The Genie, The Lamp and Your Brain

You can transcend stress and transform work into the joy of excelling. Beginning today. Starting right here, right now. It's all about learning to work with your brain.

The Genie in the lamp is really the archetype for the unique genius encoded in your brain cells that's the blueprint for the gift you are here to give the world. You can start to coax that genius to come out and make your dreams come true. By dreams I mean the full expression of your strengths, talent and ability. The research is clear that the dream we want to realize most is the full use of our natural gifts toward an effort that makes a difference in the world.

Is it hard to believe that you have this power in you or, if lost, that you could recover it at any point along the life span? You can, if you can transcend stress. The problem of being born in modern times is that most brains get wired for stress. Stress and the fear that drives all of our fight or flight stress reactions fragment the brain to the point we can't see this higher purpose or feel the joy that is a natural part of following it.

Take heart. A simple approach brings it back to life. It’s called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity could not be simpler. It means: train your mind to produce a new experience and your brain will rewire to sustain that experience. Your life is all about your brain and your brain is all about your attitude. A shift in attitude is the way you coax your brain to start giving you what you want, which is the polar opposite of stress – which is peace.

A dynamically peaceful attitude produces everything you need in emotional, social, creative and analytical brain power to release the Genie from the lamp so you can extend its light to the world.

This blog outlines the simple approach to building the attitude that turns your brain into the joy of excelling.

Love Is The Most Powerful Healing Force In The World - Part 2: The Three Indispensable Conditions for Positive Relationships

Part 2: The Three Indispensable Conditions for Positive Relationships

Carl Rogers formulated three indispensable conditions that must be present to create a climate of growth and resonance in a relationship. These conditions apply in any and all relationships, whether it is lover or friend, therapist and client, parent and child, leader and group, teacher and student, or management and staff. The conditions apply, in fact, in any situation in which the development of the person is a goal.

1. Genuineness
The first condition is genuineness, realness, or congruence. The more a person is him or herself in the relationship, presenting no professional front or personal facade, the greater the likelihood for resonance and connection. This requires that we be aware of and open to the feelings and attitudes flowing within us as we relate to another. The term transparent catches the essence of this condition: we are willing to make ourselves transparent to the other person so the other person can clearly see what we are in the relationship. There is no holding back. There is a close matching, or congruence, between what is being experienced at the gut level, what is present in awareness, and what is expressed.

2. Acceptance
The second attitude of importance in creating a climate for connection is acceptance and caring, or what Rogers called unconditional positive regard. He refrained from using the word love to define this condition, but love is what it is. By love, I mean a positive, acceptant attitude toward whatever the other person is at that moment. We are willing for the other person to be whatever he or she is experiencing, whether confusion, resentment, fear, anger, courage, pride, kindness, or compassion. We value the other in a total rather than a conditional way.

3. Empathic Understanding
The third facilitative quality of the relationship is empathic understanding. Being empathic is to perceive the point of view of another with accuracy, along with the emotional components and meanings. It means to sense the hurt or the pleasure of another as he or she senses it and to perceive the causes of the feelings as he or she perceives them. It is to enter another’s private world so completely that we lose all desire to evaluate and judge it. “This kind of sensitive, active listening is exceedingly rare in our lives,” Rogers stated. “We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change [in a relationship] that I know.”

Resonance proceeds from an accepting, empathic, and honest way of being in a relationship. This way of relating arises naturally in the absence of judging, advising, admonishing, ordering, or directing. It helps us to get in touch with our actual feelings and experience so we can become more real, less distorted, and ultimately achieve a close match between the person we strive to be and the person we are. Resonance means we are alive in the present moment, attuned to its ebbs and flows, open to a state of becoming; rather than being fixed on who or what we think we should be, or how another person should be.

How Mirror Neurons Come Into Play
The more a person feels accepted and prized, the more they tend to develop a more caring attitude toward themselves. Our acceptance literally mirrors in their brain as self-acceptance.
As a person is empathetically heard, it becomes possible for them to listen more accurately to the flow of their own inner experience. Our listening mirrors as self-understanding.

As a person understands and prizes him or herself, he or she becomes more congruent, in ways that feel real, grounded and genuine. Our willingness to be authentic with another mirrors within them as the courage to be authentically who they are.

When all three attitudes are present in a relationship, resonance is inevitable. This is because inevitably, it shifts the question from how can I change or fix this person to how can I provide a relationship which this person might use for personal growth?

Who doesn’t want a relationship with a person like that?

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The Good Life

We all want to live a good life. And it is just as true that most of us want the life we live to open the way for an even better life for the next generation. It is an ideal that has been with us for more than 2,000 years. The ideal of the Good Life was originally formulated by Aristotle around 400 BC in the Nichomachean Ethics. It served as the vision and aspiration that sustained the Greeks for hundreds of years in advancing one of the greatest civilizations in human history. Ironically, Aristotle's ideal does not define a life situation, such as material wealth. Rather, it defines an attitude toward life.

The Good Life is a state of flourishing at every level that matters.

• It’s a sense of prosperity, internally, that manifests externally.


• It’s living fully; being joyful and at peace: Meaning we enjoy our work and our life.


• We are at peace within, comfortable in our own skin; comfortable with people, and calm under siege.


• It is also fulfilling our innate potential.


• It is the joy of excelling at whatever we do, along with the sense of making a contribution.

The ancient Greeks actually defined joy as “the full use of our powers along lines of excellence.” Who wouldn't want to live a life that fit the profile above. It is the description of an intrinscially rewarding existence.

A Stressful Life
If we want to attain the good life, which we have the inherent right to live, the primary condition we need to overcome is stress. A stressful life is the polar opposite of the good life. It is an anxious life incapable of sustaining the joy and peace that engenders creative intelligence. Stress is fear. Biologically, it takes some form of fear to activate a stress reaction, and when stress becomes chronic, we pay a heavy price

Stress makes us sick, prematurely ages us, and ultimately shortens our life. There are a million people out of work everyday due to stress (American Institute of Stress). Nearly 80% of serious illness is preceded by high stress in the previous year (AMA, 2004). A hundred years ago, the #1 killer of human beings was bacteria and viruses. Stress now holds that distinction.
It shortens our careers. Nearly 2 in 3 people no longer enjoy their work because of stress (Conference Board, 2007). It is also having a severe impact on people in leadership (Center for Leadership, 2007).

Stress shortens our fuse which, in turn, shortens our relationships. Chronic stress activates a primitive survival mechanism that locks the brain into threat mode and emotional negativity.

Stress hormones debilitate higher order brain function that generates creativity and produces everything we think of as intelligence. Obviously, this is not the expansive life sustained by the joy of excelling.

Shifting Stress: A Tool To Get You Started

Fear, and the stress it can generate, is living our life in the storm of circumstances. The good life means we know how to shift fear and the stress it generates to become larger than circumstances. The proven approach is so simple that most of my clients don't believe it possibly work. Two weeks later they are amazed. Click-on here to download a tool that can get you started in shifting the stress you experience.

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The Neuroplastic Fantastic

The Power Of The Mind To Change The Brain


Back in the 1980’s the Dalai Lama asked a group of world class neuroscientists if the mind could change the brain. It is a critical question. Does the brain direct us, or do we direct the brain? Are we genuinely free? Or are we stuck with the way genetics and early childhood wired our brains, with no real potential in our make-up for personal growth and spiritual transformation. The latter is the answer the scientists gave the Dalai Lama. They said, the mind cannot change the brain. Nothing can.

Science Was Wrong
Happily, the scientists were wrong. Breakthroughs in research have now proved that the brain responds to the mind. Mental practice can take a small village of high level neurons and build it into a humming metropolis, providing you with the brain power to produce optimal results in whatever you pursue. The term given to this wonderful neurological property is neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity just might be a human being’s most powerful asset. It's analogous to the mustard seed Jesus spoke of, “the smallest of all seeds, but when it falls on prepared soil it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter." Neuroplasticity is the mechanism that builds the brain structure for something as simple as the dexterity for a monkey to retrieve food from a tight spot to something as advanced as our capacity to master an art form.

It Even Works Through Imagination
Neuroplasticity even works through imagination to learn, build, and strengthen difficult skill-sets, such as playing the piano. In 1995, a neuroscientist at Harvard instructed subjects to play a five-finger piano exercise two hours every day for five days. At the end of each practice session, he measured the motor cortex of the brain that controls precise finger movement. Within five days, the amount of motor cortex devoted to the finger movements had spread, taking over surrounding areas of the brain. At the same time, the researcher had another group simply think about practicing the five-finger piano exercise. They played the simple piece over and over in their minds, keeping their fingers still and simply imagining how their fingers would move if actually playing the piano. The results were astonishing. The area of motor cortex had expanded in the imaginary players in the same way it had in subjects who had actually played the piano. The finding: the mind can change the brain.

You Can Teach Old Dogs New Tricks
The adage that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks does not apply to the brain. The brain is quick to organize around changes we want to effect, when we practice consistently. When we do, neuroplasticity makes changes quickly. As just discussed, it takes less than one week of mentally practicing a five-finger piano exercise for the motor cortex to expand in support of the new skill. It takes:

• Ten days of constraint induced therapy to rebuild the motor cortex in stroke victims and restore significant use of an arm that physicians once thought was irrevocably damaged. (Pidikiti, Taub, and Uswatte, 1999)


• Ten weeks for mindfulness therapy to change the brain in obsessive compulsive disorder (Schwartz, 1995)


• Eight weeks of cognitive therapy to change the brain in depression (Segal, Mayberg, 2002)


• Eight weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction to shift the prefrontal corical activity from right to left (shifting the dominant attitude from negative to positive) in highly stressed workers in a biotech firm (Davidson, Kabat-Zinn, 2003)

Some of these problems, such as stroke damage and obsessive-compulsive disorder, were once considered incurable. Yet the power of neuroplasticity generated significant change in these cases and in a relatively short period of time. If neuroplasticity is this effective in extreme situations, how much more can it do to transform a brain wired for stress? It all comes back to practice. Through practice, we can construct a new autopilot that is wired for a calmer, clearer, more fiercely alive intelligence that can do anything we set our mind to.

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The Four Qualities Of Mystic Cool

Our Brain At Its Absolute Best

When neuroscientists tested brain activity in Tibetan monks, they found inner peace had significantly expanded the usual networks that generate higher order brain function. These networks were larger and more fully integrated than brain scans show on the average person, with increased blood flow to the region.

As a result, brain function in these monks had reached levels never before reported in the scientific literature. The readings on Gamma Wave activity, signaling higher mental activity, was off the chart. The highly developed neural circuitry generated a flow of intelligence that was emotionally peaceful, positive, and fearlessly self-confident, all of which made the monks immune to stress. Even more astounding was the finding that when the monks were not actively practicing mindfulness meditation, they continued to sustain these optimal brain states.

It's In Every One Of Us
The conclusion of science: Inner peace builds a powerful brain. When the scientists drilled into the basic approach to inner peace that these monks practiced they found it consisted of four essential qualities that any of us can develop. Better still, science found that a little practice goes a long way in building brain structure.

These four qualities not only produce a great monk; they produce peak performers. The dynamically peaceful attitude the monks mastered is the zone athletes work toward. It's the calm under siege that drill-sergeants ingrain in soldiers. It is the stream of creativity that entrepreneurs call the top of your game.

I call this dynamically peaceful attitude "Mystic Cool," which is the name of the book I wrote on the subject. In the book I provide a simple set of tools for integrating each of the four qualities into daily life to sustain this powerful attitude. The reward is a powerful brain generating a joyful intelligence that can excel at work and at life.

1. The first quality of Mystic Cool focuses our attention. We are quietly engaged, fully present. We drop the incessant thinking that produces a pointless preoccupation with the past or endless worries about the future. We practice being present, right here, right now, engaging whatever is before us with an open, alert mind.

2. The second quality sets our stance in life. We are peaceful inside regardless of what is happening outside. We are not afraid or threatened by the outside. Thus, we can face a challenge confidently and feel our way to the best possible response to the situation.

3. The third quality creates our sense of connection. Our hearts are open and empathic, with the intention of creating an atmosphere of interpersonal resonance. We consciously connect with our own internal center, with the people we happen to be with, and to that which we conceive of as greater than ourselves. We practice listening better, judging less, and forgiving more.

4. The fourth quality of Mystic Cool engenders a wider perspective. It is an enduring sense of the whole that transcends the fragments. We see the proverbial forest and the trees as we hold to the big picture.

These four qualities, when evoked consistently, transform a disconnected, stress-provoking way of living into a richer, more integrated way of being. In the process, this simple approach to mindfulness builds higher brain structure so we can reach higher ground, in whatever we pursue. Mercifully, it could not be simpler. It is no further than a basic shift in attitude.

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Wiring Our Brains For The Joy Of Excelling

An article in the Wall Street Journal tells of a doctor who counsels a patient in extreme physical pain, "I think your real problem is stress." When the patient complains that the muscle injections the doctor has been giving him hasn't relieved his neck and shoulder pain, the doctor says, "You can't blame me for everything that's hard in your life." The patient bursts into tears, which only confirms his doctor’s diagnosis. The doctor suggests exercise as a means of mitigating his patient's level of stress. (for the Wall Street Journal article, go to http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123724722718848829.html )

The Amygdala: Wired for Stress, Wired for Fear

The reason someone becomes as chronically debilitated by stress as the person in the news article is because his brain is wired for stress. His brain is repeatedly hijacked by the amygdala, the brain's fear center that engineers fight or flight. The primary trigger for most of our 21st century stress reactions is not real and present danger, such as a wild animal; it is fearful thinking. Fearful thinking stirs up anxious, negative emotions, which in turn generates a perception of threat, often where no real threat exists. The problem is the amygdala can't decipher between a real and mind-made danger. It sets off a reaction in either case.Emotional Memory: Trapped in the PastThe amygdala also is the storehouse for emotional memory. Emotional memory is video clips of all the bad things that have happened to us. A brain under stress is prone to project these painful images from the past onto the screen of the present, exciting visions of a future that looks even worse. The frightening picture it paints seem real enough that it has us walking the floor late at night -- night after night -- ruminating over problems for which we see no solution. During the day, our sleep-deprived mind can erupt suddenly or withdraw precipitously, either of which can damage relationships.

When the amygdala is triggered, it takes charge of our physiology. In some situations, it freezes the body, which explains the tight neck and shoulders of the person in the article. Other times, it sends body and emotions into an uproar, which over the long haul can lead to a massive heart attack. Many heart attacks can be traced back to a long run of thought attacks. Surveys by Gallup and the American Psychological Association reveal that eight in ten American struggle with stress, half of whom are stymied by extreme levels of stress. Lower brain function is running these people's lives, making a mess of things. Sending our stressed-out brain to the gym for a good workout is a good thing. It can flush out stress hormones and relieve symptoms for a while. But it isn’t a cure. It won't fix the way we’re wired.

Rewiring Ourselves for the Joy of Excelling
Take heart. There is a cure. Neuroscience has discovered that we can literally rewire a brain that genetics and a painful past wires for stress. In the absence of chronic stress reactions, a flow of intelligence gradually emerges and takes hold. Higher order neural circuits light-up, stimulating the joy of excelling. The process of rewiring is accomplished through a fundamental shift in attitude that takes us from fear and stress to a dynamic quality of inner peace. There is no greater gain in brain function that the shift from fear to peace. Mercifully, this essential shift in attitude is something anyone can make. Positive change comes in a matter of weeks.

I wrote a book on the subject, called Mystic Cool, which Simon & Schuster/Beyond Words is releasing April 14, 2009.

Is Your On-Line Social Network Providing Support or Increasing Your Fear?

What is the typical reaction we see in a worsening economy with rising unemployment? The answer is fear. Biologically, fear triggers stress. The greater part of the stress we experience is caused by psychological fear. Stress represents the way fearful thoughts generate negative emotions, producing a constant sense of threat that at times sends our body into an uproar. As stress amplifies, it debilitates brain function, leading to fatigue, poor decision-making, overwhelm, declining self-confidence, and emotional upsets that can damage relationships. Obviously, this is not the package that is likely to succeed in this bad economy.

There are proven approaches that can help people master their fear and transcend stress. But these days, most people are not spending money on that. Instead, many people are turning to Social Networking to vent, bond and find emotional support for their fears and frustrations. While it is widely recognized that interpersonal connection is a powerful antidote to stress, it is also true that social networking can backfire, when most of what is shared is gloom and doom. Other people’s anxiety can raise our own level of fear and pessimism. When the brain’s fear center is excited, it can run wild with anxiety that increases our stress level exponentially. Spending time with highly fearful people can trigger our own tendency to think negatively and lose confidence.

When engaging in social networking, if you find your feelings of stress and anxiety are increasing, exit immediately. Neurologically, we can’t afford the luxury of negative, stressful thinking, especially in these times. My advice is to redirect yourself to another group, blog or forum where the dialogue is based on “non-negative thinking” and the experience strengthens your peace of mind. Neurologically, the more we break negative thought patterns by no longer believing the gloom and doom these thoughts forecast, the more we light up networks of neural circuits that make us powerful.

Science has established that the mental zone that heightens brain power is a dynamically peaceful attitude. A dynamically peaceful attitude literally strengthens the higher order brain function that makes us brilliant problem solvers. A brain unencumbered by stress naturally generates the creative intelligence that not only sees the solution inside the problem but creates the solution that works. We call this capacity “peak performance.” A brain chronically under stress, on the other hand, is incapable of sustaining peak performance.

Find a social network filled with people whose attitude is dynamically peaceful and positive. It will help you fully engage the part of your brain you need most. And remember: stress is psychological fear; peace is neurological power. There is no greater gain in brain function and brain chemistry than the psychological shift from fear to peace. Making this shift is simpler than you might think. The reward is the capacity to excel at life.

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