Category: Planning

Eight neuroscientific secrets of financial success

The formula for making more money is entirely different from the strategies that will bring you happiness.  Making more money is simple but it’s not easy. Noted neuroscience researcher, Mark Robert Waldman, has identified eight neuroscientific secrets of financial success that I will share with you today.

You can incorporate these strategies into your day to help you double or triple your income.

Eight neuroscientific secrets of financial success

Here are the eight secrets:

1. Just dreaming about your desires will not make them come true. You need to know WHAT motivates you to make money and achieve goals. What do you REALLY desire, and even more importantly, WHY?

2. You need to VISUALIZE the goal and then VISUALIZE the way to achieve it. Most people forget the second half of the visualization process.  According to Oettinger, you also need to visualize how you are going to overcome the obstacles that stand in your way.

3. You need to CRAVE the expected reward. Otherwise, you won’t be motivated to work for that goal.

4. You need to work MUCH HARDER AND LONGER than you are neurologically programmed to do. The brain is lazy so you’ll need to be creative to keep your energy high and your motivation strong. Achieving little successes through out the day will get you releases of dopamine that will help keep you motivated.

5. You need to train your body, mind, and brain, to work more EFFICIENTLY. This requires EXTENSIVE KNOWLEDGE of your field and your skills. If you don’t have the needed skills you must learn and acquire them.

6. You need to keep your STRESS levels low. This involves exercise, relaxation, taking pleasure breaks, and eating well.

7. You need to triple your OPTIMISM and interrupt your DOUBTS on an hourly basis.

8. You need a TEAM. Success requires colleagues, partners, teachers, and coaches…the best you can afford. None of us can achieve financial success solely on our own.

Next Steps

Again, what you need to do to make more money is simple. However, it is not easy and not everyone will take the time to make it happen. Spend a few minutes now and assess how you can use these neuroscientific secrets of financial success to drive your income higher.

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Secret To Achieving Your Goals

Want to know the secret to achieving your goals?  Once you have set your goal and developed a daily plan to achieve it, focus on that process and not the goal itself. That is the advice of Jeff Haden, author of The Motivation Myth.

Everyone has goals. The people who actually achieve them, create routines, build systems and anticipate the obstacles that are going to come up against and plan for them. They consistently take steps that in time will ensure that they reach that goal. In effect, they forget the goal and focus on the process.

The Old Way of Achieving Your Goals

In the past people spent all your time focusing just on the end goal. Those who do that may become disheartened by how far they still have left to go. For example, say you want to lose 125 pounds. After several months you have lost twenty pounds (a significant sum). If you continue to focus on the goal, many will overlook all the progress and fixate on the fact that they are still far from achieving it. If you continue to focus on this gap, instead of the weekly progress, you may give up and eventually gain the weight back.

The Newer Way of Achieving Your Goals

There is a better way. Instead of focusing on goals, focus on the process.

If you focus on doing the things that you need to do, day in and day out to achieve your goal, you will make daily progress, and each day this will give you a dopamine reward to help you stay on track.

What matters is not how you currently compare with your goal. What matters is that you consistently work your process and do what you set out to do, each and every day, to reach your goal.

Thoughts?  Comment below and share on social media.

Tips for Improving Willpower

Here are some brief tips for improving willpower from Jeff Hayden’s excellent book, The Motivation Myth . These will help you accomplish your goals without needing to depend on willpower, a resource that dwindles throughout your day.

What is Willpower?

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Willpower is the ability to control yourself . It’s a strong determination that allows you to do something difficult (such as to lose weight or quit smoking). At its essence, willpower is the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals.

Willpower is a limited resource

However you define it, willpower is a limited and dwindling resource.  You start the day with a certain amount and it fluctuates throughout the day and generally declines over time.

Willpower can be compared to a muscle that becomes fatigued with overuse. Studies show that repeatedly resisting temptation drains your ability to withstand future enticements.

Exceptional willpower is not a quality you are born with. Rather they’ve found ways to make decisions that don’t require willpower and determination.

Six Tips For Improving Willpower

Step 1: Eliminate as many choices as possible.

Choice is a problem because it forces you to decide what it is that you want to do. The more choices we need to make during the day, the harder each one is on our brain and the more it depletes your willpower.

The best way to eliminate choice is to develop good habits so that your brain can operate on automatic. This is what the brain does by default. Whenever it finds that it needs to so something again and again, it creates a new neural network to make repetition more efficient. Your job is to oversee your brain and make sure that this new habit supports you in the pursuit of your objectives.

Step 2: Make decisions at night so you need to make them tomorrow.

Pick easy decisions that will drain your store of willpower and make them at night before you go to bed.

The idea is to take as many decisions off the board as you can the night before, because that will allow you to conserve tomorrows mental energy for making decisions that really matter.

For example, lay out your clothes for tomorrow so you don’t have to decide or look for what you need. Also, if you want to workout first thing in the morning, have your workout clothes and shoes set out so they will remind you. Also make your to do list before going to bed. This will get the needs of tomorrow off your mind as well as set your priorities in advance.

Step 3: Do the hardest things you need to do first.

You have the greatest mental energy early in the day so focus on doing your most difficult challenges first. Don’t waste time reading email or the newspaper. Save your willpower for the crucial things.

Dive right into one of your highest impact activities and complete it. The feeling of getting it done will motivate you to accomplish even more.

Step 4: Refuel Often. 

Your willpower is tied to your blood glucose levels.

Maintaining steady blood-glucose levels, such as by eating regular healthy meals and snacks, may help prevent the effects of willpower depletion. So take periodic breaks to eat or snack.

Step 5: Create reminders of your long-term goals. 

Create tangible reminders designed to pull you back from the impulse brink. Post little stickup note on the refrigerator reminding you that you are not the kind of person who eats late night snacks.

Step 6: Remove temptation altogether.  

Control your environment to help your self-control. Make it automatic to follow the right routines.

If you are trying to lose weight, get high caloric snacks and deserts out of the house. Similarly, if you are attempting to eliminate alcohol or tobacco from your life, get them out of the house. “Out of sight, out of mind.” Don’t leave temptations around to “tempt” you.

Additional Information

For more information on Willpower check out this excellent resource from the American Psychological Association.

Turning Worries Into Solutions

Do you have worries? Undoubtedly you do. If you are alive, you have problems. We all do.  Are you interested in turning worries into solutions?

Of course you are. In this post, I am going to describe one of the most effective evidence-based strategies for dealing with negative feelings and thoughts that hold us back from realizing our goals and dreams.

This process is based on a decade of cognitive/behavior research and neuroscience. A majority of successful business people and entrepreneurs currently practice it.

The Three Step Process

Here is a basic three step process for turning worries into solutions:

1: identify a specific worry and write it down.

2: Reframe the worry as a real-time problem.

3: Ask yourself: “How do I solve this problem and overcome any obstacles that stand in my way?”

This allows you to create a PLAN you can set into ACTION.

Want to Take It to The Next Level?

If you would like to supercharge the earlier three step process, use the WOOP process based on the latest research of Gabriele Oettingen (Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation):

1. First visualize your goal or desire in great detail. (Wish or Desire)

2. Visualize in great detail all of the benefits if you achieved that wish/desire/goal. (Outcome)

3. Visualize and write down all of the obstacles that are stopping you from attaining that goal). (Obstacles)

4: Visualize a plan or strategy that will move you toward your goal. (Plan)

If you don’t have a solution, you’ll need new skills or coaching to see if your plan is realistic. If not, focus on a different wish/desire.

 

Are You Visualizing Correctly?

Many of us involved in personal development visualize our goals daily.  Our gurus have told us to do that for years and we have made it an important daily ritual.  But for many of us, visualization does not work or at least not like we have been lead to believe it should.

It turns out that visualizing your goal is only the first step.  Much more is needed. The newest research, spearheaded by the psychologist Gabrielle Oettingen, shows that you must do 4 types of visualization: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.

She calls this WOOP and you need to do each visualization in the following order:

  1.  WISH:  First visualize your goal in great detail. This is essential.
  2.  OUTCOME:  Next, visualize in great detail all of the benefits you’d get if you achieve the goal. If you can’t do this, you may have picked the wrong goal.
  3.  OBSTACLE:  Visualize and write down all of the obstacles that are preventing you from attaining that goal. This is the most essential step that many people ignore or avoid. If you can’t clearly see all of the obstacles and problems involved in achieving a new and bigger desire, you’ll never find a solution.
  4. PLAN:  Plan a strategy that will move you toward your goal. If you can’t come up with one, ask for help, learn new skills, or change your wish. Once you have this plan, visualize yourself using it to overcome the obstacles you laid out in step three.

To appreciate the power of this simple technique, do it 2-3 times a day with small desires. Remember to visualize the obstacles and your plan for overcoming these obstacles. This is critical.

Also, don’t forget to take action and persevere. Your dreams won’t magically materialize! Visualization is necessary but not sufficient to achieving your goals.

Don’t Go to Bed Without A Plan For Tomorrow

One daily ritual that you clearly want to adopt is setting your priorities for the next day before you go to bed.

If you don’t establish ahead of time what your priorities are, you are likely to get distracted early in the day by things such as email or by other people’s priorities (not yours).

So each night, ask yourself:

  • What do I need to get done tomorrow?
  • What are my highest priorities?
  • How and when will I get these done?
  • What obstacles might I encounter and how will I overcome them?

Keep in mind that you are not just creating a to-do list. Rather, it is a process of mentally working through how you will accomplish your priorities and how you will overcome obstacles that are almost certain to occur during the day.

Since we seldom are able to do everything that we add to our to do list,  it’s essential that we work on our most important priorities as early as possible during the day. Our most important activities are our highest impact and highest income producing activities. Make sure that you schedule these on your calendar for early in the day. Don’t attempt them mid afternoon when your energy is waning.

Plan tasks that are easy to accomplish and don’t require a lot of mental energy for later in the day.

PLAN YOUR DAY. WORK YOUR PLAN.