Do you ever feel stuck in life, like you’re just repeating the same cycles over and over? Do fears, doubts and limiting beliefs hold you back from achieving your dreams? According to neuroscience expert and serial entrepreneur John Assaraf, this is because success is 80% psychology and only 20% mechanics. In other words, most of what determines how far we get in life happens in our minds.
The good news is, you can literally train your brain to break through these barriers and create new empowering neural pathways to accomplish anything you set your mind to. In this blog post, we’ll explore science-based brain training tactics from Assaraf to upgrade your mindset and unlock your hidden potential.
The Power of Repetition
Assaraf credits his early mentor Alan Brown for teaching him the power of repetition. As a troubled teen with a chaotic home life, Assaraf believed the limiting story that he wasn’t smart enough to amount to anything.
Brown saw past this story and asked 19-year old Assaraf to write down his goals and what beliefs he’d need to achieve them. Every morning for a year, Assaraf read these goals and affirmations out loud, visualized achieving them, and repeated empowering statements like “I am worthy.”
This process trained Assaraf’s brain through neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to form new neural pathways with repetition. Thoughts and behaviors we repeat get ingrained, while those we neglect get pruned away. By consistently activating new empowering circuits in his brain, the old disempowering ones weakened.
Modern neuroscience confirms it takes between 66 to 365 days of daily repetition to rewire neural circuits and ingrain new habits. The key is consistency. Start small if needed – even 10 seconds of practice can lead to transformation over time as new connections solidify.
Focus on Progress, Not Perfection
When attempting to form a new habit or achieve a big goal, it’s easy to get discouraged by setbacks. However, Assaraf’s mentors taught him to focus on progress rather than perfection. Incremental gains made consistently over time lead to outsized results.
Aim to get 1% better each day in whatever metric aligns with your goal. Celebrate small wins. Even two steps forward and one step back still moves you forward. Progress conditions your brain for success by releasing dopamine, activating reward centers. As the saying goes, “Inch by inch, anything’s a cinch.” Stay consistent, and each small rep will get easier as your new neural networks strengthen.
Reframe Failure as Feedback
One of the biggest obstacles to achieving your goals is fear of failure. But according to Assaraf, “failure is an opportunity to learn.” When you detach failure from your identity and view it as feedback, it loses its paralytic power over you.
Assaraf suggests asking yourself: “What progress did I make? What did I learn?” Anything you learn from a temporary setback brings you closer to your eventual goal. Talk to yourself with the same kindness and empathy you would your best friend. Adopt a growth mindset that believes you can incrementally improve through effort.
Rewrite Your Self-Limiting Story
We all develop self-limiting stories based on childhood experiences. But as Assaraf learned when reconciling with his father decades later, you don’t forgive someone for their sake, you do it for yourself so you can move on.
Ask yourself: How is this old story serving me? Does it empower or limit me? Remember, you are not your story. Beneath self-judgments are universal human fears – fear of failure, not being good enough and so on. Recognize these fears as part of the shared human experience, not personal flaws.
Then, intentionally rewrite your inner narrative. Replace disempowering “I am” statements like “I am stupid” or “I am unworthy” with empowering ones like “I am capable” and “I am improving.” Own the authorship of your life. The past can’t be changed, but you write the future.
Set Your Emotional GPS
Emotions drive behavior more than anything else. When we move away from pain or towards pleasure, those motions activate established neural pathways. You can harness this by consciously engineering your emotional experience to drive your goals.
Assaraf suggests techniques like future pacing. Imagine how amazing and joyful it will feel when you eventually achieve your dreams. Let those emotions resonate through your body. This primes your neurochemistry for goal achievement. Dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin flood your system, lighting up motivation and reward centers. Use daily visualization to set your emotional GPS towards your goals.
Understand Your Set Points
We all have emotional set points ingrained from childhood that shape our self-image and worldview. For example, if you see yourself as someone who always struggles with their weight, your brain will unconsciously sabotage efforts to lose weight to maintain homeostasis.
Once you understand this, you can identify and upgrade self-limiting set points. Replace “I’m too lazy to exercise” with “I love moving my body.” Alter the emotional map guiding your behaviors. Set points can be changed through retraining your neural pathways.
Make One Small Step
When big hairy audacious goals overwhelm us, we freeze and procrastinate. But you can trick your brain by just focusing on one small step at a time. According to Assaraf, identifying one minor action short circuits the threat response. Your brain goes, “Hey, I can handle that!” Dopamine releases, progress continues.
Build momentum by stringing together daily micro-actions. Small hinges swing big doors. Master the lifelong habit of showing up. Consistency beats intensity every time. Compound interest makes small steps extraordinary over time. That’s how ordinary people achieve extraordinary goals.
Retrain Your Brain with NeuroGym
Assaraf has taken his life’s work studying how to retrain the brain and boiled it down into NeuroGym – an online platform that uses the latest neuroscience to help you transform your mindset and habits. It combines meditation, visualization and other modalities into simple “Innercises.”
NeuroGym establishes new neural superhighways through repetition so empowering patterns become automatic. Other modalities like biofeedback, eye movement exercises and binaural beats enhance results by harmonizing your brainwaves into “flow” states. With consistent practice, you can upgrade mental models that hold you back.
Conclusion
You are not a permanent victim of your biology or past conditioning. With intentional and consistent effort, you can fire and rewire neural pathways to achieve your biggest dreams and goals. Retrain your brain to overcome self-limiting programs using repetition and visualization. Keep your emotional GPS set to your goals. Focus on progress, not perfection. And shed old stories as you take authorship of your life.
The path to your objectives already exists within you. Train your brain daily to unlock your hidden potential. What goal will you achieve today?
