Training Your Brain To Speed Up Success

In the past few posts I’ve talked about how important it is to change your focus from what you don’t want to what it is you do want from your body. So now that you have (hopefully) worked on making peace with where you are so you stop negative signals affecting your brain and neurochemistry and you have turned your focus to what it is you do want as an end result you now want to have something you can do on a daily basis to help you maintain a positive focus. Keeping a positive focus helps you reinforce the new neural patterns you’ve created in your brain (neuroplasticity) as well as keeping your chemical and energetic balance in a place that will allow success to happen at a faster pace.

One of the best things you can do to keep yourself in a positive focus is to continue looking for little bits evidence of success—kind of like baby steps (you may not be there now but that doesn’t mean you can’t see yourself on your way bit by bit). Now that you know what success should look like (your end goal) you should have a concept of what things will start to look like and feel like while you are on your way. Think of it like being on the road to a vacation destination—you should have an idea of what it is like to be where you are going (like going to a beach resort from a colder climate). As you are on the road you would be noticing things that are indicators that you are on your way. Like knowing which cities and states you will have to pass through and what the weather in each area might display. You might notice different vegetation or a different smell in the air. Point is, even though you are not at your final destination you are noticing the small things that tell you that you are on your way. Even when you are far away you can be looking forward rather than looking at where you started.

The same thing can be applied to your body now that you know where you are going. Continue looking for little things that show you that you are on your way. There are plenty of things that you can look at to see that you are still closer to where you don’t want to be than where you do want to be but what you notice is a choice. Looking at where you started would be like noticing you are only 50 miles out of Chicago when you are your way to Miami rather than seeing that you are 50 miles closer to Miami. When you start looking for evidence of success you will not only train your brain to continue looking for more of it but you will continue to put your brain and neurochemistry in a state that will help those successes come faster. Even if you only have 10% improvement, you could either continue looking at the remaining 90% and perpetuate that or teach yourself to see the 10% improvement and build on that. However, if you don’t teach yourself to look for anything different your brain’s filter (called your Reticular Activating System—RAS) will always seek out the thing you taught it to focus on, which is more than likely the things that you consider problems.

Think of looking for any evidence of success as a way to program your brain (including your RAS) and neurochemistry to behave the way you want it to. In a previous post I talked about how our actions often reflect our programming, which comes from our dominant focus. If you are focused on getting away from what you don’t want you will continue to be led to do things that match those images—focus on fat and the actions you will resonate with the most will be things that keep you fat. When you focus on being lean and healthy and find little bits of evidence of it you will be thinking in a way that matches activities—like exercise and eating well—that will help you get there faster. You are basically training yourself to think like a person who is already successful. Imagine what someone who is already at the place you want to be thinks about their body and how they feel to be in it. Those are the things you want to look for—even if it’s just a little more shape in your shoulders or a tighter calf muscle. Use the areas that already resemble what you want the rest of your body to look like as a resource to focus upon. Places like your forearms are typically leaner than most areas of your body. You may have other areas you already love. Spending some time admiring those lean areas will help you resonate with success. The more you resonate with success the more you are programming yourself for success.

Your brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised and fed the right things too!

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