Success from Brain-Training or Brain-Mapping

This one is an inspiring and true story.

Former Cricket player all-rounder Richard Petrie’s career was cut short after he tore his Achilles. Unlike Donovan Bailey, he never recovered fully. My guess is he didn’t have access to a hyperbaric chamber.

As with most sports professionals, he ended up in sales. (I’ll write up a story on Donovan Bailey next week)

In this article, he emphasizes a dedicated regimen of mental conditioning and brain-mapping techniques can leverage more than good sales.

A brain-training or brain-mapping regimen can enhance one’s ability to persuade, influence and basically overpower a person.

In Track and field, your two biggest competitors are yourself and the stop watch.

“It all comes from the basic premise that if you’re going to be a top performer in anything you’ve got to learn to think like one first. Otherwise you just end up going to the level you’re thinking.”

Vicki Hyde, chair entity of the New Zealand Skeptics Society, isn’t convinced and cautions anyone looking for a quick fix to be wary.

“You have to say that sitting around and thinking about your goals each day is probably going to be a good thing for you but whether that’s going to make a tangible difference in terms of your life situation is a whole other kettle of fish.”

Hyde is reluctant to rubbish the whole idea of brain training but says there can be an element of self-deceit, especially where money is involved.

“Those who view the glass half full rather than half empty tend to find it getting it fuller rather then emptier but then there’s the other end where you have people promised all manner of capabilities such as curing their cancer by having happy thoughts — one could only wish it were so.”

Petrie may find some skeptics but he has plenty of high-spending corporates convinced.

Petrie and his marketing specialist partner, Hamish Conway, have been hired by the likes of Air New Zealand, the police, and the armed forces to teach recruiters, sales agents and hostage-taking negotiators brain-mapping techniques.

Petrie claims a dedicated regimen of mental conditioning can leverage more than good sales. Brain training, he says enhances one’s ability to persuade, influence and basically overpower a person, although not necessarily in a nefarious way.

“We don’t have to be asking for money. We’re all selling our ideas to other people, the principles are exactly the same. The key concept to understand when you’re persuading people, whether it’s hostage takers or people buying things, is that people make decisions emotionally. It’s far more powerful to know how to influence a person emotionally than it is to give them a whole pile of logic.”

Petrie rolls out the iceberg metaphor. Wisdom has it that our conscious, logical and rational mind is the tip exposed and interacting with the outside world while our subconscious is the invisible supertanker of emotions that steers the big berg through murky waters.

Petrie suggests the subconscious best understands images and visualization, which if true, supports the effectiveness of the five- minute mental exercises.

There’s more than a few parallels with traditional meditation but Petrie stomps out any yoga comparisons. At least where his interests are concerned. “This is not about taking thoughts out, this is about putting thoughts in and meditating over what you want, again and again and again.”