Prove Yourself To Your Brain

While you need to trust your brain, you have to allow your brain to trust you. To secure the confidence of your brain, you must check yourself regularly, again and again, because we are all subject to all types of doubts and fears. It is not through your thoughts or words, but rather through your actions that you can really check yourself. Through your actions, you must show yourself what kind of person you are, persuade your brain of this, and win your brain’s total trust. If you think a lot, but do not act, it shows that your brain power is not yet adequate. Your brain is failing to send a signal powerful enough to move your body. No creation is possible without action. Nothing meaningful at all happens without action.

The trust of your brain cannot be earned in a day. Your brain’s trust is a form of energy, an asset that must be accumulated and managed carefully by investing a great deal of time and effort. You build faith in yourself when you continue to show devotion to what you do, beginning with small things and moving one step at a time to larger things. This growing faith, ultimately, quiets the brain’s doubts and fears, and enables the brain to reveal and utilize its powers to the greatest extent possible.

To win the trust of your brain, you must develop and exercise willpower. Willpower is the ability, once we establish a goal, to see it through to the end. It is persevering despite obstacles and pain encountered along the way. When you make up your mind and say, “I’ll do it,” our fear of the task will vanish, and your heart will feel lighter. We will use 100% of our energy because we will be free of conflict over whether to do the work. Once you truly make up your mind to do something, your brain, on its own, will make all the preparations necessary to accomplish the task. Then, quite mysteriously, conditions surrounding you will develop in a way that will make it easier for you to accomplish what you set out to do.

Aid will come to you unlooked for. Things that seemed to have only a small chance of working out will end up going your way. If something we intend to do is not working out the way we would like, we should check ourselves to see whether we truly have the willpower to reach that goal and remind ourselves what it was we made our minds up to do in the first place.

When, with willpower, honesty, integrity, and responsibility, you put your choices into practice, you earn the trust of your brain. Your brain will begin to listen precisely to what you say and serve you loyally. You will grow into a mature human being who continues to reduce the discrepancies and contradictions between thought and deed, between body and brain, and between the principles for life we establish and the lives we actually live.

Pursue Your Highest Character and Grandest Dreams

Among all the animals living on the Earth, human beings have the largest brains relative to their bodies. Our brains are the organs that consume the most energy. The brain seems to have both regions specialized for specific functions, as well as broadly unspecialized regions. Compared with other animals’ brains, the human’s prefrontal lobes, which are involved in planning and evaluating, are particularly well developed.

Especially through the development of the pre-frontal cortex, human have the extraordinary power of choice. Not only can we choose how we will respond to given stimuli or situations, we can also produce our own novel stimuli and create our own circumstances. Through this ability to choose, we can experience and create ourselves and our world in the way that we desire.

All behaviors, memories, thoughts, and habits have corresponding neural circuits in the brain. These circuits come together to form who we are now. Theoretically, the number of neural circuits that the human brain can create by combining connections between nerve cells exceeds the number of atoms in the entire universe. This infinite combination of connections gives us, literally, infinite potential.

A network with more connections than the number of atoms in the whole universe; the infinite potential latent within that network of connections; the brain’s structural properties that make possible deep thinking and analysis, synthesis, and, more than anything else, choice–what do you think all these exist for? How will you use this potential during your lifetime? Our brains do not exist only to worry about what we will eat and what we will wear tomorrow. They are far too precious to be used only in these ways. Let’s allow our brains to pursue significant, far-reaching dreams and goals, that befit their greatness.

The most effective way to awaken the sleeping brain is to engage it in a workload that must require its full awareness and attention. Establish a big goal requiring absolutely all of your energy, abilities, and wisdom. Set up a goal that will enable you to take great leaps forward. If you create a goal that you can achieve easily, one within the scope of your limitations, then your brain will use less than 100% of its capacity. If, however, you pursue a grand, far-reaching vision, your brain will train itself accordingly and work hard to meet your expectations.