Reticu-what?

We've all had that experience where we look at purchasing a vehicle and then all of a sudden begin to see that vehicle everywhere. For example I commented to my wife a few weeks back that I liked the really unique blue paint of one of the vehicles in town, and how I had never saw that colour before. Over the next few weeks I saw that same shade or very close matches to it on vehicles almost daily! I wasn't looking for it, but something was catching it and drawing my attention to it subconsnciously.

That "something", is called the Reticular Activating System (RAS).

You are going to learn how to use it to your advantage, but first let's get nerdy about this.

The RAS is a whack of nerves nestled in our brainstem that has a bunch of jobs to take care of. Simply, it teams up with the thalamus and hypothalamus to tackle things like sleep wake cycles, focus, arousal, our fight or flight response, and how we percieve the world. In this conversation, most importantly, we will focus on it's ability to filter out needless information in order to allow important information to get through.

When the RAS identifies something as important, like an idea (the vehicle you want to buy, or the blue car example from earlier), it seeks out things that support that idea and puts them into our consciousness while filtering out the things that do not support that idea.

The RAS is impartial; when we identify something as important, it goes on a mission to search out more of it. It searches for anything that supports the idea, and eliminates or edits anything that does not.

So this makes sense in terms of looking for something we are actively searching for, like that wanted suspect's car, or a suspect's red shoes for example, but here's the real power of it:

The language and thought patterns we use supports our thinking and FEEDS the RAS.

The RAS is like an old radio tuner. You can adjust what you focus on (perspective and opinion) by changing key words. Our words and breath can work the frequency knobs to find the ideal station. With different words and breath, you can work the knobs and bring a kick ass and uplifting station into clear reception or move onto a better one.

By making excercises like last weeks journaling practice a habit, the RAS begins to kick in and filter more of that good into our consciousness (don't be scared of that word). Team up practices like that with paying attention to the language we use (getting rid of soft talk, I SHOULD do this, I CANT do that, etc) and all of a sudden your world is gunna get a whole lot brighter and clearer.

We have the tools to drastically shift our persepective and lives already built in, we just need to learn how to use them.

Want to kick that RAS into high gear? Jump on a call here and lets talk about it!