I have written before on how learning to be the man you want to be is much like being an entrepreneur. Bob Sutton of RobbSutton.com wrote a post that not only nails the core characteristics of being a successful entrepreneur, without knowing it he nails what it takes to be the man you want to be.

Read his post as if your business is your life. Let us know how this applies to you. How are you going to be richer?

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A recent study showed that the relaxed brain wave state of theta not only increases memory, it also increases learning.

Synchronization in the brain is influenced by “theta waves” which are associated with relaxation, daydreaming and drowsiness, but also with learning and memory formation, the scientists explained in the study in the journal Nature.

Image via Wikipedia

Before healing my dyslexia and Asperger’s syndrome, I personally experienced that not being relaxed significantly affected my ability to remember and learn. The scientists from this study suggest that the findings from this and similar studies should lead to assisting people with learning disabilities. I would agree.

My personal experience with my learning disabilities taught me that the harder I tried, the tenser I became – and the worse I performed. I know this is true for everyone. For whatever reasons, a person processing a learning disability has a mind that not only works differently than most, it is more sensitive. We have a difficult time focusing under multiple distractions and we will tend to be less likely to follow through on a task. Yet, we have the potential to be more aware of subtle stimuli and their significance. When the body and mind is relaxed, such as in the theta brain wave state, the distractions disappear and leave us to easily focus our awareness on the task.

Asara Lovejoy’s book, The One Command teaches you to enter into a theta brain wave state to “connect up to source” so to have your commands be actualized. Her contention is that in this relaxed and connected state your affirmations are more powerful, and more likely to come true.

She’s right. Being in theta presupposes that you are relaxed and “in your body,” meaning your body and your mind are working in unison. Neither one, nor your external environment is distracting you. You fall into a place of having the focus of a type A personality and the relaxed awareness of someone with a learning disability.

The short course

A quick way to access theta wave’s power is to find a non-distracting space, and then begin to start to sense your body. For most of us, this is a foreign experience (I will be offering more on how to do this in future posts). I suggest you start by internally feeling your toes. You can imagine you are breathing in and out of your toes. Continue this process up both legs then through your entire body.

After ten minutes or more of relaxing and connecting o your body, start your task. If you fall asleep, as many will first do – that is what you needed. When you awake, you will be more relaxed. Either way, you will be more able to remember, learn or create.

Let us know how much smarter or richer this makes you .

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Image via Wikipedia

Who Is in Charge – Your Rational or Emotional Brain?

A recent NPR story speaks about how our emotional brain often makes those tough decisions – but that’s not a surprise.

If we’re to get honest, we would admit that the big or stressful decisions are often emotional decisions. In our rational culture we learn to justify that our gut feelings are correct with our logic and rhetoric.

The problem comes in our collective belief that our “brains,” or rational minds are in charge. We all have deluded ourselves in believing that as Descartes said, “I think therefore, I am.” This dualistic debate between emotions and logic or mind and body continues to go on in spite of growing research that our emotions are more often what make the decisions.

If you want to make better decisions – feel more. Go to the source. Feel what you are feeling, feel what you want. Honor your feelings. Have your brain, your rational self serve your feelings. Stop fooling yourself. Don’t serve your brain. Have your brain serve you and your feelings.

Your feelings will win out in the end. If they don’t get what they want, they’ll act out like a kid and pout or do some indirect behavior.

I’m sure you’re probably thinking you can’t just do everything you feel like doing, and you’re right ­– you can’t. What you can do to honor your feelings is to listen to them. Often just listening to your feelings is all that is needed for them to feel happy. If you don’t ever listen to them you will stop hearing them. Then either you will not have the skill to sense them or they will not communicate to you because they know they will not be heard.

Some call this process being mindful or being aware. It is just that – sensing and accepting what is occurring.

If you want to be smart – use all your assets, use your feelings.

Let us know how this feels for you.

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I wrote a post about Sam Martin’s “Manspace” on our Men’s Work blog – A Journey of Integrity.

Understanding that as men we need space and it isn’t necessarily an avoidance of the femine, but serves the nurturing of the masculine – will empower both sexes. In working with myself and other men over the years, I noticed often buried in our cultural expectations are our instinctual urges to have our own masculine spaces.

Women have a beautiful ability to start up a conversation with another woman on the spot. It is as if as the hunters of the hunter-gathers we need a safe space to open up, a space away from the predators who may have us for dinner.

We might have evolved as a culture, yet our DNA is still the DNA of primitive man. When stressed our instincts take over. Men strive for freedom. Given that, having a space to escape to can support a man and his relationships – where do you go to get space?

Related posts:

1. How Do You Hold Space?

Evolutionary Change™ is the instinctual process of deep change. It is how humans have transformed themselves for thousands of years. It is what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey.

It is represented as the five stages on the top of each page: Imagine, Commit, Catalyze, Integrate and Share.

What is unique about this change process?

We all change unintentionally or intentionally. Evolutionary Change™ taps into a hidden ability you have to create deep and sustainable change. Why not use a dormant ability to enhance the process of change and creation?

Why haven’t I heard about this before?

Good question. As Joseph Campbell explained, it often is at the core of great literature and mythology. You’ve likely have heard of it, but no one explained it as technology you could use to facilitate change and success.

How do I use the Evolutionary Change™?

Start in the beginning-imagine what you want to create. Once you have a visceral sense of what you want to manifest-commit and go for it. At some point you will come to a place where you descend into your deep place of change, it may be a place you’ve never been. Catalyze what you want with your courage to risk. Here you let go of what was not working and surrender to what you want. Allow your new guides on this adventure to aid you. Once you find your magi-integrate it into your being and life. Then begin to share it.

Here are the five stages explained:

Imagine

Allow your dream to lead you

All adventures begin with intent. Your intent might be to shift a problem in your life. It might be to create change. There is always a purpose, a focus.

The clearer your vision, the more focused your energy will be for your adventure. We often move out of reaction. When you can slow down to feel what you really want, your focus becomes apparent. You may think it is to change one aspect of your life, yet after reflecting on your feelings, you begin to see there is more.

There are times when you just need to take that first step, and then you will know what you want. Movement begets awareness. Awareness begets clarity.

Alternatively, you may need to extract yourself from your chaos to slow down to feel so you really know what you want. Today in a world of high stress, we often run around reacting to whatever is occurring in the moment. We may believe we are in control of our lives, but at best, we are controlling the chaos.

Give yourself what you need to dream. Go back to your childhood and those dreams. Remember what you told yourself you wanted out of life. What do you want? Are you getting it? Dream big.

Let the images and feelings of what you want become your mandella that you focus on through your new adventure. It will change as you travel your adventure. You will learn more as you allow yourself to experience what this adventure brings you.

Commit

Begin the adventure, start your revolution of change

Now that you have a sense of what you want – just begin. This can be the hardest stage. You may find opportunities to do something else. There is always another crisis that needs your attention or another person.

What are your reasons not to start? What are your saboteurs? What takes you out of backing up your commitment with action? How bad does it have to get to move?

Life does a funny thing to us. If we don’t move, it moves us. How many times have you procrastinated only to act out of necessity? You may tell yourself that you don’t know what to do. You don’t want to mess up so you do more research. You want to get it right.

As you analyze the situation, the situation changes and you lose the opportunity and you are forced to respond in a way you rather not.

Get it wrong. Commit. Trust that even a wrong decision can lead to the right place.

How many times in your life has magic shown up because you didn’t do your normal thing? When you are moving, your life comes at you. The particular energy and movement of going for your dream is powerful. It might be scary for you. It is real – you are alive.

Catalyze

Create with help from the WR and its members

You know what you want. You are on the move to getting it. Now what?

This is where you change. This is where you do it differently than you have in the past, where you take risks. To get the result you want, you need to shift your behaviors. Easily said, not so easily done.

Old patterns show up particularly under the stress of change. Your head tells you to do it the old way or the way others do it. Yet, there is some deep part that is saying change, dare to be different. Your voices of the past are loud. What do you do?

You get help. If you get lost when traveling, you ask for help. You ask someone who knows the area to guide you to where you want to go. With guidance, you head off in a new direction with renewed confidence you will reach your destination.

The catalyzing occurs when you combine your vision of what you want with action to achieve it along with the input of something new. The help of others can be what causes change. You don’t need to do what others suggest, you just need to allow the new input to affect your adventure.

As in chemistry, the catalyst creates a reaction that would not exist without it. Allow the Whole Revolution and all its community to assist you at arriving to your new place.

Manifest

Integrate your creation into your success

Now that you are in a new place with your creation, you need to integrate your creation into who you are and your world. From your travels, you need to weave your experiences and gifts into your being. This means you will be different from the person who began the adventure. How do you meld these two people?

You may feel a need to speed through the integration of your experiences. There might be an urge to move on, to get to the next thing — don’t do it. Allow yourself the pleasure of deepening your experience. The desire to hurry can take you out of the full power of what you went through to arrive. To receive the largest return on your investment, you need to permit the natural assimilation of your learning.

Hang with others who have traveled a similar adventure. Share your stories. Ask them questions. Dream on where you’ve been. Honor yourself for all that you’ve accomplished.

The more you integrate, the more powerful the benefits from this adventure. What you learn will soak in deeply so that much of your learning will become unconscious; this is the deepest kind of learning.

You may need to rearrange your world to fit this new you. It’s similar to engaging in a new fitness program to the extent that your entire body changes causing you to buy new clothes. If a part of your life doesn’t fit, look at letting go of it.

Share

Apply your wisdom to changing your world

Once you have embodied your change, it is time to share it. Not only will this benefit others, it will enhance your change. As you share, you will receive reflections on how much you’ve changed.

Here you will adapt your new self to your world. You will be tested – you will occasionally fail. You will find yourself reverting to your old self, the one you left behind. That is good, you are learning.

Just as parts of your old self are being shed so may aspects of your old life. Friends may have a difficult time relating to you after your return from your adventure. It can be difficult letting go of a past that no longer serves you. It can get more intense if one of these friends attempts to bring back your old self rather than accept who you are now.

Your life will adjust, as you continually show up as your new self, you express this new self as you share. Out of this expression you’ll become comfortable in your changes. You settle in, your world tweaks itself to meet you.

Sharing your gifts is key to completing your adventure. It is often out of sharing that you receive the full importance of your adventure. Sharing what is precious to you renews you. Sharing your gift touches others in a deep way. They may decide they want what you. That desire can be the call for them to start their Whole Adventure.

Related posts:

1. Starting the Evolutionary Change – Begin Changing Your Life
2. How to Speed Deep Change
3. Why Change Doesn't Last?

Change requires determination, sometimes like that of a competitive endurance athlete. An article in National Geographic Adventure on how to get through adversity, tells the story of how Rosie Stancer attempted to be the first woman to travel solo to the North Pole. She didn’t achieve her goal, but she did survive—minus two toes while vowing to reattempt.

The article quotes Andrew Lane, Ph.D., a sports psychologist, who suggests concentrating on each movement. He goes on to say, “Relaxing your shoulders can help stop a cycle of vicious thoughts.” Breathing and being in the moment no matter how difficult it might be will reduce your stress and increase your performance. A stressed body never performs as well over time. The survival response as the stress response will get us out of harm’s way, but we aren’t meant to sustain that level of sympathetic nervous system output. Over time, our performance decreases if only because we become exhausted.

Another sports psychologist, David Coppel, Ph.D., speaks about how some athletes disassociate from their bodies to get through the event. Disassociation is a backup to being present; when you can’t handle something you check out. The problem is that you often don’t check back in. It’s true, you feel less pain but you will also feel less pleasure. Not being present is a set-up to injuries and getting lost.

Stress, in a sporting event or life, can teach you to check out. The problem is you can get so good at it that you don’t even know you aren’t present. Then one day you may wake up wondering how you got to where you are. Twenty-five years ago, I had a pediatric neurologist see me for Rolfing. About halfway through the ten sessions, he told me, “I am not who I wanted to be. I am someone else’s image of a life.” He gave up medicine to discover who he was and what he wanted from life. That took an act of bravery to come back into his body and his life.

The process of change can be difficult. Often the most difficult aspect is getting present. Once you are in your body, and feeling what is occurring in the moment, change occurs. For many, the first three stages of the Evolutionary Change™ are just about getting present. Re-associating and relaxing into whatever is happening can make your event more intense. It will keep you on your path ultimately increasing the chance of success.

Related posts:

1. How to Speed Deep Change
2. Are You Producing Radical Change?
3. Starting the Evolutionary Change – Begin Changing Your Life

What do you feel?

What do you want?

How often do you ask yourself these questions? How often do you ask others these questions—if you’re like me, probably not often enough.

These questions are the portals to knowing where you are and what to do about it. If you’re like the rest of us, you were trained to believe as Descartes said, “I think there for I am.” Focusing on your thinking distracts you from what you are feeling, from what your unconscious mind is experiencing. It is your unconscious, your emotions that really are the determiners of what drives you. Reasoning doesn’t work for a young child, and reasons don’t remove your feelings and wants. Reasoning just distracts or represses feelings and wants.

By acknowledging your deeper experience, you are giving power to the part of you that has wisdom beyond your intellectual mind. You are empowering the part of you that hungers for expression and fulfillment.

How often have you calculated what to do, and achieved it only to discover you’re weren’t satisfied? I’m not saying that you should appease your every emotion or desire, I’m suggesting that you start communicating with these parts. Much like a child who doesn’t get to express or get what he wants, often you will either sabotage or not enjoy what you get.

When I started the Sandpoint Men’s Groups back in 2003, I incorporated these two questions into the core of the group. Often when a man was stuck, another man would ask one of these questions to assist the man to go deeper into discovering what he was experiencing. Out of his new awareness, the man knew what he needed to do. Every man in the group might have seen what was needed. What the group learned was that by telling the man that something was not going to work—he wasn’t learning how to create on his own.

What do you feel?
Before anything, you must feel. Are you angry, sad, afraid, shamed or happy? Having a specific label is not important at this stage, being aware of the emotional quality is. If you’re not sure, check out your body. Where do you feel tension? Where are you holding your breath? What part of your body wants to act or is held back from acting?

These questions are guides into your feelings. Surrender to whatever you experience. Keep breathing and surrender more. Your feelings will have space to come up to be felt and acknowledged. Next, put a voice to these feelings. If you aren’t used to voicing your feelings, your voice may feel weak at first, that’s okay, you’re in training. You’re just experiencing how you’re out of shape; keep feeling and speaking.

You may feel shy about voicing your feelings, we all are. As with any skill, it becomes easier with practice and then automatic. I started out very shy as a result of my Asperger’s Syndrome, dyslexia and a speech impediment. As I spoke more of my feelings, I found my voice. To the chagrin of a few, I no longer hold back my feelings. You can do the same.

What do you want?
Now that you know what you feel—what do you want? Sometimes this transition happens naturally. You may feel sad; you may be grieving a loss.
Often you need to ask yourself specifically what you want. What will solve the problem, cause you to move forward or make you happy? Habit or enculturation will have you respond in ways that might not fulfill your want, so ask yourself.

Embrace your desires; put a voice to them. Like your feelings at first, communicating your wants may come out rough. Just keep expressing and it will get easier and smoother.

Ask others
As you perfect asking yourself these questions, ask others. When asked in a soft, curious manner the response you get can be amazing. Just think about it, how many times has someone asked you what you felt or wanted? I mean really asked—without an agenda; because they wanted to know, because they cared.

Offer your question to someone as if you are offering an appetizer. Let them take your offer, if they choose and then wait. Don’t re-ask it. Don’t rephrase it unless they ask for clarity. Don’t give them multiple chooses to help them. Don’t ask for a yes or no answer.

Ask as an open-ended question, and then wait. I know that waiting in the void is difficult but through the practice of asking yourself, you will become more comfortable waiting in silence. That silence is a huge gift. It is the invitation to the person to go deep, to express honestly and feel like what he or she says will be accepted.

By asking these two simple questions and then waiting, communication is often transformed. After asking their wives these questions and then listening, men come back astounded with how easy it was and how their communication shifted.

Just ask
As you develop the skill of asking yourself and others these questions, you will notice your decisions are better and take less energy to manage. More importantly, you will be happier and be getting more of what you want.

You may notice that women are better at the what do you feel and men are better at what do you want. You’ll also may notice that certain feelings and wants are easier than others to express. If you stay with it, this process will eventually be automatic. It will be as if you have an ongoing program operating in the background asking these questions.

Play with these questions; their power is in their simplicity. Let me know what you learn.

Photo:  zaQography via Flickr

Related posts:

1. The Two Questions That Can Save a Marriage

I bet you’ve never thought about using a particular strategy about untying a knot, you just do it. But, let’s take a look at how you would go about this in a successful manner and think how it may be a metaphor for other things.

You discover a stubborn knot in some rope that you need to use. Cutting it is not an option, so what do you do?

1. You don’t sit there analyzing the problem. You start playing with it to see if there is an easy way.
2. You begin to push back on the tight areas to loosen their hold on the rope.
3. You feel for what is moving, what is releasing.
4. You make mistakes. One unwinding may only create another knot.
5. You persist.
6. You keep pushing and pulling until you get a release.
7. You use one release to get the next release.
8. You continue until the knot is completely released.

Some observations from untangling many knots in fishing lines:

1. You have to give the knot your complete attention
2. Knots weaken the line and can cause it to break
3. Sometimes it’s hard to see the knots and you have to put on your glasses or use a magnifying glass
4. Sometimes a second person makes it easier as they can hold things but best if they don’t try to help
5. Continued use of a line with knots will lead to more problems
6. Line needs to be replaced on a periodic basis
7. Sometimes a tool, i.e. something with a sharp point, is needed to separate things
8. Line sometimes has a memory of where a knot has been

We often over analyze a problem hoping that if we can figure it out, we will quickly solve it. If there is a way to calculate an easy path to resolution, great. But often you don’t have the needed information until you start unwinding the knot.

How do you unwind your knots?

Art: Wikimedia

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