I’m often asked how someone can develop a SuperMind.
Most people believe it is some complex procedure that will take years. Or a specialist programme few have the desired intelligence to qualify for. Not so. In fact, it’s all about getting started, forging the right foundations and building momentum.
And that’s something anyone can do whether they are from Milan or Mogadishu, Brisbane or Boston, Peru or the Philippines.
Because a SuperMind is what we all have and what we can all strengthen.
So, let’s get your SuperMind development up and running with these 4 simple SuperMind boosters.
1. Re-imagine differently.
You already imagine, don’t you?
What you imagine, though, are your worst fears, of everything going wrong and turning out pear shaped. Ones you keep having without fail.
And those images are driving actions and behaviours formed from the negatively set beliefs and thinking they have forged into you. If you only ever see bad things, you will expect bad things, and so end up avoiding most things. For example, if you only ever see businesses failing and picturing total financial disaster in your head, it will be no surprise that you will steer well clear of starting your own venture.
If you only ever imagine horror stories about love or travel, you will be a lone soul who stays at home rather than part of a happy couple on an exotic beach.
You have to begin re-imagining. Re-imagining differently, better, brighter, more optimistically, and with everything going right and working out. This HAS to be your first port of call for a SuperMind to take root.
Today, add some look good, feel good, imagined outcomes in your mind. Repeat day after day.
2. Write down ideas.
You have an amazing idea.
A possible great product or developing a talent you have to meet a gap in the market. In your mind it looks good. Or something to explore further; a project that really interests you or a personal ability to expand. You decide to think about it.
A few days pass. Your head has been infiltrated by other stuff – tasks to complete at home, a heavy workload in the office, shopping duties, kids to pick up, your normal weekly hobbies. Soon that super idea has gone to the back of your mind, and then out of it completely. You can’t quite recall what you thought was so cool or lucrative….and now you are frustrated and disappointed.
You can prevent this ever happening. When those brilliant ideas come out of nowhere, write them down. Always have a small note pad to hand to capture those initial idea bursts. Record as much as you receive in your mind. As your mind feeds you the total scene and how it can unfold, put it down on paper to protect. You can always add it to a computer file afterwards. Then you can revisit, rework, and progress this golden concept.
You can’t grow what you don’t keep. Do the write thing, write ideas down!
3. Discard distractions.
What grabs the mind gets the attention. All other thinking and activity gets shelved as it gets caught up in this attractor.
This means important functions such as idea generation or mental confidence building become halted. And if the source of the attention does not go away, these highly crucial attributes of the mind power down as they are not considered important.
The No.1 origin that causes this are distractions. Ones that don’t expand or improve life, they offer no growth potential or mental development. The problem is that they are the same for the majority of all of us. Yes, you know the ones!
Social media, endless scrolling on the phone entertaining yourself with funny videos, catching up with world news or sports updates, plus bingeing on a Netflix series or a few hours of down time in front of the box (that’s TV for the non-Brits out there), nights out with the boys or girls and the like.
We all are due some fun space. We deserve a break and some escapism. Except that it’s not a few minutes or something to watch over a coffee break or after a long weekend of self improvement work. It’s a daily occurrence without pause. It’s sucking the mental life out of you and you have to start binning it.
If you truly want mental muscle that can help you achieve anything, ditch the distractions.
4. Start power reading.
You mind needs a new spark.
An igniter of stronger possibility. An inspirer for far more. Something that uplifts, encourages, informs, and stimulates the best thinking.
Welcome to books.
Good books. Ideas books. Development books. Not wild fiction books or genres that again act as a distraction. Books DO help us exist within another world but it mustn’t be a dark world or harsh world or any similar world that tells a story of pain, struggle, and even death.
You have to get into books that propel you upwards where achievement lives. They can be personal life story autobiographies from the successful. Equally they could be true history tales from the past detailing success and how great things happened.
Top of the lot are educational books from the ultimate writers in your field. Those that have more than ‘been there done that’ and have actually created some blueprint that fires up your mind to how you too can elevate yourself. One of my all time favourites is ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. That’s one of mine, get power reading and discover some of your all time mind movers that get your head in a new bigger game.
Reading books is filling your mind with mental fulfilment fuel.
That’s your fab four right there. Four simple SuperMind boosters. Four is all it will take for your mind to start working in the progressive ways it was built for and has been waiting for.
Four mega kick starters anyone can set off today that will keep bringing benefits for years to come.
Picture attribution – under free content license https://pixabay.com/photos/man-portrait-adult-people-business-3022255/.
Partnering is what we do best.
If it’s not a life partner it’s a best friend or group of pals. Even our work place is a style of partnering in a job scenario to create results. It’s what we are made for, and it often brings out the best in us.
I have already posted one set of true stories that perfectly prove this last month (see that post here). In this second segment I’ll prove it even further with some of the biggest names in business in the world and how jointly they crafted major success.
Everyone has heard of Nike. The multi-billion dollar sports brand. It’s one of the top five success stories over the last four decades. But less people today have heard of Harris Tweed. The company was once an iconic Scottish fashion mainstay. Everyone from country folk to Royalty wore their jackets and clothing, all crafted on looms on the isle of Harris in the Scottish Islands.
But, times moved on. Fashion preferences changed. People favoured softer fabrics and sexy must-have brands on the up. The traditional tweed seemed dated, a historical throwback confined to times gone by. The market shrank, jobs were lost, and the economic future of the industry looked about to disappear for good..
But, in 2001, along came Nike. Looking for a fresher version of their Terminator trainer, they thought Harris Tweed could help promote the footwear in a specialised way and create a buzz. They ordered 10,000 yards of the cloth. Soon anyone who could weave on the Outer Hebrides islands was hard at work.
The orders flew off the shelves and saved Harris Tweed. Today their mill employs over 70 people and supports over 100 weavers. And they haven’t stopped there. This year Nike and Harris are combining once more for a limited edition Dunk Low trainers.
Such is the power of partnership and collaboration. For hip and cool with historical and elegant.
Top Marks together.
It’s not just one-off associations that form an amazing alliance.
Some have been lucratively in existence for many years.
When a Belarusian immigrant arrived in the North of England in the 1880’s he spoke hardly any English and had little money. He started up a small stall in Leeds market selling small homeware items under the slogan, ‘Don’t ask the price, it’s a penny’. The phrase caught on and soon he was doing well. Meeting a cashier from his wholesale suppliers they joined forces – one the stock purchaser and promoter, the other the credit and financial controller.
The partnership soon opened full Penny Bazaar stores where customers were free to browse which was not the normal custom.
The stores grew and expanded to 12 stores and 24 market stalls in only a few years and they were renamed under their surnames….
Marks and Spencer.
Today they can still be found in every high street in the UK plus 434 stores internationally across the globe. From one penniless newcomer who joined with an everyday local to develop an idea, today the business is worth £7.13billion. Yes…BILLION!!
Now do you believe in the power of partnership?
Penniless power.
You don’t need mass capital. Ideas are free.
They often span out of people with no funds or empty pockets who have to find a way to progress their fledgling concept idea or business. They also lead to joining forces with another person in the same position or with a similar vision. Needs must as they say.
Often it’s when we are stuck and struggling that our best ideas evolve. They are also the perfect moments to co-join with a partner to share skills, contacts, and add twice the manpower to pushing from a bad position to a brilliant one.
So when you have your next awesome idea that you hope will save the day, look also for a companion who can share the load and the road ahead with you. Partner-ships are ones that help us sail into new waters. And they often ensure that the tide turns in our favour.
Ideas are free, partnerships are golden.
If you are wondering what to do next, joining with a partner could be what works wonders for both of you.
Reference – Bbc.co.uk – Nike’s fling with Harris Tweed.
news.stv.tv – Nike and Harris Tweed unite.
Financial Times – www.ft.com – First Person: Donald John Mackay
corporate.marksandspencer.com – Our History.
archive.marksandspencer.com – Timelines – The M&S Story.
Photo attribution – free to use under the Pixabay content license by solmaiororquestra
Superthinking is something anyone can develop. Anyone at all.
Hearing the term Superthinking though makes us believe it’s some specialised ability set out for the luckily born brilliant few. The type of thinking available only to top scientists, mathematicians like Einstein, or those born with some genetic advantage that boosts their brain power.
That’s far from the truth.
In fact, you can start Superthinking TODAY in important key, but easily achievable steps.
So, get ready to superthink by following these three mind boosters.
Step 1 – Cut out the sad sources.
Our mind is fed by two sources of belief and thinking.
The first is from our past, often our distant childhood, creating inherited hang ups and insecurities. They added imprints and influences that still run round our mentality today. We, however, are often aware that our lack of drive to achieve came from Mum’s advice not to risk too much. Or our view we are not smart enough from how we were a late developer at school and others got better marks than we did. We know why we are the way we are in relation to them.
The second is a silent damager to our psyche. Bad sources of information we access on a daily basis. These infiltrate and secretly infect our outlook on life and the world. Rolling news with their awful narratives and images. Social media with its fake presentation of who is up to what and why. Mind numbing TV series of dark thrillers, murder, violent crime, and everything with a heavier edge. They are NOT entertainment. They are like taking a mind poison day after day.
Step 1 – you have to cut out these sad sources that suck the air out of your hopes and possibilities.
Step 2 – Develop a super set.
You step up in step 2.
Nature abhors a vacuum. By removing one source of mental information, you have to replace it with another. You have to find a new fuel for your brain waves.
To do this you are going to create a new super set of thoughts.
This is simply developing a small range of higher belief thoughts and imagined results to match, that you commit to repeating day by day. Ones that can be accessed whether you are in the shower, taking a coffee break, in a traffic jam, or relaxing with a glass of wine after a long day at work or in family duties.
These must be clear, distinctive, and progressive formed of elevated thoughts. Typically they should revolve around personal aims or projects that matter to you. These are NOT affirmations that you say to convince (or con) you that you are going to have a marvellous out of the blue surprise. They represent a bigger future for yourself that represents everything you would love to be and get out of life.
A super set won’t be shallow – wanting just to be a millionaire or a mega influencer so you can feel good about yourself. They are pure personal. Mine would take the form of seeing lots of my popular selling books in the book stores. They would be accompanied by beliefs that I am an accomplished writer who creates unique, original work.
The set can end with individuality – I feel complete living life as this author. I am alive and confident that being myself is fulfilling. And I believe that’s all I ever have to be at all times as I only ever have to be myself. Dedicate some time to forming your own super set.
Step 2 – develop a super set of thinking that fills up your mind with good imagination and energy.
Step 3 – Keep doing the write thing.
How many times have you had a great idea and then forgotten it soon after?
Our minds get so heavy with everything we have to do and remember it gets lost as other required tasks take over. Many of our best notions come and go like this. What’s needed is to record them when they appear.
Any time something cool or amazing or inspiring as a concept, product, or service pops into your head, DON’T LOSE IT. Write it down. Always have a small notebook ready to lay down these out of the blue superthoughts. You don’t need to go into depth yet. Just a quick line with the idea. These can be sub divided into categories if you find you are having ideas on a frequent basis.
Those sub types can be divided by subject (product, business, self career move). They could be recorded under personal rating (such as 3 out of 3 for a option in an area that is a major interest to you, down to 1 out of 3 for a general possibility). Choose a couple for yourself.
Personalising is always the key. They are YOUR ideas from YOUR supermind designed for YOU. Always keep you as the lead soul in everything you mentally produce.
Then, every few weeks keep coming back and reading through them. One or two are going to constantly leap out at you. Even more dramatic is some will trigger your mind to light up major style. THESE are the ones to explore and start the process again. Write how they can evolve. What they or it would look like. Who it would help. What you will need and so on.
Step 3 – keep doing the write thing to get to the right stuff. The stuff of superthinking.
There you have it. The magic 1-2-3. The same three steps that led me to writing my book and creating this site. And what keeps me unfolding even more potential for the supermind thinking future brand. This effectively acts as your proof of life. Your mental proof of how it can all evolve. Because, you don’t need to be an official genius to start superthinking like the best.
You just need to jump in to these three steps to opening up your supermind today.
Photo atrribution – Free for use under the Pixabay content license by geralt.
Ideas are free. We all have them.
Most ideas we have are basic. They are not massive world shifters or life changers for everyone in humanity. They are everyday and simple. But, it’s these very same ideas that can be the most successful and useful that has ever been seen. And ones that are so obvious that it’s amazing they haven’t been spotted and used before!
Swan Vestas were the iconic match company in the British Isles. Founded in 1883 the company was a stalwart of high street shops. The public from all backgrounds used their matches for everything from boiling a kettle for tea to lighting candles on a birthday cake.
But their chief fame was that they were the go-to brand for pipe and cigarette users, giving them the moniker of ‘the smoker’s match’. So much so that estimates calculate the number of matches ever used to be in the billions.
It was a hyper successful company and highly profitable. Creating greater revenue became difficult because most people already used them for every type of daily activity.
But, as legend has it, one pipe smoker employee saw otherwise.
A simple strike.
One day in the 1970’s this nameless pipe enjoying fellow turned up at Bryant and May’s (the owner and manufacturer) stating he could save the company millions with one simple idea. As the company had researched every avenue before to achieve this, they seriously doubted his claim. He persisted and they agreed to pay him £1m if he could, indeed, match his statement.
Swan Vesta boxes had two strips of glass paper on either side of the box that matches were struck across to ignite them. He noted generally people favoured one side to the other (most likely to being either left or right handed). He provided a number of boxes he had collected that showed this to be true.
Bryant and May had double the cost in providing a striking zone that was effectively rarely used. His idea was to have only one on one side, halving that cost instantly.
They did further checks. The pipe genius was right. His keen eye and simple suggestion proved to be a winner. Swan Vesta matches began being produced in one edge only boxes. The public barely noticed and few complaints were received. Bryant and May made millions, and our simple genius walked away with a million of it.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!!
Scoot to success.
Dominic McVey was 15 when hit started making it simple….and big!
When misspelling on an internet search he discovered collapsible metal scooters. They were cool, simply cool, and he wanted one. In fact he believed other teens would too. Unable to afford one he cut a deal with the American manufacturers to buy five (through clever fundraising – disco events, trading on the stock markets with his Dad’s credit card etc) and get one free.
He sold those five (including his) in days. Then next week he sold ten more. He knew he was onto something. This portable, lightweight, fun transport was the perfect toy/transport in one. With further bravado he won the European distribution rights and two years later his sales topped 11 million units! Even the Queen called him a pioneer in entrepreneurism.
Today he’s worth over £7 million. A millionaire from a few pieces of metal and a lightweight frame.
Don’t think simple is vital? Just take a look at You Tube and see how many people view videos on how to make an omelette, wire a plug, teach a dog to sit or wallpaper a room that has unusual angles.
So used have we become to using technology to solve complexities and do advanced things, we’ve stopped using simple as the tool for making life work.
How simple can you be?
Some of the greatest ideas ever have been simple.
Simple because they make it easy for us to live our lives well or efficiently or enjoyably.
The three point seatbelt, sliding doors, the solar light bulb, and of course one of my all time favourites, The Post-It note, to mention but a few. They simplify, streamline, and work.
So, what’s your simple?
Your simple need that you find an answer for could be the one EVERYONE wants the answer for. Or, like the metal scooter, knows it’s something they would love.
If you have an idea for a product or service (who ever thought dog walking for other people would take off!!), don’t dismiss it because it seems too basic. In this mega busy, fast paced 21st Century, there are more and more things that would support our living. Simple things.
Keep it simple and you can be super successful.
References – aestheticons.wordpress.com – Swan Vestas Matches.
https://inspireip.com – A simple idea that made millions.
https://uk.finance.yahoo – Just how did Dominic McVey make his money?
Photo attribution under free content license – https://pixabay.com/photos/women-idea-university-students-1687853/ by melyserna.
Did you know you may have an undiagnosed condition?
It’s one that tens of millions of other people the world over suffer from too. It’s not diabetes. Nor is it high blood pressure. Or any stress related maladies. It’s repetitive self-sabotage syndrome.
You’ve not heard of it before? Well before you go checking out symptoms on Google there’s a reason you’ve not have come across it previously. I made it up! The name that is, not the actual ‘condition’.
Self-sabotage shows up when we reach a point of attempting to be better or happier, richer or re-visiting a scenario that we failed at or upset us before. Rather than soar and excel, we unconsciously (i.e. we’re not fully aware that we do it) trip ourselves up. This can be through poor self talk telling us not to bother. It can be through reminding ourselves how badly it went before. Or the classic sign of self-sabotage -procrastination. Ah, got it now??
Yep, we’ve all put the blocks on ourselves at one time of other. Even Tom Cruise has. Well kinda.
A trickle to a flood.
Cole Trickle is an up and fast coming young NASCAR driver. His career is on the up until one day at Daytona he is involved in a serious racing crash. When his racing adversary and now friend Rowdy Burns is then also found to need brain surgery Cole re-evaluates his racing.
He is given a chance to get in a car again but he’s a shadow of the old fearless kid who won races such a short time before. After one race where he retired the car, his chief car builder Harry sees that Trickle deliberately blew the engine. His accident and his pal’s health worry got in his head. He self-sabotaged himself.
But you see, as in this film, life often makes us face ourselves again. In his final chance race at the Daytona 500, Cole is trailing last. His short career seems over. Then there is a big smash on a turn, exactly like the time he was hospitalised in the same such incident. Cole slows down, the self-sabotage begins. But Harry breaks into his head space and tells him he can do it, he can get through this.
Cole listens and trusts, and powers up and through the wreckage, and defeats his demons. He goes on to take victory. I know it was only acting from Tom Cruise, but the manner in how he played that character, I’m sure he has suffered from self-sabotage himself in the past. Yes, really!!!
Maybe you are beginning to recognise it in yourself now?
In your mind how the past keeps coming back to haunt you in certain situations? Or that your business ideas or big plans never seem to get off the drawing board again and again?
It feels like a mountain to climb to get anywhere. But YOU are that mountain!!
The Mountain is you.
The art of self-sabotage is one many of us have perfected.
So adept are we at it that we put ourselves in situations that look like mountains to get out of. We end up stuck, blocked, isolated, alone, or trapped and blame it on these very mountains holding us where and how we are. But, WE are the mountains. We are the very thing in our way.
In her ground breaking book about this, ‘The Mountain is You’, Brianna Wiest reveals all the schemes and thoughts we construct to then pretend we would move forwards, upwards, into money, into love, and into freedom if we didn’t have too much to climb to get there.
She magnificently wrote, ‘ The mountain is often less a challenge in front of us as a problem within us’, and that, ‘There is nothing holding you back in life more than yourself’.
Where Cole Trickle destroyed the engine to avoid facing an old fear, we do the same through inner beliefs and insecurities that rise up like Everest.
- We start a business idea but leave it sitting there because we think we are not good enough to make it work. Or that being successful means things can only go downhill from there.
2. We don’t have any true committed relationships because once we get close to a partner they will see we are flawed and not worth loving.
3. We don’t allow ourselves to ever explore having more money because we have the warped idea that wealthy people are hated and users.
Recognise some of these echoed in your repeat struggles? Now you can perhaps start to see that the only thing keeping you from you desire is your self-sabotage hijacking it.
No rock, no hard place.
In each occasion of our own just like those above (read Brianna’s book to discover yours!!), we open up our inner mountain and stick it slap bang in our face. We can no longer walk our path, or win our race be that to be an artist or to win Daytona. I’m asking you now to face your self-sabotage skills and finally see when and where you have always used it. Your missing career, life partner, financial success etc will be where to find it. Where you always put it when a shining life can be won. Your mountain instead of your mojo!
Just make sure you don’t end up like Cole with a glittering future ahead of him but so held back by what’s in his head he says, ‘You got me here, now what?’ Don’t be someone who blames everything and everyone else any more. Don’t look up at mountains that are not there.
It’s time to no longer be stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Photo attribution – Pixabay.com – https://pixabay.com/illustrations/ai-generated-man-stress-mistake-8993806/ by Graphixmade under free use content license.
References – Days of Thunder – Paramount Pictures 1990.
The Mountain is You – Brianna Wiest – Thought Catalog Books.
If you were to think of exercise, like most people you would probably imagine some physical activity.
And with that perhaps a sport or definitely some exertion on the body.
Very few would ever first link to exercise with the mind. Nor would they ever believe that the best exercise we could do for ourselves isn’t physical, it’s mental. And yet, developing the mind is the prime way to begin powering up almost every area of your life. One day it could serve you very well indeed.
Hugh Glass needed an incredibly fit mind. Why? Because his body was almost totally out of action.
Glass was a frontiersman and trapper working on a trail up the Missouri River in 1823. One day when scouting for game near where the Grand River forked he surprised a mother grizzly bear with her cubs. Protecting her brood the bear attacked and mutilated Glass so badly internal body parts and bone were visible. His fellow trappers eventually left him for dead believing it was impossible for him to survive even for a short time.
But what the body is incapable of, the mind can be alive as ever and incredibly capable. Waking from unconsciousness with no weapons or equipment he realised he was abandoned in the freezing wilderness. Plus he could hardly move.
Death seemed inevitable.
The mind can go far.
Glass knew his only hope was to crawl and keep crawling. For all the extreme pain that flooded his body, he set his mind at making it back to civilisation and life. And that he did. He famously crawled inch by aching inch some 200 miles and even crafted a makeshift raft so he could float downstream to Fort Kiowa.
Six weeks after his seemingly fatal attack, Hugh Glass reached the fort and a place in the history books. It’s also the story behind the Hollywood Oscar winning movie, The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
This story typifies that physical effort was not enough. Pure mental fortitude and willpower was required to have any chance at all. Luckily that is what he possessed in bucket loads. How many people today could honestly be able to achieve the same feat with their minds???
One type of person in modern life can experience such mental toughness. The ultramarathon runner. They can typically run hundreds of miles in events on all types of terrain and face every type of weather. The Moab 240, for example, is a 240 mile (386km) ultra event with over 31,000 ft of elevation through the baking heat of Utah where daytime temperatures can hit over 100 degrees and with night time drops to below freezing and even snow.
How do runners cope with such punishment?
Champion ultra runner Courtney Dauwalter has developed a mental exercise called her ‘pain cave’ to push through immense exhaustion and various bodily ailments in her 100+ mile runs. When she can’t physically take another step she goes to a space in her head and makes that space bigger in her vision. This space is where she has the determination to keep going.
It works because this one time biology teacher when she started ultra running has won pretty much every prestigious ultra race there is and set course records everywhere in doing so.
Which leads me to this question.
Do you exercise your mind….at all?
I would wager two truths now.
- That virtually everyone will say, ‘No’.
- That virtually everyone will say, ‘I don’t know how’!
It’s common as I’ve already noted that exercise = physical movement in some form to the majority of us. Trouble is that some of the best and highest achievers of all time haven’t been Olympian athletes except in their mental work. And you can join them starting NOW! Here’s how with a mini starter list on how to exercise your mind –
a) Read more. Not social media posts but plain old books. This will cause your mind to start whirring into action imagining the scenes, the characters, the plot and what can happen etc. It’s the first great place to start mental movement.
b) Read more mental books. Follow on from that by reading books on the mind by the best writers. Not meditation books but ones on better thinking, greater focus, developing ideas etc. Check on that genre on Amazon or in your local bookstore. There’s plenty their to feed your mind.
c) And rather than include a slew of other suggestions I’ll simply add the following – practice imagining better for yourself, push yourself to learn a new skill, make your future plans and create ways to develop them, try crosswords in the paper, commit to one hour in the morning and one in the evening dedicated to progressive thinking and positive expectation as but a few.
The world has gotten very comfortable with making physical exercise an integral part of its daily lives. But it plainly fails in the mental department when that very effort to develop the mind shifts life in major style.
That’s not the bear on the trail, it’s the elephant in the room. We need to be fit and strong in the head not purely for good mental health, but for the sheer power it injects into our life to improve ourselves, believe better and higher, and to generate new possibilities. The mind is the seed and our life is was it feeds.
So start your mental exercise regime today.
Then you will lose the weight off your mind and be dripping in mental muscle that will wow everyone.
References – www.brittanica.com – Hugh Glass.
Wikipedia – Hugh Glass.
www.bbc.com – Courtney Dauwalter – Step inside the pain cave.
www.destinationtrailrun.com – Moab 240.
Photo attribution under free use content license – https://pixabay.com/illustrations/ai-generated-man-strong-gym-8706770/ by Hansuan_Fabregas.
