How To Use The Law Of Attraction To MANIFEST ANYTHING In 2023 | Dr. Tara Swart Bieber

Once you understand that you can literally change your brain at any stage, any age, any mindset. It's life changing, isn't it? And you do that through...

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes.

What is manifestation in your mind? And how do you use neuroscience and neuroplasticity to manifest what we want?

Yeah, so, I mean, it's so aligned to a lot of things that you speak about because at its most basic manifestation is setting a goal and achieving it. Or, you know, what I like to say is it's making into reality in the tangible world your dreams and desires. And I'm not the kind of person that, you know, always said I'd like to live forever or, you know, live till I'm super old or whatever, but Once I discovered neuroplasticity, I thought, I wish I'd known about this when I was 18.

Really?

You know, it's literally life-changing. I think I was naturally manifesting from about the age of 18 anyway, but I didn't understand the science behind it. Once you understand that you can literally change your brain at any stage, any age, any mindset, that's like, it's life-changing, isn't it? And I feel that One of the things we were sort of chatting about earlier is that just because I'm a scientist and an MD, it doesn't mean that in my real life it's easy for me to just channel neuroplasticity. It's still hard. I've been through a divorce, I've been through grief, I've been through career change. And those hard times taught me resilience and neuroplasticity. But the hard times were almost the opportunity. I didn't want to go through those things. you know, our listeners to go through hard times, yeah, pain. But you can take that as an opportunity. And I think if you really understand neuroplasticity, then you can make the worst times in your life the start of the best time in your life. And that's what I love about neuroplasticity, that it's that ability to change, to grow, to regulate your emotions, which I know you're really into, and build resilience. I mean, an example of neuroplasticity that I would share with you, with our listeners, is gratitude lists. So for years in my journaling, I would write 10 things I'm grateful for every day. And they were always external things: friends, family, travel, financial freedom, whatever. And I literally just got bored of writing the same things. So I thought, okay, what else could I write? So I started writing things like my creativity, my vulnerability, my resilience, internal things. And that was a real game changer.

Really? What happened when you started doing that?

It made me think that whatever life throws at me, I've got the tools and resources within me to deal with it. And I didn't always have, you know, in my 20s, I wouldn't say I was very emotionally regulated. But learning that whatever happens, the sort of the pendulum swing for your emotions, the higher it goes, the lower it goes as well. And bringing that to like parameters that you're comfortable with is that gives you sort of autonomy and agency in life. And again, that's the thing I love about neuroplasticity.

I want to get back to manifestation in a moment, but you're talking about pain and grief and career, changes and health challenges that come up for people. If someone is going through a really hard time, pain, suffering, their health, relationships, breakups, death, anything, how can they use neuroplasticity to make it the greatest thing that ever happened to them, even if it's the most painful thing they've ever gone through?

You know, it's such a hard thing to answer because obviously people go through pain and sometimes the end result isn't good. But I think just doing what you can during the process, so I think visualization is really, really important. We know that that can actually cause cellular changes in your body.

Really?

Visualization?

So before you go further, I've heard you talk about manifestation, gratitude lists, and visualization. And you're starting to sound like the woo-woo self-help industry, not a MIT professor, medical doctor, scientist. But what I'm hearing you say is that there's real benefits scientifically to these things.

Yeah, and I think when I wrote my book, the Source, which sort of married together science and spirituality, there was a risk element to that. A little bit like when I left medicine and started coaching and speaking. I look back and I can genuinely say to you, Louis, that the biggest risk in my life would have been not leaving medicine and changing my career. Really? Not kind of merging the spirituality with the science. Those would have been the biggest risks, not doing those things.

Staying only in the science and in the medicine.

Yeah.

Why do you feel like you needed to merge both?

You mentioned that I'm sort of done with being defined by my job titles and qualifications. And that's a journey I've been on for quite a long time. I would say pre-pandemic, I had a conversation with someone at a dinner party where I said, you know, who am I if I'm not a doctor or a neuroscientist? And she said to me, because you're so much more. And I just burst into tears. So that journey, you know, has been quite huge. And I would say that I'm on a journey of continual reinvention and that neuroplasticity underlies that. So the ability to be someone new, to be to be reborn, but all absolutely based on science. I know you were right to call me out and say it sounds a bit woo-woo.

What do your colleagues think about this when you speak about manifestation, gratitude lists, visualization, meditation? When they're like, well, that's just some personal development, self-help talk. Where does the science prove and show evidence that these things are effective, in fact.

I mean, I think what I would like to say to you and have you reply to is that it's in the doing. So if I, you know, I've been doing what I call action boards, but they're like vision boards for like 50 years.

You sound super woo-woo now. You know, the dream boards, the vision boards, yeah. I love this stuff. I mean, for me, this is stuff that I love. But you're the MIT, you know, you can't talk about those things, can you?

And I think actually that's probably what my colleagues at MIT love about having me. I don't look like an MIT professor. I don't dress like an MIT professor. I'm not afraid to speak about those things. If you challenge me, I can always give you the science. You know, one of the things that the, the, the Vice Dean, I'll probably get his job title wrong, but he's a very good friend of mine, said to me after a few years was, oh, yeah, the brain-body connection really is a thing, isn't it? And I just find that so frustrating because it so obviously is a thing. And there's still this perception that there's a cutoff at the neck, that what goes on psychologically isn't related to your physiology, you know, and. And another neuromyth is that emotions are bad, you shouldn't have emotions at work. Sure, dysregulated emotions are not good, but emotions are good, we need them to survive.

And being able to express them in a healthy way, you know? Yeah, the full range of emotions.

To have them, to understand what they are, to feel them, to be able to name them.

Yeah, they're signals. Yeah, they give you information.

But you know, another thing it gives you information is, is your gut. And that connection between the gut and the brain is, we've known about it for a while, you know, sort of, there's a big neural connection between your gut and the limbic part of your brain, which is the emotional part of your brain. But it's actually bidirectional. So if you're stressed, that has an impact on your gut. And, you know, if you are malnourished or you eat processed food or you drink alcohol, or you take antibiotics, then the impact that that has on your gut then affects your brain. And it's not just through nerves, it's through chemical messaging, it's through hormones, it's through other nerves and the sort of, you know, the ones that we classically know connect the gut and the brain. So that comes back to what I was saying about visualization. having an impact on your cells. And your gut bacteria are very integral to all the cells and the rest of your body. So your immune system is connected to your gut and then that's connected to your mental state. It's connected to your brain, it's connected to your skin. And I like to speak in normal words, but that is psycho-neuro-gastrointestinal. immunoendocrinology.

There you go. So did you call it vision boards? Do you call it something else?

I call them action boards.

Action boards, okay.

Because I do not believe that you can create a fantasy of what you want your life to look like.

Without action.

Yeah.

I agree. So what is the, okay, can you break down the science for me a little bit on Visualization and action boards. How did these scientifically support, what's the evidence behind how they actually work with connecting the brain to getting the results you want in life?

So, having been a professional sports person, you'll understand about mental rehearsal and biofeedback, which is listening to messages from your body, which we sort of touched on with the gut-brain connection. So if your brain has seen something or experienced it through mental rehearsal, then when it comes across something similar in real life, it's less threatening. So uncertainty is the most threatening thing to your brain. Anything new is a huge threat to your brain, which is kind of counter to neuroplasticity, right? Because with neuroplasticity, I make myself do something new every year. So I've learnt several languages.

Really?

Yeah.

How many languages do you know now?

I've learnt five in my life. I'm not going to pretend that I'm.

Fluent in all of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Are you fluent in any?

Yeah, so I was very lucky. I was brought up bilingual in English and an Indian language. And then from the age of nine, I learnt French at school. And then as an adult, I learnt three other languages at different times. Probably not so good at those ones.

Yeah.