Mark

Our beliefs determine what we will and won’t try. They determine how we feel about others. They literally shape our future. For most of us, our beliefs were formed out of our past experience and environments. Many times, they don’t even make sense!  The following information is a set of tools to help you discover and take control of your beliefs.

This is an oversimplification of the real guts of what Tony Robbins teaches about reprogramming your brain for success.  The end goal is to discover your current beliefs so that you can change the disempowering ones. You should write down your answers to each question.  Don’t just read this stuff!  Do it!  Take the time to get clear about your beliefs!

When I refer to “states” below, I’m referring to mental states or feelings. Really they are the same for our purposes.

1. Brainstorm: List your “ends” values, which should be states, not things. You get these by asking the question, “What is most important to me in (my life, my family, my career, etc)”.  If you find yourself saying something like, “my house” or “my car”, you need to ask yourself why is it that thing. Every want that you have in life is because you believe it will help you feel a certain way.  That feeling or state is what we are after.
2. Sort that list in order by which states you would do the most to have.
3. Brainstorm: List the states that you would do the most to avoid.  A helpful way to get these is to ask yourself, “When have I felt horrible about myself or my situation?”  Remember, we don’t want to relive it, just capture the state in a word or two.
4. Sort that list in order by which states you would do the most to avoid.
5. For each state in each list, answer the question, “What has to happen for me to feel this way?” These answers can usually be expressed as “if, then” statements. These statements are your beliefs about your life, your family, your career, etc.
6. For each belief, ask the question, “Is this belief empowering or disempowering?
7. Create new beliefs to replace the disempowering ones.  What would be a better, more empowering belief to have?
8. Reprogram your brain with new beliefs! (see below)

Brain reprogramming techniques:

• Scratch the record: A record that has been scratched will never play the same again!  Like a digital image or an audio recording, your memories CAN be modified!  More importantly, your interpretation of your memories can be modified. To do this, replay the memory in your mind’s eye while purposefully changing it to reflect your new belief. Do this with feeling!
• Incantations: What you repeatedly say, you will eventually become. Use your new beliefs to create incantations which you will recite with feeling each day.

Updating your beliefs is powerful!  Remember that your beliefs affect everything you think and do.  They shape your thought patterns and your actions.  It’s absolutely critical that you get to know yourself and take control of your vessel!

Problem: If you were in too big of a hurry to install iOS 4 on your jailbroken iPhone 3G, you might be surprised and disappointed to find out that Apple’s multitasking really doesn’t work well, or at all. After opening a few apps it basically leaves your phone with 2 to 4 MB of memory all the time. As you can imagine, that’s not enough memory to do just about anything without the OS having to free some up. You can manually remove the app freeze states but I found myself constantly doing it and trying to free memory before running anything. What a pain!

You might be asking, how did this happen? I thought multitasking was not supported on the 3G? That is correct.  It’s not supported but it can be enabled by simply flipping a switch in a Springboard plist (startup preferences file). Using the pwnage tool from the iPhone dev team you can enable multitasking during creation of your restore image by checking a checkbox but if you don’t want to build a new restore image, here is a better way.

This also applies to 3Gs owners who are disapointed in Apple’s implementation of “multi-tasking”. I prefer backgrounder to this solution. I would even if I were on a 3Gs.

Backgrounder has been updated for iOS4.  The beauty of this solution is that you can turn it on or off any time you wish.  It also supports more than one type of backgrounding (native, and foreground styles).

Solution:

1. SFTP in to your phone or use something like iPhone Explorer and Go to /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/
2. Open the N82AP.plist (for iPhone 3G) or the N88AP.plist (for iPhone 3Gs).  If you are unfamiliar with plist files, they are just XML files. In this case you may need the Apple plist editor (already installed on all macs) since these particular plist files are stored in a binary format rather than text.
3. Expand the “Capabilities” section and uncheck the “multitasking” boolean property.
4. Save the file and respring.

There are a few other things you may want to modify in the plist file while you’re in there.  Have a look at the options.  For the sake of speed, I disabled “homescreen-wallpaper” and enabled “launch-application-while-animating” and “load-thumbnails-while-scrolling”.  After making these changes and respringing, my iPhone 3G is running snappy!  There are a few exceptions to this such as the built in camera app. It is definitely slower to start up.  :(

Can somebody please make an SBSetting Toggle for this?  That would be awesome!

UPDATE: There is an app on the SiNfuL iPhone repo now which will disable multitasking.  It’s called “Disable iOS4 Mutlittasking”.  That’s cool but an SBSettings toggle would still be cooler (even though it requires a respring).

According to RSA’s Dan Pink in Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, employees want 3 things:

• Autonomy (self-direction)
• Mastery (we like to get good at things)
• Purpose (a grand ideal)

If this is true (and according to Dan, it is science), then the worst thing a manager can do for his team is to require too much of them in too little time.  Doing so would prevent them from self-directing their work since there is not time for their desires.  It would also prevent them from ever achieving mastery because they would have to quickly move from one project to the next.

I believe that a better approach is to make the purpose (that grand ideal of the company), crystal clear.  Then choose a few 6 month goals and set the team loose.  The end result is what matters, not the means to get there.  Taking this approach allows team members the opportunity for discovery and autonomy.  Allowing them enough time to do it right allows them the opportunity for mastery.

I deeply agree with Dan’s findings.  I know they are true for me in the work place.  What do you think?

One bird is perched on the fence. He squaks a few times. Then two birds are perched on the fence. They face each other. The second bird chirps. They exchange tones a few more times. Then they fly off together.

True faith requires that we take action toward the thing that we seek.  In James 1:22 we find, “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.”  James expounds on this a bit.  He says that hearing and not doing is like seeing yourself in a glass, then going on doing the same thing, forgetting what type of person you saw.

Dreams!  Belief in something higher and better is always the beginning to improvement and progression.  This is why Faith is the first principle of the Gospel.  Thoughts become actions which then materialize into our perceivable world.  If you believe something strongly enough you will take action on it.  This is always true.  Faith isn’t the end goal.  Rather, it is the beginning of creation and actualization.

I know a man, a good friend of several years who is struggling with multiple health issues. He is a devout Christian and a great example to me in many ways.  Here’s a portion of one of our conversations regarding his health issues:

Me: Well, the question is, what do you take from it?  How can you learn from it and better your health and quality of life?
…
Him: Hopefully God will just heal it all and there won’t be anything to update
Me: Anything is possible.  Just depends on your quality of faith right?
Him: Yep and how it works into God’s plan

While I totally agree with him, his words reminded me of a common falsehood amongst many Christians.  It is the idea that all you have to do is believe and you are saved.  In a sense this is correct because if you believe strongly enough you will take action eventually.  You will begin to devote your life to serving others and living consistent with God’s commandments.  We must be careful of how we teach this principle though.  New Christians often mistake it to mean that if you believe, you don’t have to do anything and the grace of Christ will cover you.  I believe that God helps those who help themselves.  This is true of our spiritual goals, our health goals and every other facet of life.

In 2 Nephi 2:14 the prophet Lehi taught, “there is a God, and he hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.”  If you don’t consciously take control of your environment then your environment will take control you. Like currents in the ocean we will be tossed and driven forth.  We must decide today to set goals and work towards our own dreams and desires; to seek out a better life and a higher quality existence.  NOW is the time to design our futures!  This is a vital part of God’s plan for all of us.  He has blessed us with intellect and he expects us to use it to our fullest potential.  He lifts us when we fall as long as we never give up.  Isn’t that a wonderful thought?  Any good thing you can think to have or do in your life can be yours because God has blessed you with the capacity to achieve it!

As Jesus taught, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

Kelley has been writing a book; a really cool book.  Last night I had a dream about it.

Somehow we were involved in a contest whose winner would get a full day from Steven Spielberg’s team.  They were going to film and produce the first chapter of a book.  We ranked high and they selected Kelley’s book.  We had one day of filming and production.  It was an awesome experience to be a part of. I know because I remember feeling on top of the world even though I don’t remember many details.

We didn’t hear anything from them for the next couple of days but we’d been hanging around their sets to see what else they were working on.  I ran into Mr Spielberg in a break room and asked him what he thought of Kelley’s first chapter.  He said, “It was pretty good!” as he grabbed a paper cup behind the microwave and proceeded to get his drink.  His tone was such that I could tell he enjoyed reading it so I asked him, “What would it take to make it so good that you couldn’t put it down; so that you would have to produce a film from it?”  He thought for a moment but as he began to speak, I awoke.

I don’t think I watched, read or observed anything the prior day that would inspire such a dream so it came as a surprise.  On top of that I usually don’t remember my dreams.  When I do remember them I always try to figure out what I might learn from them.  In this instance the thought crossed my mind that if I am ever to be in the presence of someone like Mr Spielberg, I should find a biography on him and learn about him first.  I learned from one of Napoleon Hill’s books that if you want someone to be interested in you, you should first show interest in them.  That’s not hard in this case because I am interested in Spielberg.  I love his films and would love to learn more about him and what inspired them.

We each have a left and a right side to our brain but their functions are so drastically different that I like to refer to them as separate brains.

The right brain is our antenna to the universe.  It receives ideas; very abstract ideas with absolutely no rules attached.  Reality as we know it doesn’t affect the right brain.  It is where creation happens and anything can happen there.  It is where feelings of the heart come from.  You can trace any desire, any goal down to one thing; a feeling.  Isn’t that what we are all after anyway?  Self-importance, happiness, love, passion, excitement, peace or some other feeling?  It’s not the fancy house or car that you want.  It’s the feeling that you think it will give you to have those things.  The right brain is very important to our progression!

The left brain makes sense of stuff so we can understand and build on to those very abstract ideas from righty.  Left brain is all about rules and logic.  It decides how to interpret right brain’s abstract ideas.  Without left brain we would wander through a pointless existence, not knowing good from evil, happiness from sadness, pleasure from pain, etc.  At times we would feel good or bad but we would not know why and we would not know how to recreate it later.  Left brain is also very important to our progression!

Your two brains never really stop.  They do experience higher and lower levels of activity though.  For instance when you go to sleep at night, your left brain relaxes a bit which allows your right brain to dominate.  This is where those really crazy and disturbing dreams come from.   You know what I’m talking about, the one where there are two of your mother and they are kissing each other?  No, that wasn’t my dream but mine was equally disturbing.  When you wake up and your left brain kicks in it immediately discounts the reality of such an idea by throwing out all your rules about why it is not possible and even if it were, it would never happen.  Another example is the financial analyst or the computer programmer who goes into 100% logic mode every day to do their job.  During this time the right brain relaxes.

Left and right brains are a team.  They must work together.  Musician’s and Programmers alike will be better at what they do if they learn to balance the use of both sides of their brain.  Their creations and solutions will be both exquisit and sound.  When the left and the right brain are working together we are unstoppable as human beings!  This is when true focus is attained.  The experiences of life are for practicing this very thing!  When both left and right brain agree on an idea, it becomes wired into our nervous system.  It can become a very deep part of us.

Have you ever had a knee jerk reaction that you regretted later?  When you thought about it you realized that your action didn’t represent who you are inside.  That was your nervous system doing what it is wired to do.  Whatever seed of thought you nourish in the garden of your mind will bear fruit in your reality.  If you grab a lizard by the tail it will pop off and he will run away.  His tail, even though completely disconnected from his brain, will continue to try and help him get away by writhing about for a few minutes until it loses what energy is left in its cells.  This is because his body is wired!  Moving fast and getting away are actions that are so deeply rooted in his nervous system that you can disconnect the source and they still act accordingly.

Whatever it is that you wish to accomplish, you must get it wired into your nervous system by use of BOTH your left and your right brains!  You cannot do it with all logic or all big ideas.  You must combine the two to produce intense feeling and focus.  This is what gets you pumped!  It’s what makes your actions reflect your desires.  When you are wired in this way your goals will pull you toward them.  Some call this the law of attraction.

In so many ways we need to learn from and become like children.  Children are not hampered by the rules of the left brain and they often experience a lot of extreme feelings.  They haven’t been around this earth long enough to make up a bunch of rules which may or may not be true and which prevent them from being emotional.  Many adults are so limited by logic and rules that there is no place in them for creativity and passion.  They have essentially disconnected their antenna to the universe (right brain) by caging it in to a prison of rules about what reality is.  This limits their ability to create and to experience joy.  This is kind of scary because we have heard it said that, “you lose what you don’t use.”  In the case of the brain, this literally true.  We know that neurons travel through neural nets in your brain.  When you don’t use a particular neural net for a long time it becomes week and other neural nets connected to it begin to disconnect.  What this means to you is that your relational memories start breaking apart into individual memories.  This is bad because everything that we learn is by association.

This information is all well and good but how do you use it to your benefit?  How do you keep your brains working together?

Ask yourself these questions…

• Is the brilliance of my right brain stifled by the rules of my left brain?
• Is the power and focus of my logical left brain dormant because I let my right brain dominate (too many big ideas and no focus)?
• When was the last time I did something creative?
• When was the last time I got laser focused on a project until I completed it?
• Do I use both sides of my brain in my daily activities?

These are action questions.  Don’t just read them.  If you realize that you should change something in your life to allow for more left or right brained activity, change your actions today!  Become something greater than you are!  The power is within you to do so!

Dude!  So good!  My chocolate pudding has tons of ice chunks in it.  It’s a different consistency but I’m a fan!

We turned our fridge temperature down the other day.  It’s a little too cold now but I never would have learned about icy pudding if we’d not turned it down!  I wonder what other icy surprises we have in there?

Yes, I’m still on an Anthony Robbins kick.  I’m learning a lot about myself and how my mind works.  Even more importantly I’m learning how to fix problems in my brain that exist due to my past false perceptions of reality.

For example; I just realized that I have associated excitement and passion with feeling stupid and making a fool of myself.  This evaluation came from my teenage years when if I got excited, my voice cracked.  Since I was tall and lanky, getting excited changed my movements and I felt uncoordinated.

This is an incorrect evaluation of the truth.  I’m still tall and lanky but I’m confident in my physical coordination and my voice rarely cracks anymore.  I sometimes still hold back because of this past association in my brain.  Knowing this, I ought to change my evaluations of excitement and passion.  I ought to live every day with greater excitement and passion!

Since those days of high school I have adopted a few new rules into my life.

1. Looking stupid is FUN and helps me learn new things!
2. Telling stories of my past foolishness is funny.  It makes me and other people laugh.  It helps me to see clearly through my past false perceptions because I now recall the stories in a state of calm and understanding rather than a high emotional state.

I believe that Anthony Robbins is correct when he says, “A superior life is created by superior evaluations.”

I recently updated the flash player to v10 on my mac. It broke video playback on many websites including nickolodian cartoons (argh ironman) and our intranet at work.

I seem to remember this happening the last time a major flash update was released. I’m not sure if it is related to some other software on my machine or not.

Turns out that the upgrade didn’t work properly. The fix was to remove the flash player altogether and do a fresh install.

Flash uninstallers:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

Fresh install flash after your uninstall:
http://www.adobe.com/go/getflash