John Assaraf explains why you fail at goals: your reptilian brain handles survival instinct, your mammalian brain drives emotion, and only your neocortex thinks logically. Procrastination, fear, and negative self-talk come from the first two brains running the show while logic barely moves the needle.
Chapters
John, I hope you're having an amazing day. Now, the headline of this obviously is shocking news. You know, you really have three brains, not one. And what do I mean by that? Well, I've been always fascinated with why people, you know, set goals and they really have the intention to achieve their goals. And so many people have goals, whether it's in their head or they write it down. And then for some reason or another, they either procrastinate, they become afraid, they start having doubts and anxieties or negative self talk. And I'm fascinated with why that happens. And in doing the research of why that happens, what I discovered is we really have three brains. Now, that may sound really odd, but the three brains go back 4 to 500 million years old, when we were basically swimming out of the ocean, coming onto land, and we developed something called the reptilian br. And if you think about a reptile, whether it's a crocodile, a lizard, or a snake, for example, I know some of you are afraid of snakes. You know, what does a reptile do? Well, it's looking instinctually at its environment for anything that might harm it, or it's looking for anything that it can feed off of. And so the first part of yours and my brain is the reptilian brain that's about 4 to 500 million years old, you know, on Earth. And so above that, we developed the midbrain or the mammalian brain. And that's the side of us that developed over several hundred million years that is giving us the ability to have emotions, emotions like doubts or anxiety or sadness or happiness. All of the array of emotions happen in the midbrain. And then over the last 4 to 5 million years, this newly developed part of our brain called the neocortex started to develop, which is really all about rationale and thinking. And our society. We have really gotten away from understanding the reptilian brain, the emotional brain, and the logical rational brain and how they work as one. What I can share with you is if you don't understand why, what's causing you to automatically have fears, or what's causing you to procrastinate, or what's causing you to have these negative emotions around situations that prevent you from taking action towards your goals, then you're really using your logical and rational brain. Now the good news is logic and rationalization is great, except it's only responsible for 3 or 4% of your actual behaviors. The new research shows that you first have to take care and learn how to manage the reptilian brain, the brain that's keeping you alive and trying to keep you really super focused on safety and eliminating any real or potential danger. The second part of your brain that you have to learn how to master is the emotional brain. How do you manage your emotions and learn how to use the ones that are constructive and manage or eliminate the destructive emotions? Then the logical mind kicks in and makes decisions that allow you to really move towards your goals. If you'd like to find out more about how to use all three brains and achieve your goals faster and easier than ever before and really master what's in here. The gift that you, you know, our creator gave us was this amazing brain. It's yours to use. I've got an amazing advanced goal achieving workshop that you can click on the button down below somewhere on this page and you can watch about a 60 minute presentation on advanced goal achieving. I hope you've enjoyed this little bit about your three brains and how you can achieve your goals faster and easier than ever before.
