Friday, October 29, 2010

PROGRAMMING YOUR RAS – WRITE YOUR INTENTIONS DOWN

It is very easy with today's fast paced lifestyle to let our intentions slip from our conscious mind as we get caught up in the pressures of day-to-day living. If we let that happen, then days, weeks, months, and years slip by while we "tended to our life". We lead hectic lives but at the end of the day, get no closer to our intentions than we were before.

Most of us have heard that writing down our intentions is an essential step in achieving them.


Besides all the good reasons that you have heard before like helping you remember, making you accountable and so on, writing down your intentions is a powerful way to programme your reticular activating system or RAS.

A compelling reason why we write down our intention is to create a set of instructions for our RAS to carry out.

When we write down our intentions, our RAS receives our desire as a clear instruction and starts seeking things to bring it to us.

The people who will help us, financial and physical resources that we need, information resources, clients, and other necessary things, will appear. Thanks to our RAS.

How does writing our intention down prime our RAS?

Writing our intentions down forces us to get very specific about what we want, rather than just having some "vague idea". Our RAS likes clear instructions.

Writing down our intentions impresses our RAS by making them more "real". It brings our intentions from the realm of abstract thoughts in our heads into the physical world where we can actually see them, touch them, and even smell the ink and paper.


Our intentions are no longer just thoughts! They become tangible things that motivate us, and create feelings in our gut. Even the act of using the eye in coordination with the hand holding the pen makes a much stronger impression on our RAS as we write out the phrase or expression.

Here are a few tips on instructing our RAS with good intention writing.

Write your intentions in the positive. Our RAS is a very loyal and obedient servant. It can not determine right from wrong, and it does not judge. It’s only function is to carry out its instructions to the letter. The more positive instructions we give it, the more positive results we will get.

Write our intentions in the present tense. If we write, “I will learn French” the RAS will do nothing - thinking that it is postponed until later. To get our RAS to spring into action, write our intentions in the present tense, first person, and as if they are currently true.

Write our intentions in the form of a document, not a list!

Just making a list of intentions does not empower us to actually accomplish it.

Writing down our intention as part of an empowering and very personal document would impress our RAS more.

Instead of writing “A new home,” write “A 2,000 square foot, full facility freehold condominium with 3 bedrooms and 3 baths. Full frontal sea view with a rain forest at the back where I take my walks every day. Mass rapid transit and comprehensive amenities a short walk away”.


This is Kung Fu legend, Bruce Lee's intention document.

Once again we are giving our RAS a detailed set of instructions to work on. The more information we give it, the more efficient our RAS can become.

Our RAS stays alert and focused on our intentions when our instructions are regularly reinforced. By keeping our written down intentions where we can see them on a regular basis, we will be regularly reinforcing what we should be focusing on.

Read your intention document at least 2 times every day. When we read and re-read a phrase or sentence the impression on our RAS becomes deeper and deeper.

Rewrite our intention document regularly.

When the words are written and then repeatedly re-written they have maximum impact on our RAS. Don’t be content with a first draft. Write down your intention. Then rephrase it, compact it, add motivating adjectives, make it pithy. A week later you may want to adjust it again. Keep on fine-tuning.

There’s something else going on, too. When we write something down, research suggests that as far as our brain is concerned, it’s as if we were doing that thing. Writing seems to act as a kind of mini-rehearsal for doing. Mentally rehearsing something can “trick” the brain into thinking it’s actually doing it, and writing something down seems to trigger this same effect.

There is something magical about writing our intentions down which makes achieving well-written intentions an almost certainty.

Your great intention wouldn’t happened, if you didn’t write them down.

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