Your Ultimate Power – Part 1

You have a power that you gives you amazing control over your life experiences. There are two features that make this power very special:

1. You have total control over this power and total access to its awesome gifts. You get to use this power for anything that you want. Moment to moment you choose how to use it, either consciously or unconsciously.
2. No one else, NO ONE, has any access to this power unless you give it to them. And even then, they only have indirect access. If you grant them access, consciously or unconsciously, they must tell you what they want you to do with the power and then you choose to use your power the way they want you to use it.

This ultimate power is the power to choose your thoughts at each and every moment. You possess this power totally. You always have possessed it and always will. However, most of us have not been aware that we have this power and we are not aware how amazingly powerful we become when we use it effectively.

You see, your thoughts, your persistent thoughts, and the accompanying emotions determine your course in life. If you have a goal, something that you really want to achieve, and you really believe you can, then you will give it your all. Obstacles be damned. If they slow you down, it won’t matter. If they knock you down, you’ll get back up smarter and stronger. If you really want it and really believe you can get it, you will.

If, on the other hand, you believe you can’t or just aren’t sure, you will not give it your all, you will hesitate when you meet an obstacle. And if you get knocked down a few times, you will decide that is just proof of what you believed all along, that you can’t do it.

“Whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re probably right.”
~ Henry Ford

This is the first part of a discussion where I will briefly review the evidence that this power exists. Then in Part 2, I will explain the two points above which specify that you have sole control over this power in your life.

Proof That This Power Exists

How do I know that this power even exists? Can I prove it? As a matter of fact I can. Let’s look briefly at three areas of endeavor for the proof: athletics, medicine, and parapsychology.

Athletic Proof

This is an area where physical performance is of the utmost importance. The uninformed observer sees athletes performing in competition against other athletes or against a clock. They may see a news clip of them practicing physical skills. What they don’t see is athletes practicing the mental skills required to win. Why? Simple, there really is nothing to see. Or, what there is to see is considered a secret that they don’t want the competition to benefit from.

What do you think is going on during the halftime of a big game? Do you think they are sitting in the locker room having some refreshments and watching the halftime show on TV? Not a chance. They are practicing the ‘inner’ game.

Every sport has an ‘outer’ game and an ‘inner’ game. The ‘outer’ game is physical practice and strength/flexibility training. Practicing the basic skills of the sport, a tee shot in golf, a tennis serve, a foul shot in basketball, pitching a baseball, hour after hour after hour. Practicing basic team plays over and over till you can wake up at 3 am and run the play with your eyes closed. All of this is very important.

The ‘inner’ game, is the mental and emotional aspect of preparing to do your best. It involves positive self-talk (affirmations) and visualizations that program the subconscious mind to direct your conscious mind and body to do your very best.

Professional athletes maximize their performance by practicing both the “outer” game and the “inner” game. You can often see them practicing their “outer” game in warmups. But you probably aren’t aware of them practicing their “inner” game because there is little or no physical activity associated with this practice. Yet they are doing it all the time. What do you think every serious tennis player is doing when they do their ritual before each serve? What about each golfer just before each shot, each quarterback just before he “calls” for the ball, and every gymnast just before they do their floor routine? They have practiced their “inner” game so much that they can repeat it in a couple of seconds even with their eyes open.

Back to what’s going on during the halftime of any professional sporting event. Since there are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, do you think they would use this precious time doing anything that they weren’t certain would improve their performance? For sure they are taking care of any injuries and they are acknowledging what they did well and what needs improvement and mostly they are working on mindset, attitude, team coherence, purpose, why this matters. These are all aspects of the “inner” game, building belief in your ability to effectively do what needs to be done.

Every new pharmaceutical must be proven to be safe and effective in clinical trials. The FDA regulates this process. Doctors have long known that their status as healthcare professionals can influence the patient’s health. So half the patients in a clinical trial are given a sugar pill that looks just like the active pill containing the drug being tested. A significant percentage of people receiving the placebo will report relief of symptoms even though they received an inactive sugar pill. They believed they received the ‘real thing’ and their bodies responded accordingly solely based on their beliefs and their body’s ability to heal itself.

Some people also experience unpleasant, unintended side effects from the ‘inactive’ sugar pill. This is referred to as a nocebo response. It is caused by psychological influences that result in an unpleasant expectation from the treatment.

Big Pharma spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year to account for your power to affect your body with your consciousness. Professional athletes spend time, effort, and money applying that power to their personal performance. Maybe you should pay more attention to your power to affect your own body and begin to consciously use this power to improve whatever you say is not working well in your life.

Parapsychology Proof

Parapsychology is the scientific study of the powers of the mind that lie outside the realms of conventional psychology, things like hypnosis, telepathy, and near-death experiences.

There is a broad range of studies showing that ordinary people (if that is not an oxymoron) without any special training or skills, can influence the behavior of simple electronic devices, such as random number generators and other inanimate objects.

Although there is no generally accepted explanation for how this occurs, there is so much evidence from numerous investigators that it is difficult to ignore.

While these effects of consciousness on inanimate objects are relatively small, they are still statistically significant. Moreover, there is another level of significance. My statistics professor in graduate school (whose name I can’t remember) often said:

“If I walk out in a field of 500 cows and wave my hands in the air and one of the cows levitates 10 feet off the ground, that is not statistically significant, but it is significant!”
~ My Grad School Statistics Professor

These parapsychology experiments, although they are statistically significant, are, more significantly, just plain significant. Our understanding of mental things and physical things specifies that they operate under totally separate and distinct laws. Therefore, consciousness is not supposed to have any effect on physical objects. But it does. And that is telling us that we really don’t understand the bigger picture as well as we might think we do.

These results are assigned to a field outside of the respected field of psychology, parapsychology. This field is not generally accepted by professional psychologists. The results of these experiments are little known by the general public compared to many phenomena of orthodox psychology. I believe that both of these facts can be attributed to the fact that the results tear at the very foundation of our understanding of the world we live in. If we accept these effects as real, we must look differently at our relationship to the world.

Summary

So serious athletes, healthcare professionals, and parapsychologists all know that our consciousness affects our physical bodies and physical objects in the world. Now you also know it.

There is more information available about the two characteristics of Your Ultimate Power and how to begin using it more in your life in Part 2 of this post.

Note: I have a lot of references to original research papers demonstrating these effects and books summarizing the results but including them here would make this too long. More details will be available in my forthcoming book Affirm Yourself. If you are interested, stay tuned by enrolling in my email list.