Recently, I read Hal Elrod’s newest book, “The Miracle Equation”. It aligned so much with what I teach that I asked him to be a guest on the Epic Success Podcast.
During our interview, Hal and I discussed the Neuroscience of Unwavering Faith, and I wanted to dive deeper into the topic for you here.
In his book, Hal outlines the formula that he’s found to achieve great success in his life, or what he calls “miracles”, which he defines as tangible measurable events. He breaks down belief and faith as necessary to success, which aligns what we have discovered in the Neuroscience..
Have you ever wondered whether “if I believe it, then it will happen” was grounded in truth… I mean really, it just seems too good to be true, right?
So let’s dig in a bit more…
The Science: Who’s the boss?
From the neuroscience perspective, we’ve seen 3 research-proven findings that give credibility to the Science of Success through belief and faith. These are:
- Your brain doesn’t know the difference between what is really happening and what is vividly imagined over time.
- Your brain builds pathways based on what you repeat over time (aka what you believe and have faith in).
- Your brain has a system (the Reticular Activating System – RAS for short) that acts as a gatekeeper, only letting what you believe into your conscious mind.
These 3 discoveries are what created the foundation of neuro-hacking success. To understand these, you need to understand how our mind works.
Your thinking brain is made of 2 main parts:
- your conscious mind
- your subconscious, or automatic processing mind.
Your daily actions and decisions (80-90% of them!) are governed by your subconscious mind. It’s why some people say, “That is just who I am” and never question their decisions and actions.
What’s vital to know is that your conscious thinking mind IS THE BOSS. It is telling the subconscious mind what to program and automate. It does that by listening to what you claim as truth, every day, in the words you speak and the scenarios you experience (both in reality and in your imagination). It automates what you BELIEVE, and reinforces the stories you tell yourself.
That’s great news if you are feeding your brain unwavering belief in who you want to be. YOU are 100% in control!.
The Brain: A Child may be running your life and business…
The first part of the subconscious automation process starts with your thoughts. Those thoughts create emotions. Thoughts and emotions combine to become beliefs. Those beliefs, repeated over time, is what your subconscious sees as TRUTH – and therefore builds a neural pathway of automatic thinking.
This happens so that it is EASIER for you to automatically jump to what you believe, which saves valuable energy in the brain – your most finite resource.
That’s right – you are ALWAYS training your brain to automate beliefs, whether you realize it or not.
Starting from childhood, you have been repeating and advocating for beliefs over and over again, making them automatic. Many of us never question this and are therefore running our daily lives (and businesses) from those same belief patterns left over from childhood.
You can see evidence of this when you brush your teeth every day. When you were a child you believed and had unwavering faith in the process of how to brush your teeth. Over time your subconscious mind automated it so you no longer had to think about it.
Want to challenge this? Tonight try brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand and see how you start to have to “think” about what you are doing again.
It is from this subconscious automated place in your mind that 80-90% of all your daily actions and decisions come from. These daily decisions and actions generate your results.
This works well if your thinking has been off of auto-pilot and you are purposefully CHOOSING what you believe – but if you are like most of us, you may have beliefs about yourself like “I am not enough” or “what if I fail?” or “who do I think I am – people aren’t going to like me”.
The great news is, there is a process to eliminate the faulty programming that’s not serving you!.
Unwavering Faith: Why it Works
In Hal’s book, The MIRACLE EQUATION, he talks about the 2 things that must happen for Success to take place:
- Unwavering Faith AND
- Extraordinary Effort
In his process, he talks about taking a specific measurable goal you want, committing to unwavering belief that it WILL happen and outlining the extraordinary effort that you WILL take to make that happen.
He describes an example in the book of when he declared, “I WILL sell 20,000 in ten days (of cutco knives – what a great story!) – there is no other option and I WILL give it everything I have until the end, no matter what!”
What Hal did and why this created success, is that he is unknowingly did “brain priming” by:
- feeding his brain the exact “belief” he wanted to happen
- feeding his brain the exact steps that would make that happen
- repeating it over and over again with words and visualizations
- taking inspired action every day towards that goal
By brain priming, he was telling his subconscious mind that THIS is the neural pathway I want you to build and automate.
I have a warning…
Your brain may resist a little in the beginning (our brains want to keep things safe and familiar) but eventually your mind sees that this is the only thing you BELIEVE and then goes to work automating it.
That’s why, over time, it gets easier and easier to achieve that goal. This is also when the RAS (Reticular Activating System) kicks in to help you see more and more of what you need to in order to make that goal a reality.
In this Miracle Equation, 3 things have happened:
- Even though it has not happened yet, your brain believes it HAS happened, and is automating your thinking like it has. In this process, you become someone who already has the results, before they even happen.
- You now have an automated neural pathway of success through “brain priming” your unwavering belief and then taking the extraordinary effort needed to achieve your goal
- Your RAS has taken over and is allowing you to see ideas and opportunities that you were not able to before, because you didn’t fully BELIEVE.
The brain science of success is clear…it is no longer, “ I have to see it, to believe it” BUT instead, “If I want to see it, I HAVE to believe it.”
You are the creator of your thoughts, so only you can create the thoughts, that become unwavering faith. That same faith fuels your extraordinary effort and allows you to step into the best possible future, as your best possible self!
Want to get your hands on Hal Elrod’s book The Miracle Equation?
Click here to order and download a free sneak peek!