Influencing Your Inner Movie – The Thinker & The Caveman
This is my favorite thing to teach. Being able to positively influence oneself is a critical skill for anyone increasing success, happiness, and even health.
There will be more videos teaching how to apply these concepts and tools in your life.
Stay tuned!
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Explore posts in the same categories: brain science, Career, Influence, Informative, Motivation, Solution-focusTags: being liked, Brain chemistry, career, change, influence, learned optimism, motivation, passion, positive, Purpose, solution, solutions focus, transform
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bob faw's blog 
September 13, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Root Cause Analysis = Root Canal. Love it! Great job capturing and communicating the neuroscience of emotional and social intelligence. As for the positive:negative ratio, I keep track everyday of that ratio in regards to what I initiate as an interaction with my 15 year old son. My personal goal is 5:1. Periodically, we have a talk on how that’s going. It really has created a positive change in the climate of our home.
September 13, 2012 at 10:02 pm
Wonderful food for thought (and action, too) — in the workplace, in the home, in the classroom, among friends.. This was enjoyable and inspiring. Thank you!
September 13, 2012 at 10:38 pm
Thank you for your feedback, Teresa.
It was a lot of fun (and work) to put it together.
September 14, 2012 at 12:38 am
Concise, humorous and insightfull!!
September 14, 2012 at 9:41 am
Thanks, Aaron. That was exactly what we were aiming for. 🙂
September 21, 2012 at 6:21 pm
Great video! It’s informative, funny and engaging. Thanks for putting it together. So I understand we calm the cave man through changing our and others’ inner movie through using more positive and solution focused language. Some questions that came up for me are: Do you have a sense of how long does it take for people to retrain their brains to talk more positively most of the time or to reduce the cave man’s influence over their inner movies? Can we change the inner movie through more positive language only, or are there other tools as well?
September 22, 2012 at 10:28 am
These are great questions you ask, Zsuzsi.
1. The length of time it takes to train one’s brain for an optimal positive:negative balance depends on what their current ratio is and how much “training” they’ve had to speak negatively. It took me several years because in my teens my brain was habituated in a highly negative way. Even once I’ve gotten to a good balance overall, I regularly find new areas to hone this skill in self-talk, how I coach clients, talk to colleagues, and even more challenging – to family members and close friends. The good news is that every step of the retraining process yields beneficial results.
2. Positive language is only one of many tools we can use to retrain our brain. Everything we sense in life effects the way we perceive the world, and even ourselves. The movies & TV we choose to watch, what we read, the people we listen to, and even how much we immerse ourselves in nature and other nourishing environments. It really comes down to focus. What we focus on (on our “inner movie”, particularly with emotion, sticks in our brain more. So, some things that help are: Focusing on positive imagery of your desired future far more of the time than on what might go wrong. Playing back scenes of positive highlights of the day trains our brain this way more than complaining about what we didn’t like. There is a place for venting, it’s more about the balance between the two. Another practice is looking for beauty in as many things as possible – especially things we generally have a negative gut reaction to. E.g., a political party we have an aversion to — what is something you can agree with that they espouse; a group of people you generally have negative feelings about–seeking to see something they do that is life-affirming; or simply “stopping to smell the roses”.
There are countless more tools and methods for gradually transforming the way our brain works. I welcome ideas and other questions from others as well.