel an emotion first, and then think of a reason why we feel that way. The process happens so fast that often we think it happens the other way around, and in fact both reinforce each other. The way we think influences the way we feel, and fundamentally changing the way we think about an event can have a huge impact on how we feel about it. But changing the way we feel purely by changing the way we think is hard, which is why purely cognitive therapy and psychoanalysis that neglects emotion take such a long time.

We make all our decisions on an emotional basis, then come up with a rational justification for them. This is why effective salespeople give their sales pitch in terms that appeal to our emotions showing how buying their product will either make you feel good, or stop you feeling bad.

For more about the importance of emotions in our lives, I recommend the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.

Emotional repression is at the root of a great deal of mental suffering. The solution is to learn to feel and express the emotion that has been repressed. For a practical workshop on dealing with difficult emotions, go to The Mental Toolbox.

Fear

Fear is one of our most primal emotions, and deserves special attention because it's so powerful. In fact, there are specific circuits in our brain for dealing with it. The purpose of fear is to alert us to danger. It activates quickly because the circuits dedicated to it bypass a lot of the higher processing areas of the brain. As a result, our fear response tends to be inaccurate. We can easily became afraid of things that represent no danger. We're also prone to fear and anxiety about things that represented dangers to our ancestors, but no longer do so in the modern world.

Fear is paralyzing because it activates our brain's fight-or-flight response, which affects every organ in our body. We lose the ability to think clearly and to remember things, which is what happens for performers during stage fright. Getting the heck out of there or ceasing movement like a deer in the headlights in the hope that a predator doesn't notice us, becomes our only priority.

We can learn to become afraid of things by experiencing traumatic events, and we can undo this learning by dissipating the emotional charge that these events leave in our brain. The most powerful way of doing this is to systematically desensitize ourselves by exposing ourselves to a weak version of the stimulus that causes only mild (but not overwhelming) anxiety in an environment where we get a positive reward; then gradually increasing the stimulus.

Fear is a good thing because without it we would kill ourselves off almost immediately without it, but we generally notice most the fears that bother us by holding us back. You don't want to desensitize yourself to the fear of playing in oncoming traffic, for instance.

To learn more about how fear operates, read The Emotional Brain by Joseph Ledoux.

Mind and Body

The distinction between mind and body is a relatively recent idea, and is somewhat misleading. The mind is a function of the brain, and the brain is an not only an organ of the body, it's also massively interconnected with every other part of our body via the central nervous system. There are as many neurons connecting our brain to our body, as there are in our brain itself. Stop thinking of mind and body as separate; they're completely interdependent.

Our brain has a controlling influence over every part of our body, and again this is mostly unconscious. The connection between them is two way: what happens in our body effects our brain, and what happens in our brain effects our body. This is why chronic stress, which is an emotional condition generated in our brain, can cause physical disease in our body. When we are stressed, our fight-or-flight response activates: Our body tenses up physically and systems which are not essential to escaping a predator, like our immune system, are shut down or suppressed temporarily. That's fine in the short term to escape a predator, but leave yourself in that state for an extended period, and you'll have a problem.

We have relatively little conscious control over the interaction between our mind and body. Anything that relieves emotional stress will reduce to load that the fight-or-flight response puts on the body, allowing it to heal more quickly. This is why meditation help cure physical illness. It's also why the placebo effect occurs, and why homeopathy, kinesiology, reflexology and other alternative health treatments with no therapeutic benefit still work for people who believe in them.

Memory

There isn't any one centre of memory in the brain; memory is distributed throughout every neuron in our brain and central nervous system. All neurons have a simple biochemical mechanism for remembering what stimulus they fire in response to, and this mechanism is reinforced each time they fire in response to the same stimulus. The way our neurons are wired together creates our capacity for subconscious memory, and our ability to bring memories into consciousness.

Memory and emotion are tightly linked: Heightened emotional states cause memories to be reinforced more strongly. This is why you remember where you were on September 11, but not August 11 the same year; and why traumatic events can sometimes cause overpowering memories as in the case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The association between memory and emotion is two way, which is why a particular memory of the past can evoke an emotion even in the present, and why experiencing any particular emotion can bring back memories of other times when we felt the same way. Emotional baggage from prior experiences can colour our reaction to new situations and cause us ongoing grief and frustration. Therapy and other emotional healing techniques work by dissipating the stored emotional charge in our brain that we remember associated with painful or difficult memories.

Learning

When we are first born, our brain is like a mostly-blank slate. It is pre-loaded with only basic survival instincts compared to other animals, primarily the ability to learn what we need to know from other people and from our interactions with our environment. As the most intelligent animal on the planet, our ability and need to learn is much more dominant than our instinctual abilities. Our brain is literally wired to learn.

Our first 5 to 7 years are a particularly rapid time of learning. During this period our brains are still developing at a rapid rate, and the interconnections formed between our neurons depend on what we learn from our interactions with the environment and people around us. Neural plasticity is at its highest during these early years, and what we see, hear, feel and experience literally shape the structure of our brain. This is why childhood trauma has such a long-lasting effect on us. After this time, our rate of learning slows down, but we continue to learn by experience throughout our whole lives.

We tend to feel good when we're learning something new, provided it seems relevant and interesting to us, and builds on a foundation of something we already know. We need enough of our brain's existing pattern-matching circuitry to be firing in order for us to incorporate the new knowledge. Attempt to learn advanced calculus before you've mastered basic arithmetic, and you'll feel overwhelmed, confused and unhappy. But learning to play a challenging new song on guitar once you've already mastered the basics, is intrinsically rewarding. Our desire to learn and grow is a by-product of our brain's survival instinct for adaptability.

Repetition Feels Good

The biochemical mechanism that occurs when our brain matches a pattern causes that pattern to be reinforced. It also secretes chemicals that make us feel good. So doing some familiar task over and over is pleasurable, and as we build competence it feels better and better over time. Familiarity feels good to us, and makes us feel safe. This is why our brains are wired to reinforce our existing beliefs. It's also why we generally feel good when we chant a mantra over-and-over, when we hear a favourite song again, see an old friend, or participate in some religious ritual like going to church each week. It explains why people with an obsessive-compulsive disorder get some relief from their anxiety by repetitive tasks such as hand-washing; although it's not dealing with the underlying anxiety which returns once they stop.

Learning something new requires repetition and building competence through practise makes us feel good too. Even our reflexes can learn by repeated training. When dancers talk about “muscle memory”, they're referring to the memory in the nerves that control the muscles they are developing via repeating the same dance steps over and over. Musicians develop fine motor skills required to play instruments by repeated practice which trains both the muscles and the nerves that control them. Sports people develop faster reflexes by repetitive training to reduce the time they take to respond to a starter's gun or an approaching tennis ball.

Empathy

There are specific neural circuits in our brain that facilitate empathy, which make emotions contagious between people. Empathy gives us a subconscious sense of how other people feel, by directly triggering the same emotional response in ourselves even though our circumstances may be different. We evolved to live in groups and the capacity for empathy developed in our brain as a survival mechanism.

Neural circuits take information from our senses and are tuned to notice cues like facial expressions or tone of voice which our conscious mind may be unaware of. Our brain is connected to the brains of every other person we interact with via our senses, actions, and behaviours.

Women are generally better at this than men, because they've learned the skill through more empathic relating to other people in their lives. Empathy is a key social skill which help us relate to each other at a deeper level. Close relationships are based on the sharing of emotions and our capacity for empathy.

Empathy is why a great movie, great actors in a play, or a stirring song or poem can move us so profoundly. It's also why we tend not to like people who are fearful: because their fear is contagious to us. If a public speaker is visibly nervous, it makes us uncomfortable because we take on their fear, and fear is an unpleasant emotion. This is why nervous guys appear creepy to women, even if a woman can't put her finger on exactly why.

Sadness, excitement and anxiety are all contagious due to empathy. This is why we get swept up in the excitement at mass sporting events even to the point of mass hysteria, and explains charismatic religious group experiences like speaking-in-tongues and collective visions.

It's not just emotions that are contagious either: Thoughts, feelings, ideas, and behaviours are all contagious. This explains a great deal of group dynamics including the Mexican wave at the football, and why many people blindly follow charismatic leaders. Peer pressure combines with empathy to have an enormously strong influence on us because it stems from a social survival mechanism in the brain.

We naturally take on the emotions of those around us. This has some handy consequences: If you want to be happier, the most powerful way to do that is to hang around happy people.

The Need To Socialise

Our brains are wired for social interaction with other people because we evolved to live in groups, and we reproduce sexually. So we have an incredible drive to connect with other people where we feel safe and protected. If we don't socialise, our brains remind us to do so via the unpleasant emotion of loneliness, which is one of the worst experiences we can have. The deeper and more emotionally engaging our interactions with others are, the less lonely we feel. This is all part of our basic survival and reproduction instincts essential to our genetic survival. This need for social interaction in our brain is the reason social networking sites like Facebook are so compelling.

We tend to underestimate how strong this biological drive wired deeply into our brain is. This basic need to connect with any consciousness outside of ourselves is so strong that it overflows into other areas of our lives and can give rise to a great spiritual yearning. Jung's need for a collective consciousness is a reflection of it. Over the centuries we have created many gods to fulfil this need for our connection to a higher power outside ourselves that will also protect us. Even despite our modern-day understanding of the world, many people still intuitively feel that there must be a God out there; which is really just a by-product of our powerful biological drive to socialise.

Social Grouping and Prejudice

We evolved living in relatively small tribes who competed with each other, so we prefer to socialise with other people who are “like us”. Yet now most of us live in overwhelmingly large cities. We need to exclude the people who aren't “like us” in order to reduce the size of our tribe back down to a manageable level. The distinguishing factor between who is in and who is out doesn't matter, but our brain comes up with a reason to make it appear important: race, skin colour, religious beliefs, fashion sense, gender, sexual orientation, whatever.

This causes our prejudice and racism. It explains everything from political factions to religious denominationalism and infighting between religious groups whose beliefs are essentially identical. Any time our “tribe” grows beyond a few hundred, our brains start to find arbitrary reasons to distinguish “us” from “them” to identify what we think are potential threats and help keep us feeling safe.

Projection

We are constantly projecting our ideas, thoughts, biases, judgements and prejudices onto other people and situations in the world. There is nothing wrong with this per-se; it's just the way we work, but it's worth being aware of if we want to be able to look past our own prejudices and connect with people and experiences we would otherwise miss out on. We notice this projection least when it comes from our dark side; anything about ourselves that we haven't dealt with gets projected onto other people because this is easier than dealing with parts of ourself that we're ashamed of.

Our brain only has it's own internal model to work on, so it assumes that other people are like us, or are like other people who we have encountered before. Our ability to project attributes of ourselves and other people who we have trusted in the past onto new people or groups of people helps us determine who we can and can't trust. We tend to distrust anything too new or different.

It can also work the opposite way: we tend to assume that ancient people were like us, even when they lived in a very different culture. We assume that people in ancient or biblical times were as objective, well educated and informed as we like to think we are, despite the obvious advances in human understanding since that time. Projecting our modern-day understanding onto them, we accept their interpretation of events as gospel even though they only had a primitive understanding of how their brain, body and the world around them functioned. The realisation that the earth is not flat, and that we are not at the centre of the universe all came later. Something as commonplace today as electricity or television would have been interpreted as supernatural had they stumbled across it in the desert by the originators of today’s mainstream religions.

Creativity

Our brain is inherently creative. The western education system does a fairly good job of repressing individual creativity in order to train us to fit into a fairly uniform workforce, but our inherent creativity is still there. We like to feel in control, and part of that is to understand what is going on around us. When we understanding the things we fear, we tend to feel less fearful. In the absence of a good explanation for what goes on around us, we naturally tend to use our creativity to come up with an explanation. This makes us feel more in control, and more at ease in an uncertain world.

Our brain is constantly active. In the absence of sensory input, we will create stimulus, thoughts, ideas, and even hallucinations to fill the void. Our nervous system turns up the volume until we hear something, even if it's just background noise. This is why we dream, why people in extended isolation hallucinate, and why amputees experience phantom sensations in missing limbs.

The creativity of our minds is most powerful when it operates as a group process. Creative groups tend to be more powerful than individuals. Each person's creativity sparks something in the other people, which then sparks the creativity of other members.

All great ideas in religion and science are the result of a group creative process. Theologians base their ideas on those who have gone before, and scientists base the hypothesis for their experiments on the current understanding of the scientific community. Both are ultimately attempts to assuage our collective anxiety about living in a sometimes-hostile universe, by trying to master our understanding of how it operates. Religious teachings about God, supernatural phenomenon, the spirit world, karma, heaven and hell, angels and demons are all projections of our inner creativity onto an unseen outer world.

Limitations

Our brain has inherent limitations based on the attributes that were important for survival in the environment that existed over the extremely long period during which human brain structure evolved. The modern urban environment has changed rapidly in such a short time that we haven't had time to fully adapt. This is another reason why depression, anxiety and stress are becoming increasing problems: we aren't particularly well suited to our new environment in some respects.

While our brain is particularly good at solving problems which relate to our direct survival, it's not so good at other tasks like complex mathematical problems. We don't have a particularly good intuitive feel for cumulative probability or forecasting events which are statistically unlikely. We can deal with 50/50 just fine, but we don't handle one-in-a-million so well and we often tend to underestimate the likelihood of seemingly remote co-incidences. Ask a random group of strangers to guess the chance that another person in the group has the same birth month and day as someone else, and we routinely underestimate it. It just wasn't relevant out on the savannah. This is why so many people get sucked into gambling, large state lotteries, astrology, numerology, and unnecessarily attribute many natural coincidences to supernatural causes.

We are well adapted to thinking of time scales that are not too short nor too long, like seconds, hours, minutes, days, weeks, months or years. But we have a poor intuitive feel of nanoseconds, milliseconds, centuries, millennia or epochs. These sort of time scales haven't been important to our survival until very recently .This is why many religious people discount the possibility of a complex system including living creatures such as ourselves evolving over just a few billion years. We don't have a good intuitive feel for just how staggeringly long such a period of time is.

I hope this guide to your brain has helped you understand how you operate a little better. I'm keen to hear your ideas and feedback, so leave a comment and share your thoughts.

A Practical Guide to How Your Brain Works is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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See larger image How to Write Damn Good Fiction (Paperback) By (author) James N Frey Advanced Techniques for Dramatic Storytelling I first heard James N. Frey's book How to Write a Damn Good Novel recommended by champion speaker Craig Valentine for its tips on storytelling. I want to learn better storytelling and since I couldn't find that book at my local library I ended up grabbing this sequel on advanced storytelling techniques instead. I'm not particularly interested in writing fiction but much of the advice also applies to telling true stories to a written or spoken audience. Here are the key insights I gleaned: Having skipped the first book, I don't know really what I missed (you know, we don't know what we don't know), but I could still follow much of what he was saying. The rules are there to be broken, but first you want to know what the rules are so you know when you're breaking them. I was most interested to learn what Frey had to say about how to hook people in to a story and really grab their attention. If you don't hook them in early you'll lose them, and the way to do it is via their emotions. Well yes, I already knew that from what I'd learned at Toastmasters and acting class, but Frey breaks this down in terms of how the audience relate to the main characters in the story and particularly to the protagonist (the main dude). There is a certain order to follow here; you need to tell the story in a manner which makes the readers/listeners: Sympathise: You want the audience to start by feeling sorry for the character. Gaining the audience's sympathy gets them in involved emotionally in the story. Identify: Once emotionally involved, you want the audience to support the character's goals and aspirations and have a strong desire to see him or her achieve them. Empathise: Then you get the audience to feel what the character feels, by using sensuous emotion-provoking details in such a way that the audience can put themselves in the character's place. Hypnotise: Bring the audience to a point of complete absorbtion in the characters and their world, by revealing their inner-conflict. This final step is the most profound thing I learned from this book: the way to complete the process of hooking your audience and transporting them hypnotically into your story is to reveal the conflict that's going on inside them. In what way are they being pulled in different directions at once, and how do they resolve this? This matches what I've learned at acting school that people are drawn towards drama, drama is all about conflict, and audiences are held in suspense because they want to know how the conflict will be resolved. The more personal the conflict, the more interesting it is. Inner-conflict is the most personal of all, so it is the most compelling element to keeping an audience engaged. So here's the challenge: if you want to be a compelling story-teller, expose your inner conflict in your stories. After you've got your audience to sympathise, identify and empathise of course. This is the height of vulnerability. Frey points out that an audience may sympathise but not identify, or may identify but not empathise with a character. Break a step in the chain, and you'll lose them. Likewise, I'm guessing that exposing your inner conflict before you've already hooked them on the first three steps may just make you look like a jerk. That said, now you know the rules, you're free to break them if you want. Good stories also need a premise, which means you can sum up what the story is about concisely. It's a little different from a moral or a theme, and is more along the lines of what Craig Valentine calls a foundational phrase. If you can't state the premise succinctly before writing the story, you're not ready to start yet. The same story can come across very differently when told with a different premise. Some stories are worth telling, and some are not. Aside from conflict and drama, another key element necessary for a story to be worth telling is a change in the characters. Audiences want to see characters that change and grow; this is what makes the story interesting. If the characters make it through the whole story without being changed by it in some way, the story probably isn't worth telling. Frey also talks about the use of first and third person narration, literary genres, deadly mistakes writers make, and the importance of being passionate. I found it a good read even though I'm not into fiction, since most of the lessons are just as relevant to writing non-fiction and storytelling while public speaking. New From: $205.80 In Stock Used from: $1.95 In Stock

How to Write Damn Good Fiction by James N. Frey is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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I've been working like a man possessed for the past few months on a new project to help men build self-confidence. I know what it's like to lack confidence as a man, and frankly it sucks because every other area of your life suffers. Sure, I learned plenty of coping mechanisms so that at times I may have appeared confident, but that wasn't what was going on inside. Some days, it still isn't. And since this has been one of my greatest challenges in life, I want to help other in guys facing it too.

Self-confidence is an awareness that you have the ability to rise to whatever challenge life throws at you. It's also a sense of being at ease with yourself in any situation, and with who you are as a man. Confidence is the single most important asset that a man can possess, because it determines how we respond to challenges and how well everything else in our life goes.

To help out I've recently created The Confident Man Project site to help guys build self-confidence, including the Confident Man ebook with a step-by-step program for men who are really serious. Guys, check it out and share the articles you like with your mates.

PS: Ladies: Sorry, this is secret men's business. Nothing to see here. Move along now.

How to Become a Confident Man is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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Hi folks,

Thanks heaps to everyone who supported me during Movember.

Here's the final visual mo growth result:

With your generous support I raised $425 for awareness of men's health and to support sufferers of prostate cancer and depression, two of the leading illnesses affecting men. My team raised a total of $851 dollars, which is an awesome result.

If you've been waiting to see the final result before making a donation, it's not too late to donate via credit card by visiting my mospace page and clicking Donate To Me.

Now the only question is: should I keep it? Vote here:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Thanks again,
Graham

Update: I'm not one to want to be swayed by popular pressure or anything, but the poll result was pretty conclusive. More importantly, I got sick of this irritating growth on my upper lip catching everything I ate and drank. So it's gone, and my face feels naked again... I'm free!

Thanks for your support during Movember! Here's the result... is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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Hi folks,

I'm growing a mo' to raise funds and support awareness of depression, prostate cancer and general men's health during Movember. You've probably seen the funky ads on TV with the stylish guys and the great moustache's. Here's your chance to participate by sponsoring me! I started out like this on Day 1:

And here's the progress so far on Day 12:

Well, I seem to be getting there. It's been a rough week this week; two days wiped out with headaches, and to add insult to injury I broke a string on my strat. But you can help cheer me up by supporting my mo-growing efforts by donating on my Movember Mospace page. Donations of $2 or more are tax-deductible so donate now!

Thanks in advance for your support,
Graham

Please Sponsor Me and Support Men’s Health In Movember is a post from Graham Stoney: Writer, Speaker, Communicator - Set Yourself Free!

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