When you use the priming effect or any other daily reinforcement technique to condition yourself for success, abundance, or other positive changes, patience is key.
During the first week or two, it will usually seem like your efforts are having little or no effect. But if the technique is effective, then usually within several weeks after you begin, you’ll start seeing significant shifts in your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors. At some point you’ll observe that you seem to be making huge leaps forward every week.
From Minor Pattern to Major Pattern
Daily conditioning seems to be ineffective at first and then quickly picks up steam and often leads to a tipping point, whereby you eventually find yourself in a whole new reality.
Suppose that your initial goal starts out as just an idea in your head. Perhaps it’s a thought, like a new income goal or the idea for a new habit you’d like to adopt. But since it’s just an idea at first, it’s not integrated throughout your whole brain yet. It may be nice to think about it, but that mere thought hasn’t yet weaved itself in your other thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors.
Now for the sake of argument, suppose that this minor mental pattern in your brain — this idea — involves only 10,000 neurons. It’s an isolated pattern, so it has little influence on your vast neural network of 100,000,000,000 neurons.
Then suppose that to make this minor thought pattern into a major pattern that powerfully influences your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors, you’d need to build it up to 10,000,000 neurons in its network of influence — a thousandfold increase. And suppose that if you achieve that 1000x increase, the pattern will be well integrated into your whole being. So if the pattern is an income goal, you’ll find yourself doing whatever it takes to achieve it. If it’s a new habit, you’ll find that the habit is successfully installed, and it’s congruently integrated with your other habits.
A Thousandfold Increase
To get a 1000x increase in a neural pattern in a timespan of only 10 days, you’d have to double the size of the pattern every day for 10 days straight (2^10 = 1024), which would probably be completely unrealistic.
But to get a 1000x increase over a more lengthy interval, the neural pattern can expand at a slower, more sustainable rate. For instance, to increase by a factor of 1000 over 90 days, the neural pattern only has to extend its influence by about 8% per day. That may be doable.
Note that with an 8% increase per day, on Day 1 you’ll only add 800 neurons to the pattern (8% of 10,000). That’s a puny gain, so you may not notice much effect. The results aren’t coming through yet. Your behavior seems unaffected.
On Day 30, you’ll add 7,454 neurons to this pattern, for a total of 100,627 neurons. That’s a 10x increase from when you started, but it’s still only 1% of the way to your goal of a 1000x increase. Imagine doing daily conditioning for 30 days straight and only seeing 1% of your desired results thus far. You’re going to need some patience to continue.
On Day 60, you’ll add 75,005 neurons to the pattern’s still-expanding network, for a total of 1,012,571 neurons involved. Even after 60 days, you’re still only 10% of the way to your goal. What if you were to give up now and proclaim that the technique you’re using doesn’t work well enough? You’d be giving up right before a massive tipping point.
By the end of that 90-day time period, you’ll be adding 754,752 neurons to this pattern in one day, finally passing 10 million neurons total for the pattern. Note that 90% of the pattern’s growth happened in those last 30 days, with the first 60 days only getting you to 10% of your goal. The gains you’ll be seeing in those final 30 days will be staggering relative to what you saw during the first 30 days.
Daily Conditioning and Exponential Growth
Effects like this happen with a variety of daily conditioning methods, such as listening to positive audio programs every day or reviewing my goals every morning. At first it seems like there’s little or no effect. But with enough persistence over a period of months, it’s quite possible to suddenly tip into a whole new level of experience. Eventually that little pattern that was once just an idea becomes dominant enough to start influencing thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behavior congruently.
It’s fascinating how daily conditioning can reprogram our minds and how the effects seem to grow exponentially over time. On any given day, such conditioning looks like it’s having no effect. But when you look back several weeks, you’ll often see some obvious and profound effects.
Maintenance Conditioning
Even after achieving a new goal or installing a new habit, you often find it necessary to continue with some form of the mental conditioning that got me there in the first place. When you don’t do this, you find myself backsliding.
There are so many societal influences that encourage us to feel negative, to fear experiences that aren’t actually dangerous, to obsess over trivialities, and to settle for less than our potential. In the absense of powerful, conscious, self-conditioning, these societal influences too often become the dominant patterns within our own brains.
All experience is mental programming. Whatever you experience through your senses is still actively programming your brain. It’s up to you to take control of this programming. If you don’t like it, you can change it.
Say No to Negative Programming
If your experiences are largely negative, you’re programming your brain to get better, stronger, and faster at running negative patterns. You’re allowing yourself to be programmed for increased negativity. That’s a very bad idea. Please never do that to yourself. If you see this happening to you, run!
Taking in daily positive input is wonderful. Definitely do that! But it’s imperative that you also stop allowing negative patterns to continue programming you. If you’re noticing those patterns at all, they’re definitely programming you. Telling yourself “I’m not being programmed” or “I can rise above this” doesn’t actually work. If your eyes see it or your ears hear it, then those patterns have already gotten into your brain. While you cannot delete old patterns — unless you get yourself surgically lobotomized — you can overpower them with positive patterns. But you need to turn off the negative input first.
Just as with positive programming, you won’t usually notice the effects of negative programming except when you look back to a time when the negative programming wasn’t there. Then you see the cumulative effects, such as the loss of friends, remembering that you used to be happier, seeing your health decline, seeing how much stress you have now, etc.
How I deal with negative-minded or critical friends or family members. Don’t deal with such people at all if you have the choice. If you can’t relate to each other on the basis of mutual respect and mutual support, then don’t have such people in your life, regardless of whether they’re blood relatives or were once close friends. Everyone has a bad day now and then, and that’s completely forgivable, but if they opt to wallow in negativity as their default pattern and try to relate to you on that basis, they’re out. To do otherwise would mean deliberately subjecting yourself to ongoing negative programming, and that seems like a very foolish thing to do. You have better and more interesting things to do with your life.
Fighting internally with your own brain doesn’t seem like such a bright idea, unless you’re a masochist and love struggling with self-sabotage. It makes more sense to regard your brain as your best ally. Give your brain quality input (i.e. quality programming), and you’ll discover that your brain can be a very powerful and supportive ally.
If you find yourself feeling stuck dealing with negative-minded people, you’re saying yes to that. Silent approval is still approval. You have better options than to let people negatively program your brain. Positive conditioning doesn’t take root in poisoned soil.
Opt out of the negative conditioning you notice in your life first. If you have to fire a bunch of people, make it so. Then start conditioning yourself with positive thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors that align with your desired path.
And most of all, be patient. The numbers above are just made up for the sake of example. The important observation to stress is that daily personal conditioning requires consistent and patient practice to create change. You’ll often see little or no effect at first, but if you’re taking in positive input, rest assured that it’s already affecting your brain. If your eyes are seeing it (or your ears hearing it), then your visual (or auditory) cortex is processing it, and your neural network is changing. It will take time for these changes to become consciously observable. Eventually this daily conditioning can produce some truly powerful results, which often resemble patterns of exponential growth.