I Heart Me (10 page)

Most people, professionals and some academics included, assume that the brain
is
hardwired. This popular attitude is why we get the idea that change is so difficult.

As a university student in the late eighties and early nineties, I learned that in childhood the brain was like dough. Easy to mould. Impressionable. But then sometime in our late teens,
the dough went in the oven and came out with a crust on it. Everything was now set. For life. You couldn't change it. The way you were was just the way you were.

This hardwired notion was actually abandoned nearly 20 years ago, although many still believe it. And that belief does make change quite difficult to effect. But the actual truth is that our brain is changing continually and will continue to change until we take our last breath, even if we live until we're over 100. It's called
neuroplasticity
, or brain plasticity.

Copious amounts of research have shown that a person can imagine doing pretty much anything and their brain will react almost as if they were actually doing it. A 2014 search of the PubMed scientific database under ‘mental practice' revealed over 30,000 publications.
¹
You could imagine swinging a golf club, serving at tennis, playing piano, typing, diving off a springboard, shooting baskets, lifting weights, kicking a ball or even moving an impaired limb if you had suffered a stroke, and your brain would process it as if you were actually doing it.

In my book
How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body
, I shared research in which the brains of people playing a sequence of piano notes were compared with the brains of people imagining playing the notes. After five days of daily practice, the brains had undergone identical levels of change, with the area connected to the finger muscles growing through neuroplasticity by around 30–40 times. Looking at the brain scans side by side, you couldn't tell who had played the notes from who had imagined playing them.
²

That wasn't a one-off set of results. In each of the numerous neuroplasticity studies that compare physical practice with imagined practice, the results are the same: the brain changes regardless of whether a person is doing something or imagining doing it. As already noted, the brain doesn't distinguish between real and imaginary.

Equally important, however, is that you need to keep doing the work to retain the brain changes. Studies show that if you stop a particular practice or imagined practice, the regions of the brain that have grown simply shrink back down again, just as muscles atrophy when you stop using them. Neuroscientists refer to the phenomenon as ‘use it or lose it'.

Have you ever forgotten how to do something? Say long division, for example, that you learned at school? You forgot how to do it because you didn't keep up the practice. The brain networks you built up as you learned it at school simply shrank back down, or disconnected.

Through exactly the same process, you can actually
forget
how to have low self-worth. It may sound impossible to you right now, but as far as your brain is concerned, you simply need to stop practising low self-worth and instead focus on consistently applying the principles and exercises in this book. As you do this, the old wiring will simply dissolve and any feelings of low self-worth will lose their grip on you. You will, essentially, forget how to have low self-love.

Wondering whether it could actually be this simple? Why not give it a try and see for yourself?

Imagination can be so powerful. Top athletes have learned to appreciate how ‘mental practice' can boost their performance. I used to be an athletics coach and the team manager of one of the UK's largest athletic clubs. Once you're in that arena, you swiftly learn just how much mental practice élite athletes do.

I did a corporate talk recently and I spoke after Sally Gunnell, who won the Olympic gold medal in the 400-metre hurdles at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. She explained that about 70 per cent of winning gold was mental. After failing to win the world championship gold in 1991, she'd hired a sports psychologist. Soon she was visualizing every day. She did loooots of visualization. She practised running and hurdling in her mind.

Importantly, she did a lot of practice on how she'd respond when something went against the plan – when someone overtook her, for instance, or when she had the thought that she wasn't going to win, or when she felt tired. These are the kinds of things that many people forget to do with visualization, but they are just as important as seeing yourself being the best you can be.

Using visualization to improve life performance is exactly the same as using visualization to improve sports performance. You can use it to become an Olympic self-worth champion. I had to use it myself some years ago in a difficult situation.

This was actually the first thing that was said to me when I started the first class in my new job as maths lecturer.

While writing my first book I accepted two chemistry teaching jobs. One was at the University of Glasgow, where I taught in the Department of Adult and Continuing Education, and the other was at James Watt College of Further & Higher Education. After a few months in the latter, I was asked to teach a basic maths class at a training centre outside the college. It was part of an engineering apprenticeship programme, a regional initiative to provide education and skills to young boys, some of whom came from troubled backgrounds.

I arrived at the centre and entered the class. The noise was deafening. The room was filled with 16-year-old boys, some of whom had been expelled from school, some of whom were in regular trouble with the police, and most of whom had no desire whatsoever to learn maths.

I tried to introduce myself, but I was barely heard above the din. I clapped my hands a few times to get attention. One or two boys looked at me, offering me a glimmer of hope. I couldn't think of anything else to do except start the class. So I did. My first words were: ‘We're going to cover decimals this afternoon.' That's when I obtained the advice about what I could do with my decimals, calmly offered by a menacing boy at the front.

They say you can smell fear!

The next hour or so was a disaster. I stuttered and stammered, apologized when someone didn't understand me, and got through about 5 per cent of what I'd intended.

I wanted to run out of the class. In the end, I kind of did. I ended the class 45 minutes early and told the boys that as they'd done so well in their very first class, I was giving them extra time off.

I got into my car, drove out of the town, found the nearest quiet place, pulled over and burst into tears.

I was terrified at the thought of going back into the class the following week. The next day, I went straight to find Fiona, the department head, to tell her I wasn't teaching that class again. If she had a problem with it then I'd be resigning my post as a lecturer.

Fiona wasn't in that day. So I explained what had happened to a colleague, Ian Anton. He burst out laughing. ‘We've all had that class,' he explained.

I was adamant
he
hadn't.

He told me that just about every schoolteacher in the world had had a class like that.

If that was what being a teacher was all about then I wasn't going to be in the profession for very long. I wanted an easier job.

Ian said I could quit the class if I wanted to, but he challenged me to use my own teachings to get through this difficult time. He knew I was writing a self-help book, and here I was, needing the help. The irony! As Fiona would be in on Monday, he suggested I spend the weekend working on my own self-development and see how I felt about the class afterwards. If I still felt the same, then Fiona would be able to find a replacement. But if I
felt different, it would help me a lot as a teacher if I continued with the class.

I spent a lot of time visualizing that weekend. I saw myself standing and walking around the class with confidence. I imagined myself speaking with confidence – each word slow, measured, clear and projected with ease. I also did it for real. I stood in power poses and walked with power around my bedroom, pretending I was teaching decimals, ratios and proportions with the utmost clarity and confidence.

By Monday, I did feel a lot more confident. Still afraid, but more confident. And something Ian had said had got into my head, about it being best for my long-term growth if I saw it through to the end. I could turn the whole thing into a self-help lesson for myself. Somehow that made it easier to face.

By the time I arrived at the class on the Thursday I had done so much visualizing, power posing, power walking and power talking, that I automatically moved into that style. There was still a lot of noise and misbehaviour, but I handled it better. It helped that the class was reduced in size, from 20 to 12. Most had been dismissed, for a variety of reasons.

I'm not sure how it came about, but one of the boys asked me a question about my life. I told them I had a PhD in chemistry and had previously worked as a scientist developing drugs. Then I gave them a quick five-minute lesson on what real drugs were – the medicinal kind. I explained that roots and leaves found in rainforests seemed to help people with illnesses like cancer and that the chemical was extracted and given to chemists like me,
who then made several of versions of it, tweaking a few atoms here and there, to see if any of them worked better than the root or leaf itself. I gave them a few examples on the blackboard of the kind of alterations we made and why we made them, and explained that one of these would eventually become the white pill that you get from the doctor.

They were amazed. One asked me if I knew about space travel. His dad had told him that
Star Trek
would be reality one day. So I explained that ‘warp technology' was actually when you pulled two pieces of space together so the distance wasn't a trillion miles, but just a few yards. I held up a piece of paper, poked a pen through two ends and pulled the paper together so the pen was a bridge. I told them it was called an Einstein-Rosen bridge, after the two professors who figured it out.

I was stunned by how fascinating they found it. ‘This is mad shit,' said one boy enthusiastically. They all wanted more. So I made a deal with them: I'd give them 20 minutes of mad shit each time if they gave me their attention for the rest of the lesson.

That's how it went for the next 10 weeks. As well as decimals, ratios and proportions, we covered organic chemistry, quantum entanglement, neuroscience, the placebo effect and many other topics. We even devoted a session to aliens.

It worked. By the end of the course, everyone in the class got an ‘A'. I fondly remember handing a marked test paper back to a large tough-looking boy with a deep, gruff voice. As he saw the ‘A' in large red writing at the top, he whispered, ‘You've given me the wrong paper.'

He'd simply made the assumption that he couldn't possibly get an A. He believed he was
not good enough
.

I assured him it was his paper and that he should be proud of himself. He'd earned his ‘A'. His eyes immediately welled up with tears. He quickly looked away, embarrassed.

I walked on, tapped his shoulder and said, ‘Well done, son!' I hope that helped him feel that he
was
good enough.

I learned just last year that one of those boys had gone on to university and graduated with a first-class honours degree in engineering.

Magic can sometimes happen when we face our difficulties instead of trying to avoid them. Visualizing and power posing helped me to face this challenge. They rewired my brain sufficiently in the week leading up to the second lesson. I kept the practice up for a few more weeks after that too. It showed me clearly that by changing our brain, and therefore how we respond to life's events, we find new possibilities opening up that quite simply didn't exist for us before.

SELF-LOVE GYM:
How to Be a Self-Love Olympian

• Think of a situation where your self-worth is low. It might be at work, at home, in a social situation, on the telephone. You might be getting bullied or taken advantage of. You might be giving your power away. You might be able to think of many different scenarios…
  
• Now imagine yourself in the same situation but now in a state of ‘I
  am
  enough.' Imagine how you'd be standing. How would you move? Would your spine be erect? What about your shoulders? How would you be breathing? What would you be saying? How would you be saying it? What kind of tone would your words have? Would you speak quickly or slowly?
  
• Play the scene out in your mind five to 10 times as you wire ‘I
  am
  enough' into your brain. Start the first few times by reminding yourself of how you were in the
  not
  enough stage, but by the third or fourth time, just go straight into imagining your behaviour from an ‘I
  am
  enough' space.
  
• Repeat this process consistently – either daily or a few times a week – until you actually do show you are
  enough
  in that situation.