Conscious Mind Workshop (CMW)

A Sharper, Faster, Smarter Mind in 3 Days

Here are some problems and challenges that readers have shared regarding how their minds work:

I constantly overanalyze, overthink, and second-guess myself, and it's crippling me. Instead of taking action and adjusting as I go, I just think about taking action in my head.

My mind often feels sluggish, foggy, and distracted. I have a hard time focusing.

I spend too much time dwelling on problems instead of opportunities.

I keep procrastinating on financial and administrative tasks, and it stresses me out.

My mind is incessantly thinking and chattering. It's hard to quiet it down.

I've made some dumb decisions and feel like I can't trust myself. I sometimes think that I'm stupid.

I'm chasing after too many different interests. I feel like I'm falling behind.

I feel anxious and overwhelmed when I think about changing my life.

And here's what readers say they want to experience:

I want to be more decisive and know that I'm making good decisions I can trust.

I need to get better at focusing and concentrating, so I can tune out distractions and get more done.

I want to know that I can handle whatever challenges come my way.

I want to spend each day in the flow of action and adjust course as I go along.

I could accomplish a lot more if I had better habits, like getting up early and putting in a solid day of working on my goals.

I want to feel more courageous and confident in taking calculated risks. I want my mind to create less fear and more motivation to go for it.

I want to find a direction that feels true to me.

I just want to go faster. I'm tired of living in slow motion.

Clearly people want more conscious control over their minds — and for good reason. If we could wield more control over our minds, we could retool our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to achieve our goals and fulfill our desires more easily. We'd become more intelligent, congruent, and powerful.

So why don't you operate at this high level of mental clarity and effectiveness already? What's stopping you from keeping your mind sharp, energized, and brilliant?

As it turns out, these problems arise because of how your brain has been trained in the past. If your mind seems dysfunctional at times, it's because your brain has been trained with chaotic and conflicting input.

What Sources Have Trained Your Brain?

Since your brain is trained by experience, your mental functioning today is largely the result of the experiential input you've received throughout your life thus far.

So here's a simple truth to accept: All sensory input trains your brain. Let that sink in a bit. All sensory input trains your brain.

Now for most of us, this experiential training wasn't consciously designed to make us as brilliant as possible. Our training was infected with randomness and inconsistency. We were trained by sources with conflicting motives, such as family members, friends, schools, businesses, media outlets, religious groups, and more. Every random encounter provided us with additional neural training.

If you saw it, heard it, touched it, smelled it, or tasted it, it had a role in training your brain, even if you weren't aware of the training effect.

So here's the real issue: The chaotic nature of our life experiences inevitably trains our brains to learn some incongruent, contradictory, and self-defeating patterns. Our own neural clusters end up disagreeing with each other.

Sometimes these inner conflicts aren’t a big deal, like if part of your brain remembers that you like garlic, and another part of your brain holds the pattern for not liking it. If this conflict causes your garlic consumption to be inconsistent, it probably won’t matter much.

But what if you have conflicting patterns that keep getting in your way, such as wanting to work on a project while your brain also triggers patterns of laziness, distraction, and procrastination?

Or suppose you try to stretch yourself to do something bold, and then your fear circuitry gets activated?

Having incongruent patterns stored in your brain can be annoying to say the least — and potentially crippling in the worst situations.

To make matters worse, the human brain doesn't have a very effective mechanism for resolving inner conflicts. In fact, it's pretty good at storing conflicting patterns and never getting around to resolving them.

In his book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Kurzweil noted that it would be great if we could add some extra programming to our brains to automatically search for conflicting patterns and resolve them. This would have the effect of making us more intelligent and consistent.

We’d certainly accomplish more if we could rid ourselves of false beliefs, activate motivation and focus when working on projects, or switch on courage when facing new challenges.

Eventually — and perhaps within our lifetimes — we'll be able to digitize our brains and improve upon nature's software. Kurzweil is certainly optimistic about that. But in the meantime, we're stuck with the biological wetware in our heads, so we could still use some workable strategies for improving our mental functioning today.

Do such strategies exist? Yes.

Consciously Train Your Brain

I've had my share of problems with a chaotic mind. From late 1989 to early 1991, I fell into an 18-month crime spree that included shoplifting, vandalism, breaking into cars, mail fraud, and more. A corner of my apartment was frequently stacked with stolen goods. These behaviors became addictions, and I began doing them with little concern for the consequences.

Occasionally I'd get caught. Half the time I was able to talk my way out of it with some savvy social engineering. The other times I would be arrested, handcuffed, fingerprinted, and escorted into a holding cell at the local police station. The first time was really scary since I didn't know what to expect, but by the third time, it began feeling a little routine.

After an arrest I'd take a break for about a week, and then I'd be right back at it again. Committing crimes while on probation made life that much more exciting.

My wake-up call came when I got arrested for the fourth time, which was for a felony (a more serious crime than my prior misdemeanor arrests). I stubbornly sat in the holding cell for three days because I had learned not to carry ID while engaging in illegal activities, and I gave the police a fake name (which actually worked to my advantage on a previous occasion). But this time they ran my prints and discovered my real identity.

Due to an administrative error, however, the court mistakenly processed my case as a first offense, completely overlooking my prior convictions. They reduced the charge from a felony to a misdemeanor, and I was sentenced to 60 hours of community service instead of the 1-2 years in state prison I should have gotten. I was lucky... too lucky.

I knew that if I kept going down this path, I’d eventually end up spending a significant portion of my life in jail. I finally resolved to make some serious changes. My first goal was to stop doing crazy, stupid, and illegal things, so I wouldn't keep risking arrest and imprisonment each time I went outside. I needed a better way to deal with my impulsive behaviors.

It was a long road, but I did recover, and this recovery process launched me into my decades-long passion for self development. I learned a tremendous amount about how to change mental patterns, recondition beliefs, and upgrade behaviors, so I didn't have to be victimized by self-destructive thoughts, feelings, and habits.

This path eventually led me to a fascination (sometimes an obsession) with neuroscience. I figured that the more I learned about how the brain works, the more I could use that knowledge to inform and inspire my personal growth efforts. Some of these ideas led to interesting experiments, such as when I did polyphasic sleep for 5-1/2 months, sleeping only 20 minutes at a time, every four hours around the clock. Other ideas led to simple reframes that produced permanent benefits, such as eliminating the fear of public speaking.

Thanks to major advances in the tools, techniques, and paradigms of neuroscience, the field has exploded with promising new discoveries in recent years, many of which aren't yet well known in personal development circles. Because our understanding of the brain is improving at such a rapid rate these days, this explosion of insights presents us with an unprecedented opportunity to mine these discoveries for personal development gold.

The Conscious Mind Workshop

This is where the Conscious Mind Workshop comes in. At the workshop we'll spend three stimulating days doing deep dives into the inner workings of our minds.

The overall purpose of this workshop is to help you sculpt your mind into a stronger, more consistent, and more intelligent ally on your path of growth.

You'll learn to understand, reframe, and restructure your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors in ways you've probably never considered before.

You'll learn to recognize where your mind is generating internal conflicts, and you'll practice methods for consciously resolving these conflicts, so you can experience greater inner harmony.

You'll develop a deeper understanding of how your mind has been trained by past experience and how you can retrain your mind for better performance. In fact, we're going to do some of this retraining at the workshop itself.

Is it possible to reprogram your mind if it was previously subjected to a high dosage of chaotic, inconsistent, or self-destructive input?

The answer is yes. The tricky part is that the most effective solutions are often counter-intuitive, and you need to be careful to apply sound strategies that align with how your brain actually works.

Upgrade Your Mental Programming

In a popular Cherokee fable, a grandfather tells his grandson about two wolves that are constantly fighting. One wolf is evil, and the other wolf is good. The grandson asks, “Which wolf will win?” The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”

As it turns out, this simple story holds the key to effective mental reprogramming.

When we try to change our mental patterns, we often make the mistake of resisting the unwanted patterns. But resisting those patterns still requires us to think about them, which means we're still firing and thereby strengthening the old patterns. This is like trying to attack the evil wolf. If you attack him, you're only going to give the evil wolf more combat training, thereby making him stronger. If you want to defeat the evil wolf, you have to ignore him and give your attention to the good wolf. Feed, train, and encourage the good wolf, and eventually the good wolf will dominate the evil wolf.

You see... the human brain doesn't really have a delete function. Once a pattern gets into your brain, it's normally going to be there for a long time. How many ridiculous patterns has your brain already memorized, such as the theme songs from TV shows that you haven't seen in years? But even though you can't delete old patterns, you can effectively transform old patterns into new ones.

Many people try in vain to remove their unwanted mental patterns, as if trying to delete files on a computer. But since the brain cannot un-remember what it has already learned, this approach doesn't work. What does work is to give your old patterns new roles to play. You have to work with the patterns you already have and create higher-level patterns that include them, so the old patterns will start working for you instead of against you.

At first I tried to overcome my self-destructive patterns by turning my back on them, which didn't work. I ended up living in a half-conscious fog, working at a minimum wage job and doing the bare minimum to get by. Finishing one video game after another was the extent of my ambition. I felt like a coward relative to my former self, bereft of the passion and excitement that came from my once crazy lifestyle.

Eventually I gave a fresh voice to my old patterns by wrapping them into a more intelligent pattern of a higher order. Instead of thinking of myself as a criminal or ex-criminal, I re-labeled myself as a guy who doesn't blindly follow the rules — a guy who thinks and decides for himself regardless of what society says. That was consistent with my old patterns, but the new pattern no longer dictated criminal or self-destructive behavior. This allowed me to re-channel the same passion I once had for law-breaking into more positive outlets, such as graduating college in only three semesters, going vegan, starting my own businesses, and doing fun personal growth experiments.

At the Conscious Mind Workshop, I'll guide you through a similar process of reconfiguring some of your worst mental and behavioral patterns. You'll re-incorporate these old patterns into higher order patterns that will positively transform your life for the better.

Workshop Themes

Here are some of the topics we'll explore together at CMW:

  • How to use insights from modern neuroscience to upgrade your mental patterns
  • How to train your mind to recognize opportunities
  • How to boost your motivation and energy
  • How to change your behaviors and install positive habits
  • How to make intelligent decisions quickly
  • How to detoxify your brain for clearer thinking
  • How to cultivate a sharp, alert, and focused mind
  • How to prime your mind for productivity and success
  • How to get yourself to take action consistently
  • How to spark your mind to generate creative solutions
  • How to transform your beliefs with empowering reframes
  • How to generate courage and confidence at will
  • How to live more consciously and take control of your life
  • ... and lots more

Access Your True Intelligence

Come to the Conscious Mind Workshop to upgrade your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors, so you can understand and access your full mental powers.

Gain valuable insights into the inner workings of your brain, and transform your relationship with your mind for good.

Treat yourself to the immersive benefits of a positive, supportive, and stimulating environment for 3 full days with like-minded people.

Register for CMW today, and embark on a journey of growth, exploration, and empowerment.

And have a fun, lively, and engaging weekend too! 🙂

With love and gratitude,

Steve Pavlina

Registration: $597

Date & Time

August 19 - 21, 2016
9:00am - 5:30pm Fri & Sat
9:00am - 4:00pm Sun

Location

Place on 7th
115 N 7th St
Las Vegas, NV 89101

Resources

Workshop FAQ
Free Bonuses
Workshop Photos
Workshop Testimonials

Registration: $597

August 19 - 21, 2016
9:00am - 5:30pm Fri & Sat
9:00am - 4:00pm Sun

Place on 7th
115 N 7th St
Las Vegas, NV 89101