Techniques for Embedding Intentions

If you have an intention, you take a pencil, you write it

down. You're actually doing something physical,

tactile.

Then you read it silently.

Then you read it aloud. Then you visualize that,

and you do that over and over and over again.

What that will do is then embed that into your subconscious,

and then these different cognitive brain networks get activated.

Now, can we unpack that just a minute?

Sure.

'Cause everyone that listens to this

loves to make sure that they just got the instructions

from you, Dr. Doty, 'cause I'm, like, hanging on every word.

And so there were a couple steps to that

because you had the physical pencil, you had the act of writing.

You had this moment where if you're watching on YouTube, you saw

it, but if you're listening, let me describe it. He,

he sat back in his chair.

He put his hands kind of in prayer at his chest, closed his eyes, and he started

talking about repeating the thought.

Is that the chain of events in, that you do to

encode it in your mind?

Yes, absolutely.

So w- w- so what is... Will you walk us through it one more time?

Yeah. So again, what you wanna do is to use all of your sensory

organs as much as possible

to embed that intention. So by writing it down, by reading it

aloud, by reading it silently, by visualizing it, that

creates the process where this gets embedded a- into your

subconscious. And what happens is once you get this

embedded,

it activates different parts of your brain,

and without getting too technical, I'll just mention four of them.

One is something called the default mode network.

This is what happens when your mind wanders or you're

daydreaming,

and, uh, it's self-referential because it's

internally focused, but it's where you create the narrative of

who you

are or what you want.

So if you have negative self-talk, if you ruminate, if

you are like, "I'm never good enough, nothing works out for me, things

like that don't happen to a person like me, I can never get it right,"

that is-

That is w-

... in the default mode network.

Oh, absolutely.

Okay.

And that gets really activated and results in rumination for some people.

Can I ask you another question? Because one of the things

that you said at the

very, very beginning is you painted this

gorgeous

picture

of the ability to leverage the remarkable power of your

brain to help you get what you truly desire

in life, to help you live in heart mode, and you said it's

just

about believing it.

And part of the reason why we have trouble believing it

is because of the default mode network and all

of these stories you've repeated over and over and over again.

Is that, is that-

Yeah

... fair to say?

No, that's exactly, uh, correct. And, and-

And can we can reprogram, or we can lay down a new track?

Oh, absolutely, and it's available, uh, 24/7, and it

doesn't matter what's happened to you before.

You know, so many people get fixated, "Well,

I don't deserve this because of..." We

all deserve it.

So once this gets embedded and you create the narrative of who you

want to be or how you see yourself, what you're doing is you're

creating salience. Okay?

What's that word mean?

It means making it important.

Mm.

Okay?

Once something is important, this activates what we call our

task positive network, and the task

positive network has three parts.

It has the salience network, it has the attention

network, and then it has the executive control

network.

And

once something is salient, what you're basically saying is, "This

deserves my attention."

Mm.

And by doing it in a very specific way,

then that becomes important to you.

That gets embedded into your subconscious as something to pay attention to.

Once that is defined as something important to you, then that

activates your attention network

so that then you cognitively focus your attention on

whatever that intention is.

Okay.

Once those are activated, and, uh, I use the

analogy in the book, it's as if you've,

have a file cabinet and you've put this file into the file

cabinet

that says, "Important stuff."

And once that is there, then the attention network is

activated, which is, as an example, a bloodhound that is,

says, "Okay, now there's something there.

I need to track this down and figure out what's going on here." Then

you activate

the bloodhound, and then that gets released.

And then once that attention is focused,

then it starts looking around through all the possibilities in your

environment, and as soon as it identifies one,

then your

executive control network is activated, which in some ways

is the thing that chases down what is in your subconscious.

This is how it works. There is no magic here.

This is fundamentally basic neuroscience, and it's something that

we all have the ability to master by just doing

these techniques whereby you are able to

embed your intention. You do it over and over, and it's not as

if one and done. And what I mean by that is some people wake up, and this

is like a

New Year's resolution, "I'm going to do this, uh, January 1st."

And then January 1st comes, and you already fail the first day.

You have to not have excessive expectations at

first. What I mean by that is these are based on habit.

What happens with habit? You start small.

You don't sit there and say, "I'm gonna lose 100 pounds in the next

month." You

say, "I'm gonna try to modify my diet where I'm

not

drinking sodas."

Right. Right.

That's the first little one, and each of these little wins strengthens

you

to actually then do the big thing ultimately.

So you don't start by running a marathon on day one.

You start by getting up out of bed and walking around the block.