Self-Intelligence

The New Science-Based Approach for Reaching Your True Potential

Jane Ransom

• Publisher: Fair Winds Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781592338573
• eBook ISBN: 9781631596247
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

“If you are reading this, count yourself lucky to have found this book. It contains some of the most fascinating information and material you will ever read.” —New York Times best-selling author Jack Canfield

Self-Intelligence is the self-help book for people who long to transform their lives and who trust only proven scientific tools, but also prefer page-turners to dry prose.

Cutting-edge brain science meets superb storytelling as readers learn proven techniques to break through inner gridlock, sustain high performance, and achieve their dreams. All of this is possible due to neuroplasticity, the revolutionary discovery that we can literally re-form our brains by strategically choosing our thoughts, actions, and experiences.

First came emotional intelligence, then came social intelligence. Here, at last, Self-Intelligence provides the big picture, incorporating the latest research from diverse scientific fields. Mental coach, transformational trainer, and science addict Jane Ransom lays out for you the new Self-Intelligence™ model, which she has used to help countless clients achieve the positive change they previously found impossible.

You’ll be uplifted, motivated to move forward, and simply fascinated. The author, who also is a master hypnotist, devotes a riveting chapter to the art and science of hypnosis. Throughout the book, she shares intriguing behind-the-curtain glimpses of its applications.

By following the easy, clear precepts of Self-Intelligence, you can finally achieve your true potential and take the scientific short-cuts to greater success. You’ll be empowered to avert old obstacles because the five-part model addresses your entire being, from the hidden depths of your subconscious self to your striving self, who sets and achieves tangible goals.

PART ONE

PROGRAMMING YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS SELF

Neuro-imaging technology not only has confirmed the fact of brain plasticity, it also has created new scientific respect for the subconscious self. Because we can now spy on the secret life of the brain, we can discuss the subconscious as a real, even observable, entity. Of course, I’m particularly fond of the subconscious because I’m a hypnotist. But, as you’ll discover in this part, hypnosis is just one of many tools you can use to directly program your subconscious self.

We’ll investigate the extraordinary problem-solving power of your dreaming mind and how you can harness that power while you sleep. We’ll talk about how to take your performance in a certain area from good to great by practicing visualization the scientific way. We’ll discuss your brain’s visual cortex, explain why what you see so deeply affects your subconscious, and explore what you need to do about it for greater success. Naturally, we’ll pull back the curtain on hypnosis, my specialty and a scientific topic of great mystery.

Research indicates that you will more easily learn the scientific content here if you prime your subconscious self by asking questions beforehand. Thus, we begin every chapter with a quiz.

Remember, you can read the chapters in whatever order suits you best. While each one focuses on a particular topic, you’ll find that ultimately those topics all interconnect, just as do the five sub-selves. Therefore, as you enjoy the specific stories and strategies shared in each chapter, you simultaneously will be building, within your mind, the big-picture model of Self-Intelligence.

CHAPTER 1

DREAMS

Wake Up to Their Power

What you prevent yourself from doing and force yourself not to do, the dream will do with all the lucidity of desire ….

—SALVADOR DALI

Prime-your-mind Quiz

Research says you’ll remember this chapter better if you test yourself now. How will the answer affect you?

Dreams can be particularly useful because they …

a. enable the brain to stop thinking and to conduct cellular repair while engaging in random neural activity.

b. allow us to release repressed psychological urges, especially in the areas of sexuality and aggression.

c. process problems in a highly visual and disinhibited manner, fostering greater creativity than might occur when awake.

You’ve probably heard that some Silicon Valley high-tech companies offer ideal places to work. They provide free food, free gyms, perhaps even free time just to think up brilliant inventions. Such policies attract super-smart achievers—the geeks of the geeks. So it’s not surprising that new employees feel intense pressure to prove their worth. If they succeed quickly, they enjoy prestigious assignments and social esteem. If they fail to impress, they may be sidelined, looked down on, or even resented as the weakest link.

When Mary first called me, she sounded mortified to be seeking help. “My team can’t know about this. Some of them were on my hiring committee. For me to be seeing a hypnotist would create the wrong impression.” Once in my office, Mary explained that her team included software engineers creating an upgrade of a popular product. It was Mary’s job to program a particular new feature.

“My code looks really awful right now,” she said. “It does some things okay, but I’m almost surprised it works as well as it does. It’s really inelegant. I keep trying to force it because I can’t afford to wait. Usually my code is much better than this. They hired me because I’m good. But to try adding onto what’s there, to get it to do the rest of what it needs to do, will be like asking a donkey to be a racehorse. It’s as if my mind’s paralyzed by what my team will think of me. There’s really got to be some nice, economical way to write this code. If I had a lot more time, it would come. Ideally, I should just start over, but five months have gone by already, with only one month to nail it. I’m desperate.”

Frankly, her one-month deadline scared me too. New hires in any profession tend to suffer performance anxiety, and if Mary had come in sooner, I could have helped her to get comfortable with her job in time to prevent a crisis. Instead, she had backed herself into a corner. Now she slumped in her chair, sighing, “There’s probably nothing you can do.”

No, I couldn’t promise anything. But just maybe, I told her, she could solve this problem for herself in her sleep. “Think of it this way,” I said. “We’re going to program your subconscious to deliver your answer in a dream.”

Historically, dreams at night have often saved the proverbial day. Dmitri Mendeleev spent years trying to systemize the atomic weights of the elements, until the periodic table came to him in a dream. India’s late great math genius Srinivasa Ramanujan dreamt up many of his solutions. He said that a Hindu goddess regularly visited his sleep to give him answers. The chemist Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the tetravalent nature of carbon while dreaming, as well as the circular structure of benzene, which appeared to him as a snake biting its own tail. Two Nobel laureates, neuroscientist Otto Loewi and physicist Niels Bohr, both attributed their prizewinning discoveries to dreams.

Numerous great artists have credited dreams for directly inspiring some of their best work. These dreamers include painters Salvador Dali and Jasper Johns; poet William Blake; author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley; and musical composers from Beethoven to Billy Joel.

Thinking Through Dreaming

Despite dreaming’s long track record as an idea-generator and problem-solver, for centuries the science of dreams remained in the dark. Dreams were difficult to test, allowing theories to proliferate without much evidence. Many people asked, “What are dreams for?” Freud suggested that dreams express forbidden desires, especially sexual and aggressive impulses. More recently, scientists hypothesized that dreams randomly generate images while our brains rest.

But now, new brain-imaging technology has illuminated the function of dreams. We’ve discovered that a dreaming brain is not on vacation but hard at work. Simply put, dreaming is just another form of thinking. As Harvard dream expert (and fellow hypnotist) Dierdre Barrett points out, it’s silly to ask what dreaming is for, because, like thinking in general: “It is for everything.” (Check out her book on dreaming, The Committee of Sleep.) Thanks to positron-emission tomography (PET) scans, we finally know why in some cases we think better in dreams than when awake. But let’s return for a moment to Mary, who experienced this benefit firsthand.

Prior to hypnotizing her, I asked Mary to write a description of the ideal code she wished to create—what it would do, how it might look, even how she would feel after completing it. (She wrote, “Elated!”) Later, under hypnosis, she listened to me read her own words out loud. I also suggested that the insight she needed would come to her soon in a dream. Afterward, she took her written description home, with instructions to review it every night at bedtime. Then while lying in bed, she was to think about this ideal code, so that it would be her last thought before falling asleep.

One week went by with no results. Nevertheless, on her second visit she told me she’d been experiencing a strange sensation of hopefulness, which she couldn’t quite explain. “I think we should keep trying,” she said. So during her second session we repeated everything we’d done ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction | Welcome to the Party!
• Part One | Programming Your Subconscious Self
• Part Two | Conditioning Your Conscious Self
• Part Three | Thinking Through Your Embodied Self
• Part Four | Integrating Your Social Self
• Part Five | Vitalizing Your Striving Self
• Conclusion | Party On
• Chapter Summaries
• References
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright