Cathexis

“He shoots, he scores!”

Self-talk is a primary strategy for improving performance–in effect you are coaching yourself. This blogger talks about a study that reveals a trick to make self-talk even more effective. Instead of saying, “I’m going to do this better than I ever have,” try putting it in the second or third person–”he’s going to do this better than he ever has.” My theory is that self talk in general gets you outside of yourself, and phrasing it in the second or third person puts you even more outside yourself.

Self-Talk Increases Success If You Use This One Trick | Psychology Today.

This article is a decade old but gets to the mechanisms behind a lot of successful brain hacking and life hacking. It can be thought of as the secret behind “The Secret.” In effect, people can create the reality they most want by just being open to that reality. Opportunities to get what we want are bombarding us all the time, but mostly we are blind to them. Some people, however, keep enough of their mind open to them that they perceive them and end up feeling lucky all the time. Powerful stuff. One wonderful experiment is described in the article:

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: “Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250.” Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.

via Be lucky – its an easy skill to learn – Telegraph.

Sesame Street: Ernie Puts Down The Duckie – YouTube.

Often when we have a goal we hold ourselves back from achieving it because pushing for change is scary. We may strive for a goal half-heartedly because we don’t want to let go of what makes us feel comfortable, not realizing that gets in the way of achieving the new goal. As Ernie learns, you have to “put down the ducky”–be willing to let go of your security blanket, to learn to be OK with feeling anxious or uncomfortable–if you want to learn the saxophone or achieve any other goal.