Category Archives: Mindset

A Practical Guide to How Your Brain Works

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 … Continue reading…

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Breakthrough To Success with Christopher Howard

Does the idea of spending three days with a bunch of positive, excited people in a rock-concert style atmosphere while learning how to drop limiting decisions from the past sound like fun to you? That's the best description I can give of Breakthrough To Success, and if you haven't been to one yet, it's time to get yourself along and check it out.

I made a whole bunch of limiting decisions about myself and about the world while I was growing up, and I find that each time I go along to this event, I come back a more loving person. Isn't that interesting?

Christopher Howard's work is based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), which has a bunch of tools and techniques for changing the way we think to overcome restrictive thought patterns. I admit to being a little sceptical of NLP, but many people I know who have learned it … Continue reading…

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Happiness by Matthieu Ricard



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A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

I was put onto the audio edition of this book by a colleague from my Toastmasters club during a conversation about what makes us happy. The book is a fusion of eastern Buddhist philosophy and western scientific thinking on what it means to adopt happiness as a lasting state of mind. A key point reiterated here which I hear a lot these days is that true happiness is an internal state; it is not dependent on external factors. If we are relying on other people or external circumstances for our happiness, then we are always at the whims and mercies of things that are beyond our control. When we are at peace with who we are inside, our happiness can be based on internal factors

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Blink by Malcolm Gladwell



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The Power of Thinking without Thinking

I found this book about the power of intuition fascinating. Essentially the idea is that when we develop expertise and intuition in a certain area, our intuition can become a more reliable guide than what we end up with by using our analytical thinking. The trick is to know when to trust our snap judgements, and when they are likely to lead us astray or bias us in some way. Often we are quite unaware of our biases and unless we're aware of when they're operating, we go along thinking that we're making objective choices when really we're not.

Although it's tangential to the main theme, one of the most interesting insights I got from this book was in the section on spontaneity where the author talked about the

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What You Can Change and What You Can’t by Martin E.P. Seligman



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Learning to accept who you are. The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement

Martin Seligman is one of my favourite personal development authors. Not only are his books easy to read, but as the founder of the Positive Psychology movement he's got the academic credentials and professional experience to know what the research says, and what he's talking about.

I was drawn to this book while contemplating the question: “Just how much can a person change?”. I was particularly interested in whether it's possible to make major changes in how we relate to other people, and whether introversion vs extroversion is changable. I've done the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator a couple of times, and I've never really been certain whether I'm a shy extrovert, or a lonely

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The Mental Toolbox

Over the past few years I've become increasingly aware of how powerfully the way we think influences the way our life goes. Whether it's our relationships, career, finances, health, well-being, social or spiritual life, virtually everything comes back to our mindset. Cynicism, negativity, lack of faith in ourselves, and limiting beliefs about who we are and what we're capable of can all get in the way of us having a great life. We often pick up absurdly negative ideas about ourselves through experiences we have as we grow up, and then carry these ideas with us right through adulthood as if they were actually true.

Mental Toolbox logo sml The Mental ToolboxChanging the way we think can have a dramatic positive impact on our experience of life. With this in mind, I want to invite you to an event called The Mental Toolbox which promises help you to change the way you think away from negative … Continue reading…

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The Happiness Minute

Our brains are massive networks of tiny neurons, each of which grows when stimulated. Whether your brain learns positive, life-affirming ideas or negative self-destructive ones depends on what you feed it. We learn by repetition on an ongoing, sustained basis.

David Ambrose's Happiness Minute gives you the opportunity to reflect on the subject of Happiness for one minute each week. By the end of one year you will significantly increase your own level of happiness, and that of those around you. David's email audio course makes it so easy.

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The Secret and The Law of Attraction



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The Secret (Hardcover)

By (author) Rhonda Byrne


Rhonda Byrne's book The Secret is a follow-up to the phenomenally successful movie of the same name, both of which describe The Law of Attraction and how to make it work for you in your life. I am a strong believer in the Law of Attraction, even though I don't go along with much of the new-age mumbo-jumbo in the book and movie.

Attraction is a function of the way our brains work. The universe doesn't just magically provide whatever we focus on, nor do our thoughts broadcast or receive information, nor can we just sit back and wait for whatever thoughts we have to manifest themselves in our reality. Yet I still believe The Law of Attraction works when it comes to improving our experience of life; so let me explain why.

There's really nothing supernatural or extraordinary about

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