Release Your Brakes – James W. Newman (Summary)

Special thanks to Dan Pena for the recommendation.

– Use constructive imagination with positive thoughts. Get rid of negative attitude patterns. Paras note: I’m impressed that the inhibitive and compulsive negative habit patterns are mentioned as they were a bit puzzle piece in my own experience.
– Taking care of your physical self is important and emphasises focus on nutrition and fitness.
– Watch the words, ideas and observe how two people can look at the same thing and have a different version of what they see. It’s a representation of what is in their reality.
– Think of a dream that felt so real that even after you woke up you felt like it was still real for a while. This is the life you’re living, you’ve dreamed up your conditioning. You imagination dreams up the reality and makes it real to you. Your mental system fills in blank parts if needed.
-Getting a goal will create a conflict of what needs to change to achieve what you want.
– Every thought about every subject has been created and held by you. Yes, the adults around you helped but you’ve decided to hold on to the same. What is the conversation you’re having with yourself? Paras note: One of these that baffles me is when a grown man has an emotional reaction to another man’s looks or people losing their mind over what is in someone else’s plate.
– Think of it as adding rocks to your bag of ideas. Child hears older kids don’t like spinach, it must be bad (clunk). One day dad says he wants broccoli as he already had spinach for lunch but child sees dad’s preference for broccoli so spinach must be that bad (clunk). Now child doesn’t want spinach even if dad says they have to eat it and every time the child say is they add another rock in the bag (clunk, clunk, clunk).
– Think of your positive and negative attitudes and how you’ve grown them. How can you exchange rocks so when someone gives you negative rocks you can switch them for positive rocks.
– Talks about restrictive and compulsive attitude patterns and how one is a can’t do while the other one is a must do. This 2-minute talk explains it best: (insert link – https://open.spotify.com/episode/1z4BVU9S7yrfOWYYOiogfO?si=0XUIcHkeTwONd6_WF6hsKQ
– Self-talk is so important! Top athletes do it and even visualise their victory. You can use it to talk over the negative self-talk.
– Even if your family, religion and leaders have given you information, you’ve decided how to take it and incorporate it into your life. Otherwise 2 identical twins would go the same way.
– Story of someone who couldn’t move and memorised the keyboard and then imagined typing his name and then ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. This practice was done for 15 minutes a day. Sales people practice handling objections.

Six-Step Process for Using Constructive Imagination
1 Select Limiting Areas: Identify areas in your life where your potential is being held back by negative attitude patterns. These are places where you’re “driving with the brakes on.”
2 Evaluate the Advantage: Ask yourself: Would it benefit me to use more of my potential in this area? If the answer is yes, prioritise it. If not, replace it with a more impactful area.
3 Define Desired Self-Image: Clearly describe the positive emotion and self-description you want to develop in each area. Imagine how you’d like to feel and behave.
4 Create Triggering Affirmations: (See 10 rules below) Design verbal affirmations that act as mental cues for each trait or skill. These should be short, emotionally charged and specific.
5 Practice Mental Rehearsal: Use the affirmations to stimulate vivid imagination—feel and experience the desired behavior and emotion as if it’s already your natural habit.
6 Let the New Image Guide You: Allow the new mental image to influence your real-world behavior. Over time, this imagined reality becomes your actual reality.

10 Rules for Crafting Affirmations
1 Use First-Person Language
Affirmations should begin with “I” to directly influence your self-image.
“I am confident.” and not “Confidence is good.”
2 Be Positive
Focus on what you want to become or experience—not what you want to avoid.
“I am calm and even-tempered.” and not “I don’t lose my temper.”
3 Use Present Tense
Affirm as if the change has already happened.
“I am organized and focused.” and not “I will be more organized.”
4 State Achievement, Not Process
Describe the end result, not the journey.
“I have a warm, outgoing personality.” and not “I am improving my warmth toward others.”
5 Avoid Comparisons
Don’t compare yourself to others—focus on your own excellence.
“I am a skilled communicator.” and not “I am the best speaker in the group.”
6 Focus on Action, Not Ability
Affirm what you do, not just what you’re capable of.
“I remember names easily.” and not “I have the ability to remember names.”
7 Add Emotional Excitement
Include feelings to energize the affirmation.
“I feel fantastic being smoke-free!”
8 Be Accurate and Balanced
Be specific and realistic. Avoid vague or exaggerated claims.
“I maintain a healthy weight of 68 kg.” and not “I am perfectly fit all the time.”
9 Keep It Realistic
Avoid absolutes like “always” or “completely.”
“I am usually enthusiastic and motivated.” and not “I am always enthusiastic.”
10 Focus on Yourself Only
Affirmations should target your behavior—not others’.
“I enjoy building strong relationships.” and not “People admire me.”

– You can use the 3 mediums of verbal, conceptual and emotional to enforce it. So you can read the affirmation, experience it in your mind and feel the emotion repeatedly. The best time is before you fall asleep. Then you have to let go and try not to ‘try hard’ to make it happen. Most lasting change takes time like a ship changing course. Once you set your target/goal and set it to autopilot it knows it’s destination.
– Lots of emphasis on self-esteem and self image and how we need to reinforce the positives before going to bed as we have a tendency to do the opposite.
Useful words: Next time (with errors or failures). Up until now (change the way you’ve done things in the past). Others are ‘I choose to or I’m learning to….’.
When you help others and their self-esteem you’ll raise yours too.
– Lots of information that is now obvious but according to Dan Pena, this is the book that started it all.

Method for dealing with frequent headaches
– Get acquainted with the tension: Observe where and how hard it is.
– Test 3 images to see if it increases or dimishies (30 seconds each): Image 1 – You’re doing something you don’t enjoy (firing, cleaning, etc.) Image 2: Activities you really enjoy. Image 3: You are free to do what you want to do or don’t want to do.
– Use those images to diminish the tension: One will cause more and go back and forth between more and less.

Contents
1: Take Charge of Your Life
Change, in yourself and in your life, is inevitable.  You are guiding that process of change and you have been doing so all of your life, by intent or by default.  Now is the time to decide what you want to accomplish, what kind of person you want to become and make it happen, deliberately, intentionally.

2: A system of release
A new approach to increased effectiveness and success.  Instead of “pressing” trying harder to do better-release the wealth of unused potential which is available to you.

3). Potential and performance
The Key to more effective, productive use of your potential is to be found in the emotional patterns which you have adopted-how you feel about yourself, your job, your family and the rest of the world which surrounds you.

4). The whole person system
The human mechanism is a complex system of complex systems.  Every change in any part of the Whole Person causes reactions or adjustments throughout the entire system.

5). The conscious mental process
Four primarily conscious processes which account for a major segment of your behavior and which function as the “programmer” in the development of your subconscious “REALITY” structure.

6). The subconscious mental process
Three activities of your mental system which are largely automatic or subconscious play a vital role in guiding and directing your behavior.

7). The care and feeling of attitudes
Patterns of information and emotion are the cumulative result of your own though/feeling processes and the primary keys to effective behavior.

8). The importance of childhood conditioning
When you were very young your emotion, positive and negative, played a particularly important role in the initial formation of many basic attitude patterns.

9). You tend to act like yourself
The most important segment of your “REALITY” structure is the combination of information and feelings you have about yourself and that self-image acts very much like the setting on a thermostat.

10). Constructive Imagination
Your imagination is a powerful tool which can be used to deliberately , purposefully change patterns of behavior and release your potential.

11). How to use constructive imagination
A proven six-step process with which you can apply Constructive Imagination to your own life.

12). The high performance syndrome
The qualities which help individuals to function more effectively can also be strengthened in groups and in other people with whom you work and live.

13). How goals release potential
Use Constructive Imagination to make your goals a vital part of your “REALITY” structure so that they release energy, stimulate creativity and expand awareness to achieve the goals more quickly and easily.

14). Self-esteem-a foundation for effective behaviour
Your inner feelings of worth and value as a person have a direct impact on your ability to function effectively.

15). You are “they”
You are a creature of choice and you live with the consequences of your behaviour.  How you feel about that cause-and-effect principle is either releasing or limiting your use of your potential.

16). Building better bridges
You know a lot more about how to communicate with other people than you act like you know.  Here is the key emotional pattern which will help you to achieve higher levels of understanding in all of your relationships.

17). There is a better way
All human beings are creative by nature.  Here are some ways that you can allow your innate creative abilities to flow more easily and more consistently to help you solve the puzzles of your life.

18). Pressure-turn-on or tie-up?
Top performers in any field of endeavor are usually under the greatest pressures, yet they seem to do their best when the pressure is most intense.  Here’s how to respond to the real pressures of your life in a more positive, productive way.

19). Learn how to relax
A simple technique for learning how to relax whenever you want to do so and a practical application of this method to accelerate the changes you want to make in your “REALITY” structure.

20). You are changing the world
As you direct and manage change in yourself and the various groups of which you are a part-and as you help others to release their potential-you are changing the world.  How and in what direction, are you affection the future of the human race?