Chapter 9 Unleash Your Mental Powers Part E mp4 UPDATE

By Brian Tracy
Chapter 9:
Unleash Your Mental Powers
Part E

YOU ARE TRULY UNIQUE

What is your preferred way of learning and dealing with the world? You will be happy and fulfilled only when what you are doing on the outside is in harmony with the unique and special person you are on the inside. When you combine your dominant intelligence with your preferred method of learning, you can create a combination of intelligence and ability that will enable you to achieve extraordinary things with your life.

UNLOCKING THE FLOODGATES OF YOUR MIND

There are two powerful methods that you can use to unlock your brainpower and generate more ideas for goal attainment. These methods are called “mindstorming” and “brainstorming”. The first will make you rich personally, and the second will make you successful by enabling you to tap into the brainpower of other people. These methods are responsible for the creation of many self-made millionaires. You can use them almost anytime and anywhere.

MINDSTORMING FOR IDEAS

The process of “mindstorming” is often called the “20-idea method.” It is so powerful in generating ideas that when you begin using it your entire life will change. I have taught it to many tens of thousands of people all over the world. Everyone who uses it sees immediate profound improvements in each part of their lives to which this method is applied. The method is simple, which is probably why it is so powerful. All you need is a blank sheet of paper. At the top of the page, write out your current problem or goal in the form of a question.

Let us say that your goal is to double your income over the next two years. Make the question on this goal as specific as possible. The more specific the question, the better your mind can focus on it and the better quality of answers you will generate with this exercise. So instead of writing, “How can I make more money?” you would write instead, “What can I do to double my income over the next 24 months?” Remember, you write this question at the top of the page.

GENERATE 20 ANSWERS

You then discipline yourself to generate at least 20 different answers to that question. Force yourself to write out 20 different things that you could do that would help you to double your income. You can write more than 20 answers, but you must write a minimum of 20. Your first answers will probably be simple and obvious. You could write, “work harder,” “work longer,” “upgrade my education,” “improve my skills in specific areas,” and so on. They will be easy. The next 5 to 10 answers will be harder. The last 10 answers will be excruciatingly difficult, like squeezing water out of a stone.

But to get the most out of this exercise, you must force yourself to continue writing until you have answered the question 20 different ways. You can play with these answers if you like. For example, you can write the exact opposite of one of your earlier answers. You can also generate ridiculous answers as well.

THINK OUT OF THE BOX

For example, you might write, “work harder at my current job.” Your next answer might be, “work less at my current job.” Or, “work harder at a different job.” Or it may be to create your own job. Or it may be to get a second-income job, or to work part-time in another field. If your income depends on selling and your success in selling depends on prospecting, your answer could be to double the number of qualified prospects you see each week.

Or it could be to see higher-potential prospects who have the ability to buy twice as much of your product. Or it could be to sell a different product with a higher commission per sale. In any case, the potential answers are limited only by your imagination, and your capacity to generate ideas to help you is, to all intents and purposes, infinite.

THE IMPORTANCE OF ACTION

Once you have answered your question with at least 20 answers, go back over your answers and select at least one answer that you are going to take action on immediately. This step is very important! It is your taking action of some kind that keeps the torrent of ideas flowing through your mind. As you take action on one idea, another idea for another action will come to you. Here is an exercise you can use to double and triple the impact of the 20-idea method. Once you have generated at least 20 ideas and selected the one idea you are going to implement immediately, you can then perform the 20-idea method on that new idea, generating 20 different ways to put that idea to work.

FIRST THING IN THE MORNING

If you generate 20 ways to achieve your major goal in the morning before you start out, you will find yourself thinking creatively all day long. Your mind will be sharper and more alert. You will see solutions to problems and obstacles as fast as they come up. You will activate the law of attraction and begin drawing into your life people and resources that can help you to achieve your goal.

If you practice this exercise each day for five days, you will generate 100 new ideas to help you achieve your goals in the next week. If you then select one idea per day, you will be initiating five ideas per week. That is more ideas than the average person generates in a month, or even a year. If you generate 20 ideas per day, 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year, you will come up with an astounding total of 5,000 new ideas to improve your life and work each year. If you implement only a single new idea each day, 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year, you will be using 250 ideas per year to help you solve your problems and achieve your goals.

The average person lives with very little creativity. He is usually a victim of psychosclerosis and homeostasis, content to keep on doing the same things in the future that he has done in the past, whether doing so is working or not. When you practice mindstorming on a regular basis, you will soon have so many good ideas that there will not be enough hours in the day to carry them out.

More people have become rich using this 20-idea method than any other method of creative thinking ever discovered. All that is necessary for this method to work is for you to practice it regularly in your own life. All that is required is your willingness to use mindstorming regularly, and then to try out the ideas you generate until this process becomes a normal part of your life.

BRAINSTORMING WITH OTHERS

Mindstorming is an exercise that you can do by yourself. Brainstorming is something that you do with others. Brainstorming is a form of mindstorming done in a group, but it has slightly different rules. Brainstorming was originally developed by advertising executive Alex Osborn, and was first described in his 1946 book, Applied Imagination. It has since proliferated and is used all over the world, in every type of organization and situation, to generate ideas for a variety of reasons. It is a very simple process to learn and use.

Six Steps to Brainstorming

Step One:

Assemble the group. The ideal number of people in a brainstorming session is four to seven. Below four, you don’t have enough minds to generate a large enough variety of different solutions to the problem. With more than seven people, the group becomes too large for participants to get sufficient opportunity to contribute.

Step Two:

Do not permit criticism or ridicule. The essential part of brainstorming is that no evaluation of the ideas takes place during the brainstorming session. The entire focus of the brainstorming session is on generating the greatest quantity of ideas possible within a short period of time. Nothing kills a brainstorming session faster than the tendency of people to criticize the ideas as they are generated. As soon as one person’s ideas are criticized, the brainstorming session comes to a halt. No one wants to be criticized. No one wants to be humiliated or ridiculed in front of others. That is why you must concentrate on the quantity of ideas and leave the evaluation of them to another time, or to other people.

Step Three:

Set a specific time limit. The ideal length for brainstorming sessions ranges from 15 to 45 minutes. One of the jobs of managers and team leaders is to sit their staff down on a regular basis to brainstorm certain problems. Call everyone together and announce that you are going to brainstorm a particular goal or situation for 15 minutes and then everyone is going to go back to work. You’ll be amazed at the results.

Step Four:

Select a leader for the group. The leader’s job is to encourage everyone to contribute as much as possible. One of the best ways to lead a brainstorming session is to go around the table and encourage each person to contribute an idea—almost like playing cards, where you encourage each person to bet or pass. Once you have gone around the table a couple of times, people will start generating ideas at a rapid rate.

Step Five:

Select someone to keep track of the ideas. A key function in a brainstorming session is that of the recorder. This is the person who writes down the ideas as they are generated.

Step Six:

Be punctual. Start and stop the brainstorming session exactly on time, no matter how well it is going. At the end, you gather up all the ideas and take them away to be evaluated at a later time.

IDEAS ON INDEX CARDS

In another type of brainstorming session involving dozens of people, we break the group up and distribute index cards to each subgroup. Each of the smaller groups is assigned to generate ideas in answer to the question or problem. Afterward, the index cards containing the ideas are collected. They are then shuffled and handed out to the subgroups again, completely mixed up.

In the second phase of the exercise, each subgroup is asked to take the ideas on the cards that they have received and evaluate them, rating them in terms of their value prior to reporting back to the overall group. In a session with 20 or 30 people, two or three hundred ideas will be generated in 30 minutes. When those ideas are gathered, distributed, evaluated, and reported back to the overall group, the results are absolutely astonishing! I have worked with companies that have come up with so many solutions to problems that had been stumping them that they did not have enough hours in the day, or enough people, to take action on more than a small number of them.

THE HOME TEAM

If you are in a good relationship with another person, the two of you can form an excellent ongoing brainstorming team. A husband and wife, or any two people, together can generate a continuous flow of ideas, as long as they do not attempt to evaluate or criticize the ideas at the same time they are generating them.

IDEAS ENERGIZE YOU

There are two parts to unlocking your mental potential and harnessing the genius that lies within you. The first is to accept that you are extremely intelligent in your own way. The second is for you to use the methods and techniques described in this chapter until they become second nature to you. Like a muscle that grows and becomes stronger with use, your mental muscles grow and become stronger every time you practice one of these exercises.

There is something exciting and uplifting about generating ideas that help you to achieve your goals. The more ideas you generate, the more energy and enthusiasm you have. The more energy and enthusiasm you have, the more confident you become that you can achieve any goal you can set for yourself. The more ideas you generate, the faster you change your thinking about what is really possible for you. Eventually, you will reach the point in your own thinking where you will be unstoppable.

The Science of Personal Achievement