All thought that does not lead to action, said Goethe, is a disease. It’s like the Dalai Lama’s 3 levels of knowledge: Hear. Comprehend. Do. And do it until it becomes second nature… but not until then.
How is your brain pruning going?
I’ve known a lot if people in my long life. I have spent time with all kinds… Decades in off-color company.
One period I spent my time with gay people, men, in one of the one-time gay playgrounds of the world, Budapest. Party crowd… it was fun. Hard to achieve anything in the world, but fun… mostly.
Some of it wasn’t fun. I was a girl… And I was not gay. So their sex parties weren’t fun for me.
One person I met there was a young male prostitute with thick foundation (makeup) had syphilis. He wore the makeup to cover the lesions on his face.
And this article is interested in that coverup…
Because looking to cover up the syphilitic lesions, ignorance, evil inclination, seems to me that today, fifty years later, it has become the culture.
I don’t mean literally. Syphilis is still rare, albeit growing again, and most of my followers aren’t adventurous enough to contract the disease. No. Most of my followers are plodding pedestrians trying to look spiritual, trying to look worldly, trying to look hip.
What makes your world (and brain) shrinking, your curiosity disappearing, and your soul dying?
Don’t be knowledgeable… pretend to be.
What made humanoids brain grow is the unpredictability of their environment. The more external stimuli they were exposed, the more they were able to deal with. And the individuals who could were the ones that survived long enough to procreate.
Today we experience the opposite.
As your sense of security increases, as you need your brain less and less to survive, the number of connections in your brain get smaller and smaller, rendering your brain connections to prune.
Pruning is when the brain kills unused connections and branches in your brain, to save energy.
The more connections and branches you have in your brain, the more brain power you have to be able to think constructively, problem solving, comprehending, making connections, and telling the difference between seemingly same things.
When I measure your starting point measurements, I measure your brain as well: ultimately your quality of life will depend on your brain.
I work with students and coaching clients.
When you think of coaching, I bet you think it is telling someone what to do. But that is not coaching.
Coaching is transferring all the power to the client, so they can make better decisions, so they can build a life for themselves they can love.
Coaches that tell you what to do are like your mother who prepare you to get dumber.
The more danger your mother allows you to be exposed to, the more influences, the more activities with the more efforts, the more your brain can develop.
The bruises and hurts you experience as you grow up are badges of honor.
The more restricted your activities, the less your brain will develop, the more pruning will happen.
I did something some seven years ago, that has caused a lot of pruning in certain parts of my brain: I started to specialize in seeing through the invisible. I redirected most of my activities to seeing through feeling/sensing.
Today I am having a serious problem learning a software application, or following a technical process, that used to be my profession.
In some significant ways I have become dumber, while in others I have become extraordinary.
What have YOUR activities caused YOUR brain to do?
Probably not much.
But here are a few interesting measurements I am making as I am writing this article:
- One of my clients has increased her brain power by 10%. What did she do? Honestly, none of it was her choice, and yet it worked. She was uprooted from the state where she was born. Moved to a state and then another state. The 10% increase in brain power allowed her to become a lot more intelligent, perceptive, and be willing to follow simple instructions that were impossible for her in her home state… 10%… amazing, isn’t it?
- Another client has grown his brain power by 50%. You can only imagine how much difference that makes.
- A third: 20%.
- A fourth: 30%.
I, as a coach, first need to increase the power they have available, the clarity, the ability to connect the dots.
And then work with them to develop new strategies for their livelihood, their life.
The main strategy we use is to expand their world, to cause the growing of new neural connection, new branches of brain connections.
How do billionaires do it?
After all billionaires have focused their interest in one area of business to become a billionaire, and they could be, therefore, exposed to pruning… unless they do something about it.
Surprisingly they are exposed to pruning… but at some point, at a certain age I think, they catch themselves. Or more likely they have a strong influencer who points out to them that they are stuck in a rut… And then they all start reading. I mean READING. Hundreds of pages a day. About everything. To counter pruning.
There have been notable exceptions: billionaires who didn’t read… who spent all their time with their business. I am not saying that there is a connection, but the ones I know are dead, and they had cancer to kill them. Muscletest says there is a connection…
Who am I talking about? Steve Jobs and Sam Walton.
The moment your brain start to prune, you start drying. It’s reversible, by the way.
In my coaching we do the reversal of pruning, in essence. We use the 67 steps coaching. Done with the right consciousness: it is an invaluable tool to reverse pruning. Not because all it says is good or useful… but because it is a virtual tool to expand your world, to widen your horizon, to challenge you in ways your life doesn’t.
And private coaching clients get me personally, in addition to the 67 steps coaching, and because of my eclectic life, eclectic life experience, the many places I have live,d the many professions I have dabbled in, the many activities I have done, I can custom tailor the growth process for you.
And, of course, my Playground program blasts your view wide open… this is probably why so few people are interested. Shrinking and coverup is the fashion of our times.[/efn_note]
Now, while these four clients have achieved what they achieved, I also had clients who didn’t or haven’t.
Why? What is the difference between the two groups?
- According to muscletest, the biggest difference is what they started with. If your upbringing told you that you are ok the way you are, or that education, reading books, excelling were not for you, your pruning started too early, and you probably don’t have enough upstairs to work with… And if your marriage partner has even less, or they want you to be only their support system (maid? butler? breadwinner?) then they will discourage you from investing into growing the neural connections in your brain…
- The second crucial component is their TLB. TLB is a measure of how much pain, confusion, fog, fear, anxiety you are willing to move through to get to clarity. Most people have a TLB 1. The letters TLB stand for Twitchy Little Bastard… and they show your inclination to avoid, divert, shrink back from, or try to fix what you find hard, or hard to accept.
The most fundamental way to increase your TLB is to increase your ability to stand looking at what you don’t understand, what is not pleasant, what seems unworkable, and stay staring at it. Facing the Tiger without looking at ways to escape or change it.
Not surprisingly my clients who increased their brain power have also shown a significant increase in their TLB.
- The third component is their attitude. How much they think they know. The more they think they know the less guidance they take.
The most important aspects of attitude are 1. is it worth the trouble? 2. are you willing?
Like with everything, a combination of carrot and the stick, a threat and a reward that will move you out of the dead and dying mode you are in.
Most teaching modalities treat everyone as if they could accomplish what they teach… the fashionable “we are all the same” meme. Or they say: you deserve more, you deserve everything.
As if deserving weren’t conditional… Deserving is not an adjective!
Deserving is a verb. And you deserve, aka earn with your activity directed by your brain power.
Low brain power, low deserving.
Bummer, eh?
My clients, the four who are increasing their brain power, are getting closer to deserve more money, more compensation for the work they are getting ready to produce.
The more the new behaviors and new attitudes become instinctual, the closer they are to deserving.
