Train Your Brain For Success

Read Smarter, Remember More, and Break Your Own Records

Roger Seip

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118330555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Prise de décision

Train your mind to achieve new levels of success!

Professionals and entrepreneurs do a great job of keeping up appearances. But if they're honest with themselves, they're short on living the life they really want. Train Your Brain For Success provides the perspective to analyze how you got where you are and, more importantly, learn the skills to get where you truly desire to be. Train Your Brain For Success explains specific ways of thinking and acting that will get anyone where they want to go, fast. Learn to condition your mind to move towards success automatically, by discovering greater memory power and fundamental techniques for boosting reading speed and comprehension.

Get a proven strategy for succeeding and becoming a record-breaking performer.

• Learn to live in the moment
• Become brilliant with the basics
• Aggressively take care of your mind

Train your mind for new levels of success by boosting memory power, reading speed and comprehension.

Section 1

Your Learning Foundations

Learning Foundation #1

Your Instant Recall Memory

Chapter 1

Discovering Your Memory Power

As we discussed in the Introduction, the first six chapters of Train Your Brain for Success are dedicated to the very foundations of your ability to learn, your ability to absorb and then recall the information that you need for your growth. In this section, you're going to learn how to learn in the way that actually uses your brain in the way that it prefers to be used. Let's start with one of the most popular subjects that my company teaches: the subject of how to improve your memory.

Think for a moment about how many different ways you use your memory on a daily basis. If you're having trouble coming up with an answer, try this question on for size:

“If you lost your memory completely, what would you be able to do?”

The correct answer is “nothing.” When we're born, we come into the world with a working autonomic nervous system, so our breathing, heartbeat, and other bodily functions work properly. And we have automatic reflexes, like when the doctor hits your kneecap with that little rubber hammer to see if your muscles contract. That's it. Everything else in your life is learned. Even things as basic as what your own name is and how to eat are learned behaviors. So literally everything in your entire life requires the use of your memory.

Extend that out to your life today. At Freedom Personal Development, we will often ask our workshop audiences the question, “Where in your life do you feel an improved memory would help you be more effective, more productive, or reduce stress?” Just a few of the common answers we hear:

From professionals:

• “I wish I were better at remembering people's names!”
• “I wish I could deliver presentations without looking at notes!”
• “I wish I could learn product knowledge quicker!”
• “I wish I could remember dates and times for appointments!”

From students:

• “I wish I could remember foreign language vocabulary!”
• “I wish I could remember math formulas and equations!”
• “I wish I could remember things like the preamble to the Constitution, all the presidents, states, and capitals.”
• “I wish I felt less freaked out when taking tests.”

Honestly, I could just go on for an entire chapter about all the ways that we get to use our memories as tools for getting through life, so here's the best news:

No matter where you would like to see improvement in your memory or any area of learning, you absolutely have the ability to make those improvements. A significant body of research now confirms that for all practical purposes, your memory is actually perfect; you literally never “forget” anything. Some of you right now might be saying to yourself, “Okay, Roger, you just lost me. I feel like I forget stuff all the time! Why do you think I bought this book in the first place?” And I understand that perception; I get where it feels that way. Fact is, though, that essentially everything—every book you've read, every conversation you've had, every person you've met—everything—is recorded by your brain. Your challenge is actually not your memory, but your recall.

Example: Think back to the last time you bumped into someone you knew (and you knew that you knew), but you couldn't come up with their name. Common situation, happens to everyone. See that instance in your mind. You probably had a reasonably good conversation with that person, right? Five or 10 minutes of “how's it going, how's work, how's the family,” and so on. But the whole time you were talking to them, what was your brain doing? Racking itself with one question: “What the heck is this guy's name?” And it didn't come to you while he was there. But it did come to you later. See, you didn't forget that guy's name, you just couldn't recall it when you needed it.

Again, I could give you tons more examples, suffice it to say that your memory is in fact excellent, it's actually your recall that may be suspect. The reason this is good news is that improving your recall is very much under your control. If you can't recall a piece of information, it is always because the way that you stored it in the first place was accidental, mindless, haphazard, and unconscious. Here's what I mean.

How You Originally Learned to Learn

If you're like 99 percent of the population, back in school you learned to learn through a process called rote memorization. Rote memorization is simply learning through repetition. You got some information (from a teacher or a textbook) and then went over it and over it and over it, until hopefully it stuck in your brain. Sound familiar?

How's that working for you now? Not too well, I would bet. Just to prove the point, take this short two-question quiz:

Question 1: Did you ever take a biology class?

Yes_____ No_____

Question 2: Without looking it up, please name all the phyla of the animal kingdom.

In our live workshops, everyone says “of course” to question #1, and then nobody can even begin to answer #2. Which is fine; you don't actually need to know any of the phyla of the animal kingdom. The point is that if you took biology, I promise you were taught that information. The question is “did you actually learn it?”, and the answer is almost assuredly no. You didn't learn that information, you memorized it for the test. Test came, you barfed the information up onto the test, and were done. Which was fine for back in school, but do you see the problem?

By following the process described above over and over again throughout your formalized education, you formed a habit of how you learn everything. My guess is that habit no longer serves you very well. Rote memorization actually can get you a decent grade on a test that you know is coming, but your life doesn't consist of tests that you know are coming, does it? So you'll need a method of learning that serves you a little better, which is exactly what you'll get from the first six chapters of Train Your Brain for Success, if you'll keep an open mind about your mind….

The Teachability Index

There is a specific way of thinking and acting for any result. Our job is to be open and flexible enough to adopt those ways of thinking and acting.

Bill Harris, founder of Centerpointe Research Institute

How much you get out of this book or any learning experience has a significant amount to do with you as a learner. This material will change your life, if and only if you absorb and apply it. So be aware of what's called your Teachability Index. It's a measurement of how ready you are to learn. Whether you realize it or not, the Teachability Index is in play anytime you are attempting to develop a new skill or a higher level of understanding of anything. There are two components of the Teachability Index, each of which can be easily evaluated on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest).

The first component of your Teachability Index is your desire to learn. It just makes sense that if you're going to maximize any learning experience you must want to learn what's being taught. Some of the best news about you as a learner is that your desire to learn is very high, like 9 or 10 on the scale. Congratulations! The reason I can say this with confidence is that even though you and I may have never met, I know for a fact that you've already made an investment in yourself. You've probably invested some money to buy this book (thanks!). Even if you didn't invest your own money for it, at a bare minimum you've invested some time to get this far. You simply wouldn't have made that investment if you didn't have a pretty darn strong desire to learn. So go ahead and grade your current desire to learn from 1 to 10.

Desire to learn score _____

The second component of the Teachability Index is a bit more tricky. It's called your willingness to change, and it cannot be taken for granted, ever. Anyone who attends one of our programs or picks up a book called Train Your Brain for Success inherently has a strong desire to learn. Nobody inherently has a strong willingness to change. It's because of the comfort zone we discussed in the introduction: We are hardwired to stay wherever we are and do whatever we have been doing, even if that behavior pattern isn't getting us the results our conscious mind wants. I'm not saying that you can't have a high willingness to change, because you can. I'm just saying that if you want to boost your willingness...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction How to Break Records
• Section 1: Your Learning Foundations
• Section 2: The Components of Your Record-Breaking Life
• Conclusion: What to Do with What You've Learned
• About the Author
• Index