It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it. [00:27.9]
Bob: And welcome back, I realized last week I did a little bit of a disservice to you guys. Not a disservice really, but I dangle the carrot in front of you and I want to come back and revisit it. And that was last week, we talked a lot about how you cannot be duped again, how you can listen to somebody in such a way that you can see through everything that's going on, their values, their purposes and their purpose and giving you their messages or sending you that video or whatever it is that they're doing or even if it's just a friend doing something. And then of course, what's the main message and the supporting evidence that they give you. And while that's incredible, incredible stuff, I wanted to share with you the thing that I mentioned, which was how to actually use that in a learning environment to improve your memory so that now you have a backlog of data and information in your life that you can use at any point in time to make cross distinctions. Right? [01:26.0]
And I want to do that for you guys today because this was one major reason why I was able to piece together and create out of basically nothing, a program that enables people to ditch lifelong habits, lifelong trauma, lifelong depression and anxiety and lifelong stuckness. People just, they've never felt good enough or I've always been a people pleaser and I hate that, I'm always worried about what people think. These types of lifelong habits, nobody around me was even offering the possibility of there being freedom at all. Nobody, they literally were saying, sorry, that's just something you're stuck with or sorry, that's your personality or sorry, you know, that happened to you and it's really defined you. And I didn't believe that for a second. I didn't come out of the womb that way, which means that all of it was learned after the fact. So who I was was I not me anymore. No, I came out of the womb as me and everything else that's happened since was laid on top. [02:22.5]
And so because of this capacity to learn something new and to remember it, I had a whole lot of information from years of study in a whole lot of fields that are not even connected a lot of times. I'd studied mindfulness and meditation for years with it, with one instructor and one person to really get dig deep into helping myself see through a lot of this, the psychological junk that I'd put in my head; some four years, right? I'd spent four years, three and a half years training in biodynamic craniosacral therapy and being, becoming certified as a registered craniosacral therapist, which I still, and then taking that further and diving into all the other forms of alternative healing and energy healing, particularly, I ended up publishing a book on the topic, so I have that field of labor. [03:09.7]
I'd spent 30 years studying martial arts and particularly confrontation style martial arts in the sense of understanding the psychology of it. I'm not a fighter; don't challenge me to a match. You will win, I just won't even come all forfeit. You can have all the glory. Okay. I'm not interested in fighting people. I studied it because of what it reveals in me. I went and danced with a dance troupe and studied all that kind of stuff. I painted murals and installed murals inside of beautiful, huge buildings. One Mormon temple even in fact, and no, I won't tell you which one. So like I, I, all of this disparate experience that I had had throughout my life and when I found that I couldn't get out of addiction and people told me it was never going to happen, I said, fine. Well, I'm going to find a way. Because at that point in time I wasn't suicidal. I really did want to live and I just didn't want to live the rest of my life that way. You know, I was looking down the road 32 years old. I'm looking down for the next six, seven decades going, really, this is what I have to look forward to. A daily fight, a daily struggle with depression, a daily struggle with fears about poverty and money issues inside my head, I'm like, I don't want this. [04:16.8]
I got to find a way out. And so I was able to take all the information I'd learned over the years and piece it together into a program, into a process that I continued to find and, and hone and, and really make something so powerful that it now I'm able to like take somebody, find out what, what core issues they're holding, dismantled them in a very short amount of time, help them retrain their emotional reflexes and give them the, the viewpoints and mindset needed for them to become freedom so they don't have to fight it anymore. Effectively, I learned how to give people a reset button on their life, whatever happened before. Now that's rough maybe for some people, but it's time to live consciously and of your own choosing. And what if we could just hit restart and you don't lose any other wisdom? That's what I built. How did I build that? It started with the ability to learn and remember information. Okay. [05:07.3]
Now obviously if you are interested in getting help with that, it took me a long time to piece this together and if you're stuck in the middle of some of those things, the anxiety, depression, past traumas, things like that, or if you're just stuck in your life and you just want help getting out of it, please go over to thefreedomspecialist.com and schedule a call or go there and get started on one of our programs thefreedomspecialist.com/feelbetternow, but that's not what this episode is about, so I'm not here to show that. What, what I am here to talk about is how to learn. Are you ready? Now if you're driving and commuting, you make mental notes obviously, or maybe you'll listen to this multiple times. I know a couple of our clients have done that and either way it’s fine, it’s fine by us. Eventually we'll have the transcript up on our website somewhere and then you'll eventually be able to search through at we're, we're in the process of building that, so here's the scoop. [05:54.6]
We told you last week about how to listen, now the question is how do I retain what I've learned in such a way that it's just always connected to my field of knowledge and I don't have to sit there and scour my notebooks and try and remember things that it actually just sits in my memory banks and I can connect to it anytime that I want. How do I train that? It is a skill folks. Let's talk about memory for a second. What is memory? Now if you were there listening to the episode where we talked about what memory is and how it works with the hippocampus, obviously that's a deep dive into it. Short version is this memory is a present moment reconstruction of a bunch of data. It's not actually just a whole nugget stored somewhere. It's just a bunch of information; it came in through your skin, through your sense of touch. It came in through your nose; it came in through your eyes, it came in through your mouth, it came in through your ears. It came in through that sense of like energetic sense, which is also through your skin, but it's kind of a different feeling. So perceptions and energetic stuff. It came in through thoughts, information as thoughts, right? [06:59.3]
The thoughts you create are information that is also part of your living experience. It came through intuition and emotions and feelings and judgments. So you have all this information that happened in a moment and your brain has to process that. Now, we can't process that much stuff consciously. Like, can you imagine all of that data every second of every day? Some 4 billion? Oh some, yeah. It's like 4 billion bits of data are running through your system every moment of every day. And that's data from like what's the temperature on the air outside and biometric stuff in terms of your heartbeat and aches and pains inside the body as well as what's this person saying and what's happening across the street and what's the smell of the flower like this? There’s a lot of data, every particle, every sound, every fluctuation, every you know wavering of light, some 4 billion bits, and our conscious mind can, can really only filter and process maybe some 2000 bits. That’s one half of 1000000th of 1% [07:57.9]
So how does it filter it? These are core beliefs, obviously that's something to talk about and we've talked about that in past episodes, of course, root issues, and I may do something like that in a future episode, but right now it's only, it's only able to process that much. The rest of it is still there as data, but it hasn't been processed. So imagine you're a librarian, you have a library; there's books everywhere, right? You walk into the library and it's your job to both gather information or AKA books that are important to the people that are going to be visiting your library or what you want to do with your library. And also to sort the books that are there. Now, it's easy to gather new books because you know exactly what you're looking for. You gather them, you order them and you put them in. But all the other books that people dropped off at random because they were done with them and wanted to donate, all the other books that somebody else was just like, wow, look there's a pile of books, let's talk some more on you walk in every day and there's a massive mound of books. [08:52.0]
And if you don't look at them sort through them and them on the shelves, what happens? They're just sitting there in the trash pile. This big heap taking up space. They're there but you don't know they're there cause you they're not in an orderly fashion. So on one level memory is just basically your ability to recall. Everybody has all the memory they need, but their ability to recall that memory is different. And have you noticed that in your life there are parts of your life that you have really good memory over and other parts that you don't like birthdays and stuff and holidays and special events for the family. I'm sorry I that's not something that is like at the forefront of my memory. I literally have to grab it from the depths and be like, when, what is the exact year that my son was born? Let me have to calculate how old I was, you know, carry the three square, the root of whatever in order to figure some, some of these things out. I can get it, I can recall it, but not in an orderly fashion. [09:52.0]
It's just kind of tossed aside with, yeah, these are not as important to me. The areas of your life that you value the most, those are the areas that you have the best memory in, right? Like your job, if you're like really into your job and you've got a lot of stuff, man, you can whip out details left and right. I remember sitting in conversations with people as, as a college student who had tremendous memory for sports data and teams going back for years, like obscure stats that I would never have even thought existed. One, let alone taking the time to look up, but they would have a huge conversations around stuff that I didn't really understand and didn't care about but they could remember the tiniest details. And then they would turn around and go home and they'd forgotten to get the milk on the way home that their wife had just asked them to get about 15 minutes before when she interrupted the phone, their conversation with a phone call saying, Hey honey, when are you coming home? [10:50.2]
Memory's an interesting thing. What we value, we remember; that is the first principle here of memory, and don't take this as a slight, just because you don't remember something doesn't mean that like, Oh, well I must hate that. Like if your wife is like, how come you couldn't remember our anniversary or our this or that, and okay, it's not probably highest on your priority list, but that doesn't mean you don't care. It just means it's not highest on your priority list. So don't get that mixed up with you don't care, it just means it's not highest on your priority list. [11:20.7]
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or wants some help doing it. Head on over to thefreedomspecialist.com/feelbetternow and check out some of the things we've got in store for you or book a call so we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for. [11:49.1]
So how then do we take memory and turn it into something that enables you to remember things that are not, that are just extraneous facts and details and that you don't really care about normally, but somehow like you, you managed to remember them so that later they become information that you can grab and do stuff with. Case in point, I'm sitting here giving you a podcast. All of these podcast episodes that I've given to you, I literally just wrote down a single idea and maybe two bullet points on a piece of paper and everything else is coming out of my memory banks and my ability to see and perceive and remember things, all the stories, all of the anecdotes, all of the examples, all of the analogies. They are rooted in the information that I've gathered and you too can do this. It might take some time to practice it and I'm not saying that there aren't some people who are naturally a little more wired for this than others. I'm not saying that at all. I actually think everybody's sort of on an equal playing field on this, on this score, except that some people have trained it more just based on upbringing and family environment. [12:57.3]
Unless of course you had some kind of physiological defect where your memory is being affected. So if you don't have that then this is going to be an amazing, an amazing experience. By the way, the hypothalamus is, I mean, I mean the hippocampus is the, is the one that like when you start messing with that, then your, your memory just kind of goes away. And in some of the experiments we mentioned at the other episode, so cool. Now that we understand that memory is about recall and recall is about your library and which parts of your library you like the most, those are the most well-ordered ones. You can go in there, you know the exact shelf, you know the color of the book, you can pull it off, you can whip it out. And there it is. Other parts of the library, the library, you know, the the the restricted section for, for dark magic and wizardry. Maybe that's not an area that you go in or the bin in, like the history section where nobody, where nobody goes or where the, you know, where the kids make out in the corner because they know nobody's gonna find him. [13:56.1]
Daaahhhh, okay, cool. All right. So that, that's an area that we can definitely, definitely improve on if you want to. But moving forward, here's something you can do so that you don't have this big stack of books building up all the time. You just have a web of memory that's intertwined and you can find what you need without having to constantly sit there and drill things and drill things all the time. So how do we improve recall? Here's the basic formula. Capture it as I taught you about in the last episode, and if you didn't listen to that, go back and listen to it after you're done with this so that you really grasp it. To capture it means to capture the fourfold or all four areas that you're paying attention to and you need to practice capturing things or listen listening in such a way that you catch it. You will not catch 100% of anything, at least so far to date, I have never been able to catch 100% of stuff, but you can catch usually, mm, 60% ish if you're listening well. Sometimes up to 80% if you're really listening, but that leaves you in a kind of deficit, doesn't it? [14:58.8]
The information that was passed on, oh, only 80% of it made it. If we're really optimistic, well then then when that guy passes, not on only 80% makes that, what's 80% of 80% I don't even want to do the math, but you get the idea, right? It's like a 64% right? And then that gets passed on and what's 80% of 64 you know, like and so on and so forth. So you end up with a gradually diminishing amount of information than what was given in the, in the beginning is the what the whole game of telephone is based on. But if you've done step one and captured it well, step two then is to expand it. This literally means to go and link it to something you care about. If you're learning about bananas and you're really good at software engineering, find some details and data about bananas because for some reason it struck your fancy and connect it to what you know about software engineering or about your wife's birthday or about some strange, odd smell feature that it creates in certain people. [15:58.4]
Like literally I was looking at posture and I ended up also studying the structure of a chemical compounds and how changing the places, the same amount of chemistry in there and the same amount of atoms of oxygen and hydrogen and all these other things. If you just change their arrangement, meaning their posture, their relationship to each other, their geometry, all of a sudden these compounds become either more volatile or more acidic and poisonous where the other one wasn't, and just by changing the posture and nothing else, and so I start seeing that, Oh man, maybe posture is important. [16:31.2]
Even on a molecular level. Holy cow, maybe I need to pay closer attention to my posture, but like these kinds of isotopes is what they're called, right? I'm learning about isotopes. I hated science, but I ended up learning about it because I was connecting it to this idea of posture and now I can go and teach somebody about posture and it's connected to, okay, what I've learned about it in terms of combat, what I've learned about it in terms of yoga, what I've learned about it in terms of chemistry for crying out loud, what I've learned about it in terms of physiology, I mean psychology and and emotion, like all of these things I'm able to go and teach somebody about because I connected it to or linked it to something that I care about. [17:10.2]
So your first task is to learn something. Your second task is not just to go, wow, that was a great idea, that was so cool, and go share it. Don't share it with people yet. Take a little time to ponder it and to make a connection so that you have that familiar moment of what we call an aha moment in your brain where your little chemistry in your brain connected to dots and went, Ahhhh, and then all of a sudden we may talk about that in a future episode because it's an important process understanding itself and what that process is, but you've connected it. You get this moment of like, YESSSS I get it! That makes so much sense. And now because it makes sense, you kind of own it and it's yours. So first you've captured it, you listened. Next, you linked it. Listened and linked and you connected it and expanded it to something, you know, now you have to simplify it. [17:59.4]
It's not enough just to link it to something that, you know, simplify it. So it's so simple that even a kid could understand it. You know, it takes real sophistication to be able to arrive at something simple. That's the ultimate form of sophistication. I can't remember who said that. Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. My brain wants to shuffle between like Pablo Picasso and some scientists like Einstein or somebody else. So I don't know who said that, but it's definitely true to learn, humans are great at complexity, but to actually take something and make it so dead simple that you can explain it in a way that makes people go, WOW, I never realized that. How come I didn't understand that before? It's like so, so simple. That process is what made me able to be able to really figure out what's going on in my life and to be able to turn it around into becoming a coach, to help other people. Cause I practiced it relentlessly over and over. [18:54.6]
So the third, third piece is to simplify it. Now that you've simplified it, we've listened to it, we've captured it, we've linked it to something we know, meaning we've expanded back. We went from 80% back to a hundred percent in terms of volume of information. Now we've simplified it and distilled it down into its essence. So it's easily transmissible; at that point we're going to go and we're going to go share it. And then you go share it with somebody and you teach it. It could be in an offhand conversation. It could be in a class or a lesson setting. It could be in a presentation at a business meeting. It could be any number of other things, but you share it with somebody else. In so doing in so doing, you have literally passed on more knowledge than you would have had if you had just passed, if you had just run from the class and be like, Oh, I have this cool experience and yada, yada, yada. [19:51.7]
The reason that John Dewey says, man doesn't learn by experience, he learns by reflecting on experience. I don't know his reasonings for saying that, but it is one of my favorite quotes because it sums it up really well. Reflection enables you to connect it to something, you know, and that means it becomes a part of you. And once it, once it becomes a part of you and once it becomes so clear to you and so simple that there's no way you couldn't explain it in the simplest terms or in the most complicated terms, depending on who you're talking about, then it has the real capacity to change your life. It doesn't have the capacity to change your life if all you've got is a bunch of information. What happens when that happens is just like what happened with me? I learned something. I think it's so cool I run with it for like a day and then I get tired of it and I forget it and I move on or I try something out like a new diet program because I learned this cool thing, but I didn't really take the time to commit it my own self, right. To order it in my library and to make sure that it fit into a, in a meaningful way into what I care about. [20:55.8]
See, if you don't figure out until how it fits in a meaningful way into your life, then naturally you're going to discard it as useless information. But if you really want to remember something, if you really want to get something out of it, it's not just listening and taking good notes and especially if you're taking notes like the way I told you last time, it’s to being going beyond that, understanding that your notes are necessarily flawed and you've got to go back and review those notes and look at them and make sure you've got them down as best you can. Then you've got to go link it to some information that you've got and expanded. Then you've got to simplify it so that it's so clear to you that you could talk to anyone about it and then you got to go share it. This isn't a hard and fast order, but these five steps are there. Lesson or capture, review, link it or expand it, simplify it and then go share it. That's it. Let me do it again. Lesson or capture the information, review what you've captured, expand upon it and link it to what you care about so that it fits in a meaningful way into your life. Then simplify it so that you could talk to somebody else about it really easily and then go share it. [22:07.7]
Once you've done that, your ability to remember something will shoot through the roof and the more you practice it, here's what's going to happen in your life. You are going to find that naturally almost by second nature. So you hear something and automatically your brain is already making connections. You're expanding upon something as you're listening in a much deeper way than just momentary all Ahhh haaas here and there. You can get an aha out of just about anything. Second, you'll be able to draw from all of these disparate experiences that you've had in your life, whether it's from, Oh, I'm a dad here and I'm a business owner there, and Oh yeah, I used to play soccer when I was eight and Oh, I learned this weird thing in my biology class about stomach acids and Oh yeah, well we're here in my art class we did this, and do you know how those connect? Just because they connect because of one reason and the reason is you, you've made it meaningful to you in some way. [23:04.9]
And because they're all connected to the tree of your own personal meaning, it doesn't matter where on the tree you put it, you'll be able to find it until it becomes meaningful to you and you've ingested it and taken in all the nutrients from it and then transformed it with your expansion into leaves and eventually fruit a little nugget that is so simplified that you could go share it with somebody else and then if they ask you for it, you could go back and be like, well, here's some supporting evidence and here's the main idea and blah, blah, blah. Once that's happened, it's a part of you. Once you've ingested it and done all that other stuff. Until that's happened, it's just the scenery and scenery goes by a lot and so this my hope for you is that you be able to start to mem memorize things in a way that allows you to connect meaning because that's going to make you one of the best problem solvers on the planet, especially as it relates to what you care about. [23:58.0]
When your mind has more ordered information. It's great and I get that, it sounds like it's a lot of work, but it's actually not that much work. It's a fun process. Start small, learn one little factoid. Ask yourself, how does this relate to something that I care about? And if you want an example of somebody who goes deep, deep on this type of thing, check out the what if blog xkcd.com (what-if.xkcd.com)
He doesn't do any more episodes. I mean articles since like 2017 but if you want to look at a mind, he was an astrophysicist, but like if you want to look at a mind who is taking very even just the very first article about a baseball being pitched at 90% of the speed of light and what would happen even that, even that if you just take that much as as a starting point to see how a mind is going and connecting odd ball little things and searching out different ways to expand upon a simple bit of information that turns into a hilarious blog at some amazing comics and a rollicking adventure down something that was just a one off question that becomes entertaining. [25:01.6]
It becomes in some ways life affirming in a really valuable exercise. So go learn some stuff, go improve your memory and now you finally have the secrets. Obviously I could teach you a tons more in this arena, but that's going to be reserved for if you really want some personal one on one help. If so, we'll go to thefreedomspecialist.com and schedule a chat. We'll see what we can do to help you. Have a great week guys [25:25.8]
And that's it for todays “Alive and Free Podcast.” If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from. And, while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice. [25:45.0]
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