Be proud of me – I’m trying new things! Like creating videos. I think being able to listen to someone with a face talk is sometimes a better way to absorb information than reading text, especially since our culture seems more visual now than ever. Therefore, I decided to resurrect this YouTube account that I’ve had for awhile. I hope to be using it more often to expand on some of the ideas I write about on this blog.
This first video touches on a very fundamental concept to personal development – beliefs. Beliefs affect how we act and in many ways the results we get out of life. Discovering the beliefs that drive our actions and identifying the ones that don’t serve our needs can help us to adopt more helpful and satisfying beliefs that motivate us toward our goals. This is a core component to cognitive therapies like Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
As we enter the new year, everyone is going through the old tradition of making resolutions and goals, only to later not follow through on any of them.
According to Derek Sivers, part of the problem is we blabber about our goals too much. When we tell people what we want to do, and they acknowledge it, this changes our “social reality.” It feels as though we have already achieved that goal, even though – in the real world – we haven’t yet done any of the necessary work.
It turns out this phenomena has been known for almost a century now. In 1926, Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called it “substitution.” In 1933, Wera Mahler found that when our goals are acknowledged by others they feel more real in our minds. In 1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about the phenomena, and in 2009 he did several new studies.
In the studies, Gollwitzer gathered 163 people across 4 separate tests. He had everyone write down a personal goal, and then half of them announced their commitment to the goal to the room, while the other half didn’t.
Then, everyone was given 45 minutes of work that would directly lead them closer to achieving their goal. They were also told they could stop working at anytime.
Those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes (on average), and still thought they had a lot more work to do after they left. However, those who announced their goals to the room only worked for 33 minutes (on average) and later said they felt much closer to achieving their goal.
How can we avoid this false sense of achievement?
Derek Sivers recommends that we keep our goals to ourselves, or share our goals in a less satisfying way. You could say something like, “I need to run this marathon so I need to train 5 times a week, and kick my ass if I don’t.” By acknowledging the hard work you need to do, you won’t be so easily content with just sharing your goal. Also, your friends and family can you hold you more accountable.
So while trying to achieve your future goals, please don’t mistake the talking for the doing. A lot of worthy goals take effort and dedication, and by acknowledging this reality we better equip ourselves for actually following through with what needs to be done (and not just imagining it).
Deepak Chopradelivers an excellent lecture, elegantly touching on topics like theoretical physics, neuroscience, and Buddhist meditation. He goes on to explain how these have all contributed to a new science of consciousness.
Chopra spends the second half answering questions on diverse issues like love, healthcare, dreaming, the joys of music, business philosophy, and his experience with LSD, plus more. The whole video is a little over an hour, but it is chockful of good information and definitely worth checking out. To see Chopra so lucidly integrate such a vast scope of knowledge is truly an incredible experience.
This great BBC clip shows how certain animals can be put into hypnotic trance. Evolutionary biologists theorize that these states may be used as a defense mechanism to avoid predators.
As you will see in the video, these animals become very still and almost “dead-like” after they enter state. Since most predators react to their prey based on movement, they often overlook their targets when these animals enter trance. In this video you will see hypnosis applied to chickens and alligators:
“The human brain contains over 100 billion neurons, and roughly 1 quintillion synapses. But how did it all get started? How did the first nervous systems, the first brains evolve? How did a bunch of simple cells evolve into a biological computer?”