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Why you shouldn’t trust muscletesting for most things
Why you should not trust your doctor, your nutritionist, your muscletesting…
Mental Representation…
…an incredibly useful distinction and an incredibly rare capacity
I loved the book ‘Peak, the new science of expertise‘, until almost the very end. Then I got angry.
Somewhere around 90% of that book I noticed that he uses an expression, a phrase, that means something to him, the author, but meant nothing to me.
Now I know how you feel when you read my articles…
The expression he used was ‘Mental Representation‘.
He never quite explained what it was, and my mind was screaming bloody murder for a few days.
I felt it was important, I felt that without that the whole book is just letters and lines, and useless words in random order.
But curiosity made me fire up the hunting dog part of me, and instructed it to find it… it must be there, even if I can’t see it.
I started to have dreams that fell apart the moment I opened my eyes. I got glimpses that I didn’t quite catch… it was maddening, if you ask me.
Then finally a glimpse I could hold onto.
My story
You see, a week or so ago I did something stupid and hurt my ear. It was bleeding, it was hurting, and I could hardly hear anything through that ear.
I managed to give this injury only as much attention as it deserved, and continue life, working, webinars.
Then I went to the chiropractor. Nothing special, I go every Tuesday. He insisted that I let him look into my wounded ear with his handy dandy ear scope. I wasn’t too eager… but he was persistent.
He looked and ‘pronounced’ that I punctured my ear drum. He suggested that I go to a specialist.
I immediately felt worse… the power of suggestion, lol, but declined to go to a specialist.
At home I went deep inside and looked at my ear again from there. I tested my hearing by rubbing my fingers together at different distances from my ear.
I disagreed with him. I ‘saw’ how my ear was, and my ear drum was not punctured, the air didn’t hit my inner ear. And now, a week later, my hearing is 100% on that ear, and I am well, though the wound is still healing…
Now, why am I sharing this with you?
Because I created a Mental Representation of my ear, including my inner ear, much like an ultrasound, an x-ray, and other diagnostic methods do. And compared what I saw with what I knew must be… I looked up some pictures on the web.
Aha… Mental Representation is like a model that shows the thing in full bloom, healthy, as intended… that you can compare with how it is.
As you can see, the chiropractor with his scope, and his ‘knowledge of anatomy’, saw what he saw, but misinterpreted it.
His mental representation was faulty
I started to see a corner of what that until that point meaningless phrase could mean.
Then I remembered that somewhere in the book he talks about a swimmer. A swimmer who started to improve, dramatically, when she created Mental Representations of her stroke, her angle, her breathing, compared the Mental Representation with how they were in actuality, and started to adjust each to the model she just created… And the swimmer did that, gradually, to an ever increasing perfection.
Hah… I am starting to see it more.
You envision a result, and then you get to it by adjusting what you do, what you have to do to to bring reality and the perfect Mental Representation to match.
And you can do it in any area of life where you want to achieve more results than your current actions give you.
In some way the Japanese Kaizen methodology, invented by an American! does this.
The workers know how the finished product should look. They know what each part should look. They know that the process should be smooth. So when a process is clunky… they give feedback to management, and the clunkiness is smoothed out.
You can go from underachiever to overachiever in 20 steps…
…by adjusting 20 elements of your process to more perfect, if you have a mental representation of perfection… if…
You can do it in any area.
One area where I am try to help people to do that is what they put in their mouths, to get well, get back to perfection to the degree they can.
I am using my feelings AND muscletesting while I am connected to both to them and to Source to do that.
- I have a 90-essential-nutrients-list-according-to-Joel-Wallach.
- I know a lot about Ayurveda body types. Vata, Pitta, Kapha.
- I know a lot about the blood type diet.
- I know a lot about the different types of eating styles from the Human Design modality.
- And I can I recognize gluten intolerance, indigestion, fructose intolerance, incorrect food combining,
…because I know what they look like: I have the correct Mental Representation of each.
How I do it?
I do a session on the phone or in email. I make the recommendations, and do a checkup two weeks later.
And just like with everything, your interpretation of what I said is approximate… and often you don’t like, you don’t agree with what I recommend. So to take someone to full health may take many many many adjustments.
Doctors, nutritionists, and other charlatans…
And just like the chiropractor’s diagnosis of my ear’s condition was incorrect, I can see that a lot of doctors’ diagnosis, a lot of nutritionists’ diagnosis of what is happening in your body, what is making you feel bad, bloated, have pain, be weak, tense, lazy, or stupid is incorrect AND also expensive.
Your mental representation can be only as good as the truth value of your knowledge.
- The best medical professionals base their diagnosis on a knowledge base that has 7% truth value… or as much as they have absorbed from it. Mostly lower…
- Nutritionists base their diagnosis and suggestions on a knowledge base that has only 3% truth value. Pure b.s. if you ask me.
The financial skewing factor
And I haven’t even talked about the financial skewing factor: recommending, unconsciously, the methods that make them the most money.
The body is a system that wants to perpetuate itself… not get well, but to remain the same.
Muscletesting is a good example of how wrong current knowledge is.
When you ask the body to tell the truth about what it needs to get well, you get a lie 99% of the time.
The body that is in homeostasis is going to tell you how to keep it in homeostasis, even though the homeostasis may mean one leg remains shorter than the other, or that you are severely out of balance nutritionally. I know that from my personal experience.
The body is not a good adviser, no matter how much you wish it were.
I have experimented, and have found that the answer the body gives is different from what I get when I ask Source aka All-Knowledge.
Source has a mental representation of a perfectly balanced healthy body, and it gives me the answers from that.
The body has a mental representation of the body remaining how the body is… crooked, ill, out of balance.
This is why I have said before: you eat what you are… the body wants more of what it already is. Sick, out of balance…
Because it is all according to the mental representation… The genes, that give the body its answers, have only a mental representation of the homeostasis it is in… Physically, intellectually, spiritually.
Deadly.
One other area where I see that this capacity is making you like a bird with broken wings is planning your life.
When I ask ‘J’ what would her relationship looked like if she give him respect and dropped her superiority?
She has no clue.
When I ask ‘J’, a different ‘J’, what his success looks like in his chosen endeavor: he jumps to fame and acclaim… nothing between here and there. Not a useful mental representation, the end result lacks the details that are necessary to get there. Remember? Mental Representation is detailed… very detailed. And it is always the Kaizen method (trimtabbing in other words) that takes you there.
When you look at Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet, you have NO IDEA what steps they had to go through to become who they are, how they are, how they do what they do.
Because the end result gives you no clues. It is not detailed enough.
One new book I am reading, called Will it Fly? is an excellent tool to develop your Mental Representation of your life, if you have ambition to be more. More happy, more deserving, more at ease, more accomplished.
I put the book to the paid members area. It’s brilliant. And it will prepare you for me to turn on the capacity of Mental Representation if you are serious about becoming an Expanding Human Being.
PS: The delusion of the many armed goddess
One mistake, similar to the second ‘J’s is to think that the result is one big jump away. One big push.
And that, combined with hasty, combined with eager, combined with a superiority urge… creates a complete inability to get from A to B… or even to get from A to A1.
And that to have not one One Thing, but many.
In the morning I’ll work on my discipline. Around lunch time I’ll work on my attentiveness. In the afternoon I’ll be kind. And in the evening I’ll be a maven… Or whatever the inner conversation of this type of failure is.
There are three types of failures:
1. who doesn’t do anything
2. who doesn’t do much or quits too soon
3. and our friend here, the ‘overachiever’ who considers herself the goddess of many arms…
I have a representation of each of these… but maybe the most is the third kind.
In the skill building method you can take on learning to create a Mental Representation of the result you want, find all the ways you are not that, and endeavor to adjust what you do, what you think, what you say, to that Mental Representation… in the area you would like to get better at.
The skill building challenge has three guidance principles:
- you work on a project that has a specific and measurable result, preferably in time.I can be a behavior, it can be a financial result, it can be a health result… Really anything worth working towards.
- You look at what skill it requires to produce, and what the skill when it’s perfect looks like. This is the mental representation you are going for. The many how’s of the skill.
- And the One Thing that it is all inside of, the One Thing that you will have as the context.
Your default One Thing, your default context is your racket.
Unless you are skillful at creating your One Thing, your whole skill building process will come from your racket.
Here are some examples:
- the client with the many armed goddess delusion: her racket is: she is not a match to life. So she is going to try to do many things and fail to prove that she is not a match to life.
Her useful One Thing would be: ‘I am enough‘. Strong enough, smart enough to learn, to get things done, maybe enough even to win…
2. Another client whose racket is ‘I can’t. I am weak. I am left behind‘ will prove it to himself that same thing, unless he picks a useful One Thing.
‘With every little win I get stronger‘ would be one useful One Thing for him.
3. A third client has a racket that says ‘I am worthless‘ and even when she wins doesn’t change it, because the racket doesn’t change.
Unless she picks a useful One Thing, she will remain worthless, no matter what she accomplishes. Even if she can recognize all the hundred different ways a lung can sound. She is an RN.
A possible One Thing could be: ‘I increase my worth with my actions‘ to create the context of her learning those darn lung sounds… lol.
OK, if this sounds interesting and worth your time to invest in, then you can sign up to the Skill Building Challenge.
Half, 50% of the challenge is done in the preparation: defining the three different components: the project, the skill, and the One Thing.
Get better, get bigger, get happier
