This article is partly a synopsis of the whitepaper: how-to-operate-your-brain-perfectly-v10.pdf

This article follows on from: Fundamental Control of Your Mind - Part I

Fundamental Control of Your Mind - Part II

I began my process of resetting myself to deal with my reality and to build progress upon the ‘real’ me by admitting that, based upon the results that I had in my life, I did not have what it takes to achieve my aspirations. It didn’t matter how high an opinion I had of myself or what difficulties I had so far encountered, my real world results revealed the truth. If you too have reached a similar juncture in life and can admit to yourself that you need to change your approach and maybe change yourself then you can follow the same process that I went through to get a better grip on your personal reality and then figure out how to move forward purposefully and pragmatically.

List Your Aspirational Desires

By aspirational desires I mean your ambitions, your desires for money, for business, for career, for relationships, for possessions, for lifestyle and so forth. If you don’t want to run through everything then just start with those few (or the one) that grip you the most right now. Then assess each desire according to the following questions:

• Can I physically create this desire in the real world? Sometimes we just have notions too fantastic to actually occur and we need to recognise this and cease setting it as a desire.
• What probability exists that I can make this happen within a timescale that I feel willing to commit to? When I ask myself this I don’t take a mathematical approach to assessing probabilities. I do it based upon how many factors can I definitely control and how many remain out of my control that must occur in order to fulfil the desire. I also assess the level of competition, expertise, experience, skill, intelligence and creativity involved or required. I do this more intuitively than with detailed analysis at this stage. Usually, the more rare the occurrence of the desired outcome, the higher the rewards it proffers, the more competition involved, the more barriers to entry it has, the more ‘gatekeepers’ to advancement involved, etc, the more difficult and hence more improbable it becomes. That doesn’t mean that I won’t commit to outcomes over which I will have to overcome many obstacles to achieve fulfilment. I simply want to get a realistic assessment so that I can prepare myself and not enter into foolhardy adventures of high effort, high risk and little chance of fulfilment.
• Do I have the basic competencies needed to fulfil this desire? This requires an assessment of personal resources such as the time, money, intelligence, basic skills and problem solving abilities and experience. If you don’t have them then you will not fulfil your desire.
• Do I have the specialist competencies needed to fulfil this desire? Many specific desires require some form of specialist competency to fulfil – such as a specific skill, specific knowledge, and so on. If you don’t have them then you will not fulfil your desire.
• Can I develop the necessary competencies within a timescale that I feel willing to commit to? If fulfilment of the desire requires competencies that I don’t currently have then I assess whether I can get them, buy them, hire them, exchange them or personally develop them either before or during the process of fulfilment. Committing to fulfil a desire without the necessary resources or competencies from the beginning increases the risk of failure and we do better to have a full awareness of this from the beginning so that we can deal with it rather than to deny it and grind to a halt or quit later.
• Do I commit to fulfilling this desire because I enjoy carrying out the processes involved in its fulfilment or because I simply want the outcome? I consider this a very crucial question. If I commit to achieving a long-term Pinnacle Goal solely for the outcome (money, prestige, possessions etc) then the process often becomes a numbing slog. I find it better to follow the direction that the development and acting out of processes takes me in. I allow my natural interests, curiosity and competencies to guide both my progress and my rate of progress. In my experience a joyful thing can quickly turn into a slog if I attach all sorts of demands and expectations to fulfil very specific desires. Those outcome desires set up parameters in my mind so that an inability to fulfil those desires, whatever the reason, causes negative emotions of varying types and intensities that can quickly turn a pleasurable process into a drudge. Most things of pleasurable interest develop that way because I set up few, if any, overarching expectations and because I mostly control the outcome solely by myself. As soon as I change that attitude I open up an incredibly high risk of not fulfilling my desires according to my specifications with the result of feeling bad and then immobilised.

Once you have gone through this process you can re-design your aspirational desires so that they fit these questions. You want to end up committing to possible desires with a highly-probability of fulfilment based solely upon your current competencies and by carrying out processes that you enjoy or at least that you can perform consistently and contentedly for the necessary duration. You will probably still have aspirational desires that require further development of your competencies and resources so that you have the power to carry them out. You don’t have to give those up but you do have to bow to the fact that they will never become possible until you develop those competencies. Hence you must commit to self-development and achieve the necessary competencies before you can expect to fulfil such desires. Keep those aspirations ticking over in the background but don’t expect fulfilment until you prove capable of doing the things necessary to fulfil them.

Identify Your Needs and Eliminate Them

After reading and pondering over Wayne Dyer’s book, “Your Erroneous Zones,” I came to understand that every time we set-up or perceive a need for something that, by default, we create a dependency upon factors outside of ourselves for the fulfilment of our desires. This inability to personally deliver a desire, because we cannot control the external factors involved, sets up neurotic behaviour and it sets up a system that will automatically create negative emotions. Needs differ from aspirational desires as they tend to have a continuous influence whereas aspirational desires have more of a one-off project type basis. We can, if necessary, simply give up aspirational desires in order to remove their immobilising impact. This doesn’t happen so easily with neurotic needs so we first need to identify them and then eliminate the dependency upon external fulfilment. I list the common problems that immobilise many people so that you can consider your personal desires in relationship to these things.

Placing responsibility for decisions and outcomes upon other people

Low self-esteem and beating up on ourselves

Need for approval

Need to support an identity or image

Guilt and Worry

Need for security

Need for certainty

Need to conform

Need for fairness

Need for other people and things to behave according to personal rules and expectations

Wayne’s book details the behaviours, the reasons for indulging in them and how to overcome them. I have a simple way to overcome needs and hence neurotic behaviour. I simply reject those needs and don’t set them up as desires to aspire to, i.e. I choose desires that I can personally fulfil without recourse to other people or other things fulfilling those desires. I also take a very realistic and pragmatic view of things so that I don’t seek fulfilment of desires that are impossible to fulfil, such as quickly accepting the effects of real world actions that give a bad result so I don’t spend a lot of time feeling guilty. Consequently, I either never generate the resultant emotions or else I quickly understand that my reality has not met my desire, accept that and adjust to that without fuss and bother. Very often, if and when that happens, I follow up by considering the desire that caused the emotional response and I often remove it as a desire. I usually do this by changing it to a preference, rather than a ‘must have’ need.

As a basic rule of thumb, any desire that you aspire to have or feel that you must have and over which you cannot fully control the fulfilment will end up as a need and fulfilment will depend on other people or other things. This will generally cause you stress and negative emotions because your reality will often fail to deliver the desire. Subsequently, if you want to live a life without stress, without negative emotion and with high levels of contentment and productive activity then you must only aspire to desires or needs for yourself that you can control so that you have a very high level of ability and probability to fulfil such needs and desires in the vast majority of cases.

Work Around Your Beliefs

Whenever and wherever I can, I avoid holding beliefs. We can describe a belief as an imagined fact. A poorly conceived belief can simply have too much influence over personal interpretations of events and subsequent behaviour. Due to the emotive nature of beliefs I do not ask you to change them. Instead I suggest that you re-design your desires in a very pragmatic way so that the fulfilment of them does not depend upon a belief holding true. Set up your desires so that they have physical, earthly outcomes with processes and solutions to those outcomes dependent upon your own personal capabilities and upon established facts and principles that consistently work in reality.

Manage Your Expectations, Standards and Rules

Our expectations, which tend to dictate by default our standards and rules, affect us less as specific events but more as parameters by which we judge our personal performance, behaviours and outcomes in reality. I personally find them more difficult to identify and to eliminate. With a specific event it becomes clear what caused emotions to spring forth and hence to work backward to that event and the desires involved and hence to understand how to solve that problem. Expectations create the framework of our ‘should do’, ‘must do’, and ‘ought to do’ general parameters by which we interpret our actions and results. I tend to notice them at work on myself when I feel listless and vaguely unsatisfied but can’t quite put my finger on the cause. As a result I have to infer that I subconsciously judge myself according to an expectation. To get to the root cause I generally start writing about how I feel and what would cause me to feel better and to feel satisfied. Through inference, I start to build up a picture of the reasons why I don’t feel good and the standards against which I judge myself start to become apparent.

Once I have revealed these things to myself then I can question the expectation and determine whether I can possibly fulfil it (either physically or logically) and whether I have a high or low probability of fulfilling it. I still find it amazing how many impossible, highly illogical or improbable expectations I used to labour under. I know if I have hit the spot with this kind of analysis and reframing when my cheerfulness returns to me.

Massive Relief

The key to managing your mind lies in managing your desires. All of the things that you analyse in the processes described above we can describe as forms of desire. A need creates a desire for external fulfilment. A belief creates a desire that an imagined point holds true as a fact in reality. An expectation creates a desire for fulfilment of a condition.

Once you get clear about the desires and needs, and the beliefs and expectations that cause negative emotions to well up within you (with their results of either immobilisation, destructive or distractive or desperate behaviours), then you can reset those factors so that you can control your outcomes for most of the time. Reset all of those factors to a level or condition where you have the real possibility to fulfil them by yourself. You must do this process because unfulfilled desires create all negative emotion and impossible, or improbable, to fulfil desires create conditions that result in states of permanent negative emotion.

Once you go through this process, you should feel absolutely massive relief from the emotional stresses that seemed to control you at almost every small step in your life. Once you realise that so many of your desires, needs, beliefs and expectations caused you to almost continually commit to doing the impossible or the improbable, you begin to understand why you felt so many negative emotions and why you felt so perplexed and ‘put upon’ for so long. Once you remove the impossible factors from your desires, you reset your emotional guidance system and because you have created massive possibility in your life through removing all of that impossibility then you have turned things around. Instead of your emotions controlling you, you now have the power to control your emotions through careful, and often meticulous, precision in how you construct your desires. Instead of battling against yourself and needing to develop strong character to overcome your reticence you end up working in easy harmony with yourself. The symptoms of negative emotions come to an abrupt stop and you can get on with living a highly productive and cheerful life.

This article is partly a synopsis of the whitepaper: how-to-operate-your-brain-perfectly-v10.pdf

 Fundamental Control of Your Mind Part 1

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