Did You See the Gorilla?

What are you attracting into your life?
Do you ever tell yourself, or have the inner belief that you “just have bad luck?”

I have a former client who has this belief and you would not believe the things that happen to her. It seems she’s constantly falling down, breaking things, stepping on glass or having some kind of accident in her life. Falling down stairs is a regular occurrence in her life. And she’s always saying, “that’s just my luck.”

For me, formerly, it was more subtle…

I was attracting not-so-great guys. You know the kind. Not bad guys. Not the kind of guys who were holding up banks in their spare time, just… not great guys.

I had an inner belief that all the good guys were taken. Oh, the roots were deep and there was lots more to it than that. The thing about this kind of stuff is that it’s subtle. It’s been around for awhile and you may not even realize you have these beliefs.

Do you have any patterns like this in your life?
Maybe you feel like you keep dating the same guy in a different body?

Or maybe you’re like my former client and bad things seem to just gravitate toward you…

You may not recognize it at first, because like I said before, many times this stuff has been with us for so long, we don’t even recognize it anymore. The good news is, you don’t have to see the big picture so much as you just need to know what you want. And from there, you can start changing things around.

You see, there actually IS a scientific explanation for this phenomenon…

It’s called the “Reticular Activating System” or “RAS.” What the RAS does, is take your subconscious beliefs, whether they’re true or not, and give you evidence of your belief.

It’s part of our mammalian brain and is believed to control waking, sleeping and what we focus our attention on. It is said to block out around 99% of what we consciously notice.

Are you beginning to see where I’m going with this?
My friend recently told me a story about a video she saw, which is no longer published due to some copyright stickiness, but I really want to share this story with you. So you’ll just have to take my (and her) word for it. I know, I know! It’s a lot to ask, huh?

It was a video of a room full of people, half of whom were dressed in white and half in black, throwing a ball back and forth to each other. The challenge of the video was to focus your attention on how many times a person dressed in black handled the ball during the video. The challenge was heightened by the announcer saying that around 80% of viewers get it wrong.

After the video played through, the announcer asked the viewers about the gorilla in the room. My friend was astonished. She hadn’t seen a gorilla, so she played the video through again. Sure enough, there was a man dressed as a gorilla right in the middle of all the action, throughout the entire video. And she hadn’t even noticed it. Because she was focused on the ball. (She played the video back a few times to make sure it was the same video – and it was).

You see, the RAS is responsible for keeping our brains from being overwhelmed. for example, have you ever been in a busy, noisy airport terminal with all kinds of noise going on that you never really register – until you hear your name or flight number?

That’s RAS in action.
For me, I noticed that lately there’s a lot of, “I can’t do this because… blah, blah, blah…” It was completely subconscious and, well… now it’s not. What’s the solution?

Ask yourself a better question. For me, it’s “How can I?”

It’s the RAS’s job to bring to your consciousness what you’re looking for. So if you start asking, “How can I (fill in the blank here)” you’ll start seeing things you never noticed before. Because now that your RAS knows it’s important to you, it will start drawing your attention to ways to make it happen.

But Be Careful…It Works Both Ways!
Does my former client's belief that she has bad luck bring all the bad things that happen to her conscious attention, or is she drawing bad things in because of the simple law of attraction? That's an article for another day.

What I do know, is that when I was stuck in “there are no good guys” belief, that's what I saw everywhere I looked. Once I changed that inner belief, I started seeing good guys everywhere I looked. That's because I programmed my RAS to look for something different.

There's an easy way to do this. Start asking a better question.

As Tony Robbins so succinctly put it, if you ask yourself, “How come I can’t lose weight?” Your brain will say, “because you’re a pig.”

When you start asking a better question, however – for example, “How can I lose weight and have it be an enjoyable experience?” your brain just might remind you that back in the day, you used to love playing racquetball.

Since “How can I…” will be a new question for your brain to process, it might take awhile for it to give you the answer, but if you focus your attention on a better question, you’ll start noticing the gorilla in the room.