Personal Power II – Day 3

Today’s lesson was all about “Neuro-Associations” and how they shape our destiny.  As I touched upon in yesterday’s post about day 2, we are all driven by the twin forces of “Pleasure” and “Pain”.  “Neuro-Associations” are the mental associations that are created in our brains throughout our lives.

Marketers spend billions of dollars a year utilizing “Neuro-Associative Conditioning” methods to link certain things in our brains with other things.  For example, beer commercials often try to associate drinking beer with parties and beautiful women in bikini’s and youth.  When  you go to the store and pickup a 6-pack of beer and take it home, do you really believe that all of a sudden a group of bikini-babes is going to show up at your house to party with you?  No, but it doesn’t matter.  The association between beer and having a good time is already subconsciously conditioned in your brain and you buy the beer with that association even if you’re not consciously aware of it.

Another example I have recently seen on TV is the commercials for Nutella.  I love Nutella.  It’s hazelnut chocolate spread in a jar!  What’s not to love about that.  However, even though I love eating it once in a while, I have never once considered that the product I am eating is in any way healthy for me.  I saw it the same as eating a chocolate bar.  Recently, however, I’ve started seeing commercials on TV talking about Nutella being a healthy part of starting a day out right for children.  When I first saw this I thought it was hilarious, because I didn’t think that marketers actually had the kahoona’s to try to convince us that chocolate in a jar is healthy for us or our children.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the stuff, but I just didn’t think that people would actually fall for thinking that the stuff is healthy.

However, after seeing the commercial dozens and dozens of times, they kept showing the product and the “healthy” ingredients going into it and at a deeper down level the thing actually started to infiltrate my subconscious mind.  Today, if you put a jar of peanut butter and a jar of Nutella in front of me, and asked me to tell you which one is healthier without thinking about it, I would immediately tell you that Nutella is healthier even though I have no idea which one is healthier.  If you put a jar of strawberry jam and Nutella in front of me, I might choose Nutella as well.  I really have no clue which one is healthier, or which one has less sugar to tell you the truth, I would have to run upstairs and check the labels, but without checking labels I might actually pick Nutella as the winner.  Now that’s the power of Neuro-Associative Conditioning.

Marketers are conditioning our brains all day long.  We can’t escape it.  It’s not just marketers either.  Our parents, society, the media, Blogs, websites, music lyrics, etc. are all conditioning our brains.  You can’t escape it if you wanted to.

The trick is not to try to run away from the world, but rather to grab control of your “Neuro-Associations”.  In today’s lesson I went through and identified some associations I’ve made in my life that have had a positive effect on my life, and some that have been disempowering me.  Tomorrow’s lesson is going to teach how to re-program those associations, but the first step is to become aware of them.

Is All This Compatible With Law of Attraction?

As I go through this course I’m spending a lot of time contemplating how the things that Tony Robbin’s teaches align with the teachings of the Law of Attraction, such as for example the stuff you might read from Esther Hicks / Abraham books.

For example, yesterday I was doing the exercise where I sat down and wrote out the “Pain” I might experience if I didn’t follow through and make certain changes in my life in a particular area.  Normally I focus on the positive side of the coin, but Tony talked about getting clear on the negative side of not doing what you desire to do as well.

At first this worried me a bit because the Law of Attraction teachers say that if we focus on a negative thing we will attract it into our lives.  However, I had a huge realization today that made me see past this.  I’ll have to use an example in order to explain otherwise it’s going to be difficult to speak in hypotheticals.

Let’s take an example from my Theme for 2009 post I wrote earlier this year.  One of the things I want to do this year is to clean and organize my office.  Previously, I would simply try to visualize the benefits of having a clean and organized office.  What Tony suggests is that I also connect to the negative side of not implementing this.  Let me dive into this example so you can see what I mean.

Here is how I approached this previously:

Desired Action: Clean, Organize and Maintain an Organized Home Office

Benefits If I Do This (Pleasure): Easier and quicker to find things.  Cleaner environment will inspire more ideas in me.

That would be more or less how I would approach this in the past.  With Tony’s work we dive in deeper:

Desired Action: Clean, Organize and Maintain an Organized Home Office

Benefits If I Do This (Pleasure): Easier and quicker to find things.  Cleaner environment will inspire more ideas in me.

What’s the Worst That Could Happen If I Don’t (Pain):  A lot of time will be wasted that I could spend doing more exciting things.  I could miss out on opportunities due to not being able to find things in time.  I could subconsciously start to limit the amount of projects I work on that I enjoy due to not being able to organize myself.  The mess could act as a negative metaphor which makes it harder for me to organize my thoughts.  I could miss out on opportunities to work with people or invite friends over when they call and my office is messy.

See how this works?

Now at first this may seem counter-intuitive, because doesn’t the Law of Attraction start to attract all those things I wrote out under the “Pain” section?  Well, yes it would if I focused on all that stuff which is EXACTLY what I have been attracting subconsciously without realizing it.  Meaning, all that stuff I just wrote out there under the “Pain” section had to come from somewhere, right?  It was already in my subconscious mind, I just wrote it out.  Well, if that stuff is already there in my subconscious mind, then it’s already “attracting” all that negative stuff.  So, getting clear on the “Negative” aspects of what will happen if you don’t do something isn’t going to make you attract it any more since it’s already there buried in your mind.

Bringing it to the surface, isn’t going to make it any worse.  In fact, now that I brought it to the surface I can use it as contrast to create and focus on the opposite of that.  So, everything I wrote out as a “negative” I can take its opposite and put it under the “positive” column.  Meaning, organizing myself isn’t just going to make it easier and quicker to find things and inspire more ideas in me.  It’s also going to provide more time for me to do more exciting things, and it’s going to subconsciously allow me to handle more exciting projects, and it’s going to allow me to be able to connect with anyone I want to invite to my house without having to worry if my office happens to be clean etc.

All the negatives can now be re-written
as positive and by focusing on those positives we begin to attract those by the Law of Attraction.

Now, we go even further and I have to also ask myself what associations I have linked to cleaning and organizing my office.  Meaning, I have to get clear on what I have been associating with cleaning and organizing my office all along, for years, long before starting these exercises.  Here’s what I came up with:

Desired Action: Clean, Organize and Maintain an Organized Home Office

Previous Associations:

• when I’m cleaning and organizing I feel like I’m wasting my time
• I could be doing more productive work
• why put all this stuff away when I need it all at my finger tips
• I don’t have a place to put everything.  Meaning a lot of stuff doesn’t yet have a spot
• etc.

You see all the “negative” associations I’ve had with organizing and cleaning my office, desk etc.?  Well, as silly as some of these may sound, they have been sitting in my subconscious mind all along.  So, whenever I thought about cleaning and organizing, the FEELING that these beliefs were producing in me would not allow me to attract cleanliness and organization in my home office.

There are some really profound and fundamental lessons to be learned here with all this “Pleasure” and “Pain” and “Neuro-Associative Conditioning” that Tony Robbins talks about, as they relate to the Law of Attraction.  See, if you want to leave your job and start your own business for example, but you have deep neuro-associations of pain linked with starting a business that you aren’t even aware of, then as soon as you start thinking about starting your own business you instantly start to push it away from yourself because you link pain to it.

You can consciously say “I want to start my own business” and wonder why you’re having trouble attracting that reality, and the reason could very well be that you have very deep subconscious associations of pain associated with business or you starting a business.  For example, maybe a friend of yours started a business and it ended up costing him his marriage.  Or maybe you once started a business and your friends all laughed at you.  There could be a million negative associations people could make with starting a business even if they aren’t true.

This lesson has definitely made me think about a lot of things in a different light.  There is definitely a lot of overlapping wisdom that I am seeing between the stuff that Robbins teaches and the stuff you’ll find in the Law of Attraction books like “The Science of Getting Rich” or Esther Hicks / Abraham books.

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