Imagine the moment energy from a sound wave vibrates the tiny hairs on your inner ear, just enough to send a spark of electricity to your brain. In NLP they call that first access. The very first time your body picks up some information about the world is like the Adam and Eve of sensation. Naked, pure. You haven’t yet processed it and decided to ignore the voice of your spouse, or run from the alarm. All is harmonious.
You get this type of first access with all things in the environment that you can sense, as soon as it becomes loud, bright, hot, cold, hard, soft enough for your senses to pick up.
The interesting thing is that there’s more to it than whether the stimulus in the environment reaches a threshold that sets your nerves-a-tingling. You also have what they call top down influence. It’s like a company’s board of directors deciding to ignore a marketing report that doesn’t fit their plans, or the figures that they don’t want to see. Try this: If you tear your attention away from this blog, and cast your attention out like a net, you will notice things you haven’t noticed before.
Directing your attention is a technique that can be very calming and bring you into the present moment. It’s used to start inducing high performance states, and hypnotists use it to help induce trance. As you lay back in your chair, consider the classic hypnotist’s line ‘…and as you hear the sound of the waves crashing, you begin to feel very relaxed…’
What you are paying attention to can change your perception of the world, and is a very powerful thing to manipulate.
All this lends some meat to the idea that you get more of what you focus on. It can be all to easy to see reality as fixed, and laugh a bit at the new-agers who talk about the power of consciousness flowing through the world. I agree that phrase puts me off too.
But have you ever learned a new word and then heard it everywhere all of a sudden? Or bought a car and noticed that everyone else has it too?
Maybe you could use your top-down ability to direct your attention, and control what nerves-a-tingling messages get the most say in your brain.
The crux of the post is this: What information does your board of directors pay attention to? Set your intention. You can literally notice more. Information is power. Turn up your radar.
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