Now why would I do that?
We receive roughly 2 million bits of information per second from the world around us through our senses. Our subconscious mind filters this information down to about 126 bits per second, which is far more manageable. That means that roughly 1,999,874 bits of information from our environment is either deleted, distorted or generalized in some way.
Ever heard the phrase "Seeing is believing?" What is more accurate is "believing is seeing". Your subconscious is filtering information out of your experience that is not congruent with what you believe. There is a part of our brain called the reticular activing system that does this.
We have all experienced this in action. The classic example is your friend gets a new car and all of a sudden you see that color and model everywhere you go. Did everyone get the same car at the same time as your friend? Not likely. However, due to a change in your experience your RAS has now freed new information to pass through to your consciousness. That's pretty handy.
How can you use this to your advantage to create some change in your life? Through asking better questions. Our subconscious mind is an eager servant. When you ask yourself questions, your RAS will begin to filter through all that data to find answers. If you don't like what you are seeing, it is time to change the station!
I attended an Integrative NLP Practitioner Certification® Training April 29th through May 5th. It was a great experience and I certainly learned a lot. During one of the lectures by Dr. Matt James he mentioned a study by Richard Wiseman. Richard Wiseman conducted a 10 year scientific study on our beliefs about luck and the manifestion of it in our lives. I found that particularly interesting because I do believe that what we see is determined by what we believe. It is a self-fullfilling prophecy.
According to Richard Wiseman, from his article published in the Skeptical Inquirer May/June 2003:
"My research revealed that lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."
I immediately put this to the test! I began combining the question "How did I get so lucky?" with my nighttime FasterEFT affirmation tapping routine and asking myself the question any and every time I thought of it during the day.
Not even a week later I noticed changes. The first one that I became conscious of was walking out of Petsmart and hearing myself say, out loud "Wow, how did I get so lucky?" Everything I needed that day was either 20% off, buy one get one free, or marked down. When I heard my own voice I stopped short and realized what I said and what had just come to pass. It was working.
What would you like to see different? How can you ask better questions to adjust what your RAS filters in? What we want is out there, the evidence we see merely supports what we believe to be true. Basically we see what we look for.
This classic video demonstrates it in a very clear way:
How did you do? I missed it the first time too. This is a great example of missing the obvious based on what we are looking for. What we look for is based on our focus and our beliefs.
Here's a short and clear video about how your reticular activating system works:
You can read Richard Wiseman's article in full here: http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
Thank you for reading!
-Nicola
No comments:
Post a Comment