30. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

I was working with a male client yesterday who struggles with issues of self-worth, loneliness and anxiety despite the fact that he is a tremendously gifted young man. He is highly intelligent, kind and caring guy.

In the course of our talking, I had a hunch that reading him part of an article I wrote a few years ago might be helpful. So I asked him if I could read it to him.

The words hit him smack in the heart like a car bomb detonating in the middle of a town square. His eyes teared up. A look of recognition crossed his face. A barrier had fallen. Something had resonated with him deeply. ‘That’s it, that’s it!’ he said. ‘It has to do with my self-worth!’

Because it was such a powerful experience for both of us, I recorded the top 10 core beliefs for a happy and successful life and added it to my top secret video blog at

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com/core_beliefs/.

At that site, you can hear me read the top 10 core beliefs for a life of happiness and success. These are beliefs that (I believe) you must get intimately acquainted with to improve your chances at a successful and contented life. These are helpful for anger management as well. Most of us have negative, destructive tapes playing continuously in our heads (‘I’m not good enough’, ‘I’m lazy’, ‘I can’t do it’ and so on). These old tapes must be reprogrammed with positive, supportive, encouraging tapes to help you become more resilient and active.

The Top 10 Core Beliefs read something like this…

Core Beliefs That Work Towards Well-being

1. You are incredibly important and matter tremendously to the rest of us.

2. You are not alone. You are surrounded by others who care.

3. There is no failure, only delayed success.

4. Lessons are repeated until learned.

5. Learning never ends.

6. The present is a better place to live than the past or the future.

7. You can handle it.

For all 10 core beliefs, visit the my top secret new blog at drjohnsblog.wordpress.com.

My thought was to share these new, supportive beliefs with anyone who is interested. If they resonate with you, simply play them a few times a day in the background while you work. Repetition is key to reprogramming old tapes.

Hopefully, they resonate with you as much as they did for me and my client yesterday.

Live happy,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

New blog: http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com

Site: http://www.GuideToSelf.com

PS If you’d like a  FREE copy of my book on how to quiet the voices in your head, turn down the volume on negative emotions and turn up the volume on positive emotions, click here for instant access!

Posted in Danville CA, Overcoming failure, Curiosity, Hope, Subliminal messages, Optimal Human Functioning, Men's feelings, De-escalating anger, Well-being, Resiliency, Men's emotions, Happiness, Guide to Self, Life coach, Dr. John Schinnerer, Guide To Self Beginners Guide To Managing Emotion, Depression, Subconscious mind, Anger Management, Emotional management, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »

27. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

‘I have become comfortably numb.’  - Pink Floyd

‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’  - Henry David Thoreau

‘And I just can’t keep living this way
So starting today, I’m breaking out of this cage
I’m standing up, Imma face my demons
I’m manning up, Imma hold my ground
I’ve had enough, now I’m so fed up
Time to put my life back together right now’  - Eminem

Do you live life by running away from pain? By running away from conflict? By fleeing internal dis-ease?

Or do you live life by seeking meaning? The tireless pursuit of purpose?

Purpose is made possible by positive emotions. Without the feeling of curiosity or interest or passion or love, you may miss meaning.

So here’s a quick tip…turn one negative into a positive - shift negating nervousness into energizing excitement.

From the inside, nervousness is the same as excitement.

Both elevate the heart rate.

Both cause a sensation of butterflies in the stomach.

Both get the blood going more quickly in the body.

The only difference is HOW you interpret the bodily sensations in your mind.

So the next time you begin to get nervous, tell yourself, ‘Alright, I’m getting excited now!’

This will help reframe the situation as one in which you are growing comfortable in your discomfort.

And this is critical. It is essential that you get comfortable in your own discomfort. Because that is HOW you begin to get healthy - psychologically, emotionally, physically, financially.

You must take a risk. You must step outside your comfort zone if you want to succeed.

Pursue your purpose in life. Make a mark on meaning.

This one step will change your life.

So take the first step - tell yourself ‘I am excited now.’ 

And remember, avoiding disease is NOT the same as pursuing health.

Have a great weekend!

John

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Positive psychology coach

Author, speaker, trainer, bald white guy

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com

Posted in Meaning-making, Danville CA, Curiosity, Optimal Human Functioning, Well-being, Pursuing Purpose, Executive leadership, Gratitude, Hope, Creativity, Dr. John Schinnerer, Realistic optimism, Happiness, Emotional management, Assertiveness, Consciousness, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »

25. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

Ask yourself:

 How often am I irritated?

How frequently am I depressed?

How many years have I been anxious?

Do I want to find out more about Advanced Tools for the Mind (ATM)?

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com

Have fun!

– John

Posted in Curiosity | Print | No Comments »

25. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From UCLA press release on EurekAlert!…

‘Neuroscientists can predict your behavior better than you can

Surprising UCLA brain scanning study has implications for advertising, public health campaigns

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” — John Wanamaker, 19th-century U.S. department store pioneer

In a study with implications for the advertising industry and public health organizations, UCLA neuroscientists have shown they can use brain scanning to predict whether people will use sunscreen during a one-week period even better than the people themselves can.

“There is a very long history within psychology of people not being very good judges of what they will actually do in a future situation,” said the study’s senior author, Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. “Many people ‘decide’ to do things but then don’t do them.”

The new study by Lieberman and lead author Emily Falk, who earned her doctorate in psychology from UCLA this month, shows that increased activity in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex among individuals viewing and listening to public service announcement slides on the importance of using sunscreen strongly indicated that these people were more likely to increase their use of sunscreen the following week, even beyond the people’s own expectations.

“From this region of the brain, we can predict for about three-quarters of the people whether they will increase their use of sunscreen beyond what they say they will do,” Lieberman said. “If you just go by what people say they will do, you get fewer than half of the people accurately predicted, and using this brain region, we could do significantly better.”

“While most people’s self-reports are not very accurate, they do not realize their self-reports are wrong so often in predicting future behavior,” Falk said. “It is surprising to find out that some technique might be able to predict my own behavior better than I can. Yet the brain seems to reveal something important that we may not even realize.”

The study, the first persuasion study in neuroscience to predict behavior change, appears June 23 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For the study, Falk, Lieberman and their collaborators sought people who did not use sunscreen every day. The study group consisted of 20 participants, mostly UCLA students, 10 female and 10 male. The participants had their brains scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at UCLA’s Ahmanson–Lovelace Brain Mapping Center as they saw and heard a series of public service announcements. They were also asked about their intentions to use sunscreen over the next week and their attitudes about sunscreen.

The participants were then contacted a week later and asked on how many days during the week they had used sunscreen.

Lieberman and Falk focused on part of the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex, which is located in the front of the brain, between the eyebrows. This brain region is associated with self-reflection — thinking about what we like and do not like and our motivations and desires.

“It is the one region of the prefrontal cortex that we know is disproportionately larger in humans than in other primates,” Lieberman said. “This region is associated with self-awareness and seems to be critical for thinking about yourself and thinking about your preferences and values.”

The researchers developed a model based on 10 people and tested it on the next 10. They shuffled the 20 people in different ways to test the model. There are more than 180,000 ways to divide the 20 people into groups, Falk said.

“We ran a simulation of the 180,000 combinations, developed our model on the first 10 subjects on each of the 180,000 simulations, and tested it on the second 10,” Falk said. “We saw a very reliable relationship, where for the vast majority of the 180,000 ways to divide the group up, this one region of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, does a very good job of predicting sunscreen use in the second group.”

This finding could be relevant to many public health organizations, as well as the advertising industry, Lieberman and Falk said.

“For advertisers, there may be a lot more that is knowable than is known, and this is a data-driven method for knowing more about how to create persuasive messages,” said Lieberman, one of the founders of social cognitive neuroscience.

Neural focus groups

While 19th-century department store pioneer John Wanamaker (quoted at the beginning of this release) advertised effectively for his stores in newspapers, he still said he was wasting half his advertising budget — only he didn’t know which half.

“We’re learning something about which half,” Lieberman said.

While advertising agencies often use focus groups to test commercials and movie trailers, in the future they and public health officials perhaps should add “neural focus groups” to test which messages will be effective while monitoring the brain activity of their subjects.

“A problem with standard focus groups,” Falk said, “is that people are lousy at reporting what they will actually do. We have not had much to supplement that approach, but in the future it may be possible to create what we are calling ‘neural focus groups.’ Instead of talking with people about what they think they will do, a public health or advertising agency can study their brains and learn what they are really likely to do and how an advertisement would be likely to affect millions of other people as well.”

“Given that there are emerging technologies that are relatively portable and approximate some of what fMRI can do at a fraction of the cost, looking to the brain to shape persuasive messages could become a reality,” Lieberman said. “But we’re just at the beginning. This is one of the first papers on anything like this. There will be a series of papers over the next 10 years or more that will tell us what factors are driving neural responses.”

“We hope to build a sophisticated model of persuasion that may incorporate multiple brain regions,” said Falk, who studies the neural basis of persuasion and attitude change. She has been hired by the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor as an assistant professor of communication studies and psychology and a member of the university’s Institute for Social Research, starting in September.

While some people have emphasized reasoning and emotion as key areas on which to base advertising campaigns, a key question may be whether messages and advertisements can be produced that “make people feel, ‘This is about me and is relevant to my preferences and motivations,’” Falk said. “Perhaps effective messages reinforce our values, our self-identity, what motivates us. We will learn much more as we continue this line of research over the years.”

Neuroscientists will learn whether they can predict behavior better and are likely to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the roles played by different parts of brain regions, said Falk, who this March received UCLA’s Charles E. and Sue K. Young Award for outstanding research and teaching. She is interested in how to make more effective health and other public service messages aimed at young adults.

“There is still much we do not know about how to get people to make healthier choices,” Falk said. “We hope to learn much more about what makes messages more or less persuasive.”

Different brain regions may be important for persuading people to tell or e-mail their friends about a health message, product or service; Lieberman and Falk are studying this issue of “creating buzz” as well.

However, the implications of the research go far beyond advertising, Lieberman said.

“There are many applications beyond how you make a good 30-second commercial,” he said, “including how teachers can communicate better so their students won’t tune out or how doctors can convince patients to stick to their instructions. We all use persuasion in some form or another every day.”

Beware of hucksters

Some people are already offering “neuro-marketing,” purporting to help businesses sell their products and help candidates run their advertising campaigns, Lieberman noted. They may, for example, recommend what colors and sounds to use in commercials. Is this effective, or are they claiming expertise they do not possess?

“In general, they are taking simple views of how different parts of the brain work and are saying it is important to turn a particular part of the brain on when advertising, and therefore you should do more of this or that,” Lieberman said. “For instance, they will say you want to activate the amygdala because that is the brain’s emotion center. Typically they are not looking at the relationship between what happens in the brain when someone is exposed to an advertisement and what actually are the outcomes that you care about. For example, do people change their behavior? Does someone spread the message to others? Instead, they are giving generic analysis, and my guess is that the vast majority of the advice they are giving is not accurate.

“To really understand the relationship between the brain’s responses to brands and persuasive materials and desirable outcomes, you actually have to measure the outcomes that are desirable and not just say what should work,” he said. “There are many folks claiming to be neuroscientists who have read a little introductory neuroscience, and that is not enough expertise. It’s almost infinitely more complicated than that.”

Co-authors on the Journal of Neuroscience paper are Elliot Berkman, a UCLA graduate student of psychology in Lieberman’s laboratory who will be an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon this fall; Traci Mann, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota–Minneapolis who was formerly on UCLA’s faculty; and Brittany Harrison, a former UCLA undergraduate student.’

John’s Thoughts…

Okay, so I love this study. This excites the hell out of me. The idea that we are finally at the point of using neuroscientific tools to be able to somewhat accurately predict human behavior is astounding.

However, here is the pitfall with this particular study. The researchers have said several times that humans are notoriously bad at self-report. In other words, we are not very good at telling other people what we will do or what we have done. We know memory is unreliable and varies according to what emotional state we are in at the present moment. We know we are poor predictors of how we will behave in the future. We know we don’t do well at predicting how future events will make us feel.

 And yet, the release says, ‘participants were then contacted a week later and asked on how many days during the week they had used sunscreen.’

So we don’t truly know how frequently people had used sunscreen because their recollections will vary based on how they were feeling at the moment they reported that information.

And I’ve been here before from a researcher’s perspective and it’s a maddening chicken and egg scenario.

The other problem I see coming down the road is the ethical debate. I am absolutely for the development of this technology with the assumption that it will be used for constructive, socially desirable messaging. And that is a BIG assumption. Once the technology is fully developed, anyone can get their hands on it. Once the technology is in the hands of individuals who lack ethics, values and social and emotional awareness, we’ve got a serious problem. Because then the technology will be used to craft powerful, predictive messages that are fueled by nothing more than revenue. That is dangerous.

The next step, in my mind, is to teach more individuals social and emotional awareness so that more are acting towards the greater good, more are joining the advanced human team, more are aware of their top values AND acting in accordance with them. Only when we reach this plateau of human development will such technologies have a chance of fulfilling their idealistic promises (and I’m all for idealism!).

In any case, I’m still excited about the study. I think they’ve done tremendous work and this is the harbinger of a new vista in neuroscience. Congratulations to the team at UCLA!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Award-winning author, founder of Guide To Self

Real Men, Real Emotions, Real Potential

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com

Posted in Neuropsychology, Awareness, Danville CA, Memory and recall, Neuromarketing, San Francisco Bay Area, Subconscious mind, Consciousness, Innovative brand research, Dr. John Schinnerer, Unique marketing research, Chief Marketing Officer, Customer Engagement, Brand Equity, Business & psych | Print | No Comments »

24. June 2010 by John Schinnerer.

A fantastic new white paper by John Schinnerer, Ph.D. on the top scientifically proven tools to turn up the volume on your positive emotions and lead a happier, more productive life.

Discover the answers to questions such as

What are you doing now that you are passionate about?

What gets you excited to get out of bed in the morning?

What would you enjoy doing even if you weren’t paid to do it?

What are you really good at that also energizes you?

Just visit us at …

 http://www.guidetoself.com/contact.htm

Fill in your name and email address and you will have instant access to the white paper.

Enjoy!

John

PS Be sure to vist the site to get your free white paper on Instant Happiness!

http://www.GuideToSelf.com/contact.htm

Posted in Optimal Human Functioning, Employee engagement, Danville CA, Self-compassion, San Francisco Bay Area, Real Men Real Emotion, Well-being, National speakers, Science of love, Emotional mind, Happiness, Customer Engagement, Men's emotions, The human brain, Hope, Resiliency, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »