t’s not fairy dust, it’s your brain + nerve system. More specifically, your Reticular Activating System (RAS). A bundle of brain cells about the size of your little finger near the base of your skull.
Just for a moment, let’s get technical. Your brain + nerve system is incredibly complex. And literally every moment it is taking in BILLIONS of bits of data, aka sensory overload. To keep you from becoming overwhelmed, the brain needed a gate keeper, or a tiny bouncer to allow through only what is most important to you. Thus, the birth of the RAS. What your RAS does is sift through all this incoming information and reports only the important pieces. The catch? It sifts everything through a filter that YOU set up, consciously or subconsciously.
Let’s take an example. You’re at Fashion Square Mall looking for a cute little red dress. Right then, you have just set up your RAS filter to search for nothing but little red dresses. When I run into you outside the mall and ask if you saw any blue dresses, you will likely say, “I didn’t see ANY!” This is not because there weren’t any; your brain simply wasn’t programmed to see them. And let me remind you again, YOU set up the filter.
The RAS does the same thing to validate certain beliefs too. If you say to yourself: “I am terrified of public speaking,” “I am not creative,” or “I don’t have any time,” your brain W I L L come up with past experiences to support these beliefs. So, why not set your brain up to find examples of: “I am powerful,” “I am a creative genius,” “I am wildly successful,” or whatever makes your soul sing? The beauty of your RAS is that it guides your mind to see what you want to see, and from there, you take action.
How can we condition our RAS to constantly be searching for opportunity, abundance, contribution, gratitude, expansion, growth, or empowerment? The answer is simple, but not easy. We prime ourselves. Every. Single. Day. You have to continually refocus your brain and remind your brain what matters most to you.
It’s crucial that you become that person who carries around five pages of a carefully crafted dream to read often. And even more crucial that while you read it, you feel how it would feel to be living that dream now, expressing enormous gratitude as if it has already happened. It’s discipline and persistence in the beginning, but just like running a marathon, once you get through that wall, your desire becomes a burning obsession. This is when your brain sees nothing but the fruits of your labor manifesting into your dream life!
