Unfortunately, there seems to be major shifts in the minds of our changing generations.  That shift is leaning people to need more things spoon fed to them with continuous distractions and activities while the mind of every individual is becoming more and more unchallenged.  Kids especially show this as young generations are easily bored and they seem to require more and more toys, games, activities, attention and things to keep them happy.  Funny thing is, this is happening mostly in the highly developed nations.

Learning Keeps the Mind Active

An active mind is a healthy mind so its important to keep your mind active throughout your life, not just when you are young.  One method to really keep the mind truly challenged is to always be learning.  Many people get to a point in their lives where they don’t believe they need to and some even think that they are no longer able to learn new things once they reach a certain age.  It’s this kind of believe that prevents them from learning new things, not their age at all.  It takes years to slowly disengage the mind and many people let their work and home lives become so comfortable and repetitive that they have no need to learn new things.  They don’t take on new experiences, they never go out looking to read or learn new things and they do the same job for many years!  This kind of lifestyle will quickly give someone the belief that they can’t learn any longer and its that believe then that prevents them from ever taking on new learning activities.

I recently wrote an article about empowering others to become learners and every step in that article applies to ourselves as well!.  The practice of learning new skills, studying new material, and building new skills and knowledge to apply is a powerful mind enhancer.  It strengthens your neural connections in the brain and exercises the mind’s memory.

Creative People Don’t Get Bored

Creativity is a trait that usually goes hand in hand with learning.  The most creative people in history and even those I know in my life are also the people that are constantly learning new things.  Think of famous inventors, artists and teachers; they are all creative and people who are constantly learning.  Creative thinkers are able to find new activities with very little or even no stimulation.  They can take their surroundings or current activity that might be very boring to one individual, and they can find new things to do, create and to think about.  Its doesn’t seem to matter where they are, who they are with, or what the environment has in it to spark the creativity and learning attitude to expose itself.

Using the signs of boredom is a very powerful tool in life.  Its useful to parents, teachers, and leaders in all areas of life.  Parents and teachers can use it as a sign that they have students or children with untapped potential just looking for more challenging studies and activities.  It’s a sign that the creative side of a person is not yet that developed either so bringing more of creative learning, games, hobbies and activities can improve that creative thinking.  Leaders can use it to easily identify their most creative thinkers and those who can handle more challenging work.  Learning should be an important part of everyone’s lives and at least in these areas, you can make a huge difference to yourself and others by making learning continuous and a bigger part of life!

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 18 Comments »

Lives are so busy there is little time to just sit back and enjoy it. Unless one goes looking for a way to find peace and quite, it definitely isn’t going to jump out and offer itself to you. Not only are our lives busy with activity, but so is the mind and we constantly let it have a landslide of thoughts that stir up emotions, stress and active thinking that keeps you distant from the here and now with out being able to truly experience any one moment in the mind.

I wanted to share some ways that anyone can simplify life and live more in the now.

Simplify Your Life

1. Ignore distractions and take advantage of how they often go away on their own.
2. Don’t answer your phone every time it rings, stay in the moment of whatever you are doing and wait for a message
3. Turn off your computer, your internet access on your computer or at least your popup notifiers (like email / IM) whenever you can
4. Turn off your cell phone, don’t carry it constantly or even better, don’t have one! (This is my favorite way to simplify, I don’t have one myself)
5. Move or buy a house close to work, to avoid driving
6. Ride your bike or walk to commute and get around
7. Give away things you no longer use or need
8. Just buy less stuff
9. Buy a smaller house than what you think you need (less space is more)
10. Spend time reading, its a wonderful way to escape the complexities of each day
11. De-clutter your living space
12. Get out into nature
13. Don’t rely on technology gadgets for everything, pen and paper work fine for more than people dare admit nowadays!
14. Take up a creative hobby. Music, art, writing and building things helps you focus on just one thing.
15. Finish what you start before switching tasks. One thing at a time
16. Smile at and say hello to strangers
17. Do some simple generous deed

Simplify Your Mind

People have an amazing ability to make things as simple or complex as we want and no matter what the task is, you can always make it simpler or more complicated. This is evident in many ways, many included in the list above. As a product development manager, I see this everyday in my workplace as we approach problems and plan software products. There is both a simple and complicated approach to everything. I’ve experience both and have learned that the complicated approach used to give me a sense of satisfaction that at the time, I thought was valuable and better than a simple solution. Over the years however, I’ve learned to drastically simplify things from a development perspective and now see evidence everyday of how it is better. All the complexities we build into things (as well as in our lives) causes more complexities as new things occur and makes change much more difficult. Think of it this way, changing your mind for some simple decision is easy. Changing your mind over something complicate that affects many other things however is far more difficult. This is true in everything we do and the complexities of life and in your mind prevent you from making change and even from learning.  Look for a simple solution, a simple action, anything that’s easy to just do, right now.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 7 Comments »

One of the most impactful things I’ve ever learned is to master the control of my state of mind. I first learned this from Anthony Robbins’ books and audio courses and I’ve since reinforced and enhanced this learning by studying the mind, dreams, and other authors and teachers of the mind and psychology. The premise behind what this is about, is that your state of mind affects everything you do in life, either directly or indirectly. Your state of mind has a direct impact on many actions within the body and these are highly tied to your emotions, or how you feel. So if you are willing to learn to control those things that affect your state of mind, then you can have whatever state of mind you like which ultimately leads you to feeling however you like!

What Affects Your State

Many physical attributes affect your state of mind as well as your experiences, words, actions and even things like your diet. However, a number of physical attributes are directly under your own control and so once you learn this, you can understand ways to control your own state. Here are some important things that have a direct response in your mind and on your body.

• Body posture – Hold your head up high and your shoulders back and its an automatic response in the mind of more confidence.
• Breathing – Slow deep breathing does many things for your health and body to remove toxins, this also delivers needed oxygen to your brain which affects your state.
• Facial Expressions – The most significant here is smiling. Its physically impossible to really smile and NOT affect the mind, its subconscious and automatic.
• Energy Levels – How well you energize your self including your activity, exercise, and health affect your mind as well.
• Diet – what you eat has an impact on your state of mind as well.
• Thoughts – Directly and massively impact your state of mind.
  

So, all these things are important, yet the most critical of all is your thoughts. It affects your emotions completely and the good thing, thoughts are controlled entirely by the conscious mind, nothing else! What this means is that the way you feel and your state of mind is controlled by your thoughts.

Remembering a Specific State

The reasons this is important is that you can learn to remember a specific state of mind, and by thinking about that and visualizing everything about that state of mind, you can easily reproduce it and the response of feelings that it generated. You do this by:

1. First pick the feeling you want to reproduce. For most people this is joy or happiness or peace or satisfaction.
2. Then, think of the times that you completely feel that way. Spend some time to remember the details about those feelings and pick what has been the most intense moments of those feelings.
3. Visualize the things you saw in that moment, put yourself into that surrounding, see the colors, the lights, the objects. Spend time visualizing the major components as well as the minor details, the imperfections you can see, the textures and shading, the shadows and reflections if there are any. Remember as many details as possible. Close your eyes if it helps to really visualize it in your mind. There is an interesting article on Practice This about closing your eyes to see more which is about visualization.
4. Now remember the things you could hear in that moment. Think of all the sounds every object makes, or the actions or nature in that environment. Think of the sounds that each object makes when put into motion or moved.
5. Move on to the sense of smell next. What specific smells can you remember. What season was it, can you smell it? Can you smell and sense the air, the humidity, the people and objects in that setting?
6. What feelings or senses of touch did you have. What were you feeling in your body? What clothes are touching you skin? Can you feel anything against your skin, the wind perhaps? What are you touching and how does it feel exactly. Rough, smooth, what other textures. Spend some time and just imagine feeling all those things to put yourself into the same place that you experiences this emotion you are after.
7. Change your own body or face to match what you remember. Were you smiling? Were you moving about in motion, if you can, do those things while visualizing all these other senses to put yourself back exactly into that memory.

All of these steps will bring back memories of that same emotion and state of mind which will in turn, leave you feeling that same state of mind just from remembering it.

Activate that State

The best thing to do with the ability to follow these visualization steps to get into a state of mind is to next, associate that state of mind with something instant. This allows you to activate that state and learn to call upon it whenever you want. One technique for this is to associate that state of mind with some words and actions you can do and say. Pick something that isn’t common for you to do and use that to activate that same state of mind. You want something unique. It could be to snap your fingers, clap your hands, a funny face, a specific body stance, a weird or loud word or phrase, any of these things could be used to associate with your state of mind. To associate it, just do your action or say your words and immediately begin thinking of all those feelings and memories about that state. Do this out loud and in action a number of times over and over. Put some energy into it and be enthusiastic. Keep repeating it until you seem to be able to really feel that every time you activate your state with your words or action you can feel or sense that state of mind and memories it is generated from.

Practice Switching States

And finally practice is where this all becomes useful. To change state, you need to not only associate that state but practice switching states quickly. Pick another state of mind (ideally something quite opposite to the state you first picked) and go through this process again. Do all the steps to learn that new state and really identify with the feelings and senses for that new state. Make a new association (or action) and repeat it a number of times.

Now, you have two separate states, each with its own action. Practice switching between these states by alternating your activation. Start off by giving yourself about 15 seconds in each state. Practice to change faster and faster until you can literally change your state of mind in just an instant. You should be able to activate all those feelings, your memories, thoughts and even all the senses in just a short moment. This can take a bit of time to practice, but just 10 minute sessions for a few nights in a row can really get you quick with this.

Actually Using your State of Mind

So, now that you know you can change your state of mind just by activating it and changing your thoughts and since you’ve conditioned your mind to instantly change its state basically on command, you can do this whenever you want. I’m assuming most people picked a positive set of feelings to learn to associate so you can now use that to change your perception, mood and responses in more difficult or not as friendly environments. Maybe its with someone or something you don’t like but want to kill the negative emotions that go along with that? Well, this will work for that too. As long as you have a stronger associations with your activation to put you into that state of mind, than the things in that situations to put in the state you don’t want, then you can instantly change your mindset make things more like how you really want them.

The more you use this, the more you’ll look to use it and the more you will train your subconscious to recover from feelings and mind sets you don’t want to experience. You can literally get to a point where anything you consider bad or to be replaced state wise, happens automatically by your mind once you’ve become so practiced at doing this.

So, I encourage you to look for ever opportunity to use your knew state associations and practice it. Learn new associations and use them as well. You will eventually be doing this to every negative response subconsciously or automatically without even thinking about. You can experience a lot more joy and happiness in life if you change the way your mind responds to stimuli. My next article I’m going to publish is about how you can use this idea of controlling your mind to impact EVERY response you make in your life.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 7 Comments »