Mental rehearsal is great and effective to condition your mind. Okay, this is a magnet here, and actually, I was testing it out before, and it actually broke because this is an industrial magnet. I kind of thought it was like a marketing gimmick. It's actually so strong that when I put this magnet on, I can't even pull it off. When I put this magnet on, it exploded, broke, and a bunch of sparks flew everywhere. I'm going to show you how to get exactly what you want, just as sure as these ones are a little less dangerous, just as sure as magnetism works. How to unblock it and how to get what you want are just as certain as magnets' attraction to one another.
Imagination Is The Key To Mental Rehearsal
So to understand how to get what you want, it goes back to 1992 when there was a study in the journal of neurophysiology and they measured a group of test subjects who visualized themselves lifting weights with a particular finger over time, and they didn't just have a loose image in their head. This is one effective mental rehearsal. They literally mustered up all of their energy and all of their intention to literally enter the vision in their mind, as if they were lifting the weight using the power of their own mind to imagine it shockingly. The research found that the finger that they had simply just imagined lifting with actually became stronger than the other fingers, and there are all types of crazy studies like this where they've had people lifting weights and people imagining piano exercises.
The people that were doing it in their imagination were seeing muscular differences or brain differences. It shows that when you mentally rehearse correctly, your life actually starts to quite literally change. Just like magnetism works, that's how mental rehearsal works, and I had a crazy story. I was early in my career, and I wasn't really making the progress that I wanted, and I was pissed off about it, so, if you think about it from a mental rehearsal perspective, I was angry. I wasn't getting what I wanted, which was really me mentally rehearsing, not getting what I wanted over and over, and so I started mental rehearsal that I was a successful speaker.
Never Underestimate The Power Of Your Brain
I started imagining all these companies and colleges contacting me and paying me for speeches, and I'd walk into that picture. In my mind, I'd hear the audience. I'd feel the excitement of shaking hands with the client as they gave me a check, and I had a pretty crazy thing happen. I was actually on Coast To Coast, a huge night time radio show that goes from like 2AM to 4AM, and I was on with George Noory in the middle of the night. We were talking about one of my books, and we did this epic thing, and the next morning I got an email from a woman. Read my blog about Reality Is Just An Illusion so you can learn more.
She works for a big Fortune 500 company, and she asked me how much I would charge for speaking, and they wanted to have me out. I found out later that this woman couldn't sleep in the middle of the night. She woke up at like 12:30 and when she woke up, she hit the radio and when she hit the radio, I was on. She rolls over, writes my name down, falls back to sleep, and contacts me the next morning. Think about these magnets. That's how mental rehearsal works, and I ended up getting my first 10,000 speaking gig out of that event when a lady in the middle of the night couldn't sleep and the magnetism of mental rehearsal brought her into my life.
Big idea number two is to never underestimate the power of your brain, and learning to juggle has actually been proven to cause specific areas of the brain to grow. According to a study that was published in Nature in 2004, German researchers at the University of Regensburg recruited 24 people, who weren't jugglers, by the way, and they divided them into two groups. Group one practiced juggling daily for three months, and group two, which was the control group, did no juggling at all. Afterward, at the end of the three months, they did MRI studies on the brain, and they found out some pretty crazy things.
Repetition Is The Key To Permanently Rewiring Your Brain
So the subjects who acquired the skill of juggling had a measurable increase in the gray matter of their brain in two separate areas of the brain involving visual and motor activity. Now, the shocking thing about this is that those who stopped juggling had their enlarged brains return to normal size within just three months. So it's just like a muscle in the gym. This is one effective mental rehearsal. You use it or you lose it. This study shows that the brain literally has the ability to grow new nerve cells and has regenerative functions when you do things, and that probably explains why I had so many crazy results by using success hypnosis every day.
The reason that it worked is because I did it every day, just like they showed that the brain actually reversed all of its growth in the gray matter, with the people juggling if they stopped. Similarly, when you use this success hypnosis every day, you start to literally build a new brain that is magnetically programmed for you to have success. Now before we dive into number three, I just want to give you a quick affirmation. "I'm a genius and I apply my wisdom." If all of that stuff can happen to your brain, maybe you have a lot more dormant power than you could possibly imagine.
So step number three is repetition. Repetition is the key to permanently rewiring your brain for money, for success, for happiness, for confidence, for health, and for anything that you want. In Dr. Joe Dispenza's book, Evolve Your Brain, he shares a research experiment that was done at the department of neurology at Bella View Hospital in New York City, and it was pretty crazy because it showed that up to 75% of stroke patients achieved total restoration in the control of their paralyzed arm or leg. Repetition was the key ability that they used to rewire their brains, so they take all these people that can't move their arms or their legs and they give them proper instruction to diligently practice focusing their minds while mentally moving a paralyzed limb. This is another effective mental rehearsal.
The Power Of Thought And Mental Rehearsal
So, in their mind, they're moving it. They receive mental feedback through sophisticated biofeedback machines, and every day they practice moving that arm. They practice moving that leg until they can reproduce the same brain patterns when thinking or imagining moving that affected limb as if they were actually moving those limbs in real life. That's when they started to reverse their own paralysis. So what does this study at Bella View Hospital in New York City show? That, regardless of their age, and independent of the severity of their injury, their brain showed them the ability to restore the body's function at a higher level through applying mental will.
They were activating new cells. Other parts of their brains were picking up to restore the lost basic functions. So if they could do that, you could probably make more money. You could probably be more confident, you could probably be more successful, and studies show it takes about 66 days for these behaviors to become automatic in our brain to start to take over these things and replicate them in our lives. What most people do is quit before then because they don't see a measurable result.
But in 2010, there was a study in the European Journal of Social Psychology, and it's pretty crazy. It reveals that it can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for people to learn a new habit, but the duration depends on the vividness of the mental activity, imagination, or mental rehearsal that occurs in their brain. So, just like these two magnets attract each other, you can start to move your brain, mind, and future toward a new goal just by the power of thought and mental rehearsal.