Speak the language of change to your brain

If you are in the process of still working on your New Year’s list of goals, here’s another tip for sending a meaningful message to your brain for positive change. In the last post I explained how much easier it is to achieve a new goal by phasing out old behavior, not all at once but over a period of time, as you are phasing in your new desire.  This type of phase-out and phase-in technique is one that requires conscious attention as you are installing a new habit pattern.

Another way to communicate to your brain’s programming system is to communicate with its subconscious language preference.

Who knew that your brain had a language, let alone a language preference?

Well, whether you know it or not, your brain does have a preference for processing information.

Now, brain language is not straight forward, but rather a mix of styles with one being usually more dominant than the others.  How your brain determines its language preference nobody knows, but its choice of language preference is generally divided into three basic styles — Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic.

What this means is that your brain understands a meaningful message better if it’s in a language it recognizes. Let’s use the “don’t eat pizza” message again.

If your brain language is primarily visual, it processes information in pictures. Giving your meaningful messages as only affirmations every day to not to eat pizza will go in one ear and out the other.

If you want to communicate with this kind of brain in a meaningful way, you need to conjure up visual images.  Images like seeing yourself being satisfied with just one slice of pizza and eating a green healthy salad, seeing yourself walking past the pizza shop without any hesitation to stop, maybe even imagining your kitchen filled with a assortment of fruits, vegetables and other healthier choices.

If your brain is the auditory language type, then all the visualizations in the World won’t be as effective as a series of good auditory inputs.  These can be affirmation statements that you repeat daily, but for better results you will want to use a CD or a mp3 recording of approximately 20-30 minutes in length.

Now, most individuals have visual language, a smaller percentage have auditory and the smallest percentage has kinesthetic language brains. Here the brain gets its meaningful messages from some sense of movement — either as physical action/physical touching or a descriptive sensation.

In a physical action the kinesthetic language is more likely to move towards the things it wants rather than away for it. As the brain eyes and smells the pizza aroma almost simultaneously, the body seems to find itself magically moving in the direction of said pizza.

By comparison, a descriptive kinesthetic sensation is when you describe something as a “sense” or “a feeling” that can motivate you into action.

Does this sound familiar?

“I had a bad day today, so I stopped and got us a pizza for dinner tonight.”

“What do you want to eat tonight? I feel like pizza.”

I want something, but I don’t know what I want, but we just had Chinese let’s get pizza instead.”

If you have the kinesthetic language brain then you need distractions, aversions or interventions to keep your body from moving towards what you don’t want.  One distractive technique is to snap a rubber band for a slight pain on your wrist to remind you not to eat pizza. Then there is the aversive image where you sense or feel the pizza is really something quite disgusting. An intervention would be when you would plan for another more pleasurable activity — perhaps a soak in the bath tub or an intimate encounter would make any desire for pizza magically disappear.

So, if you want to successfully communicate meaningful messages for change to your brain you need to get on the same page and speak its language.

Once, you understand each other, it’s so much easier for your brain to give you what you want.

Spend sometime with yourself and try these different language styles and find out which one works best for you.

Next, will be some more ways to can get your brain to do what you want it to.