A Templeton Finn Coaching Article:

HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT...

Things get a lot easier when you know what you want

When you become clear and honest about what you really want, the world seems to put all sorts of things in your way to help you get it.

This may unfortunately not be due to fate being on your side, but instead to a part of the brain called the "reticular activating system" (or "RAS").

Your RAS keeps you sane

The RAS is the system that allows us to receive a constant barrage of millions of pieces of information from our senses and not go insane. Essentially it only passes information from our unconscious to our conscious mind if it thinks the information is relevant.

The RAS is the reason why:

• before you bought your new car, there were very few of them on the roads (in fact it was quite exclusive)
• after your placed your order you started seeing them everywhere.

Possibly news of your purchase escaped and a trend was set, or maybe they were there before and your unconscious mind didn't think they were important enough to warrant your conscious attention.

What else are you missing?

Your RAS likes to prove you right!

Imagine those cars were opportunities for wealth, success, happiness or whatever you really want. Unless you tell your brain to bring them to your attention, you will literally not see them. It's not that you'll see them and choose to ignore them. You won't consciously know they are there.

Your RAS can work for or against you. It knows your conscious mind doesn't like to be proved wrong so it tends to pass through information which supports your current beliefs. If you spend a lot of time telling yourself that you can't trust people or that you're particularly bad at making presentations, it will surely prove you right.

Your brain is incredibly powerful and it does most of its processing unconsciously. However, it needs to know what it is supposed to be doing.

Our brains have changed much less than our lifestyles

Our brains haven't changed much in the last ten thousand years

Your brain evolved to keep you alive in a dangerous world where:

• strangers were likely to kill you
• avoiding sabre toothed tigers was a daily concern.

So your brain tends to keep you safe and not present information to you about risky things. To get the best for you in the modern world it needs a bit of help to decide what to do for you.

Tell your unconscious mind what you want

If you tell your unconscious mind what you want from life, it at least has the chance of passing relevant things your way. The difficulty is that most people know what they don't want, and our unconscious minds don't understand a negative. Try not to think about a dancing hippo. So if you go through life focussing on what you don't want, you may well get more and more of it.

It takes a bit of effort to change your mindset to focus on what you do want, but the rewards are potentially huge.

Our Coaching E-Book takes you step by step through a process for working out what you want from you career.