Tuesday, April 16, 2013

How the Mind Works - Program Your Mind For Success

By Kelly R. Crumble


A Tale of Two Cities, the most printed original English book, starts with the following words, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."

Those words can still apply today. It depends on the internal representation that we have of the world in which we live. There is an objective reality but we cannot see it. All that we can grasp is our own perception of that reality and that perception differs with each individual.

Directing and guiding this stream of awareness is a system. We can think of the mind as system that directs our information processing. This system is made up of numerous elements, all interacting and influencing one another to generate our experience. The way we experience the world is through the process of representing, sequencing and ordering the information we acquire from the outside world. The system of information processing we call "the mind" can also be called our internal reality. We each have an external reality- the environment we live in, the circumstances of our lives - and we each have our own unique internal reality. It is this internal reality that lies behind emotions, behavior and results. Our inner reality is far from a random mess of mental chaos. Human subjective experience has a structure. Knowing the specific elements that make up the structure of our internal reality enables us to alter the structure so that it serves us better.

For thousands of years we have believed that the mind was complicated and elusive; a mystery waiting to be unraveled, a cipher waiting to be cracked. We now know that the mind is much simpler than we once thought. When we know the building blocks of human subjective experience, the elements that make up what we call "mind," we can change them.The components of a system can be reorganized. The processes we use to encode information and the sequence data can be optimized to produce desired results. When we know the elements of a system we can change the system so it functions more effectively and efficiently. When we know what is going on behind the scenes of behavior and emotion, we can change it and transform our experience.

We've all heard about limited attention span, and in marketing that sometimes seems to be the norm for customers. What this means is that only part of your memory can be activated at any one time and it will be a single area located in the most easily activated part of the memory. This will also be the most familiar one, the one used most often. The more often it is used it becomes even more familiar. Think repetitive marketing campaign, top of the mind awareness, copy crafted to appeal to certain senses that becomes familiar to your customer over time. People need to be told about a product or service at least SEVEN times before they buy it/try it. Think repeat customers here.

We talked a little about mental patterns earlier in this book and about Neuro Linguistic Programming. Mental patterns simply refer to memories formed in your brain to record your experiences as you see, hear, feel, smell, sense or taste them. The more often you do this your brain builds a pattern of it - a familiar pattern.When you experience a situation again, or something similar, the memory is activated and you go on autopilot. So you can see if you did an email campaign to blend with your website copy and all the other areas we have outlined where you can use keywords and phrases, the more people see it (the site or email or etc.) the more familiar you become. This goes right straight back to relationship marketing. Nice tie in isn't it?

OK now you have a pretty fair idea of how the mind works. Let's go just one more step further. You already know about the language of the brain being pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells - in other words input from your senses that is your imagination when it is processed. Your brain can only work with positive information that it receives from your five senses. Your brain can't work with inputs you haven't experienced or otherwise called negative information.Here is a very important point to remember when thinking about your customers. They can't reflect and act at the same time. They need to be focused on one thing or another (reading your website copy, email etc) and thinking about it or taking action and buying something. Trick is to be able to switch them from one to the other quickly and effortlessly. Good thing you know about Neuro Linguistic Programming and how the mind works.

After the objective reality has finished being distorted by our previous references and our fundamental beliefs it has to contend with the ubiquitous mediatic barrage, most of which is taken at face value. What shreds of truth could maintain its integrity once it has been through all these distortions? No wonder that most of us are walking contradictions.

Thankfully, man is the most adaptable of all creatures. It can compose with what is not so and it can create a reality that is not real. We can live and function in a world of our own creation. We can see light where there is darkness and see truth where falsehood reigns. We are indeed a most amazing breed.Taking a glimpse at the way our mind function will not change anything much. But, it might explain our inconsistencies and the paradoxes that we see all around us. It can also explain why some of our actions and behavior don't always get the expected results. At any rate, knowledge is always superior to crass ignorance.




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