Phillip Adcock: Training Your Mind for Success in Life

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Phillip Adcock is a commercial psychologist and managing director of a number of human behavior analysis companies operating in 17 countries. He boasts some of the world’s largest organizations as clients, including Apple, Kraft, L’Oréal, Mars, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Tesco, and Procter & Gamble. He frequently appears on UK television. He lives in England.

Favorite Success Quote

“If the brain was so simple that we could understand it, we’d be so simple that we couldn’t”~ Ian Stewart

Key Points

1. Your Brain is Wired to Fight, Flight, and Fu….Find a Mate

When you seek to understand your brain, you have to realize that it takes our brains nearly 30,000 years to evolve, and for the past 30,000 years of evolutionary history, our brains have been wired for three things, fighting, fleeing, and finding a mate.

Whenever you are presented with a new situation, your brain will filter it through these lenses, basically, should I fight this thing, run from it, or screw it.

Whenever you are in a new and scary business, life, or mating situation, your brain is not logical and you are working with wiring that evolved to help you survive on the plains of the Savanna, realize this and you will be able to perform at a much higher level.

2. It is Emotion That Makes Every Decision

People who think they have a real choice in making decisions, do not understand how the brain works. Your brain operates purely out of emotion, and on its simplest terms it operates to move your towards pleasure and away from pain.

If you can understand this, you can manipulate this to associate more pain and pleasure with certain things that will help you move away form what you want and towards what you do, even if it means loss of pleasure in the short term.

3. Use All of Your Senses to Get in State

If you want to get into state, simply use all of your senses.

Get in a room that inspires your sense of sight with colors that motivate you and images that fire you up, light a candle or something else that smells good and relaxes you and helps you think, stand on a certain type of floor that will help you to feel either more relaxed or more motivated, and finally put on some music that gets you into state.

4. Break the Script

If you want to break a habit, break the script. If you are a smoker, figure out when it is that you normally smoke and change something about that routine. Stop masturbating and quit watching porn. Change the coffee that you are drinking, the way you drive to work, the gas station that you fill up at or anything else that will help you to change a routine normally associated with a habit.

5. Always be Learning

Plain and simple, if you are not learning, you are dying. You need to constantly expand your brain and expose it to new and exciting ideas to be growing into the man that you want to be.

Always be learning.