CHECK OUT MY RECENTLY PUBLISHED PAPERS:
Exploring The Possibility Of An Elimination Algorithm as the Basis for Human Intuition:  A Study of a Successful Expert System for Eye Disease Diagnosis
Unlocking The Science Of Emotions Through Pattern Recognition: Establishing Emotions As A Proper Field Of Study

An Hour On A Self Improvement Plan - Resolve Your Concealed Conflicts

The simple logic of this self improvement plan helps to clear your mind quickly, when something bothers you. It has helped settle my mind, letting me sleep soundly. It can help you too, particularly, when you are upset.

Aroused emotions trigger restlessness, excitation, and agitation. Becoming conscious of such arousal is important. It is the key to productive self awareness. Nagging worries about your career, family or health suddenly become more intense. Become aware of your restlessness and spend a little time in evaluation.

You may need to make hard choices between career and family, or work and relaxation. If you choose to move to a new city, you could well lose a valued relationship. Life often offers you troubling options. There may be no quick answers. At the same time, not being able to make up your mind may leave you in turmoil. You could burn with resentment, or be filled with dread. This self improvement plan can resolve conflicts, which could have enveloped you in turmoil for months. That may sound a difficult promise! But it can be done - in just an hour or so of quiet evaluation. Freed from such internal conflicts, you will enjoy more restful nights.

A massive reservoir of evolutionary intelligences, including animal instincts and your common sense, operate in your subconscious mind, constantly formulating competing plans for your life.

• Without your awareness, these emotional intelligences find swift answers to the daily issues which you face in life.
• When answers are not forthcoming, these intelligences trigger discomfort, causing you stress.
• Since these emotional senses operate within their own narrow compartments within your mind, their internal conflicts make it difficult for you to make up your mind.

The Self Improvement Plan
Take a significant problem, which really troubles you. Bring the different viewpoints within your mind about this problem out into the open. Write down a bullet list of the issues, which describe this problem. Enter the points in the cells of a column in a spreadsheet.

• Listen carefully to your mind and write every thought down. You will soon empty your mind concerning this particular issue.
• The most difficult to draw out are those intolerable fears in the back of your mind. Write them down. Acknowledging their existence will have a calming effect.
• Once your list is completed, enter your judgment of each bullet point in an adjacent cell in the spreadsheet. It could be “fact,” “fear,” “possible action,” etc. Your judgment is your common sense view, which labels each bullet point. You will find that many bullet points will fit a particular label.
• Now, sort the spreadsheet, using the labels column. You will get an organized, common sense view of this major problem in your life. Bringing out and viewing your hidden fears will calm your mind.

Creative, but troubling search processes are an inherited animal feature of your mind. Read how this process helps you to acknowledge and accept the existence of problems in your life. That will calm your mind. Then, patience will usually bring you solutions.

A Self Improvement Plan
Do Conflicting Action Plans Form In Your Mind?
Your mind is a powerful problem solving machine, which works overtime creating competing strategies for coping with your life. Specific organs in your brain trigger competing emotions, each offering a distinct evolutionary approach to solving problems.

These intelligences sense patterns and respond based on millions of years of evolutionary experiences. They also remember your successes and failures over a lifetime.

The emotions of anger, fear, or dread propose competing plans. Anger seeks to destroy obstructions. Fear seeks to escape. Dread freezes you into inactivity. Each emotion operates in a narrow compartment within your mind.

A Self Improvement Plan
Is Your Mind A Powerful Search Engine?
Within milliseconds of seeing danger, even the most primitive of animals will search a complex environment for a place of safety and swiftly retreat to its security - say, under a rock. The primitive brains of those animals have subconscious search drives, which can locate solutions to survival problems from mountains of data within the blink of an eye. Your mind is a highly advanced version of the same amazing machine. It can also find solutions within milliseconds. So, if you feel troubled, it is because your mind cannot find workable solutions to your current predicament.

A Self Improvement Plan -
What Happens When Searches Fail?
You will not have been troubled, if your mind could solve the problem. You will have acted already. But, in today's complex world, you cannot run away and hide. Your job may be under threat. You would need the income. Rents and bills need to be met. Subconsciously, your mind searches for solutions.

While you drive to work, meet clients, or have lunch, subconscious drives keep battering at the cage of limitations set around your life. Each possible solution faces an unpleasant obstruction. They trigger fear, or anger signals, within your nervous system. Those emotions set off visceral responses. In your subconscious, these systems cycle through your problems over and over, affecting your health and wellbeing.

A Self Improvement Plan
What Happens When Your Strategies Conflict?
You are also troubled by shifting perspectives. At times, your career appears attractive. At other times, a hopeless trap. You do not wish to forgo the benefits of your job. Yet, it is not satisfying. And, there are no alternatives in sight. Different levels of your consciousness envelop you within changing worlds of euphoria, dissatisfaction, or dread.

When an emotion occupies you in its level of consciousness, you are blinkered by its narrow vision. The real problem behind your turmoil is that your negative emotions are generated by your lower animal levels. Those levels lack a global view. This problem solving technique creatively reconciles your subconscious conflicts, into a wise world view.

A Self Improvement Plan
What Is The Effect Of A List?
Your mind has a phenomenal capacity to go in and search all its nooks and corners to deliver the outlines of your thoughts on any subject. That ordinarily happens, when you sit down to write a shopping list. Your mind delivers a reasonable list of the essentials. Similarly, list your thoughts into the cells of a spreadsheet. Within a short span time, you can assemble all your views of your problem in one place. Enter each aspect of your problem as it comes into your consciousness, into a cell in a few words.

(It is necessary for you to write down the heading of your exercise to focus your mind.) Enter your vague fears. Even crazy ideas, which cross your mind. What are your objectives? What are the things you can do? What are the threats? What are the favorable points? Invariably the good thoughts come after you have entered the bad ones. Usually, these outlines will fill about 60 cells in your spreadsheet. You may not wish to reveal some of these thoughts even to your best friend. But, a spreadsheet is impersonal. It does not pity, gloat, or gossip.

A Self Improvement Plan
Have You Listened To The Background Ideas?
You can have an exhaustive list only if you note each thought down. A few words to describe a project limitation, an area of opportunity, the views of a friend, or even a hunch. When you expect them, different viewpoints will drift in, in conspicuous sequence. In your daily life, usually the most unpleasant thoughts will keep repeating in your mind.

But, when you note them down, such thoughts will not recirculate again! After all, you do not write the same item in your shopping list a second time. Writing them down will also elicit your muffled, but crucial insights. By the time your list is over, every level of your consciousness will have expressed its competing view. That process itself has a calming effect.

A Self Improvement Plan
Do All People Have Intolerable Thoughts?
Mental turmoil originates from the thoughts, which your mind will not accept. Invariably such possibilities are so fearsome that you just don't even want to think about them. Most fear concerns the unknown. Note that unknown negative possibility. Entering it into your spreadsheet cell cannot do you any harm. You are not going to think about it, but the issue is there. In reality, just acknowledging the existence of that fear will have a calming effect. This problem solving method will have included your deepest concerns, while forming an acceptable plan for your life.

A Self Improvement Plan
How Do You Achieve A Calm View?
Your fears and misgivings belong to the lower animal levels of your consciousness. Fortunately, evolution has created within your brain a neutral and rational intelligence. That is your "RB," your rational brain. It inhabits the prefrontal regions of your brain.

RB is the true investigative part of your brain. Growth of the prefrontal cortex led to the human race. RB is wired to gain access to all your knowledge from an unemotional viewpoint. The Buddhists report that RB sees the ups and downs of your life like “watching a bird in the sky.” 

A Self Improvement Plan -
When Does A Calm Assessment Occur?
RB, the true judgmental part of your brain, takes charge, in the next step in the creative problem solving routine. Simply enter a label, an assessment of each entered thought, in an adjacent cell of the spreadsheet. That label is the judgment of RB.

You will find that each label deposits a particular worry into a practical unemotional file pocket. The process shifts your views into a calmer perspective. The labels could be: Unlikely. Possible action. Accept failure. Time will offer a solution. An Opportunity. Labeling clarifies your views. That classification becomes the permanent wisdom of your mind. The labels will pin down needless fears, unlikely possibilities and the many pertinent points, which you had never evaluated.

You will find that just 8 or 10 labels can actually be repeated for many of the 60 thoughts. A "sort" command of the labels column will arrange similar ideas together. Listing similarly labeled thoughts together will suddenly bring clarity to your problem. They become groups of consistent and allied thoughts. Some of your worries about your job are unlikely to happen.

When the more improbable concerns are seen together, they distill reality and purge anxieties. The less likely outcomes can also be ignored. The inevitable ones have to be accepted. You can take positive steps to solve the remaining issues. This method balances the conflicts within your mind. By foreseeing, acknowledging, acting on, or accepting major issues, you will have created a practical strategy for your life.

A Self Improvement Plan
What Follows Acceptance?
Konrad Lorenz recorded the negative emotions of a chimpanzee in a room which contained a banana suspended from the ceiling just out of reach, and a box placed elsewhere. "The matter gave him no peace, and he returned to it again and again. Then, suddenly - and there is no other way to describe it - his previously gloomy face 'lit up'. His eyes now moved from the banana to the empty space beneath it on the ground, from this to the box, then back to the space, and from there to the banana. The next moment he gave a cry of joy, and somersaulted over to the box in sheer high spirits. Completely assured of his success, he pushed the box below the banana. No man watching him could doubt the existence of a genuine 'Aha' experience in anthropoid apes."

Before discovering the usefulness of the boxes, the chimp had no peace. But, your brain has advanced. You have an RB, which can focus on your problems, taking failure as an acceptable option. The chimp would have still have solved its problem, if it had calmly focused on the banana and the boxes. Creatively focus on your spreadsheet. Trust your powerful brain to find your solutions, without stress and anxiety.

A Self Improvement Plan
What Happens When You Expect Success?
If it is unrealistic to expect to succeed in solving this problem, this exercise will reinforce your sense of failure. Creative problem solving solves the conflicts between many issues. But, the system will always search only for practical solutions. It will not evaluate a bridge to the sun. If you lack an answer, it is not the end of the world.

Fear and despair are primitive responses, which do not solve your problems. You may even find it hard to believe that you will succeed. But, your mind can imagine situations. Imagine being successful and you will see the problem from a brand new context. You need views from many different angles. Be patient. Organizing your concerns into a self improvement plan will give you a more calm and focused outlook on life.

A Self Improvement Plan 
Are You Prepared To Wait?
If the answer to your problem lies within the information available to you, your mind will have discovered it. You have memory stores, with knowledge inherited across millions of years of evolution. Added to those are a lifetime of memories of many successful and failed strategies. Drives superimpose one memory on another to create new images in myriad combinations.

Even a child can imagine a chair with an attitude, or a refrigerator with a toothache. When your subconscious drives play with such an infinity of combinations, it continually recognizes successful patterns, leading to new and creative solutions. Keep adding data and new contexts to your memory stores. Subconscious search drives work ceaselessly. When you complete this self improvement plan, you will reach a more calm and creative frame of mind. The moment your mind discovers a solution, you will know. Then, the “Aha” experience is sweet.

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