MAJOR Breakthrough, Part I

Last week was most definitely up there with the BEST weeks of my life!!!!! To tell you why I have to give some background...

Ever since I began to homeschool, I felt like there was so much that I wanted to have happen in my own life and in the life of my family. In reality I felt like all I could do was stay afloat and put out occasional fires. How was I going to change so drastically to become the person I needed to be to offer my children a quality education!?

I began my search for an answer to this seemingly unanswerable question. My journey began in the classics. I read books such as The One Minute Teacher: How to Teach Others to Teach Themselves by Spencer Johnson and As a Man Thinketh by James Allen (an absolute gem!). I listened to a CD of Napoleon Hill my husband had. Our book group read The Jackrabbit Factor: Why You Can by Leslie Householder and The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life by John Assaraf and Murray Smith. All these books and along with scripture and prayer helped to shift my existing paradigm and give me hope for my desire to teach my children.

The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life was probably one of the most life changing books for me and I didn't even finish it! The first 8 chapters are dedicated to a clear explanation of how our brains function and why we limit ourselves with self-defeating thoughts and behaviors.

Smith and Assaraf explained that our unconscious brain is in charge of 96-98% of all our body does. Right now we are breathing, our hearts are beating, millions of cells are being destroyed and millions are being created all without us even thinking about it. In fact our conscious brain is in charge of only 2-4% of all we do. The authors estimate the average adult's attention span is 6-10 seconds! Can you imagine if our conscious brain was in charge of our unconscious brain's duties. "Don't forget to breathe! Is my heart beating? OK, now walk!" Within 6-10 seconds we would be dead!

Now when we think about the goals and dreams we want to accomplish, we do this with our CONSCIOUS brain...the one that has A.D.D.! We wonder why we fail when the desire of our hearts is to SUCCEED. Instead of trusting our conscious brain to follow through with these important tasks we need to program and/or reprogram our unconscious to carry out our goals.

Assaraf and Smith explain that our unconscious can be programmed visually, audibly and emotionally. They suggest creating a vision board with pictures and words that would illustrate and support your dreams and goals. In addition to this, the authors suggest writing positive, present-tense statements that describe what you want to become. They encourage you to piggyback these statements with an emotion of when you were successful or happy in your past. Assaraf uses an example of when he scored a winning touchdown for his high school football team. Reliving those emotions while reciting your positive affirmations help to cement them in our unconcious mind.

I'm sure you want to know what happened next...but since we've exceeded our attention spans I'll finish the story in Part II. Stay tuned!