From shy guy to don juan. Daily experiences.
"The secret of happiness is freedom. And the secret of freedom is courage."

Friday, May 12, 2006

Bootcamp w2d4

I was in a very social mood earlier today. My brain was certainly doing it's homework at night. I went to the swimming pool and was chatting everyone up. I even became the alpha man in one moment, with girls asking me questions and me vibing with them and their groups. Great stuff! These weren't proper conversations but I will count it as two:
So my count is: 9/15.

3 customs of an alpha-male:
1. Smile
2. Sense of humour
3. Social

How do you DO IT? You hear this a lot: "Just do it", "Do it anyway", "Do it now". But how does one "do it"?
First of all you have to realize the duality of your nature. You are really two things.
1. The body, which is in fact an animal called a human. It has a brain which is not you. "You" is something else and that is:
2. The consciousness, which is a recent addition to the brain of the animal. It's a new module as you may call it. This is "you", the self-awareness, the soul, or any other name. You got the idea.

Wave your hand.

If you did it, who really did it? You might say, "well I did it". Really? How do you know how to wave your hand? Did you take part in the process of getting the responsible neural networks to dispatch an electric signal and send it to the muscles in your hand? No, you did not. It was the human, the brain that did that. What did "YOU" really do? You thought about it.
Now think about what power do you actually have over this body? What is the function of consciousness. You get signals from the brain which you interpret as thoughts. Then you attach meanings to those thoughts based on your self-awareness. And that is the only purpose of "YOU" - the function of the brain. Here it is again, remember this: "you attach meanings to thoughts based on your self-awareness".
Let's say you are in a group of people and you want to make them laugh. You have a joke and you want to tell it. You are thinking of telling the joke and then you feel fear. You start thinking about all the stuff that might go wrong, that you will be judged, that you won't be funny. Also you're thinking about expections that you want the joke to produce. These expectations cause more fear of loss. Loss of an image, of an expectation. Why don't you do it? Because you feel fear. How can YOU overcome this? Remember the only purpose of consciousness? You can only attach meaning. If you attach a meaning to telling the joke, that you just want to learn from telling it and see what reactions there are you will attach a new meaning. On what meanings does the brain act on? Meanings are fullfiled based on BELIEFS. If you believe that you are just playing and learning then that meaning will be powerful, and you will DO IT. If you change your beliefs or change your meanings based on the beliefs you already have than you will DO IT.
A second problem is motivation. Do you ever encounter a job you must do that you know will take long and will be hard and will not give you pleasure? Or even will give you pleasure but you just don't feel motivated enough to do it? This is a wide topic and can be delt with the belief change like described earlier. Changing beliefs is a long task. I created a mind hack to overcome this quicker.
Wave your hand.
Now wave your hand 100 times.
Why didn't you do it? Why didn't you wave your hand 100 times? Because you started thinking about it, you started attaching meaning to it and eventually you realized it will be too time consuming and won't give you any positive result. But what if you really want to do it? You can force yourself to do it, the so called willpower. What will happen? You will get negative responses from the brain, you will start feeling tired or silly or any other emotion and you will eventually stop. So how can you do it? Remember how you waved your hand once? Was there any thinking involved in the process? When I do it, I have a maximum of one thought that is easy to overcome by attaching any meaning. It is very easy to do it. What is waving your hand 100 times? It is just that, wave your hand ONCE but ONE HUNDRED times. So wave your gand. Now wave your hand and so on... There is no thinking involved, there is just a counter in the back of your head that keeps track of this. The brain doesn't question what you are doing. And that is how you make big things done.

To sum this up:
If you don't have motivation, you don't have a strong belief to make it done.
Use the mind hack of dividing the task into small pieces and just focus on one at a time -> DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
Now, if you feel fear or any kind of emotion that prevents you from doing things. Realize that those are responses from the brain based on your desires of doing something. Ignore them. You can feel the fear and do it anyway.
This is the point where most self-help books fail. They don't tell you how to "Do it anyway". How to DO IT!?
Well, I'm here to tell you this great secret. Remember what is the only function of consciousness? You can only attach meaning. So, always in your life when you did something consciously you had to attach any kind of meaning. So when you are overcoming fear you must attach meaning in order to ignore it. How to attach a meaning that ignores emotions? Don't EXPECT any result.
If you don't expect anything the fear is pointless, it becomes just what it is, a pure thought.
You will do it anyway, only if you don't EXPECT any result.
Now... how do you "don't expect any result"?