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.
Just Listen to Reprogram Your Brain
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.
As examples, I combined practices of breathwork, accelerated learning, and subliminals in a program called “Think for Success” long before personal improvement programs permeated the market. I’ve gone right to the waveforms, acoustics and electronics, including engineering a custom subliminal encoder that optimally hides a signal, only two or three decibels below audible. The approach tunes the message channel’s volume to the carrier, evaluating instantaneous volume and signal characteristics of each. I’ve used multi-channel, multi-stage digital processing for decades to create a wide variety of programs.
This continues to be a significant endeavor of mine, shared with a select group. In the last couple of years, I’ve dramatically changed the approach and have seen some astounding results. I’ve now pulled the levers to apply this to a larger audience.
From an early age, I observed that some ideas seemed locked in concrete, in myself and others. By contrast, other ideas would be fluid and easily shaped or changed. Similarly, I’ve always wondered where the storehouse of emotion and its long term influence on our behavior lived. Why can I change a perspective 180 degrees on a solidly held perspective in one area, such as physics, epistemology, or even religious views, but find it extremely difficult to change my internal programming or emotional baggage in other realms?
Along this journey, I’ve suspected the peripheral nervous system, visceral feedback mechanisms between our muscular-skeletal system and organs, and many others. Clearly, it seems the brain stores personality and emotional content differently than other information. Not only have I found a likely storage mechanism, hidden in our brains, but the methods to drive change at new levels.
Myelin covers connections!
A missing ingredient is myelin growth and its effect on the overall neural network that is our brain. Nerves and pathways in our brain range from lightly myelinated to highly myelinated. This has been known for quite some time and largely ignored at the personality formation level. Recent research has found, by testing individual neurons in mice, that highly myelinated neurons are over 100 times faster than lightly myelinated neurons. Further, studies suggest the brain routinely ignores slower pathways when the faster pathways are activated.
The implications of the role of myelin on our selves are enormous: Not only does the pattern of connections matter, but the particular pathway and its relative myelination. Myelination changes much more slowly than connection or activation patterns. Facts can be learned in hours to months, full myelination occurs with years of practice.
The stream of consciousness and your self-awareness depend on wide participation within your brain at a moderate pace, not selected neurons moving at maximum speed. Since these faster pathways are optimized for repeated, practiced, actions, they are not readily available to introspection or change. In other words, part of your brain wires itself to exhibit a personality trait autonomously, in a very different fashion than the stuff of normal thought and awareness. A machine, almost literally, runs your personality if you don’t take charge.
Much of our ingrained behavior, often attributed to sub-consicious or unconscious actions, are most likely actions carried out by highly myelinated pathways, or super-highways in the brain. These super-highways preempt conscious thought and create a baseline of behavior, emotion and apparent motivation that is physically inaccessible to our ‘conscious’ mind. Conscious thought is essentially bypassed when the pathways are fully activated. Obviously, this is only one key facet of the human experience — there are disparate brain areas, the limbic area, all contributing to our total self. I don’t suggest that other theories are incorrect, but rather that myelination is a key factor in separating much of our behavior from our short term conscious control.
Now, back to the theory of growth. In the past, I have used brain entrainment, breathwork, neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis, subliminals, and guided visualizations, in various combinations, to help people become more relaxed and aware, while helping build new internal self concepts. These techniques worked, but never as dramatically as desired.
Until recently, the programs I produced were better than average, but followed the general patterns in other available products. In the last couple of years, I have found some of the missing links I had been looking for. Recent research on neuroscience and the action of nerves in the brain suggest a very different approach than anything I’d previously seen or created. After more than a year of experimentation and refinement, I have created a new approach to enable personal growth and development. I’ve generated dramatic shifts in previously immutable thought and behavior patterns.
By incorporating recent research, and improving the model that that informs the programs, I determined another approach was needed. Some of same tools and elements are used, along with a few new tools, but the approach is driven by a very new model.
My first attempts blew away my beliefs about what was possible in human change. I’ve subsequently endeavored to refine and package the approach, finding a balance between pace and power that is widely digestible.
In very general terms, the new approach focuses on creating new, competing, semi-highways, and helping your brain loosen the grip of the well worn pathways or super-highways that get built over time. It is not too different than trying to replace a poor golf or racket swing, ingrained through years of ineffective habits, with a new precision swing. Your old mental pathways must be de-emphasized as you perfect your new swing by building new pathways. We need a do-not-enter sign on many of those old super-highways.
Most programs focus on relaxation and increased suggestibility, ostensibly targeted at a simplistic model of the subconscious. This seems good on the surface: Reprogram the pathways by ‘suggesting’ new actions. However, only real world action and rich sensory visualization have been shown to grow new pathways or drive myelination at a rapid pace. The simple technique of relaxing and sneaking messages to the “subconscious” only works to a very limited extent. Further, the messages go to your conscious and semi-conscious ideation, but don’t address the highly ingrained system that operates without conscious thoughts at the least opportune moments. In other words, it is not the thoughts of your subconscious, but rather the highways you’ve built, that take over your life. On the other hand, the conscious mind can always improve in areas like integrity, openness, humility, and commitment, which pure affirmation based systems do help.
The model I’ve evolved also could explain and improve “retreats” and large group awareness programs (“LGAT”), which are often moderately effective. The immersion, reprogramming, specialized language, isolation to a new social group, and other techniques combine to fool the brain into leaving the myelinated paths turned off. The highly novel and focused experience drives conscious attention and nurtures new pathways. In other words, introducing new trigger patterns, creating a constant sense of novelty, keep the brain from activating the super-highways long enough to expand self awareness and foster new pathways. This can set a baseline that creates subtle dissonance when returning to everyday life. Using training, follow-up, willpower and diligence, the participant then has the opportunity to catch self-teaching moments and drive long term change. I’ll cover this line of thought more deeply in another post. Nothing here involves large groups or retreats, though the framework could potentially improve their design and effectiveness.
If you have a serious drive and desire to substantially alter your automatic self, this new approach is now available. I warn you, this approach requires commitment and openness to change. With a very effective approach at a neurological level, it is still imperative that your conscious psychological self fully directs and engages in your desired change.
Rather than simply relax the brain and utilize the modest increase in suggestibility, this approach combines techniques that stimulate your brain with diverse activation patterns and help you trigger replacement of your internal reference model. Your brain, while using the program and in your daily life, will use the new reference model, that you choose and define, to retrain itself. You will literally catch yourself at critical moments with thoughts like “is this the person I choose to be.” You can feel your brain re-wiring itself. The process still takes time, but the progress you will feel is like exercise on steroids — you will see the results at a pace that seems too fast to believe (seemed like a good analogy, though I’ve never exercised with steroids).
We offer a core foundation program, which has about 10 sessions spread over successive mini-levels. Each level builds on the earlier levels and is tuned to drive your neural pathways to reorganize and assist in breakthrough changes. That program has been available and free for several years. For more advanced people, who want to go beyond the foundation, we offer several premium options to take your life to an even higher level.
If you’re interested in reshaping yourself, please sign up. Join Now and experience the foundation program, risk free. Once you’ve become a member, you will find more information and the areas to download the sessions as you progress. A commitment to a new approach and a new path can dramatically change your life. These techniques have helped thousands evoke dramatic transformation in key life areas. If you’re ready for change, they can do the same for you as well.