The Gift in You: Discovering New Life Through Gifts Hidden in Your Mind (13 page)

Only about 30% of adults and 40% of children are Visual/Spatial dominant. It is therefore not accurate to say that everything we see in our heads is in pictures. When visual learning dominates in both children and adults, visual strategies should always be a part of the learning process as they encourage mental operations not usually performed in a verbal mode.

You enhance your Visual/Spatial type of thinking when you:

• Read and create your own cartoons.
  

• Examine advertisements and billboards.
  

• Use poster displays in your office or class to help you think and express ideas.
  

• Work with flow charts.
  

• Use mnemonic systems, such as the Roman Room technique, body parts, numbers and rhyme systems to remember, plan and make up linked stories.
  

• Draw pictures or doodle when thinking.
  

• Practice differentiating between colors.
  

• Take an art course.
  

• Practice developing your visual memory by doing the
  da
  Vinci exercise, that is, stare at a complex object, memorize it, then close your eyes and try to recall it in as much detail as possible.
  

• Play imaginative games.
  

• Build complex Lego structures.
  

• Take a robotics course.
  

• Use the 5 Step Switch On Your Brain™ Learning Process.
  

Clearly, as you work with and strengthen your dominant form of thinking, you will begin to appreciate that all seven types of thinking do exist in all of us, in our gifts, on every level and in every culture. The gift may be dormant, but it is there, waiting to come alive. Your gift will awaken when you discover it.

Now that you better understand the structure of your gift, in Part Three we'll look at what might be standing in the way of your greatest potential - your greatest purpose.

INTRODUCTION

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He also has planted eternity in men's hearts and minds [a divinely implanted sense of a purpose working through the ages which nothing under the sun but God alone can satisfy], yet so that men cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end"
(Ecclesiastes 3:11 AMP).

I hope that you are filled with expectancy and excitement because you are starting to understand how you make decisions, how you learn and how your gift is structured. Along the way, you have probably also learned more about your spouse, your children, your friends and neighbors, and maybe even your boss!

Now when you wonder, "Does anyone out there understand me?" you can see in Scripture that God does - He created you with care. Now you can better understand yourself - how you were created with intention, a purpose and greatness.

In Part Three, we will take the structure of your gift one step further and explore what may be keeping you from your potential, from your true self, the person God created you to be.

Although our perfect God has designed us in perfection, we live in a fallen world. What was meant for good can easily turn toxic, through toxic thoughts, toxic words and toxic actions.

Life happens. People hurt us, and sometimes we hurt other people.

Toxic seeds, even little seeds, can start to grow gift-blockers, which can block your gift.

When you have a gift-blocker - or more likely gift-blockers - in action, attitude is affected. An attitude isn't just a flippant word or a flitting mood. In science, an attitude is a cluster of thoughts with emotions attached.

In your brain, you have millions of these clusters of thoughts, each with its own emotions. These clusters of thoughts combine to form one overriding attitude that describes you.

Because each cluster of thoughts triggers specific emotions, individual attitudes will emerge as the individual thought clusters are activated. We can have a combination of healthy and toxic attitudes all mixed in together. Essentially, attitude is the "flavor" of our thoughts.

There are three principles operating when we talk about attitudes:

1. Attitude cannot be hidden.
   

1. Attitude is the state of your spirit and mind that influences your choices, which in turn influences your words and your behavior.
   

1. Attitude is tangible – we can feel it because of the chemicals that are released.
   

A Well-Developed Toxic Thought: A Schematic Representation

A Well-Developed Healthy Thought: A Schematic Representation

These three principles indicate that we can use our attitudes to help identify and unblock the gift-blockers.

Here's how it works: Your gift is your unique way you think through the Seven Pillars of thought.

Both the toxic thoughts (toxic attitudes) and non-toxic thoughts (healthy attitudes) "filter" information, adding either a negative or positive flavor to them. Consequently, these filters either distort or enhance the thinking process, blocking or unblocking the effective operation of the gift.

If you have a toxic thought while you are processing in your own unique way, you have to "push" the information through the toxic thoughts (toxic attitude) in your brain as you are
looping
through the Seven Pillars.

Toxic thoughts and their tangible bad attitude become gift-blockers. The result is that gift-blockers inhibit our ability to think and operate in wisdom and our overall health in mind and body.

We have to adopt the guiding principle: We can't control our circumstances (life, people), but we can choose to control our reaction (attitude) to the circumstances.

In the next chapter, I am going to discuss attitude in more detail, helping you to identify its tangible aspects and how to recognize them when they get toxic.

Then you will see how to overcome these toxic gift-blockers.

You can walk in the gift God has given you - with confidence and purpose.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

{LOVE AND FEAR}

As we've learned, an attitude is a cluster of thoughts with emotional flavor, and every type of emotion has one of only two roots - love or fear.
¹
Love and fear are the root emotions, and all other emotions grow from these.

For example, out of love flow joy, peace, happiness, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control, compassion, calmness, inspiration, excitement, hope, anticipation and satisfaction. Out of fear flow hate, anger, bitterness, rage, irritation, unforgiveness, unkindness, worry, self-pity, envy, jealousy, obsession and cynicism.

The discovery that love and fear cannot coexist in our brains is revolutionary. In fact, scientists have researched the anatomy and physiology of love and fear right down to a molecular, genetic and epigenetic level that can be described in detail.

They have found a deeper system in the brain concerned with positive love emotions and negative fear emotions. They have discovered that these two systems cannot coexist, that at any one conscious moment, we will be operating in one or the other for each cluster of thoughts we think.
²

Love Tree

Fear Tree

Science is showing us that there is a massive "unlearning" of negative toxic thoughts when we operate in love. The brain releases a chemical called
oxytocin
, which literally melts away the negative toxic thought clusters so that rewiring of new non-toxic circuits can happen. This chemical also flows when we trust and bond and reach out to others. Love literally wipes out fear!
³

We also have another amazing chemical called dopamine that works with
oxytocin
. It flows as we expect and anticipate something. It also puts us on heightened alert to build new memories as we imagine helping someone do well in a test or restore a relationship, for example. It gives us a thrilling surge of energy and excitement and confidence and motivation to carry on.

And then as we actually help someone do well in the test or restore the relationship, endorphins and serotonin are released that make us feel great. So when we do good things and reach out in love, God blesses us by helping our brain
detox
and increase our motivation and wisdom, helping us negotiate life more successfully.
⁴

We see this scientific discovery confirmed in Scripture:

"There is no fear in love [dread does not exist], but full-grown (complete, perfect) love turns fear out of doors and expels every trace of terror! For fear brings with it the thought of punishment, and [so] he who is afraid has not reached the full maturity of love [is not yet grown into love's complete perfection]" (1 John 4:18 AMP).

Scientists have shown that when we are in a fear mode we will get caught in a cycle of chemical and neurological responses that dominate and dictate the choices we make and the reactions we set in motion. We will be at the mercy of the environment, the reactions of our body and the toxic memories of the past. Our gift will be blocked and our true-self will vanish. We will quite literally be at the mercy of the effect instead of initiating the cause.
⁵

As we learned, in the depths of our
nonconscious
mind (I call this the
Metacognitive
level) where about 400 billion actions per second are being performed, we have billions of existing thought clusters with their emotions attached giving their specific attitude "flavor."
⁶
This is so important to understand, because these thought clusters are referenced and some made conscious every time a new thought starts to form, helping our brains make sense of new information. So when we are exposed to or think about something toxic, and there are thought clusters attached that have toxic emotions attached, they will set in motion a chemical cascade, launching your mind and body into stress mode.

Normally incoming information goes through a certain route as it enters the brain passing through structures as the information is being processed to creatively add to your knowledge.

Some of the important structures involved in this route are the thalamus, which acts like a transmitter station, the
amygdala
, which is like a library holding emotional perceptions, and the
cingulate
cortex, which is in the conscious evaluative part of the brain. This route allows incoming information to be received, appraised and evaluated, and the appropriate best and healthiest response from the body to be generated.

We also have an area in the brain call the corpus striatum that is directly involved because it is activated for positive reinforcement and gives us the experience of feeling good, safe and filled with self-confidence. At all costs, this system tries to keep the brain and body calm, peaceful and feeling good, filled with self-confidence and esteem. When the striatum is activated, we get the positive sensation of feeling safe and filled with confidence.

When it's not activated, we do not get this reinforcement of feeling safe. Interestingly enough, the corpus striatum is the area activated by cocaine and other addictive drugs, which highjack this positive reinforcing neural system, making a person feel good and enticing him to use the drug or addictive substance more often.
⁷

However, despite the powerful chemicals released by our bodies, we must never forget that greater is He that is in you than he that is in this world (1 John 4:4). God has given you the ability to break free from any addiction. I discuss this in the next chapter.

Just as drugs highjack this positive reinforcing system, so do the "gift- blockers," those toxic thought clusters hiding in the depths of your
nonconscious
mind, just waiting for the opportunity to highjack your thinking and the neurological pathway of love.

Gift-blockers can also become addictive: How many times have you caught yourself thinking about an issue or event over and over as though you can't let go?

Fear
 

As we have learned, fear is powerful. It affects us deeply, and we handle it one of three ways:

• We control the fear with conscious cognitive evaluation.
  

• We become dominated by the unconscious toxic thoughts throwing the body into stress.
  

• Conscious cognitive evaluation is involved, and instead of controlling fear, we make it worse.
  

The latter situation, concentrating on the fear, can bring about a fearful state even in the absence of the actual fear stimulus. This is what happens in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) where the memory of a trauma can invoke a response in people that is as real as when it happened, even if the trauma occurred years ago.

The attitudes - cluster of thoughts with the emotion attached - are producing the chemicals for anxiety and worry even though
rson
is no longer in threatening circumstances.
⁸
The thoughts about the toxic occurrence, not the actual toxic occurrence, set off the stress response. If we worry every day about what might happen, we create an attitude of uneasiness, which creates the stress response. And this stress response will produce toxic fruit (see images on pages 144 and 145 of the Fear and Love Trees).
⁹

It is actually very interesting that scientists call this a "learned" fear because fear is not a natural part of how we were created. Fear is a distorted love circuit. We were created for love and all that goes with it, but we have learned to fear.
¹⁰

The real pathway - the neurological "love" pathway - is consciously evaluating the toxic fear thought cluster and then choosing to hand the situation to God, not fear. When we do this, the corpus striatum will be activated, all the correct neurotransmitters and peptides and hormones will be secreted, and we will feel good and be able to rejoice despite the circumstances, like it says in James 1:2, "Consider it wholly joyful, my brethren, whenever you are enveloped in or encounter trials of any sort or fall into various temptations" (AMP.).

What we need to remember is this: A thought has an emotional component attached to it, like a "chemical signature."
¹¹
Every time we think, we make chemicals that produce feelings and reactions in the body. Clusters of electrical thoughts with these chemical messengers create our attitudes. We express our attitudes - love or fear - through what we first think and then through the choices we make, which dictate what we say and do. When you add either love or fear emotions to a thought cluster and give it a unique flavor, then it becomes an attitude.

A bad attitude is proof that you are not operating in your gift. A good attitude is proof you are operating in your gift.
¹²

Because attitudes cannot be hidden over a sustained period of time, overcoming gift-blockers is imperative to walking in your gift. They reflect you; they reflect your spirit. And we need to remember at all times that "it's God's Spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty One that makes wise human insight possible. The experts have no corner on wisdom . . ." (Job 32:8 The Message).

"You are responsible not only for what you do say but also for what you do not say."
- Martin Luther

Love
 

Although we have discovered how powerful fear is, it is important to remember that love is much more powerful and our brains were made to operate in love. Each of us has our own familiar electrical chemical balance where we feel at peace. It's almost like a perfect idle rate that runs on the love attitude.
¹³

Philippians 2:5 tells us, "You must have the same attitude Christ has" (LAB). This might seem impossible to do when we are operating in fear. The fact is that it is impossible because we cannot operate in both love and fear at the same time.

A love attitude is disrupted each time we create a new toxic thought or activate an existing toxic thought - a fear attitude, which is a gift-blocker. Any disruption in the body and mind's regular and consistent electrical chemical balance - love attitude - will result in discomfort, and we will consciously and unconsciously try to restore the balance.
¹⁴
It is important that you learn to identify this discomfort because it is a conscious and
nonconscious
mental activation of an attitude. 

That's when you have the opportunity to examine that attitude to see whether it's a love or fear attitude. And if you continue to focus on fear, your gift will be blocked. Your brain and body will respond automatically and distort the love circuit into the fear circuit.

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitudes toward them.

Even though fear is powerful, operating in love is even more powerful, and fear is a gift-blocker. You can choose. Even though you may not be able to choose your circumstance, you have the choice to operate in fear or love.