A change of pace...

I have titled this post 'A change of pace' because that is exactly what will be happening for me in the next 6 months as I take on the 14th Australian Masters Games in Geelong in October this year. I will be competing in the 100 meter sprint and I am planning to WIN!

Now this could be an absolute pipe dream but for me, I understand the power of the mind and will use this to push hard and to give myself my best chance. Goals are there to challenge us, to push our boundaries and to take us beyond our comfort zones.

This is how I am choosing to Colour my Canvas this year.

I will be using my blog for this period to write about what I go through to become competitive ready - from my training, my emotional journey and how I mentally rehearse my race. I will go through every part of my preparation and will hopefully use it as a guide to help others become ready for their next challenge in life!

I hope you stay tuned. I am sure it will be a wild ride!

Please also visit https://give.everydayhero.com/au/veronica-wood

Veronica Wood

Belief creates your reality...

The Ant and the Ferrari was borrowed to me and has provided me with inspiration for this post. Thanks Leslie xx.

 

It was written by Dr Kerry Spackman, a neuroscientist whose style of writing is so approachable that you can really relate to the words on the page. He puts a different spin on life and the meaning of it all.

 

There is one chapter in particular that really grabbed me called 'The Psychology of Belief'. It is an eye opener to say the least!

 

Dr Spackman discusses the self-fulfilling prophecy and I would like to try and explain this to you without writing word for word from his book.

 

The self-fulfilling prophecy is an outcome of belief. It comes about when we create something  because of our own belief in it. We make it happen because we believe it is going to happen. 

 

I will use an example given in the book because it brilliantly demonstrates this self-fulfilling prophecy theory.

 

One day you decide to go and visit a clairvoyant. You really want to get married but you are not sure you are looking in the right places. So you go to a clairvoyant and they tell you that you are going to marry a someone in uniform. As far as the self-fulfilling prophecy goes "the instant she says this, your chances of actually marrying someone in uniform increases by 1000-fold.."

 

Wow really? Ok how? Well firstly, you are keen to find your soul mate and get married and secondly you want to believe in your clairvoyant (otherwise why else would you have gone). When you leave the clairvoyant, people in uniform are now on your radar! Now that you are on the look out for someone in uniform you notice more and more people in uniform! You never really noticed all these people before. Your chances of meeting someone in uniform has just .. well... increased by 1000-fold!  You are paying way more attention to those nurses who catch your bus, or the police officers on the side of the road. You even start to notice every single type of uniform there is!

 

Our mind looks for patterns in our everyday life and as soon as you start to focus on something like people in uniform, that is what you will see. A bit like when you buy a new car, you start seeing that same model everywhere!

 

Now that you believe that you will marry someone in uniform, you will be more receptive to those who are wearing one. That flight attendant you never thought you would have a chance with will now seem ok to approach, because hey.. they might just be that one in uniform your clairvoyant was talking about! You believe that you are starting to open up your chances of meeting that 'one'.

 

What also happens is that you will be more inclined to close off an opportunity to meeting someone without a uniform as you don't believe they are the person you are looking for. This reduces your chances of marrying someone without a uniform and therefore increases your chances of marrying someone in uniform.

 

Incredible isn't it! It seems we make things happen when we believe in them. When we believe in something, our actions become more in tune with making that belief come true! Our persistence increases which in turn creates more opportunities and in the end we succeed because of our belief in it.

 

My advice to you, believe in something worthwhile. Believe in the positive, believe in happiness and believe you can achieve anything you want!

 

Belief creates your reality.

 

What a wonderful life we have.

 

Veronica Wood

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Change: a necessary evil

Why do I call it a necessary evil? Well that is because it is.

 

We all know that change is necessary but it is sometimes one of the hardest things to do. Change can sometimes feel very evil and there is plenty of reason for that.

What is change? Change is the process of becoming different. And that is not as easy as we like to think it is.

 

Here is one example of how difficult it must be:

 

"Roughly 600,000 people have bypasses a year in America. These people are told...that they must change their lifestyle. The heart bypass is a temporary fix. They must change their diet. They must quit smoking and drinking. They must exercise and reduce stress. In essence, the doctors say, "Change or die." You would think that a near-death experience would forever grab the attention of the patients...You would think the argument for change is so compelling that the patients would make the appropriate lifestyle alterations...Ninety percent of the heart patients do not change...Change is that difficult."**

Mind blowing isn't it.

Why is it when we know that something needs to change, we continue the same old way. Stuck in  rut. Are we really that stupid. Well....of course not.

It is difficult to change and that is all there is to it. It is not easy, it hurts and makes us feel extremely uncomfortable. And here is why:

"For every known element in our life, we have an existing neural representation in the form of people, things, times, places and events, and each neural representation connects every person, place, thing, time  and event to a specific feeling."*

Therefore everything we do, everyone we interact with, those thoughts are connected to a feeling. A neural connection. Each time we make change to any of those elements, we are creating a physical chemical change in our brain and it makes us feel different, uncomfortable and leaves us with wanting to go back to the way we felt before.

If you allow yourself to reject those new feelings, then "you are headed for a release of a lot of chemicals that will reinforce who you have always been." You will not change. If however you want change then you need to be prepared to stop any automatic thoughts and  "feel very uncomfortable with not being your normal, habitually thinking self."* This uncomfortableness is what prevents us from change.

Being able to deal with a short period of being uncomfortable is all it takes to begin the process of change.

The big question is how do we overcome this overwhelming desire to stay in a comfortable state?

It takes an understanding of what is actually happening to us in that time of transition, what the end result may be and a knowing and trust in ourselves that we will make it happen.

I found this flow chart by Robinson which makes a lot of sense:

A lot of people do not move on from the first part of change. The knowing. If this is you, then focus on the next stage. Create a desire to change. Ask yourself what this change will give you. That will be enough to create that desire and will provide a boost in your motivation.

 

The next step is probably the hardest of them all. The self belief. The 'I can'. This is vital to any change as you are the only one that can make it happen. Set yourself small achievable goals and you will build that confidence to succeed.

As they say 'practice makes perfect'. You may not succeed the first time but commitment and persistence will get you there.

I believe the rest will follow.

Change is something that must happen for us to evolve. Life is too short to stay 'stuck in a rut'.

Change is the necessary evil.

 Veronica Wood

* (Dispenza, J. 2007, Evolve your Brain: The science of changing your mind, Health Communications, Inc. Deerfield Beach, Florida)
** (from an article in UltraFit Magazine Accelerate)

Do you judge me? I would say you do...

Ok so you probably don't judge me as such but judgement of one another comes so naturally (and quickly) that we make up our minds about someone before realising the effects that our own thoughts have on us.

"Judgement appears much too early and impedes the freedom of thought..."

'Unlock your Creative Genius by Bernard Golden, PhD, Prometheus Books, Amherst NY'

I read this sentence (now this is not the full sentence and I have taken it out of context) and I just had to write about the subject. Why we judge one another fascinates me. Why does it come so naturally? Why does it happen so quickly and why do we think we know who someone is just by looking at them? Surely we can only be basing our judgement on our own experiences? If this is the case, then are we all so completely illiberal?

From what I have researched so far, it seems that our perceptions are to blame. Our perception of our environment, including those who are in it, are created by our experiences so far. The only way we can view a person is to match what we see with what we know. This happens instantaneously and before we know it, we have a picture in our minds of who that person is.

Isn't it so narrow minded to think our 'scenario database' has every possible situation in it that we can make these conclusions about people. We are convinced we know someone just by looking at them.

I judge people, just like you do. If you are honest with yourself you will also admit that.

When we see someone new, it will always trigger thoughts of curiosity. Instead of automatically judging someone I am teaching myself to 'wonder' about them instead. It allows me to still think about the person but in a non-judgemental way. Instead of making a conclusion about someones life, I like to wonder what life they have led, what challenges they have faced and success they have had. I wonder what makes them happy, what they are passionate about and what makes them tick. I also like to wonder what is going through their minds.

Having judgemental thoughts about someone does not only 'impede our freedom of thought', it also affect how we interact with people. If we automatically feel negatively about someone before they even get to speak, we limit our interactions and therefore our own experiences in life. Limiting our experiences will limit our perceptions. Perception is what we use everyday to create who we are, what we have around us and our finite path. Do we really want to limit that? I certainly don't.

More food for thought.

Veronica Wood

What is your route to original thought?

Interesting concept don't you think?

 

How does one come up with a new idea, an amazing concept or creation of something so dynamic that it changes the course of their life or the lives of many? Is it by chance that we stumble across such things, are we inspired or is it purely hard work and effort?

 

I would put my money on it being a mixture of all.

 

I read an article recently in Scientific American Mind magazine (amazing mag by the way!) called 'The Science of Genius' and it discusses the notion of genius, how we become one, if we can at all.

 

The article discusses the theory of 'blind variation and selective retention (BVSR)' or to put it more simply, backtracking over failed attempts to discover new ways. How many times have we failed at something and just walked away telling ourselves 'well that just doesn't work' and not going back to try again? Many I am sure. The theory of BVSR proposed by psychologist Donald Campbell leads us to believe that geniuses use this form of research to come up with their 'genius' ideas.

 

"The blindness of blind variation and selective retention (BVSR) merely means that ideas are produced without foresight into their eventual utility. The creator must engage in trial-and-error or generate-and-test procedures to determine the worth of an idea. Two common phenomena characterise BVSR thinking: superfluity and backtracking. Superfluity means that the creator generates a variety of ideas, one or more of which turn out to be useless. Backtracking signifies that the creator must often return to an earlier approach after blindingly going off in the wrong direction."

 

Now I hope I didn't just lose you there. What this is really telling us is that if we want to create something new, we need to revisit our past failures, be open to creating new ideas without really knowing (or worrying about) where they will take us and allowing ourselves to investigate possibilities.

 

We cannot all be geniuses. It takes pure dedication to the research of new concepts and ideas and continuous questioning and backtracking. I don't know about you, but for me there are not enough hours in the day for this type of creative thinking! Although I would love to be a genius and spend all my waking hours researching and creating new ideas, that is not the direction I will take after reading this article. Instead what this says to me is that we can be the best person we can be by revisiting our past failures and trying, trying again.

 

Original thoughts..... how often do you have them? We need them to see different perspectives. When we see a different perspective, our lives instantly change. Our mind opens to new ways of thinking and we become different people.

 

Thought I would share.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

Veronica Wood

 

 

 

 

 

 

What we miss purely by paying attention.

I would like to start this post by asking you to watch this clip. I would like to suggest that you play it at full screen, pay very close attention and follow the instructions.

I first saw this clip whilst watching a TV show called 'Test your Brain'. The documentary points out some very interesting facts about how our mind works and the things we miss whilst paying attention to other things.

How did you go with the clip? Don't worry if you missed it.  I was flawed at the fact that I completely missed it! I was so focused on counting and getting the number right (I can be quite competitive), that there really was no way I would have seen anything else.

 

I am a stickler for being focused and paying attention on the things that are important. But after watching the above clip I now wonder what I am missing around me in the mean time. Well I guess that is the price we pay to secure a memory.

 

"The more attention the brain pays to a given stimulus, the more elaborately the information will be encoded - and retained."
(Medina, J. 2008 brain rules: 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school, Scribe, Melbourne)

 

That is great for those things we are paying attention to. How do we know what to pay attention to?

According the 'brain rules' we use previous experiences to predict where we should pay attention. This must mean that the more we experience, the better we would be at predicting where we should pay our attention to, right?

I do now wonder what I am missing each time I step outside my door. I wonder if I had actually paid attention to something, would it have changed my experience and therefore my perception of the environment around me? Something to ponder.

 

If you don't expect to see something, you probably won't see it. Remember that it doesn't mean it wasn't there.

Veronica Wood

Think your way to reaching your goals!

 

Do you want to 'think your way to reaching your goals'? I do!

Have you heard of the term 'visualisation'? I have and throughout my life have used it as a tool to get what I want by ensuring that I am as prepared (mentally) as I can possibly be. Visualisation is term used when you visualise (or think about) in detail, something you are preparing for. For example, if you are preparing for an interview (which I have had many!) you think about how you would like the interview to play out. A role play in your mind. I have previously visualised myself in the interview as being calm, that the answers will come naturally and that I come across to the interviewer as confident and capable of the job. The last time I was looking for a job, I had one interview and got it.

It really does work and I am now understanding why.

Get this:

"With mental rehearsal, if we can stay focused, the brain does not know the difference between physically doing the activity and remembering the activity."

(Dispenza, J. 2007 Evolve your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mindc, Health Communications, Inc. Deerfield Beach, Florida)

 

So your mind cannot tell the differnce between the actual interview (discussed above), and a mental rehearsal of the interview - but it does take a bit of effort in learning how to do this effectively.

There have been numerous studies from psychologist and scientists to find out exactually what is happening and how this actually works. Below is an experiement which demonstrates it perfectly.

 

Experiment
4 groups of individuals. These groups were asked to participate in a 5 day study where they were to practise the piano. Here is how the groups were organised:

Group  1 - learned, memorised and physically practiced 2hrs a day, a one handed, five finger sequence;

Group 2 - physically played the piano with no instructions and randomly practiced for the same period of time;

Group 3 - never physically touched a piano. This group observed group one until they understood what was being learned, and then mentally rehearsed it for the same length of time (2hrs each day);

Group 4 - was the control group - this group did not learn, practise or observe the lessons. They did nothing at all.

 

At the end of the 5 day study (and some intense testing), they found that the group that mentally rehearsed only (Group 3), "showed almost the same changes, involving expansion and development of neural networks in the same specific area of their brain, as the group who physically practised the sequences on the piano." Group 2, even though they practised the piano, showed very limited changes to their neural networks.

 

The below image shows the new neural circuits being established. The top level - Physical practice (Group 1) and the bottom level - Mental practice (Group 3):

 

 

This demonstrates the close relationshiop between doing and thinking an activity. This really is mind blowing! To know that we can change our actual mental capacity just by thinking about it is amazing.

 

For us to benefit from this however, we need to educate ourselves on what it is we want, and how we can achieve it. We need to give our minds the right instructions before it can do the work for us. Think about just how better we could be at something, if we were using both our mind and our body to achieve it.

I will be using what I have learnt about mental rehearsal in the next 10 to 12 months as I will be competing in the Australian Masters Games in 2013.  Here are the steps I will take (and steps you can take to reach your goals) :

Step 1 - Decide on a goal:
I have decided on and set a goal of running the 100 mtrs at the Masters Games;

Step 2 - Educate  yourself on what you need to do:
I will watch loads of videos and educate myself on sprint techniques and running a 100mtr race to show my mind how I want my body to perform. I can then mentally run the race over and over and over exactly how I want it to turn out;

Step 3 - Physically practise:
I will pysically train to teach my body how to run a 100 mtr race so it is familiar with it;

Step 4 - Believe in yourself:
I will tell myself  the following "I am fast", "I will train hard enough to be competitive" "I will do what ever it takes to acheive my goal".


That is my goal (well one of). What is yours? Do you know?

When was the last time you asked yourself these questions

 

"Who do I want to be?"

"What do I have to change about myself to get there?"

"How can I become better?"

"How can I modify my behaviour?"

"What do I have to change about myself to achieve my goals?"

 

Some big questions and quite confronting if you are not used to asking yourself these things. These types of questions are 'open ended' which allows our brain to think outside the square. They create more neural pathways (compared with survival type questions like 'when am I going to eat next?') and without getting too technical, these questions help us to be open to see new possibilities and opportunities. 

 

It is time to get real and get on with what we are really capable of by using our minds to get the most out of this life.

Some more food for thought.

Veronica Wood