One of the most important systems in your brain, that either allows you to achieve what you want or to fail at it is called Reticular Activation System.
I’ll explain it to you.
We receive through our senses, mainly eyes and ears, tons of information every second, but before it gets to our consciousness, it gets prescreened by the Reticular Activation System (RAS). Most of the information gets dropped off and only a little part would be allowed to go through and we will become aware of it.
I’ll give you this example. 
You come out of the mall and you can’t remember where you parked your
yellow Lamborghini. You start looking around, by literally turning your head left and right and moving through the parking lot in all kinds of directions. At some point you find your baby, get inside and drive off. The task of locating your vehicle is completed.
What was happening in your brain during it and how were you able to locate your car?
You weren’t aware of it, but your brain sent a signal to the RAS requesting to locate a yellow Lamborghini and provided a mental picture of it. Your RAS started screening all the information arriving through your eyes about every vehicle near you and trying to find a match for the mental image of a yellow Lambo.
When it happened, it sent you a signal “The vehicle has been located!” and you became aware of it.
Now, here is the beauty of this story: If I were to ask you how many gray Toyota Camrys were in the parking lot (that area where you were looking for you car) you are not going to be able to tell me.
Not because you didn’t see them, but because your RAS did not allow this information through to your awareness.
Your eyes did see every vehicle around you, but your brain did not receive any information about it.
Do you remember the Terminator? When he went to a bar all naked looking for some clothes.
You could see on his “screen” how he was scanning the dimensions of each patron in the room looking for a person with the same measurements and his RAS was telling him “too small”, “too big”, “inappropriate” - that’s how our brain works.
That’s the system that helps us to find a friend in a crowd, to wake up when a child crying in the next room, but sleep through much louder noises of trucks driving buy and helicopters landing in front of the house.
Another story.
Here is this lady, friend of our family, back in Russia, dreaming for a few years to marry a guy from America.
When I asked her “Why?” she said “Two of my girlfriends married guys from America and they are very happy!”
I thought to myself “That’s a great reasoning, it’s just I know different stories, when the same scenario went terribly wrong or at list not as successfully.”
I told her about cases, where it wasn’t exactly a good decision on the side of those other girls, about that Russian girl, who got killed here and about other stories that I knew.
Now, pay attention, she had two successful stories and I gave her, I think, about four or five unsuccessful ones.
She said, whatever.
In a while I talked to here again, the conversation went again to her idea to marry a guy from America and again I asked her about her reasoning. She said, that she has two successful stories about two girlfriends who blah, blah, blah…
What happened to my arguments?
Her RAS did not allow her to retain my unsuccessful stories, they did not match what she was looking for, therefore my stories got disposed of as just some noise. If I gave her some instances that would support her version - she would obviously remember them, because they would match the ideal story she is looking for.
I’m pretty sure you can find a lot of examples in your own life to see how your RAS works.
Here is a question, though: how do we use this knowledge about our brain in order to succeed in business?
Here is how.
In order to be able to materialize our ideas and dreams, we need first to create a compelling vision about our goals and about what we wont to achieve in our business. This vision has to be precise and detailed, because this vision is going to be the yellow Lamborghini we are going to ask our RAS to locate on the parking lot called “Life.”
I’m not talking about some magic, but rather about re-calibrating our brain in order to be able to see all the opportunities, that we normally don’t even notice around us, all those people, who we could utilize, but we don’t know that they are around us, all those new ideas, that are in front of us, but we can’t see them, because we are to busy telling ourselves “I’m not good at business, there is too much competition around, I’m out of ideas, 98% of new businesses are normally fall apart within the first two years…”
All those arguments are supporting the idea of us failing.
Success starts from us sending a clear vision of our business and our achievements to the prescreening center of our brain called Reticular Activation System.
If you believe in yourself, if you know exactly what you are looking for, if the only future you see for yourself is success - that’s what your RAS will find for you in your reality and present to you in a way that will feel like magic!
You will be amazed of all the opportunities and people around that are going to help you in one way or another, it will feel like a dream come true, like everything is finally falling into place, but it will not be a miracle, it will be your brain in action.
You
create your success, by letting your powerful brain know that success
is the only outcome you are looking for and that’s what you will be
presented with!
We’ll discuss particular techniques and tools in following posts.
