Piece Of Mind. Sandy MacGregor
reading to a kid when you think he is not paying attention. “Pay attention, listen to the story! You wanted me to read to you, do you want to hear it or not?!” ... but he heard every word!
Many school teachers come across kinesthetic kids and in some instances they are labelled hyperactive. I have even heard of situations whereby children have been given drugs to calm them down! There are other ways of teaching these children. It is very important if you are a teacher to know whether your students are visual, auditory or kinesthetic. When teaching any group of people these three representational systems always need to be covered.
Exercise
Here's another exercise. Take a pencil, and once again in the space provided, write down why you decided to read this book. What is your expectation, what do you want out of this book? You could even ask your friends to have a glance at the book and see what they would get out of it. What I'm promoting here is to have a discussion with yourself, and others, to work out what reasons you have to read, study and do the exercises in this book. Whilst this may be difficult for you to do, I encourage you to share your reasons with someone. There's always quite a variety of reasons from all those involved.
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Let me now share with you what I'm going to cover – what my reason or aim is, for writing this book.
•Firstly I am going to show you how you can obtain relaxation and release stress quickly. To achieve this though there is one proviso, and that is – that you want to do it! If you do not really want to do it, then that probably means that you are not ready for it yet. I guess it's a bit like giving up smoking, if you don't really want to do it then you will not succeed in giving it up. The same with relaxation and releasing stress, there will be a “struggle” going on in your mind and you cannot possibly achieve relaxation unless you want to do it.
•Secondly I will cover accelerated learning skills. In fact what will happen with accelerated learning skills is that you can experience some of the skills by reading and doing the exercises in this book – we've already started. The “how to apply it” to things like study and work will also emerge. Of course the actual study you will need to do yourself!
•Thirdly, I will show you a way to achieve your goals faster. The goal can be whatever you like, for instance wanting to relieve pain, wanting more self-confidence, wanting to give up smoking or to release weight (we don't say lose weight any more because if you lose something you want to go and find it again), achieving success, increasing sales, controlling anger, overcoming insomnia, better communication, achieving a certain mark. Whatever your goal may be, you will find a way of achieving that goal faster – much faster than it took me when I first learned about how to do this, and we'll come to the reasons why.
Is the reason why you decided to read this book covered by the three points above? Look back to what you wrote down in the last exercise.
Questions and Answers
Will I be able to achieve all three?
Yes, you will. You will be able to achieve relaxation in 30 seconds. You will obtain a way to clarify and achieve a goal faster. Say if your goal is to obtain high distinctions in final exams or to release weight, then you'll be able to start working on it in this book. It could be your primary aim for reading this book and you will certainly be able to experience and obtain some accelerated learning skills.
How important is having a goal?
One of the things that the science of dreams has shown is that happiness is a journey. Happiness comes from moving towards a goal, not actually getting it.
To remain happy always have a goal that you are working towards. A famous guru describes the secret of happiness as “BE HAPPY”. In other words a verb – a doing word.
What about recall and memory can these be improved?
Yes, absolutely – that will be covered, in fact there will be some exercises on that. I will tell you about memory and how it occurs and how you'll be able to put information into the brain whereby you'll be able to recall more easily. Our memory is fantastic – it's recall that we need. To improve recall we need to take the correct action to ensure that the information goes to long term memory.
REVIEW OF CHAPTER 1
PREVIEW OF CHAPTER 2
Chapter 2: The Brain
I am going to tell you about the way this works for me; in other words I'm going to go through my left brain, analytical approach. It's the best approach for sceptics, of which I am one of the biggest! I'll start by telling you about the brain and how it works: how memory works, how recall works. I want to demonstrate to you that this is scientific. In the last 30 years a lot of work has been done on the brain and scientists have proven many new facts. Prior to that, people who used the brain differently were either labelled “loonies” or “brilliant”. There are new breakthroughs happening all the time and some of the recent ones I will be passing on to you. It's a good idea to keep abreast of all new developments, because there are probably many new things still to come that will revolutionise learning yet again.
I found the following quotation from the 1962 edition of the Reader's Digest: “OUR HUMAN BODY Its Wonders & Its Care” (page 113) quite interesting:
The unconscious mind is a marvellous storehouse. The most wonderful part of your mind is undoubtedly the unconscious, which lies below the recoverable memory and is thousands of times larger. We don't yet know very much about the unconscious mind, but we are learning fast and some day may know how to tap its great powers. Your unconscious mind contains many millions of past experiences that, so far as your conscious mind knows, are lost forever. By means of several devices we now know how to bring back lost memories. One method is “free association”, used by psychiatrists. If a patient lets his conscious mind wander at will, it can give him clues to forgotten things which, skilfully pursued by the doctor, will bring up whole networks of lost ideas and forgotten terrors. There are certain drugs which also help in this process; hypnotism, too, can be of tremendous value in exploring a patient's unconscious. Many psychologists believe that we can make more use of our unconscious minds. Innumerable people have found that they can profitably “talk to” their unconscious. Some people find that they can bid themselves to wake up at a certain time in the morning. You can sometimes even improve your tomorrow's mood if you will say to yourself when you go to bed – and believe it – that you will be more cheerful in the morning.
Haven't we come a long way in 30 years!