Uncover Your Organizing Principles

Take this opportunity to uncover your Organizing Principles, see their limitations, and flip your perspective—all of which will start the process of no longer letting them run you. My Organizing Principles have been: The world isn’t safe; don’t trust. Painful feelings are dangerous. (The corollary is all feelings have the potential to be painful, so

27 Oct, 2014
Posted by Steve Fogel
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Your Perspective Determines your Perceptions

Here’s a visual image that illustrates how your perspective determines your perceptions. It also illustrates that the instructions you receive—which, when you’re on automatic pilot, come from your programming—determine your perspective. Look at the following drawing (designed by early-twentieth century Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin), which can be perceived as a white candlestick against a

23 Oct, 2014
Posted by Steve Fogel
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My Favorite Books – Part I

I’ve always loved books, both fiction and nonfiction. In previous blogs I’ve written about some of my favorites, and this week and next I’m going to share a more extensive list of books that have inspired and enriched me. My Early Favorites When I was a kid, my dad read me Aesop’s Fables, illustrated

16 Oct, 2014
Posted by Steve Fogel
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Pause Your Machinery: Thinking Mindfully about Acts

Stop and take a moment to “pause your machinery.” The concepts and techniques I present throughout my latest book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, require mindfulness to learn and master, and this brief written exercise will give you the opportunity to rest, step outside the pattern of passive reading, and

9 Oct, 2014
Posted by Steve Fogel
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A Road Map for Becoming Mindfully Aware of How You Operate—Payoffs or Heavy Costs?

I’ve mentioned that our acts have three payoffs, but are these really payoffs? By becoming mindfully aware of and reflecting on my acts, I can now see that they don’t deliver real payoffs; they’re just payoffs for my machinery. They keep me trapped in my old fixed way of being and reinforce the neural

25 Sep, 2014
Posted by Steve Fogel
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