Innercise is for the individual who knows they are capable of achieving more wealth, greater health, and career success, but they haven’t cracked the code to unlocking their fullest abilities and skills.

Know Your Brain

It’s Not Your Fault

  • Your brain is an astonishingly complex and powerful organ.
  • But for all the power, reaching your goals can seem impossible at times.
  • Your brain has evolved greatly to keep you safe and running efficiently, but priorities are different now than they were seven million years ago.
  • Your brain is still a work in progress and often struggles to keep up with the changes needed to meet your new priorities.
  • Old habits and automated ways of thinking, feeling, and acting can keep you stuck.

Meet the Gorilla

  • You have two “brains”, not one.
  • One that you are aware of (your conscious brain), and one that lives beneath your awareness (your subconscious brain).
  • The vast majority of activity in your brain is subconscious.
  • Your subconscious brain is fast and powerful.
  • Simply using more willpower, hard work, or cleverness isn’t enough to overcome the “the gorilla”.
  • To achieve your highest potential, you need to align your conscious and subconscious brains.
  • Your behavior and most results are driven by your subconscious patterns, not your conscious brain.

Upgrading to Brain 2.0

  • Your brain is far more flexible than previously believed.
  • It changes throughout your life using the innate mechanisms of neuroplasticity, with your willingness or without it.
  • You can encourage neuroplasticity through curiosity, purpose, focus, exercise, fun, spaced repetition, and stepping out of your comfort zone.

Buff Your Brain

  • Just as exercise can strengthen your physical muscles, innercise can strengthen your neuro-muscles.
  • There are three core neuro-muscles.
    • Awareness, to bring new insight to things inside and outside you that you barely notice, and to give you the ability to choose.
    • Intention, to use the choice offered by awareness to decide what is that you want.
    • Action, to focus on that chosen path and deliberately choose how you will think, feel, and act.
  • These core neuro-muscles are most effective when repeatedly combined over extended periods of time.
  • Innercises are fast, reliable techniques to help you strengthen each of core neuro-muscles.

Master Your Thoughts and Emotions

Gorilla Warfare

  • The old model of “set a goal, do the right things, and get the results” doesn’t work.
  • Living up to your highest potential is more than know-how.
  • It is also about doing more of what you know you need to be doing.
  • There are six common obstacles to successfully reaching your goals.
    • Fear.
    • Limiting beliefs.
    • A negative mindset.
    • Excess stress.
    • Disempowering habits.
    • Lack of emotional control.

Habits

  • Habits mostly run beneath your awareness in your subconscious.
  • Like addictions, habits get triggered and then operate on autopilot.
  • Your brain doesn’t recognize habits as good or bad.
  • It only sees them as neural patterns.
  • With consistent practice, you can change your disempowering habits into empowering ones.

Fear

  • Most fears are “patterns in the subconscious vault” of your life experience.
  • They can be born from both real and imagined experiences.
  • You can subconsciously feel fearful without ever consciously being aware of it.
  • Irrational, subconscious fears can have a huge cost to your health, wealth, and happiness.

Beliefs and Stories

  • Beliefs help drive your behavior and form your reality.
  • The conscious/subconscious divide in your brain creates two types of beliefs.
    • Explicit, ones you are conscious of.
    • Implicit, ones hidden in your subconscious.
  • When you try to change, your explicit and implicit beliefs don’t align, and you’ll likely experience cognitive dissonance.
  • This will result in your implicit beliefs trying to bring things back to the existing state of affairs, including self-harming and self-sabotaging.
  • Many of your implicit beliefs that don’t serve you well can be identified and changed.

Stress and Anxiety

  • Stress can be experienced as a wave that crushes you or one that you surf to the shores of success.
  • Your response to stress, not the stress-inducing event itself, determine your feelings and emotions.
  • Chronic worry and anxiety can be replaced with sustained quiet and happiness through innercises such as meditation and mindfulness.
  • Real mastery of stress can come when you first notice the wave building and then you effectively calm yourself at that moment.
  • Think of stress not as bad, but rather a sign of something you care about and something you can grow from.

Mindset

  • Everyone has an evolutionary predisposition toward a negativity bias as a way to protect against unknown dangers.
  • Your tendency toward disempowering thoughts and feelings is nicknamed your inner Frankenstein monster, while your tendency toward empowering thoughts and feelings is nicknamed your inner Einstein.
  • Both have value, the one you listen to most is the one that will most shape your life.
  • The key to changing your mindset, and the results you strive for, is to strike the right balance between your inner Frankenstein monster and Einstein.
  • A positive mindset and a healthy construct of emotions are choices available to you.

Master Your Behavior

Your Brain on Goals

  • Goals can help align your conscious and subconscious minds.
  • Goals can give your brain a target to aim for.
  • Vivid, precise, and written goals are more achievable than those that are not.
  • There’s a neurological sweet spot for right-sized goals whereas ones that are too large or too small likely will not be rewarded.
  • Creating an achievable daily action plan for your goals increases the likelihood of success.

Make the Plan

  • Plans are the bridge between setting goals and achieving them.
  • Without plans, your goals are just dreams.
  • HOW and WHY work differently in the brain, and understanding them, requires dedicated time.
  • Small steps allow for mini-successes, which can give you bursts of motivating dopamine.
  • Planning is an Innercise, which changes your brain.
  • You don’t have to know your whole plan at once.
  • Just knowing the next step can be enough to eventually get you to your destination.

Your Innercise Ritual

  • Change takes time.
  • Actions you take now to change your brain plants seeds and spread roots for future harvests.
  • Be patient.
  • Building a daily innercise ritual is crucial to your success.
  • Type components of Innercise rituals include relaxation/meditation, visualization using audio and video support, goal creation, specific training, and goal planning/review.
  • Your current results are a scorecard of your past thoughts, feelings, and habitual behaviors.
  • You can change your future scorecard by changing your brain starting today.