Training Your Mind Can Turn Your Life Around

[Lorraine Hancock]

The human consciousness is the awareness of oneself as a being that
thinks and learns. Consider the difference between your consciousness
and its closest relation, emotional awareness. Since the time of Freud
(who lived from 1856 to 1939), we as a society have become skilled
interpreters of how dreams, fears, conflicts and emotional attachment
affect our experiences and actions. In spite of our high level of
emotional awareness, few of us achieve a high level of mind
consciousness. Otherwise educated and sophisticated people have
virtually no awareness of how they solve problems, discover ideas,
assimilate and manage information, or adapt to change.
Is it is important to develop your mental prowess? A human mind is an
instrument of enormous power. The similarities between the workings of
your mind and the mind of a major scientist (such as Einstein) or a
revolutionary thinker (such as Freud) are great, while the differences
are subtle. To make the most effective use of your mind, you need to
be aware of what it does as you think and learn. Strange as it may
seem, you only have to learn to use the ability the mind that you
already possess. That is why mind consciousness is such a powerful
asset. With the right techniques, you can train your mind and improve
your memory and accelerate your learning.
You can never totally be the master of your mind any more than you
could ever totally be the master of your body, but you can guide it.
Your heart keeps beating, your lungs keep breathing, your ears keep
hearing, and the rest of our body keeps working, for the most part,
whether you tell it to or not. In the same way, your mind keeps
assimilating information and reinterpreting your experience. But
neither are you obliged to let your mind master you. Think in terms of
the analogy with your body. You can tell your eyes where o look and
your feet where to step. With exercise you can influence how far you
can run, and with training you can even affect how rapidly your heart
beats. With memory training, if you observe your mind and understand
it, it will exceed your expectations. If you continually train your
mind with the right memory techniques, it will serve you well in years
to come.
With subtle change in your observation skills, you can guide your own
learning in the same kind of way that a government regulates a
country's economy. Economists offer methods for the government to
avoid both an over heated inflationary economy and economic
depression. They track business cycles and prescribe remedies to
contain the excesses that could derail economic growth at any point.
Your mind goes through learning cycles in the same way that the
economy goes through business cycles. If you understand the cyclical
patterns of your own mind, you will be able to keep the growth of your
own mind magic on trick as well.
Can brain training help you in the real world? Definitely! Tennis
Coach Timothy Gallwey has argued for years that you will do better at
learning even a sport such as tennis if you become conscious of how
your mind naturally learns. The same principle applies to most domains
of experiences.
Adapting to life in the information age will in essence be no
different from adapting to any other dramatic change in living
conditions. Futurists such as Alvin Toffler and business experts such
as Peter Drucker tell us that power in the information age will come
increasingly from the mind. That can mean only one thing, in the
future, even more than before, you will have to rely on your own
natural ability That should not be cause for alarm. Your natural
ability is entirely adequate as long as you are skillful in putting it
to good use.