Transcription
Hey, it's Chase Hughes. There's going to be a lot of goal-setting videos coming out, but I want to show you a quick and easy way to do this. And I'm going to expose to you some of the ways that brainwashing is actually used on people, and the exact formula to do it. And the reason I want to do this is because I want you to be able to use these brainwashing techniques on yourself. Let's get started.
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So, first, let's talk a little bit about evolutionary psychology. There's a theory out there called the triune brain theory, that our brain evolved in three stages. Where the first part of the brain to evolve was this little guy down here, the little brain stem. This is actually what keeps our heart going, our blood flow, our breathing, digestion, all of our circulation, all the stuff that we can't consciously do. We can't consciously control it.
The next part was this little guy up here. This is the mammalian brain. So, this is kind of like the brain of an animal. And finally, we have the neocortex, which covers up everything. And literally, the word cortex means cover. So, if we're looking at the animal part of the brain, we kind of imagine something that's inside of an animal's head, be it a chimpanzee or your dog. It's pretty similar. There's some intelligence and IQ differences there, but they're kind of similar. One thing that's absolutely certain is that the mammalian part of the brain doesn't really comprehend language at all.
So, what happens? The reason for this part of the brain, this is when we feel fear. When we experience something that's fearful. When we see something we really like. When we see a potential sexual partner. It all rings off, but it doesn't work off of words. It works off of a visual images. It works off of pain. It works off of reward and fear. So, what it looks like down on the inside part of this brain is this little part right here. So, if this is what we really make all of our decisions with, which it is, most of our decisions in life come from this part of the brain. So, if we have a mammalian brain here in this little area, and just a little bit surrounding this, how would we speak to that thing? That part of our brain that cannot understand English or any language? How do we communicate to that? It's the most powerful thing. It drives our emotions. It drives our decisions. Our behaviors are really down deep inside of this part of our brain, but we can't talk to it.
So, how would you speak to an animal? How would I convey a message to an animal? We have to do things that are visual and emotional. And we're really going to break this down in just a few seconds. When your brain thinks that something is really important to you, it looks all over the place for it. Think of the last time you bought a new car, and you drove around the entire city, and all you could see was that exact make and model of vehicle. And it wasn't that a bunch of people just went out and got them right when you did. You just started noticing them because your brain somehow thought, "Okay, they think this is important. I'm going to start looking for it everywhere I go." And that's called the reticular activating system inside of our brain. It's basically a focus flashlight. And that's really important to us because the more we are reminded of doing something, the more we're reminding our brains that something is important to us, the more the brain is going to look for it. And we all know somebody who talks negatively all the time. They complain about things all the time. And that's what they get in their life. That's what their brain says, "Oh, this person wants me to go find all these negative things. I'm going to go find them." But we're going to get down into the brainwashing part of that and how that applies in just a second.
There's been a lot of studies done on success. One of the most profound was a study where they followed people from a very young age, five or six years old, all the way until they were 40. The people who became older and were successful all had one big thing in common, and that's the ability to delay gratification. That ability to delay gratification was the single biggest factor in whether or not those people wound up successful later in life. And that's just the introduction to what discipline really is. And I'd like to give you my definition from a behavioral expert's perspective of discipline. And discipline is when, in the moment, you are placing your future self's needs ahead of your own. That means the benefit to you in the future is more important than the reward in the present. And if you think about this, people who are overeating, people who don't go to the gym, people who eat bad food, people who are doing things that are not good for them, drinking too much, smoking cigarettes, whatever it is, it all boils down to whether or not they're prioritizing the needs of their future self or the desires of their present self. So, when you think about your future self, I want you to think that needs to be my number one priority. And we'll get down into this a little bit deeper in just a second.
Let's talk about two key concepts here in a really tight package, just so you can understand these concepts before we move into this brainwashing part of goal setting and what it really means. The first is that most of our failures, we can attribute to future self-neglect. Now, I'll say that again: most of our problems in our lives, we can attribute to future self-neglect. I'm neglecting my future self. Think about how many times you've been pissed off at yourself because you stayed up late, you had an exam the next morning, or there was something going on in your life, you decided to go party at night, and you know you had a big meeting or a job interview the next day, or an exam. We tend to be upset on our past tense self, not really realizing that what we're doing now is setting things up for the future self, whether we like it or not.
And the second key concept here that I really want to unpack for you, especially with this goal-setting mentality, is habit versus discipline. And we've all heard people, our friends, maybe it's you, we've all heard people that say, "Oh, he goes to the gym every day. I wish I had that kind of discipline." Or, "I see her going to yoga or working out every day of her life. I wish I had that level of discipline in my life." But there's a secret there, a behavioral secret. That with those people, what you're seeing is not discipline. You're seeing a habit. Discipline is only required a few times, just like a teaspoon full of discipline, just to get a habit started to where it becomes a repetitive behavior. And neurons in the brain literally form a super highway. The more often you do something. And that's a huge part of the brainwashing formula that I developed for the military.
Coming up next, the brainwashing formula has an acronym that spells out F.E.A.R. And that stands for Focus, Emotional Involvement, Agitation, and Repetition. In those four, the focus part means that you need a person's undivided attention. Something has to be so important to a person that they're very focused on what's going on in the present moment. In the emotional part, we need the emotion to be involved for behavioral change. And we also need this for ourselves when we're changing ourselves. If I want to communicate something to that animal brain, like we talked about earlier, I need emotion. I need visualization on a very regular basis. And agitation means that something has to be disrupted. In a brainwashing scenario, someone might get their head shaved, or wear outfits that are way too big for them, or be placed in a room that's not comfortable, or be deprived of sleep in some way. In your life, all we need to do is change things up. And what we're doing is we're tricking that little three-pound piece of meat inside of our skull, that little animal brain that's in there. We're tricking it into thinking, "This is a new environment. I need to pay more attention to what's going on." So, the more you're able to agitate your life, you wake up at a different time, you change your routines around, move the furniture around in your house, change the light bulbs to a different type of light bulb, anything you can do to signal to your brain, "This is a different era. I've started a new chapter in my life." Whatever you can do, it automatically makes the brain start paying more and more attention to what's going on. And we get that emotional involvement.
Some people have talked about vision boards before. And this is where, like, if one of my goals that I'm setting for the next year is going to be, "I'm going to buy this type of house," or "this type of car," "I want to make this kind of money." Some of these people that do vision boards, and a lot of them attribute this to a spiritual thing, which I don't know much about. I'll give you the science behind that. If you have a vision board with all of these photos that are tied to what you're looking for, I've got the photo of the house, the photo of the car, the things that I want. And I'm looking at that on a very regular basis. That is what's going to be the repetition, the visual part of it. But when you look at it, it should be something that you try to make as sensory-rich as possible. So, as you're looking at the vision board, the more sensory-rich, what does it look like? What's the temperature there? Right then, what does it smell like? What does it feel like? The more sensory-rich, the more we're going to translate from the upper part of our brain, which is language, sending it down to the animal part of our brain. Because it builds a cohesive image. Once it gets down there, then there's emotion involved. So, we have the focus, the emotional involvement, and we have the agitation. And those all three work together all the time. So, the more you can get a full visual picture and force that animal part of your brain to be emotional about the event, the more likely you are to achieve your goals.
And the final piece of this is repetition. The more often you do it, the stronger those neurons will bond together. We see this in lab studies all the time. Neurons that are firing repeatedly begin to form a bond, and then more neurons form around it. So, it begins from a path that you walk past the grass, and it starts to get paved, and more and more and more wide. The more often you do something, so it becomes an automatic behavior and a super highway. And then success becomes a habit. Discipline becomes not just discipline, but that just becomes a habit, something that you normally do.
And the link below, I've put the F.E.A.R. brainwashing technique model inside of a goal-setting worksheet that you can use to really crush your goals. I want you to try this out, and please reach back out to me if it works for you or if it doesn't.
The final part of this is a question that I get all the time: How many goals should I set? There's four goal categories that I personally set goals in. This is Brain, Body, Business, and Behavior. Each one of those might have two or three goals in it. These are the big goals. Brain is the mechanism that will do everything for you. If you don't prioritize your brain health, what you're putting into your body, what you're doing to make your brain healthy, all those things that are making your mental state and your psychology healthy, if those aren't happening, everything else is a domino effect of failure. The brain is the organism that makes everything happen. The body is next, because the body is what you're using to achieve these goals. If you're writing a book, if you are starting a business, and you're typing out emails, you're doing it with your body. The healthier your body is, the more likely you are to achieve your goals, because the body is the vehicle that you're using to accomplish your goals.
The next is business, and this could be, "How much do you want to make?" "How many customers do you want to have?" "We have a major contract coming up." "I want to score this many clients a month." Whatever it is, I do two or three business goals there. But I always use for every single goal, I use the F.E.A.R. model. How will I make sure that I'm focused on this? How will I make it emotional? What will I do to ensure that I am agitated? My, my sense of self is a little bit shaken off, and I'm letting my brain know, "This isn't the everyday situation. We need to pay more attention to this." And how will I make sure that I repeat this goal? And some of this might be, "I'm going to put reminders all over my house." Some of it might be, "I'm going to put reminders on my phone. I'm going to tell my phone, remind me every three hours to do X, Y, and Z."
One thing I would highly recommend you do is put things everywhere you can to remind you to connect to your future self. And think about your future self. One of my clients printed out a picture of themselves using an app that makes you look like 95 years old. So they would always know, "I'm going to be that person one day." And they were able to connect with their future self. A lot of behaviors that were problematic before started correcting themselves. And if you think about this from that perspective, once we're prioritizing our future self, and we've just got that mindset taken care of, everything else is a by-product. So, I'm eating better, I'm spending money in, in better places, I'm making smarter investments, I'm doing things with people, I'm building social relationships. That goes down to your relationship with your future self and how much and how often you think about them.
So, the fourth B is behavior. And behavior could mean, "I am going to schedule more time to focus on my self-discipline." "I'm going to change my habits." "I'm going to set goals better." "I'm going to go see a counselor or a coach." "I'm going to do something to make sure my mindset is constantly improving." And that's different from the health of the organism of your brain. We're talking about the ecosystem of your psychology. One critical thing you really need to have is a journal. No matter what you're doing with the goals for this year, for next year, for the next 10 years, you cannot manage what you cannot measure. My strongest recommendation is to bring as much awareness as you can onto your daily behaviors. Am I looking forward to my future self on a regular basis? Just rate yourself on a one to ten scale every day. And the journal is the closest thing that you can ever have to a steering wheel on your own behavior. The more awareness you bring to it, the more control you're going to have over that behavior.
Remember, the animal part of our brain cannot speak English or any other language. The more you want to speak to that, the thing that makes all of our decisions down there, it needs to be emotional, visual, sensory-rich, and repetitive on a very regular basis. Just like when you got that new car, and you noticed it out everywhere. You didn't have to try to do that. You looked at it on YouTube all the time, you looked at it online, you noticed them driving around, and eventually your brain starts thinking, "This is becoming more important to this person." And you can absolutely do this. You can hack your way into it and do it on purpose instead of on accident. And that's the thing. All we're doing is just taking a few techniques to manipulate a pound organism that's inside of our head, and it's an animal brain. So, we've got to use techniques that speak to an animal. How would you show your dog the Taj Mahal? You could take them there, you could give them the smells of the experience, the temperature. We can do all kinds of things, but we can't tell them about it.
So, if you're setting goals, they need to be emotional, and they need to have a why. They need to have a deadline, and they need to have milestones associated with them, which you will all find in the download link. It's a free download with a goal-setting worksheet using the F.E.A.R. brainwashing system. Please use this technique. Brainwash yourself. And I promise you, this stuff works.