FKhats B-Log Adventure

Train Your Mind to Give You What You Want, Including Ideas

Train Your Mind to Give You What You Want, Including Ideas

Hail and Well Met!

         Last week I shared how I keep my own ideas, but where do you get them?  Do they float through the air like fairyflies, barely out of reach until you wrench them from the air, crushing their little wings until they give you what you want?  Do you lure them out with sweet words and candy?  Do you coax them through a tangled web into your waiting trap and use their gnawed off paws?  Or do they club you over the head and demand your attention, their time on your page?  Are you a planner, designing them from a blueprint doing point a through z until it’s done?  Are you a shaper, taking the raw nugget of an idea from random generators and hammering it into shape until it begins to resemble what you need?  Do you bet on voodoo, lucky socks, and idea generators?  Do you participate in daily pencil sharpening rituals?  Incantations built word on word, until the static builds a sudden strike of genius onto your page?  Or do you walk the other way, teasing ideas out like cats, playing coy and hard to get until its sitting in your lap purring?   

         I personally have ideas bombarding me all the time.  The hamsters are happy to provide, might blow up if they don’t.  Stories are everywhere for me.  I dream them, I ruminate on half heard conversations, I play with what ifs, why’s and hows, after all wouldn’t it be neat and exciting if a dragon invaded downtown and started flaming all those unhappy/angry commuters that clog up MY bus?  Wait!  No!  I’d be trampled in the stampede, and crisped!  Maybe eaten!!

         My most prolific source of stories and the loudest voice my muse uses is though nightmare.  When I am stressed I have nightmares that would make Freddy and Jason pee themselves.  Bright, vivid, too real horrors that leave phantom teeth marks tingling along my body.  Growing up I had nightmares all the time.  I would wake screaming until my mom threatened to take me to the doctor.  I learned to stop screaming.  If they can’t fix my ears, no way were they getting near my brain.  I also learned how to defuse and often prevent the nightmares.  I would tell myself stories and change the endings until they were no longer so terrible and frightening.  I would drift off to dream on the stories I spun. 

         When I was older, I discovered I could use books to keep them at bay.  Anything engrossing would spill over into my dreams, and as long as I stayed away from horror books, probably wouldn’t come bite me.  But, if it did, I could spin a story from its carcass and drift off to dream something better.           

I wouldn’t recommend nightmares or learning how to ‘not scream’, but, if you have them use them.  Lemons and such. 

         What is important is that I trained my mind, I found techniques that worked, and I practiced them until it worked, until I could quite literally do it in my sleep, and kept practicing until it became like breathing.  Automatic.  You do it or die.

What we are all seeking isn’t a specific all encompassing answer, it isn’t a trick, or easy.  But it isn’t some complicated hoodoo that costs money either.  What it is, is a simple formula of HOW TO FIND YOUR OWN ANSWER to a very complex question to make change and get results. 

The answer when found, is consistent.  It is repeated endlessly by published Authors, wealthy Businessmen, charismatic Politicians, famous Actors, Diet Religious and Business Gurus, Musicians, Con Artists, Problem Solvers, Match Makers, Language Collectors, Memory Masters, Olympians, Artists of every stripe, and is practiced but seldom realized by every person that can read or write. 
The answer has been hinted at, baldly spoken, but most often laid out in inspirational anecdotal stories, and milked for every penny anyone can get out of it:

You too can learn to INSERT YOUR NEED HERE  (i.e.:  generate ideas on a regular and consistent basis, build wealth, become charismatic, charm ladies, get published, learn a new language, make millions, play guitar like a rock star, be an evil genius, etc., etc., etc.).

The Question:  How can I cultivate my mind to give me what I want? 

The Answer:  Your mind and its imagination is a very powerful and versatile muscle you must direct and train to do your bidding.

HOW:
Decide what you want 
Find a technique that works for you 
Practice it until it becomes a part of you
Practice more
Keep practicing FOREVER, or until you die. 

Your mind is a muscle that needs a treadmill and some serious gym time to work it into the shape you want.  You can even use an exercise that doesn’t come easily, doesn’t seem to fit, and practice it until you bulk up and it shapes YOU into being a proper vessel it can flow through.  Our minds are so powerful, they can and will carve new pathways if they can’t utilize existing ones. 
         
I would still advise you to at least try to find one that works with the existing you.  It will not only be easier to get where you want to be, but if it isn’t fun, if you aren’t regimented into military-like discipline, you just won’t do it, can’t stomach it, would rather clean your closets, toilet, or toenails first.  You simply won’t go to the gym/keyboard/chalkboard/sketch pad, you will abandon it.  You will find reasons, or reasons will find you, to do anything else. 

But if you do find you need to use an uncomfortable technique, you have some options: 

1. Keep at it until it shapes you and you develop that military-like discipline.  Military-like discipline itself being another mental muscle to bulk up on, that you can apply to every other area of your life.
2. Try another technique to practice. 
3.  Find something worse and more painful to practice at so this practice becomes the choicer practice.  (Dieters have been told to try dog food upon occasion, as a diet and general FAILURE stick)
4.  Change practice venue (outdoors, indoors, museums, trains, anything not blue...it can trick your mind into thinking you have given it something ELSE to work on) 
5.  Cultivate a trigger (danger alert:  don’t make it too complex or weird, you may need to use this skill trick where people CAN see you, and you may find your mind becomes fixated and WONT work without it)
6.  Do a complimentary exercise (you want to generate story ideas, but it isn’t coming, you like drawing, so start pumping out sketch ideas, one after the other... or you have to build reports at work, start generating ideas for reports, how could you use that filing you have to do for your report...same/same, one strengthens the other)  You know what?  Do this anyhow, find other ways to support that initial drive, keep hitting that muscle.
7.  Take a short break and try again.  Discipline and persistence may also need to be bulked up to support the muscles you are working on.  These too can be worked at in complimentary exercises, like:  resisting that extra potato chip, charging it when you know you shouldn’t, one more Facebook surf, that every five second phone check, etc. practice practice practice.
8.  Find a support person or group. 
9.  PLAN TO FAIL ALOT, plan accordingly with plan b, c, d, and keep at it.
10.  Reassess regularly...maybe weekly or monthly, are you seeing progress?  Are things a little easier?  Are there other actions you can use to reinforce your efforts?

We do this with all the bad habits in our life without ever thinking about it, isn’t it about time you used it for the good stuff?

What are you waiting for, go get it!

         ~ Faith

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Next Topic:  Practice exercises:  Where and how to tap, trap, and steal ideas.
(my apologies, I realized that the how and where, were just practice reinforcement to a much bigger question of how to get my mind to get me what I want:  Ideas consistently and regularly)
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Frequency: Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday
Personal WC Daily Goal: 1000
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