Breakthrough Approach to Personal Growth

Listening to Reprogram

Just Listen to Reprogram Your Brain

There are a wide variety of products and programs that offer to help you grow and achieve in various ways.  Many of these programs offer substantial benefits over a period of weeks or months.  Very few personal growth approaches offer significant long term change and help you operate at a higher level.  The market is also saturated with copycat products and simplistic placebos.  This has ultimately convinced many people that the personal development and self-help field is less than wonderful.

I have tried and reviewed many of these and look for the theory and core efficacy in every offering and technique. In every article, book, or study, I look for repeatable gains and benefits.  Though many products and individual techniques offer some benefits, none offer the long term potential I believe is possible.  I’ve always believed personal development programs could be taken to vastly improved levels.  The journey and commitment is still long, but the accumulated results could be much greater.

Over time, I’ve used passionate curiosity and mental rigor as a guide.  I discuss and validate the concepts at length, including working with psychiatrists and psychologists to get their perspective on these non-medical products.  My current theory and perspective in personal development builds on many great teachers, researchers, leaders, and thinkers.

I have gradually synthesized a hybrid neurological, psychological, and developmental framework for human growth and achievement.  For over three decades, I have been creating programs of various types to help people in their quest for personal growth and achievement.

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The Learned Self - What’s Myelin Got To Do With It?

Neural Networks and Myelination Define our Brain

Neural Networks and Myelination

I’ve always pondered why personality can seem so fixed and relatively immutable, even when the individual seems committed to change themselves.  As with many things I’ve studied about people over time, a strong neurological aspect appears underpin the highly stable personality/psychological constructs.

After reading Daniel Coyle’s book, “The Talent Code,” I see another possible good explanation.  The key aspects of his work relevant to us:

  • There are two factors that influence brain performance when myelination is strong.  First, the nerves transmit much faster, up to 100 times as fast.  Secondly, late arriving signals in the brain, those that didn’t take the faster myelin routes, are generally ignored when they do complete, if a substantial number of the faster myelination paths have already fired.
  • The effect is that highly learned pathways become super-highways of the brain.  The local streets, where you walk around at one one-hundredth the speed, are essentially ignored whenever you activate the super-highways.  Once built, the super-highway owns much of your thought and behavior.  That may be what you want for golf or violin, where there isn’t time to be consciously choosing each motion, but not so much for your personality.

I’ll now give you my synthesis on what this means to us in our core personality and being.

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The Talent Code - Daniel Coyle

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle, is a four star book that deserves an extra star if you track the hidden sub-text. Coyle covers a crucial topic on brain learning entirely from the perspective of developing extreme talent.  For example, developing skills such as becoming an extremely talented soccer player, violinist, vocalist, golfer, and so on.  He indicates that recent studies show two very interesting properties related to myelin.

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