Overcoming barriers to learning: The reality approach
Our minds often create a distorted picture of ourselves and our abilities like this reflection of two faces in the water. Imagine that you walk to the bathroom after you wake up in the morning and look at your reflection. Your face is distorted as if in a funhouse mirror. It looks like your skin is dripping off of your face as if it were melting away. You're disgusted ... afraid to touch your own skin. This is just an exercise in imagination, right? But unfortunately, our minds do something like this to us every day. We [...]
How To Use Life’s Little Annoyances To Build Mental Muscles
In 1912, Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe was seen digging through the garbage hours before his event began. That morning, he discovered his shoes were stolen. Thorpe scrambled to find another pair. Fortunately, he found two shoes in a trash can. One was a few sizes too big, so he wore extra socks to keep the shoe from falling off. He competed in the pentathlon (5 events) and decathlon (10 events) and beat every athlete despite this hardship. Having his shoes stolen didn't stop Jim Thorpe because of prior preparation. He had already built up his endurance, speed, and skill [...]
How A Few Paragraphs Inspired Morty To Create The Lefkoe Occurring Process
In December of 2009, Morty read a book called The Three Laws of Performance by Dave Logan and Steve Zaffron. Just a few passages in that book inspired him to create a process that would change both our lives. “Each person assumes the way things occur for him or her is how they are occurring for another. But situations occur differently for each person.” “So what exactly does occur mean? We mean something beyond perception and subjective experience. We mean the reality that arises within and from your perspective on the situation. In fact, your perspective is itself part [...]
How to find the cause of fear of failure in three steps
Tamara puts a bean stew into the oven on Friday. Then before the sun goes down, she turns off the oven and leaves the stew inside. Hundreds of other women in her village in Lithuania do the same. Like them, Tamara leaves the stew in the oven until later on Saturday when she takes it out and serves it to the family. Why did she do this? Tamara and the other women were Jews living in Lithuania in the 1900s and so did not work on the Sabbath which begins sundown on Friday. To serve hot food would require [...]
How to identify the meanings that cause you to procrastinate (without excessive navel-gazing)
When you turn on an incandescent light bulb, what is happening? Working against resistance is how a light bulb produces light and heat. In people resistance can also produce procrastination. Electricity flows into a very thin wire in the bulb called a filament. That wire is thin on purpose. It's thin so that the electricity will have a harder time going through it. When the electrons have to work harder to go through a material we say that material has greater resistance to electricity. And a light bulb filament [...]
How To Use The Extreme Thinking Method To Counter Upsets
The sandbox tree has sharp thorns, and its fruit is poisonous, but neither of these features makes it one of the most dangerous trees in the world. The danger comes from its sound. Or rather, how it makes that sound. When the sandbox tree's fruit is ripe, it explodes, spewing seeds at up to 150 miles per hour. Most trees let birds and animals distribute their seeds by eating the fruit. The sandbox's approach is just as effective yet pushes beyond the usual limits. When we want to dissolve unwanted meanings, we, too, can use an approach that pushes [...]
Noisy Mind? How Occurring-Awareness Can Lead To Inner Silence
Why did millions of people in the Soviet Union choose to sit in the dark one evening in 1977? The Soviet Union had decided to have a singing contest on TV called Intervision. The producers of the show wanted viewers to vote for the songs they liked best. There was a problem though. Paper ballots would make voting too slow and few people had phones. So they came up with a rather unusual solution. Viewers would turn off their house lights during the program and then turn them on when they heard a song they liked. The power company [...]
Overcoming barriers to learning: The reality approach
Our minds often create a distorted picture of ourselves and our abilities like this reflection of two faces in the water. Imagine that you walk to the bathroom after you wake up in the morning and look at your reflection. Your face is distorted as if in a funhouse mirror. It looks like your skin is dripping off of your face as if it were melting away. You're disgusted ... afraid to touch your own skin. This is just an exercise in imagination, right? But unfortunately, our minds do something like this to us every day. We [...]
How To Use Life’s Little Annoyances To Build Mental Muscles
In 1912, Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe could be seen digging through the garbage hours before his event was to begin. That morning he discovered his shoes were stolen. Thorpe scrambled to find another pair. Fortunately, he found two shoes in a trash can. One was a few sizes too big, so he wore extra socks to keep the shoe from falling off. He competed in the pentathlon (5 events) and decathlon (10 events) and beat every athlete despite this hardship. Having his shoes stolen didn't stop Jim Thorpe because of prior preparation. He had already built up his endurance, [...]
