Even if you hate opera this seemingly spontaneous rendition cannot fail to bring a smile!

The Power of Mindset

What’s something you’d love to learn?

Is it a language? A sport? A hobby?

A business tool, like sales, marketing or networking?

A social skill, like speaking with confidence, seducing men (or women), or making friends quickly and easily?

Now, imagine you have signed up for a six week introductory class in whatever it is you’d love to learn, taught by an unquestioned expert in the field. Your teacher stands up at the beginning of the day and says the following:

Good morning, class!

Today is the first day of our introductory classes, and I want to reassure you, there is nothing for you to worry about. What we will be learning here is something you will either be able to pick up easily or not. Each week, there will be a test to assess your level of ability. If you find you can learn it easily, this class and the full course to follow will help you to unleash and demonstrate your innate ability. If not, it will allow you to move on quickly and find something you are more naturally suited for. You may sign up for the full course or drop out of these introductory classes at any time…

How would you approach the class? How would you prepare for the first test? If you did poorly on that test, how would you approach the second? How long would you stay with the class before making a decision about whether to sign up or drop out?

When you have taken a few moments to explore your answers to those questions, take a few moments to imagine this scenario…

You have signed up for a six week introductory class in whatever it is you’d love to learn, taught by an unquestionable expert in the field. Your teacher stands up at the beginning of the day and says the following:

Good morning, class!

Today is the first day of our introductory classes, and I want to reassure you, there is nothing for you to worry about. What I will be presenting here is a learnable skill. Each week, there will be a test to assess how far along you are in your practice. If you apply yourself, this class and the full course to follow will give you everything you need to master this skill. If not, you will no doubt stay stuck at whatever level you currently find yourself at . You may sign up for the full course or drop out of these introductory classes at any time…

Same questions as last time – how would you approach the class? How would you prepare for the first test? If you did poorly on that test, how would you approach the second? How long would you stay with the class before making a decision about whether to sign up or drop out?

In her groundbreaking book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, author Carol Dweck shares the results of dozens of actual experiments not unlike the one above.

In each case, researchers deliberately influenced the mindset of test subjects in one of two directions. Some people were guided towards a Fixed Mindset – one where results were unlikely to change over time and were attributed to innate talent or intelligence. Others were guided towards a Growth Mindset – one where results could and would alter radically in proportion to individual effort, energy, application, focus and time.

In one of the most startling of the experiments, children who received identical grades on an exam were divided into two groups. The first group was praised for their intelligence, along the lines of “wow – 8 out of 10 – you’re so smart!”. The second group was praised for their application, along the lines of “wow – 8 out of 10 – you must have really worked hard!”

To the researchers amazement, the children who were told they had done so well because they were smart (the Fixed Mindset) actually became reticent to take on further, more advanced tests and even lied about their scores when asked to tell others how they had done. In stark contrast, the Growth Mindset children were eager to take on the more advanced work and told the truth about their scores.

So, what can we learn from this?

Well, the first thing to be aware of is how relatively easy it is to predispose someone towards either mindset simply by the words we use to describe and explain the activity.

If I want my kids (and clients and friends and wives and, well, you get the idea!) to approach life with a Growth Mindset, it will be important for me to develop the skill of presenting possibilities and attributing results to learning and application as opposed to any sort of innate ability.

The second is to become more aware of any areas where we ourselves have gotten stuck in a Fixed Mindset. This will often reveal itself in statements like:

• “I’m just no good at maths.”
• “I couldn’t carry a tune if my life depended on it.”
• “I’ve never been able to draw.”

These statements are often accurate assessments of past performance, but become limiting when used as predictors of future possibility.

Here are a few other useful guidelines for noticing what mindset you are bringing to your favorite and/or most important projects:

A classic example of how a fixed mindset can skew even the most positive of findings can be seen in the original intention behind the famous Stanford-Binet IQ tests. Far from being designed as a measure of intelligence as an innate character trait, Alfred Binet created the original tests as a way of evaluating which students needed extra help at school, even going so far as to warn that scores should not be interpreted literally due to the “plasticity” of intelligence.

And if the guy who created the model for modern IQ tests was smart enough to know that, perhaps we can all learn something truly valuable from our IQ score – that we can never accurately measure our future possibilities on the basis of our current reality.

Michael Neill is an internationally renowned success coach and the best-selling author of You Can Have What You WantFeel Happy Now!Effortless Success,  and the  audio program. He has spent the past 20 years as a coach, adviser, friend, mentor and creative spark plug to celebrities, CEO’s, royalty, and people who want to get more out of their lives. His books have been translated into 8 languages, and his public talks and seminars have been well received at the United Nations and on five continents around the world.

Check out Michael Neill’s Tips of the Day ….

Forensic psychologist Dr Simon Duff studied the effects of hypnotherapy on dementia sufferers compared to conventional, traditional methods, as well as group therapy.

He noticed a significant improvement in those who had received hypnotherapy compared to the standard treatment.

Dr Duff, who is conducting further research into the long-term benefits that hypnotherapy can have, said, “Those having regular hypnosis sessions showed real improvement across all of the areas that we looked at whilst the group who received treatment as usual showed a small decline over the assessment period.”

Hypnosis is a totally natural procedure and requires no drug or equipment, completely relying on the relaxation of the patient. It can be compared to ‘day dreaming’ with the subconscious mind taking an active role.

It is believed that the subconscious mind is less affected by the disease and thus tapping into that could provide significant benefits.

He added, “Participants who are aware of the onset of dementia may become depressed and anxious at their gradual loss of cognitive ability,” said Dr Duff, adding that hypnotherapy could help sufferers relax so that they can concentrate on positive activities.

Antidepressants of the Prozac type are no better than a placebo, a leading psychologist has claimed. According to Irving Kirsch, the evidence is overwhelming that there is no link between depression and serotonin, the brain chemical that such drugs are supposed to affect.

Practising psychiatrists, however, say that it would be disastrous to use stricter criteria for the prescription of antidepressants on the basis of Professor Kirsch’s research findings. “Be very careful what you advise, because we in the surgeries will be left to pick up the pieces,” said Amjad Uppal, a consultant psychiatrist for the Gloucestershire NHS Trust.

Last year in England the NHS issued 39 million prescriptions to treat depression, more than half being for “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor” (SSRI) drugs. Three million people took antidepressants daily. Antidepressants including Prozac and the newer generation of SSRIs, such as Seroxat, are taken to increase the level of serotonin in the brain.

Professor Kirsch argued that they worked through the placebo effect — patients expect to be made to feel better — and said that “talking treatments” such as cognitive behavioural therapy were more effective in the long term.

“Although the chemical-imbalance theory is often presented as if it were fact, it is actually a controversial hypothesis,” he said. “This is about as close as a theory gets in science to being disproven by the evidence.”

Others maintain that antidepressants do have an active biochemical influence. “We do not fully understand how these drugs work, but there is evidence that they influence the number of neurons and the connections between neurons. You can’t draw conclusions about this because of the nature of the study,” said Hamish McAllister- Williams, a consultant psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist at Newcastle University.

He said that depression was a dangerous illness, noting that sufferers were at as high a risk of a heart attack as those who smoked 20 cigarettes a day.

Dr McAllister-Williams believed that “at least a proportion” of the effect of the drugs was “due to active ingredients, but either way they work and we really need an effective treatment”. Dr Uppal said: “I have a very high threshold for prescribing antidepressants, but there’s no doubt in my mind they work. Research studies are artificial and do not capture the difference between effectiveness and efficacy.”

Professor Kirsch’s research, presented at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival, shows that a new drug, tianeptine, is just as effective as SSRIs in treating depression. Tianeptine, which is a serotonin reuptake enhancer, actually decreases the level of the chemical.

In comparisons of tianeptine with SSRIs and the earlier tricyclic antidepressants, the three produced virtually identical response rates: 63 per cent of patients responded to tianeptine, 62 per cent to SSRIs and 65 per cent to tricyclics. If drugs having three different effects on serotonin brought similar benefits, these could not be due to their specific chemical activity, Professor Kirsch said. “The idea that the neural transmitter serotonin is a causal factor in depression is wrong.

We found J K Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Speech extremely inspiring, moving and above all, entertaining. We do hope you enjoy it too!

Someone passed this on to me earlier today:

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future. ”
Lewis B. Smedes

Forgiviness is an interesting concept, isn’t it? We often seem to want to hold on to a bitter memory because the other person involved doesn’t warrant our forgiveness; maybe we feel that they haven’t atoned enough or they don’t yet/won’t ever deserve to be forgiven.

Yet who is injured by our inability to forgive? It may sometimes be the other person, that’s true ….  but often they remain blissfully unaffected by the weight of our resentment, bitterness and anger.

The one person, the only person, truly affected by our inability to forgive is ourself. By choosing not to forgive we believe that we are valuing ourselves. We may feel that we are not yet ready to forgive and so we hold on to all those negative emotions for a little longer and then a little longer still … and over time we become used to having those negative emotions inside of us … they begin to feel comfortable, we have ‘worn them in’. Fast forward a little further still and we have stopped being able to see/feel the way in which these emotions affect us, eat us up, drain us of opportunties to feel contented in the world.

Why do we do this? In doing so we move from being the injured party to the injuring party …  if someone stole from us we wouldn’t then start throwing money away ourself to make them pay for what they had done, would we? The concept of self harming in the interest of making ’someone else pay’ just doesn’t make sense.

So, for our own sakes, maybe we should take the time to look inside. Is there anything we can let go of?

If so, let’s do it now – isn’t it time to look after us?

Isn’t it time to look inside and forgive …  forgiveness is for no one else’s benefit but our own. It enables us to live freely and to find true contentment.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mag13618450.700-how-one-in-five-have-given-up-smoking-.html

Reconsolidation Theory and the Point of TherapyJul 25th, 2007

Most of us have a sense of our own history, our successes, our failures, our ups and downs. Our memories form an intrinsic part of our self-identity; that elusive entity that helps to give us a feeling of coherence as we navigate through time. But how reliable is this sense of our past? Is who we think we are based on a system of memory that is more fluid and unstable than we are comfortable admitting?
 

It has long been established that memories are easily manipulated. Multiple witnesses to a crime come up with widely disparate descriptions; embellishments can readily be made in response to leading questions or the desire to please – yet each witness will believe in the truth of their recall, and unaware of how their memory has been influenced.

Despite this knowledge it has been a presumption that the memory itself – whether accurate or not – is permanent, burned into the synapses of the brain. New research is suggesting that this is not so. Essentially it is suggesting that long-term memory is a myth, which could open exciting new possibilities within Hypnotherapy. It appears that recalling a memory renders it fluid and unstable – able to be changed before being re-fixed into the circuitry of the brain – and that change could include changing its meaning or even deleting it completely. This is something that has been implicit in several forms of therapeutic intervention; Regression is based around the belief that changing the meaning the client has of a past experience, or changing the way the client perceives that memory, will alter the way the client responds to stimuli in their life which are connected to that event in the mind’s organising schema. Similarly several NLP techniques involve the disruption of the way the client perceives a memory in order to change the way they feel about it – memories are chopped about, run backwards and forwards, in black and white or colour etc which can have a dramatic effect on the client’s response. These techniques have long been found to work – but why?

Can you remember your first day at school, first kiss, or favourite holiday? Hopefully at least one of those, but why can you? I mean, what’s the point of being able to do so? Clearly memory works as a means of keeping track of our lives, but why would evolution invest so much energy in creating this ability – and why would the facility to change our history by having pliable memory be an advantage to us as an organism struggling to survive on the face of this particular planet?

Perhaps we need to change our view of the function of memory from it being a static database of facts that keeps getting added to as we age – like a photograph album – to a living network of understanding – a self – that is able to adjust its sense of itself in the light of new learning. By looking at the mind in this way in this way it would become a benefit to be able to upgrade old memories to fit new views of the world. An example might be Santa Claus (anyone who still believes in him should look away now). As a child I believed in him completely, as I grew older I reached a point where I no longer did. Now when I think back to believing in him I don’t remember that “I do believe”, I remember that “I did believe”, the encoding of the memory has been changed from a belief I have to a belief I once had. That must involve a change in the way the memory is stored, otherwise how do I know I no longer believe?

This plasticity of memory has clear advantages in keeping ourselves up to date with beliefs about the world that are to our advantage, but our clients tend to suffer from the downside of this ability, which I will explain a little later. First I want to go into a little detail about how the brain stores our experiences.

The mechanics of memory

When our brains record an experience it is captured by the firing of a particular arrangement of neurons (nerve cells) which leave them connected and primed to fire again to re-create that ‘ just happened’ moment. This short term memory trace lasts just a few seconds. To be turned into something more permanent the synapses that connect the arrangement of neurons that equal the memory swell with more receptors and neurotransmitters and after a few hours the brain cells themselves actually grow, sprouting new and thicker connections to make the memory trace permanent. Proteins are produced by a range of genes to facilitate this process. This is a very simplified account of something termed consolidation. What renders this process even more remarkable is that this memory pattern then migrates. Initially the building of this brain pattern occurs deep in the brain in places like the hippocampus, but over the course of weeks and even years it moves to more general areas of the cortex – a bit like moving something from your ram to your hard-drive. Until recently it was felt that this was the end of the story, the memory stays in the backwaters of the mind gathering dust but essentially remaining the same. A recent experiment blew this idea away.

To study the process of consolidation researchers interfere with the steps involved in fixing a memory in order to test their influence on long-term recall. Joseph LeDoux and Karim Nader discovered something puzzling.

They trained rats to associate a darkened box with an electric shock to their paws. The rats learn the box is to be avoided and freeze the next time they are put back. If, a few days after this conditioning, the animals were given a drug to prevent protein synthesis before being reminded of the box it made no difference to their ability to remember it as a bad place. The memory seemed fixed and safely stored. But if the rat had a brief reminder of the box just before the drug was administered the rat lost its conditioning – it forgot it was supposed to be scared. The memory had somehow been erased. The pair labelled this reconsolidation. Intrigued, they went further. Traditional consolidation theory suggests that memories are fixed locally by protein changes within a few hours of the event and then filed to long-term storage in the cortex after about a month. After conditioning rats in the same way they left them for 45 days, by which time the memory should have been fixed and immune to interference.

As before, the rats given no reminder of the box before being injected, or who had their hippocampus destroyed, kept their conditioned response to the box.

But the rats that were given a reminder of the box before being given the drug did develop amnesia in the rats. Destroying the hippocampus also took away their fear of the box. The consolidated memory – which conventional wisdom said was permanent and stable – had been removed by the action of recalling it. In Nader’s words “The dogma was that once a memory trace had been consolidated, it is permanent. But here it is labile – subject to interference in exactly the same way as a brand new experience. We were showing memory to be something incredibly dynamic.”

It appears that memory moves from the hippocampus to the cortex during consolidation, but is returned to the hippocampus for reconsolidation by the act of recall.

This dynamism would be unnecessary if the brain just wanted a photograph album, but it fits perfectly if memories exist to make sense of the present, and distorting some memories while generalising about, or even deleting others, serves to improve the mind’s recognition and understanding of the world in order to prosper within it. If a memory becomes plastic every time it is recalled then it can be re-filed in a usefully updated way. The mind can make choices about whether to merge old and new, or to reinforce their differences.

Some previous findings in therapy support this new model. Back in the sixties it was noted that electroconvulsive shock treatment given to conscious psychiatric patients could produce amnesia of any recently recalled memories, but not memories left dormant. In the 70‘s Canadian psychiatrist Richard Rubin used this to cure OCD by getting the patient to focus on their obsession before administering the shocks. Before you start wiring up your recliner, there are other methods that may be using reconsolidation; Stanislav Grof of Maryland University investigated the clinical use of LSD back in the 50’s and found that the hallucinogenic experience often changed the patients perception of the memory and dramatically reduced treatment time. More recently an African herb with similar properties has been used successfully with heroin addicts, reportedly by changing the memories connected to their addiction and releasing them from their need. Again, I am not advocating a trip to your local dealer. In the USA one of the best documented forms of effective therapy for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is EMDR, where the sufferer recalls a traumatic memory while following the path of the therapist’s finger through their visual field. Without doubt it can be highly successful. Within the framework of reconsolidation theory it may be that recalling the memory and moving the eyes while doing so causes the memory to be re-stored using different submodalities, which change the meaning of it. As suggested previously, this is similar to NLP techniques such as the Swish pattern, Spinning, and Fast Phobia cure. So there already exist non-invasive and non-drug-based approaches that can be understood in terms of reconsolidation theory. Perhaps so can client’s problems (and ours!).

Research by psychologists has shown that children are learning about their environment from the moment of their arrival (and probably before). Babies can mimic facial expressions when only 45 hours old; they are, quite literally, learning machines. The mind learns by creating models of how things work, testing them, and then updating them as they gain new information. This fits well within the model of reconsolidation, and is obviously useful for our survival. For example, as a child I was told not to go near the fire because it would burn me. Having no model for what burning actually was in terms of its effect on me I touched the hearth and burnt my fingers. My information was updated and I learnt to avoid getting burnt – I didn’t have to keep testing to see if hot things still burnt. As I look back at memories involving heat they are filtered through the belief that has emerged as a result of them – the memories create the belief which then can adapt the memories that created it. It is the memory of the meaning that is evolutionarily necessary, not the accuracy of the recording of the event itself – how I remember the look of the hearth may be largely irrelevant. This structure is fine and dandy when the young scientist makes the right connections. The problem arises when the immature reasoning leads to inaccurate conclusions. Suppose at the age of 5 a child falls over during the school play and afterwards her mother tells her off showing her up. As children we are all sensitive to the withdrawal of approval from our parents and will seek to avoid situations where this might occur. This child might experience anxiety the next time any situation arises which, to her mind, seems similar. As a consequence the belief begins to form that she is scared of public speaking as these experiences of anxiety are repeated. Once this belief is formed recollection of any memory connected to this belief is likely to be strengthened because of the belief it is viewed through. It becomes a self-supporting belief system, which over time grows stronger and stronger. While the evolutionary purpose of reconsolidation is to keep us safe, its drawback is that mistakes such as this made at the young scientist stage flow down the years.

Imagine our mind as a lake. Each experience is a rock that is thrown into the lake and sends ripples in all directions. The shore of the lake is the boundary of our model of the world. When we are young the ripples influence the contours of the lake as it develops into a shape unique to us. As we mature the shore hardens into the world we take to be true – our beliefs form our boundaries. By the time we are adults the ripples from each new experience tend to be more influenced by the shape of the lake than the shore of the lake is influenced by the ripple from the rock – we come to see the world as we expect to see it, and distort it in order to achieve this. As the ripples of our present experiences bounce back into the mind-lake shaped as they are by our shore, they join and mix with the waves from previous rocks, sometimes gentling them – and sometimes reinforcing their turbulence.

How should we use this information?

In brief, then, reconsolidation theory suggests that when memories are recalled they become vulnerable to change.

Therapists who investigate the memories of their clients should be aware that every time a memory is recalled it becomes unstable and capable of change. That change can be in one of several forms:
• The memory could be strengthened in its meaning – it becomes more of what it was.
• It can be weakened – it has less effect on the belief network it’s connected to.
• It can be transformed by having the meaning of it reframed – and by doing so transform the belief that derives from it
• It could be deleted altogether.

The first possibility could be why all the recent studies of counselling styles that rely on just going over past events, and talking about the feelings relating to them, tend to deepen the client’s experience of the problem. The logical conclusion to be drawn from reconsolidation theory is that the purpose of talking about any aspect of a client’s past experience is to change either its meaning or its coding so that it creates a positive change in the belief system responsible for the client’s problem.

A major area of experimentation could arise from these findings. How many ways can we find to give a client’s mind a new experience of their past which would cause a reassessment of their future? What techniques can we discover or refine in the light of this understanding of our neurology that can achieve the latter three possibilities? Regression, submodality work, metaphor and suggestion could all benefit from reconsolidation theory.

If our past is a myth that we create to confirm our beliefs, then therapy becomes a medium by which client’s can create whatever myth of their past forms the basis for their most productive future. We should bear it in mind the next time our client says “What happened was….”

If you would like to discuss how Alison and I can support you to create a different perception of your past and, in so doing, anticipate a different, better future then please contact us – we are waiting to hear from you

Donna