Of course I’m taking about Boris. With each step on his journey he’s found to be wanting, he’s found to be lying, he’s found to be incompetent, he’s found to be making poor decisions, he's found to be out of touch, confused, passing the buck, over promising and under delivering, should I go on?
And yet millions of citizens in the UK voted for him to lead this country, to lead us into a pandemic of epic proportions, with an epic death toll, that is still rising every single day.
We gasped when even one person died from COVID19 and now we don't even bat an eyelid when the death toll totals 96 (on 20 July 2021).
Leadership in government globally has been the worst in decades, but how do we know this? We only need to look at Gareth Southgate, the England Football team manager or Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Prime Minister. Why can they be outstanding leaders but our governments can’t?
You are already the most powerful storyteller walking on the planet, the only problem is you don’t realise it yet. As you are reading this text, your mind is more than likely starting to wander in different directions, you may be reading these words for sure, but what happens to those words when they integrate with your brain is something totally unique.
The words you are reading will only make sense when they match up with the stories you have created inside the depths of your neurons, which of course reside in your brain.
All of us have the ability to make sense of things that are happening around us and we do this through capturing short stories about the times, places, people and things that we observe, including the words that you are reading right now.
You have to create visual cues in your brain for many things and when you add some emotion and feeling to those visuals it will have a better chance of hard-wiring there. When our neurons hard-wire they stay inside our long-term memory for longer.
Stories when told well, will engender some emotion and feeling inside of you and when it does, that’s THE most powerful way for it to lay down new memory neurons. Therefore when you share stories make them relatable, memorable, different, unusual and stand out.
I love the following quote, it’s the one I always recall when creating stories.
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ~ Maya Angelou
This was my response to a question posed inside a LinkedIn group asking: ‘What’s standing in the way between you and the person you most want to be?’
I’ve realised over my young years that unhelpful thoughts get me into all sorts of trouble with myself. Usually there’s nobody else involved it’s all my own doing. It stops me from moving forward, it stops me from staying in the moment, I overthink stuff and arrive at conclusions that are never reality.
Where does this come from? How does this manifest? How can I change it?
It’s as a consequence of years of self-programming that we do to ourselves, repeated thoughts that are not true become truths in your own reality. The more you think of something the more it gets hard-wired in our neural pathways. Tony Robbins has an acronym for it, NAC, Neuro-associative conditioning.
There is also another famous saying, which sums up what happens in your brain when you continuously think the same untruths.
Imagine each thought is a neuron, maybe a new one or likely an old one, because you’ve been thinking this stuff for a while. So when you think that thought a neuron fires with another neuron that then concludes it is the truth. Very likely it’s not, but you’ve just created that connection. Repeat the same thought over and over and those neurons fire over and over too.
‘Neurons that fire together wire together’.
Once wired together it’s very hard to get them apart. The same process that wired them together needs to commence to unwire them. So repeated thoughts of the opposite of the untruth are needed in order to lose the wired connection and create a new neural pathway instead. For example, the untruth of ‘I won’t amount to anything’ could be replaced with ‘I am perfect as I am in this very moment’. Repeat that thought over and over and eventually the other one will one day stop appearing in your thoughts. It sounds great in theory doesn’t it? Doing it is a much harder thing.
The very first concept of a Smartphone is said to have been envisioned back in the mid-1970s, but that idea didn’t come into fruition until almost 20 years later when IBM’s Simon Personal Communicator first showed its face in 1992.
Most of us will consider that Apple’s release of the iPhone in 2007 was the start of the smartphone revolution. It probably made the smartphone a commercial success and killed all the others off in the process although they didn’t know it yet until years later.
Today your smartphone has become an extension of your hand and occupies a large part of your brain too. You have literally hard wired your brain to be connected to your smartphone almost all of the time. If it’s not actually on your person, you will very likely be wondering where it is, wanting it to be back in your immediate surroundings, preferably your hand or at least where you can see it. Tethered to your power lead, making sure it has enough battery life in the worry that it might actually run out.
Most of us complain of not having enough battery life although manufacturers have been increasing battery life every single year and whenever a new smartphone comes out. It may even be one of the biggest reasons, subconsciously of course, that we upgrade our phones every year, when actually there’s no need to. It’s an illusion that you need more battery life. The reason your battery goes down so fast is that you spend more time thumbing your way through it, more than you ever did.
Remember before smartphones, if you are old enough, there was nothing to do on the mobiles of those early days, apart from making calls and texting, the battery used to last for days. And batteries today are thinner and last longer and because we’re constantly on them it means the battery is being used constantly.
Not the manufacturer’s fault, it’s your fault.
You place your smartphone by your bed at night and pick it up first thing in the morning. You check it more than 100 times per day at least, at the very least.
It is so bad that it’s believed that research needs to take place into the psychodynamics of these technologies, in terms of the emotional and possibly psychopathological function they are serving in people’s lives.
Next time you pick up your smartphone just know that your brain can’t function without it, you are literally hardwired and addicted.
