Manage Your Mind Or Let It Control You: No Other Option | Dr. Caroline Leaf

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12Once someone's had a traumatic brain injury, and I mean, your dad went through one, that's pretty much that's, you know, written off. And we were trained, as I said, to compensate. So I said, okay, well, there's hardly any research in the 80s on brain injury and on how to treat it. And so I thought, okay, well, I'm going to start there. And so I worked with people that had been in comas for like longer than two weeks. And at that stage, if you had a coma for longer than eight hours, the brain damage was considered irreversible. Now, in this day and age, we know that's not the case. But in the 80s, that was the going philosophy.

0:43So I was completely swimming upstream when it came to this concept. Anyway, I showed with my subjects that with using your mind and not in any weird way, just a very systematic, deliberate, intentional mind management in different ways and different brain building and dealing with emotions and just different ways. same sort of process that you can actually change this. And so some of my first, my very first case study was a girl who was 16 at the time of an accident. And she had lost a whole year of school, written off as a vegetable. I mean, that's what the doctors used to say in those days, which is a terrible thing to say to someone.

1:19Anyway, long story short, after eight months, not only did she manage to, she came around. I started working with her when she was conscious and functioning sort of at a second grade level. and she wanted to, her goal was to get, her goal of greatness was to get back to finish 12th grade and with her peer group. Now, that was an impossible task. All the doctors said, don't even go down that road. Not even worth it. So I said, well, I was a new scientist then, very young, totally into this. Well, you know, go with me, let's do this. And within eight months, she caught up to a 12th grade level, finished school with her peers and went on to get a university degree.

1:53And one of the coolest things was that she was actually a really average student and not even good at math. after the accident, using her mind to change her brain, she became like a math genius. You know, I mean, this was like, and I can tell you story after story, and that really motivated me to work across the board with now I really have to understand what's going on. And I happened to be living in South Africa where I grew up at the time. I was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa and in the apartheid era. I mean, this is like, it really ages me, doesn't it? Go back into those, I worked through the apartheid era, the transition and the post-apartheid era.

2:26So I was seeing all the socioeconomic trauma, the racism trauma, and I worked in that three days a week in those environments with terrible poverty and whatever. And I worked in war-torn Rwanda, and I worked with the wealthiest of the wealthy, CEOs of corporations, schools everywhere that my laboratory was the world to try and understand humans and mind and get away from this scientific concept that consciousness is the hard question and no one is really doing anything. We're just talking about it as being this elusive philosophical thing that we will push aside and one day promissory science will do it one day.

3:00And I thought, I can't do this because I am mind. You are mind. So if I don't manage it, I mean, you can go three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without oxygen, but you don't even go three seconds without using your mind. So my underlying premise was, OK, well, if that's the case, what is it and how do we manage it? And if I don't manage it, what I did from my research, you can learn to manage it. Mind is malleable. You can direct the neuroplasticity of your brain. I did some of the first neuroplasticity research in my field in the late 80s, early 90s. Before it was accepted by the mid-90s, neuroplasticity was, well, that's it.

3:37And I showed that my underlying argument or thesis was, well, if our mind is always changing, which it is, so you wake up, you're experiencing everything, conversations, the emails, the pod, life, politics, You're immediately immersed in life and you're processing that through your mind. You're growing it into your brain and you're doing this every moment of the day. So if I don't control it, it's a mess. But if I do control it, then it isn't a mess. Now, I know we can't control events and circumstances. We all agree with that. So I'm not into this whole law of it. I'm not talking about law of attraction and, you know, saying 15 positive affirmations and that's going to fix your story.

4:11No, I'm not talking about that at all. It's not realistic. I'm talking about the fact that you cannot control events and circumstances. But you can learn to manage your mind, which means your responses. Yes, the things are going to happen. Trauma, death, life happens. But how you manage it, and I mean, your case is a classic example. Your life was thrown upside down, and your family's life was thrown upside down, and you managed your mind and got yourself back going. So you were doing this concept anyway. You know, greatness, that's why I said greatness comes from us managing our mind. And greatness doesn't necessarily mean that you've got millions in the bank and you're this famous superstar.

4:46It means that do you have mental peace? Are you actually growing? Are you satisfied as a person? Are you, you know, that's the sort of where we want to go as opposed to this very externalized version of it. So, yeah. Wow.

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6:38Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.