michael senoff interviews brain expert, michael j. lavery ... · michael senoff interviews brain...

For more interviews on brain training go to http://www.WholeBrainPowerCoaching.com© MMXII JS&M Sales & Marketing, Inc. San Diego California -Tel. 858-274-7851

Listen & Download 157 hours of free biz interviews at http://www.hardtofindseminars.com 1

Creativity Webinar All Six Parts

Michael Senoff Interviews Brain Expert, Michael J. Lavery On How Applied

Neuroscience Can Be Used To Stimulate And Enhance Originality, Imagination And

Your Own Unique Style Of Creativity in Today's Modern World

Can You Really Turn Your Creativity On At Will… And Never Stare At A Blank Page or Computer Screen Again?

Mega Creativity. We all want more of it. More persuasive copy, original stories, Thomas-Edison-like ideas that flow into our mind whenever we need them most – who wouldn’t want more of that in their day to day life?

Unfortunately, your brain doesn’t always work the way you want it to, especially when you’re staring at the blank screen wondering where to start. The good news is – it doesn’t have to be this way starting today.

Your problem is that you’ve been taught to live, think, and create in a “practical” linear manner, which essentially means you’ve been taught to keep the creative parts of your brain inactive.



In this exclusive, no cost, six part Q-and-A live webinar, you’ll hear exactly how to stimulate the areas of your brain so you can effortlessly, keep creative ideas flowing into your mind, at will, whenever you need them. I want to thank anyone who’s joined us for this live call. I reallyappreciate it. I hope you enjoy it, and it gives Michael and myself the opportunity to do a live call, and we’re going to cover some of the most pressing questions that I had asked my list from Hard To Find Seminars about what they wanted to know about how to enhance creativity.

So Michael, we’re going to get right into it. I’ve compiled the most common questions, and we certainly want to answer the questions that most people want to know, because we do have limited time. For a lot of our listeners, we hope to answer the questions in a way that will be entertaining, but also in a way that will help you remember the answers by answering them with many stories.

So I think the listeners on the line have the opportunity to listen to how we produce and develop a tele-seminar event, even though this is just the first stages, and I hope you enjoy it. So Michael J. Lavery, I want to welcome you to the call, and I appreciate you investing your time in covering these pressing questions on the subject of creativity. Thanks for joining us.

Lavery: Hey, Michael. How you doing?

Michael: I’m very good. How are you today?

Lavery: I’m doing great. I appreciate you setting up this conference call.

Michael: We have a question from Mr. Zambrano. He asks, Michael, what is the best thing to do if you can’t think of any creative story ideas? Do you read and search, or do you stop and incubate?

Lavery: Put it this way. Mark Twain wrote a lot of books, and all the writing was done in cursive format. He wasn’t printing; he wasn’t typing it out on a computer because they didn’t have it at that time. He wasn’t using a manual typewriter, he was writing books by hand. A lot of people today are having creative blocks because the word “block lettering” kind of comes to mind.



Think about it. Block lettering. Cursive means running along, and block lettering is exactly what it is. It is more left-brained in its structure. It’s more of a linear instead of a flowing form of writing, and my suggestion for a person that’s having problem with creating stories and original concepts is that one would not necessarily have to read to find somebody else’s concepts or ideas, but to create their own and practice the mirror writing.

Leonardo da Vinci was the world’s foremost mirror writer, and his creativity and imagination was superior to his contemporaries. I have people that are doing the mirror writing that come and say, “I can’t even believe what I was writing. I held it up to a mirror and I was shocked at what my left hand was actually outputting,” because the left hand’s connected to the right brain.

When you’re writing from right to left, you’re actually making the brain see the opposite direction. So you’re stimulating a lot of parts of your brain that normally do not have activity. That’s what I would suggest to this gentleman, that he would actually start to do beautiful cursive handwriting, both right-handed or a left-handed mirror image, and start to journal on a daily basis. I know that ideas will start flowing from the brain. He’ll probably be blown away by what he actually puts on the paper.

With our Whole Brain Power Coaching program, we’ve developed instruments in terms of templates that you can practice these creative concepts to do your mirror writing and to work on your fine penmanship. You’ll find all this at wholebrainpowercoaching.com.

Michael: Question from Alvin. Hi, Michael. Oftentimes I get flooded with great ideas but irrelevant ones when I’m supposed to be doing something else, and sometimes when I really need to come up with the ideas under time pressure, my mind just refuses to cooperate. Can one really turn on his creative mind at will?

Lavery: I truly believe a person can turn on their creative mind at will. I mean, when you think about a person that’s a stand-up comic, they’re up there in front of an audience and they’re turning on their creative juices. They’ve practiced it, so that when they’re in that environment they can react to the crowd.

If the crowd’s not really digging their routine, they can break stride and come up with something else on the spot. So basically thinking on one’s feet is what people can do. Essentially what happens to us in a



smaller world is that many of our ideas are comparable to a mirage. We see this concept and then it evaporates.

Well, a lot of times we’re not having a constant entry into a journal, and if you did that on a regular basis, if an idea sprang into your head spontaneously and then you wrote it down, and you were doing this on a regular basis, then these ideas would become concrete. You would have more access to them. A lot of times people have these concepts, and they’re just mulling them over in their brain, or talking these ideas out to other people, and then they basically evaporate.

Just imagine that a person was actually writing these concepts down and they were doing actually caricatures, and they were drawing on a regular basis and creating cartoon characters and such. Then their brain would be way more creative. Then under pressure they would be able to come up with an idea.

So when a company is saying to people, “Gather around, ladies and gentlemen. We’re going to have some brainstorming here. We need to come up with this ad, we need to come up with this copy, to freelyhit this e-mail campaign in a really positive way where people are totally understanding this original concept and absolutely becoming one with it,” and the problem today is we have too much media input and not enough reflective thinking via the pen.

Put your ideas down, even if it’s a half a page of the most exquisite cursive handwriting, it will definitely turn on the creative mind.

Michael: Tony Michael asks, what exercises can one undertake to overcome stammering or stuttering in normal everyday language interaction?

Lavery: That’s a very good question. There’s a lot of people that are afflicted with stuttering and stammering. When a person practices this phrase that I have people repeat, this is how it goes: I will think my thoughts thoroughly through, and then I will articulate grammatically correct English.

That’s sort of a tongue twister. So when a person is actually thinking thoroughly through what they want to convey, and they’re doing more penmanship than normal, what happens is the pen actually starts to change the brain. The hands rule the brain, and it actually reins in the brain’s uninhibited behavior.



Oftentimes a person that’s stuttering is using too much of the left brain. Think about it for a moment. A person such as Mel Tillis can sing in front of 5000 people, but he doesn’t want to do an interview after his event because he has a problem with stuttering. So when he’s singing, he’s flowing freely because he’s using his whole brain.

If a person is having problems with stuttering and stammering, what they need to do is breathe, swallow their saliva, collect their thoughts, and use more pitch. See, speech is a very monotone activity. It’s pretty much straight line, but I believe that if we add more pitch and tone to our voice, than we can calm our brain down, and our brain can output the proper motor signals to the tongue, the way we’re able to actually use our diaphragm, and use our lung, and be totally in control, and we slow things down.

The modern world today wants to go so fast. There’s many people that I speak to on a regular basis that literally stammer. Michael, you, yourself, are aware that when you’re interviewing people, and then you listen to the unedited copy of a dialogue that you have. You have to realize that there’s so much editing that’s necessary.

A person will go, “I – I – I remember”. So they’ll say the world “I” three or four times. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I – I got it now”. That’s a form of stammering, and a person can absolutely overcome this concept by telling the brain, “Calm down, speak clearly, slow down”.

There’s a book called The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, and they’ve proved convincingly that the greatest athletes and musicians are practicing the movements so super-slow, perfect, and then they speed it up. Then when they get to real time, it’s flawless.

So speech also can be approached in the same manner. If a person’s stuttering and stammering, slow down. Gather your thoughts. Speak clearly. Get a dictionary. Write down three, four, five, and six syllable vocabulary words, and be able to have the proper annunciation and the pronunciation.

What happens is a person and a problem with speech production, and that’s because they learn this behavior. So you have to quarantine this type of behavior and you have to have a new memory formed. Sort of like a person that has an improper golf swing. You have to relearn something, you have to delete the old memory and replace it with a new memory.



Michael: Here’s a question from Agnay Ben Ashutai. Michael, does a person’s brain develop when we are creating new ideas?

Lavery: This is absolutely proven scientifically. There is evidence now that when you take groups of people and you divide them into three groups, there’s an exercise that a gentleman did from Australia where he had people shooting basketballs. He had another group of people that were thinking about shooting free throws, and another group of people that weren’t doing anything at all.

The people that were actually out there physically shooting free throws every day for approximately 30 minutes, and the other group of people that were thinking about sinking free throws for 30 minutes, literally were lighting up the same parts of the brain. Thinking about doing the activity actually was expanding the motor strip.

There was an experiment that was done at Harvard that was taking the fingers and individually pressing notes on the piano keyboard. People were thinking about doing it and people actually were playing these musical parts. The brain did the same thing. People that were actually thinking about it expanded the motor strip almost the same way that the people that were actually doing it.

There’s a gentleman that I’ve written about in a golf book that came into the market. James Nesmith is his name, and he was a prisoner of war. He had never broken 90 in his golf game. James Nesmith maintained his sanity, even though he was placed in solitary confinement in a five by seven foot bamboo cage. Think about that. That’s pretty intense.

He kept his sanity by thinking about playing rounds of golf, and he didn’t speed through his process of thinking about playing golf. It took him five hours, actually, to play. So he would get up, he would think about taking a shower, get dressed up in his nice golf attire, drive to the golf course, go to the driving range, hit a bucket of balls, go out there and play a phenomenal round of golf.

He played thousands and thousands of rounds of golf in his mind, and he went from never breaking 90, shooting a legitimate round of 74 the first time he actually teed up a golf ball in his state of freedom. This is a phenomenal story about how the brain actually can wire itself to improve at motor skills with just thought. So absolutely our brain changes by thought.



We now the hypocampi structure actually physically grows by memorizing the names of streets. London cab drivers are actually physically growing their hypocampi structures, especially in areas of the hympocampi that’s related to spatial intelligence. There is proof that the brain actually physically grows by thinking very detailed thought.

Michael: Michael, Jim asked is it important to know your goal before you begin a creative process? In other words, should you be conscious of what you’re trying to do?

Lavery: I believe that’s a good approach to doing things. If you are goal-oriented and you write down some of your affirmations and some of your visions that you would want to have actually manifest themselves in [inaudible 13:00-13:01] that’s a great way of doing things.

Thomas Edison would scoff at the orderly nature of workshops of his competitors. Thomas’ workshop was very cluttered, and an aspect of jumping from one concept to another, oftentimes he would discover something. It was almost through accident that he came up with ideas.

I personally have had the same thing happen to my own creative process, through accident, because I have sculptures and paintings, and I’m writing, and all of a sudden I get this great idea and then I go after it. So sometimes too much predictability leads to stagnation. Sometimes when one’s really spontaneous, things can happen.

That’s why it’s kind of fun to do these type of interviews and not have it all scripted out, because sometimes it takes on a life of it’s own in the process of outputting in a spontaneous, original manner of thinking. If one wants to become very creative, one has to become a great storyteller, and that’s part of it. So if one wants to improve it, say copywriting or doing advertising, one has to constantly be aware of the gift of speech because our greatest asset is our ability to communicate verbally.

Michael: Question from Frank. Hi Michael. What do you feel is the number one obstacle to being creative, and how do you remove it in a practical way?

Lavery: Well, that’s a very interesting question. My suggestion is you would take the TV and you put it in a box, and you would put in a storage unit.



Michael: Why?

Lavery: What happening’s to us is that we have so many ideas that are fed to us through the audio/visual capacity to be downloaded that it overrides our brain’s own original processing. When one reads the book Hold Me In Power, you’ll realize that there are areas in the brain, deep on the cerebral cortex, there are six layers of the cerebral cortex.

The gray area, the folded gray area, that fits on top of the white mototrax systems in the brain. Those deep layers, where original thought arises, are literally being anesthetized. So if there’s one obstacle to creativity, I would think it would be the plasma screen that’s in your house.

I personally haven’t had a television for 33 years. It’s not that I don’t watch a little TV. I have to go out of my way to go watch maybe the last nine holes of the Master’s on Sunday, or maybe I have to go out of my way to catch part of the Superbowl. I’m not sitting on a couch every evening, or starting the day off in the morning, by turning on a television in my kitchen pantry, where most people have a plasma so that they can wake up to Good Morning America.

Because we’re constantly downloading, and I’m talking to the tune of 105,000 hours. The average person, by the time they reach 75 years of age, will have consumed 105,000 hours of television, movies. That’s not even counting mindless web surfing. So I think that one has to really take the scale out of what input one is experiencing and what output one is actually performing, and realize that there’s a serious disparity there.

Michael: I know it may be a little technical, but you had mentioned the word anesthetized. Based on your research, we’ve talked a little bit about some of your brain research and how the TV and the brain interact. What have they proven that the TV does to the brain waves of a person who watches TV?

Lavery: Oftentimes a person will say, “I’m just going to go home, pour myself a glass of red wine, and just zone out in front of the TV”. How many people have said that? “Yeah, last night I just zoned out for about four hours. I have so much stress in my life, I just turned that television on and I fell asleep in front of it”.

A lot of people fall asleep in front of the television, and the reason is because the brain waves are dropping out of normal beta. Beta waves



are an oscillation of between 12 and 24 oscillations per second, and the alpha waves are a more relaxed, reflective state of brain wave activity, between 8 and 12 oscillations per second.

A gentleman named Dr. Thomas Mohollow from Massachusetts did an experiment in which he hooked up children’s brains to an EEG, and that EEG was connected to the television. If the child could not maintain beta wave activity, the television would shut off. The television, on average, was shutting off within 30 seconds of the child watching television, and they couldn’t get the brain wave activity up in order to turn the television back on.

Michael: So what does that mean?

Lavery: They went into an artificial alpha state. It’s almost impossible for a person to drop down into alpha for an extended period of time if a person is not being manipulated by some type of drug. Television literally turns on the drug called “beta endorphins”.

Beta endorphins are more powerful than morphine, molecule for molecule, up to 48 times more powerful. So when a person is zoning out in front of the television, their brain chemistry is absolutely changing because of it, and television isn’t predictable. It’s always coming at you with some new commercial that’s hyper-edited.

The way that our brains exposed to hyper-edited audio/visual stimulus has never been seen before in the history of the human race. We have now technology that can create any type of image, any type of fantasy that we would ever want to see, we can create it through our computer technology now.

Ships can transform, The Transformers, where people are literally being slaughtered and the effect of it is so real, and it’s affecting our brain chemistry. You look at people, and their eyes are glazed over and they’ve been watching television for hours at a time. It’s not good for their brain health.

People are having a problem sleeping as well, because they’re changing their brain chemistry prior to actually having to go into the deep sleep of delta and theta. Essentially, modern man has changed his brain chemistry through artificial stimulus of audio/visual exposure.

Michael: Some people believe they have to take drugs or drink or smoke pot to become, quote-unquote, more creative. What would you say to



someone who’s trying to change their brain artificially? Does it make one more creative? Is watching too much television inhibiting creativity, and how?

Lavery: Dropping out of normal beta wave activity and you’re in a more reflective alpha state, anything you can’t remember what you’re watching. They’ve done experiments where they give a person the script. A person’s reading the script and a person’s watching the script on a television. The person is sitting there reading the print on a piece of paper and a person is actually watching it on a screen. The person that’s reading it in a normal fashion is doing much better than the person that’s watching it on a screen.

When you think about the fact that you’re not having to use your imagination, it’s all being done for you when you’re reading. Sometimes people say, “Gosh, I loved that book. When I went to see the movie it was so disappointing”. How can you take a novel and compress it into two hours of audio/visual? You can’t.

When one is reading a beautiful novel and the words are so descriptive, the imagination’s forming pictures in the brain, and the person’s being taken away by the way the words are being portrayed on a piece of paper. The imagination’s running wild.

Today, it’s all there for you in Technicolor and 3-D movies. We’re in sensory overload, and when you realize how much people are having problems with mild cognitive impairment, you have to start to connect the dots.

My suggestion is you should get on the Whole Brain Power Training Program, because the tenets of whole brain power require phenomenal discipline and focus, and it’s all detail-oriented. You have your assignments. You have the tools. You have the hammers, you have the penmanship, you have the memorization, you have the ambidexterity training. This is totally making a person dedicated and focused.

You cannot have a wandering mind and stay after these drills. You must stay focused. So what happens to us in the modern world today is we are completely bombarded by media, and we are totally distracted.

End of Part 1



Beginning of Part 2

Michael: Bob Peroski asks, Michael, I want to develop my creativity in my copywriting. What’s the first step I can take to do this?

Lavery: I believe that people are trying to write copy on a computer. I think if you go back to the old-fashioned way of writing on paper with a beautiful writing instrument, one’s going to have ideas flow because you have to contemplate it. You have to think thoroughly through what you want to do, and then you have to use the motor strip in the brain differently.

When one’s tapping away at a keyboard, one doesn’t have to necessarily have that much coordination in order to be able to output something that has a semblance of thought. I mean, there’s spell check there for you so you just hit the spell check button and it corrects it for you. Your brain doesn’t have to work nearly as hard when you’re typing on a contemporary keyboard connected to a computer.

When one actually has to output through the pen and have the cerebellum of the brain and the basal ganglia and the ability to have spatial intelligence. So when one is writing level on a piece of paper, that takes a lot more brain energy. When one’s doing the mirror writing, that’s really tasking the brain.

So if Leonardo da Vinci was writing all of his personal journals left-handed mirror image, there must have been something to it. I personally have written thousands of pages of mirror writing, and I believe it’s one of the reasons my imagination’s so vivid. If one wants to really develop the idea to do copywriting, one has to take one of the assignments that I give in the Whole Brain Power book and workbook to write an incredible story about how you visit every state in the nation, and make it funny, make it creative, use your imagination. Make it so that it makes a person laugh.

Mike, I remember you were writing your story. It was funny because it wasn’t my story; it was what you put out on your own part. My story, when I’m writing about every state, is Birmingham, because I’m seeing Lynyrd Skynyrd play Sweet Home Alabama. Then I, of course, would have to board Alaskan Airlines and fly into Juneau, the capital, so I take an expedition to see the iceberg where I nearly froze, and I got frostbit on the nose.



What happens now is I go to clear dry air in Arizona where I play in Phoenix in a four somewhere. One of my partners says, “You’ve got to check out that replica of Noah’s Ark in Arkansas”. So that’s when I went down to Little Rock and I met Bill Clinton. Bill said, “I did not inhale that marijuana cigar, but I wish I had”.

Michael: This is original awareness. This is your original awareness. It’s your storytelling in your mind. So what you’re saying is your main subtitle on your book, Whole Brain Power is?

Lavery: The subtitle is A Fountain Of Youth For The Mind And Body, and then below a picture of a hand holding the brain is The Phenomenal Discovery: The Hands Grow The Brain.

Michael: Now, explain that for the listener. Talk a little bit about the homunculus theory and how a copywriter, or one who wants to become a better storyteller by penning his stories out with his hand, the real estate that the use of the hands take up on the brain, for someone who hasn’theard any of that.

Lavery: The homunculus theory in taught in first year medical school, and essentially it states that our hands take a disproportionate amount of space on the cerebral cortex. On the very back of the frontal lobes of the brain, there’s a strip that’s about one inch wide, and it’s called the motor strip. That motor strip is basically disproportionately connected to the use of the hands.

So when our hands are made to do fine motor control of handwriting, and you do it bilaterally, and you do it in the mirror image way, you are absolutely expanding the use of the motor strips on both sides of the brain, stimulating the cable that connects the two hemispheres, called the corpus collosum, and now they’re proving that the corpus collosum actually can physically grow.

When they do studies of right-handed musicians versus right-handed non-musicians, all the trained musicians are, most likely, having a greater access to the corpus collosum, and this is one of the reasons why the corpus collosum is thicker than normal, up to 10% thicker than in an intelligent non-musician.

This information now is being readily accepted by the scientific community, that ambidexterity through training at music is changing the brain. My hypothesis is that doing the hammer drills, and doing the handwriting, and doing it on blank paper, and having it exquisite, and



using tracing paper to write with your right hand from left to right, and flipping the tracing paper over, and being able to mimic what your right hand’s doing with your left hand so that it looks exactly the same slope and the same letter formation, is changing the brain.

When you’re writing in a mirror image format and you’re having to actually flip your brain over, in a sense, to actually be able to write in cursive format so that you can actually read it, you’re giving your brain an exercise that’s so phenomenal that it’s kind of hard to explain to a person that’s never practiced it.

Michael, you know from your own experience that by doing the mirror writing, it literally changed your brain and it made you way more coordinated, too. How can you deny it? Your handwriting right-handed was chicken scratch when you first started working with me, and now it’s actually presentable.

You wrote me a letter and you didn’t have a return address, and I’m saying, “Who’s writing me a letter from San Diego?” It looked like a woman’s writing, for crying outloud.

Michael: To the people who are listening in, you’re probably wondering, well, what is Michael talking about, balancing the golf ball on a hammer, and reverse mirror image writing, and ambidexterity. What Michael is describing, which are the fundamental tenets of his brain training program called Whole Brain Power Coaching, which outlines this phenomenal brain training program that Michael has put together for us.

Michael, I want to explain, because I think you skipped over it, just a little bit about what is the definition of the corpus collosum, and I would be very confident in knowing that many of the listeners don’t even understand that the brain is separated in two separate hemispheres connected by this cable. Can you just go over that a little bit?

Lavery: I appreciate you bringing this to the listener’s attention. The brain hemispheres are literally symmetrical, and there’s a membrane that separates the hemispheres as they butt up next to each other in the brain. However, there’s a cable that runs from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere, which is comprised of between 250 million to 300 million wires.

Those are called axon sheaves, and those axon sheaves are actually myelinated, meaning they’re coated. They have an insulation around



them. This is one of the helper cells in the brain called oligal dendrocite. All this is explained in my book.

What happens now is when we have an idea that originates from the right hemisphere, maybe the right hemisphere’s frontal lobe combined with activity in the temporal lobe, has formed an idea, an original idea. That idea has to be shared with the left hemisphere so that the speech center, which is primarily located in the left hemisphere of the brain, can actually output the idea in the form of the written or spoken word.

So for instance, when I’m teaching a person to say the alphabet backwards in record speed, I give them a story, and the story’s very bizarre. If I was to teach them the rote manner of doing the alphabet backwards, like Z-Y-X-W-V-U-T, it would take longer. I explain that they’re going to make an original linking system of taking either three, two, or one letter and hooking them up.

To do the first seven letters from Z to A would be Z-Y-X-W-V-U-T. Notice how I have the cadence there. Z-Y-X-W-V-U-T. Well, the Z-Y-X is an acronym standing for Zebra Yellow Xylophone. So just imagine, notice I said the word imagine. Just picture a zebra that is playing a huge yellow xylophone. Just imagine that this is a striped zebra that is making this sound by jumping from one note to the other on a huge yellow xylophone.

Then when the zebra playing the yellow xylophone comes to the letter W, he knows that he is a Winner. Then the German man at seven foot, one inch tall, says to the zebra playing the yellow xylophone, who’s a winner, “He asked him Vut,” V-U-T, “did you Vin?” So now it’s Z-Y-X-W-V-U-T.

Then you remember this wild story. Then you go to the next seven letters, S-R-Q-P-O-N-M. Then the zebra knows that eventually he is a senior, S-R, or the letter Q stands for Question. So S-R-Q-P-O stands for Post Office. The senior zebra, so S-R, is questioning should he go to the P-O, the post office, to deliver a letter to his grandson in New Mexico, N-M.

So now we have Z-Y-X-W-V-V-U-T-S-R-Q-P-O-N-M. We’ve already done 14 out of the 26. That didn’t take that long. Now the question is, do you have the comprehension, the assimilation, the alertness, and the ability to form those pictures in your own brain so that you could actually tell that story to somebody else? That’s the fun part of being



able to use original awareness linking systems, and it works like a charm.

Michael: Can you relate it back to the corpus collosum and how doing this is going to enhance creativity?

Lavery: Of course, Michael. The way it works is that the right hemisphere was forming this picture of this zebra, and was he playing on a small xylophone or a huge one? It was huge, wasn’t it?

Michael: Yes.

Lavery: I want you to picture this huge xylophone that a truck would have to move, that you’d have to actually get a forklift to lift it into the back of a flatbed. So just imagine that this zebra was playing the yellow xylophone in a zoo. See how this works now?

Your mind on your right hemisphere is forming the picture, and it sends the signal and the information across the corpus collosum to the left side of your brain so you actually can form the mouth and the tongue to create the story and speak clearly. This is part of the whole brain power process.

Michael: Or write it.

Lavery: Or write it out. Imagine if you wrote out the story and then do Z-Y-X-W-V-U-T. Michael, what does the V-U-T stand for, do you remember?

Michael: A huge seven foot tall German man saying, “Vut”.

Lavery: That’s correct, and what does the W stand for?

Michael: W stands for Winning. Winning.

Lavery: Right. So the zebra realized he was a winner, and then German man, that was seven foot one inch tall, notice I have seven foot one? That’s a huge guy. So just think about this lumbering German man with a thick German accent that says, “Vut did you vin?” That sticks in your brain for the rest of your life.

Michael: Copywriters understand this from the great Claude Hopkins. He said generalities roll off the mind like water on a duck’s back. So in copywriting, when you use specifics, the specifics stick in the mind, and that’s very similar to what you’re explaining as well.



Lavery: That’s correct, and the best way for the creativity to actually manifest itself is to actually see it go down on a piece of paper. I mean, think about it for a second. How many people today are going to a stationary store to buy beautiful linen paper and a beautiful writing instrument so that they go write 10 letters to people, loved ones, friends, and associates? It’s not happening anymore.

The only time I get a handwritten letter, it’s coming from my mother. Everything else is always a phone call or an e-mail, but my mom has beautiful penmanship. That was because she was raised in a time where that was important. We need to go back to the time that Austin Palmer wrote his book, The Handwriting Exercises that he came out with in 1915.

Literally 25 million Americans that were practicing the same form of handwriting. When you interviewed Harry Lorayne, he told you that he does all of his original drafts of his memory book all by cursive handwriting. Isn’t that interesting?

Michael: That is correct, and he was an ambidextrous magician doing card manipulation and card magic for many, many years.

Lavery: Right. When you listen to some of his dissertations and the way he was doing his card magic, and the speed by which he was outputting the work, it was phenomenal. The great spontaneous thinkers of the past, they were putting out more original thought than contemporary people that are completely addicted to watching plasma TVs, and downloading movies on Netflix, and popping in DVDs, and playing on the Blue Ray. Modern man’s afflicted by a crisis and lack of creativity.

Michael: I would agree.

Lavery: That’s why I think that we’re getting such a great response from the campaign, of people wondering what they can do to give them the edge, to give them the spark, to create the passion in becoming a more creative individual.

Michael: Well, I think it’s going to be evident in the upcoming questions. The next question is by Louise. What brain wave do I have to be in to actually be most creative? What brain wave diminishes creativity? I think you mentioned the alpha state diminishes it, but I’ll let you expand on that.



Lavery: The alpha state when you’re artificially induced is different than the alpha state that one actually can tap into when one is in a normal environment. There’s a woman named Debbie Cruz that proves that people that can calm their brain down, and before the act of putting can outperform the people that are too agitated.

Alpha isn’t the enemy. Alpha waves are really good if they’re flowing through the left side of the brain prior to an athletic event, because one is calm, one is seeing something serene, one’s seeing the winning basket, one is seeing the putt flow into the cup, one’s seeing a beautiful shaped shot on a beautiful golf course.

What happens is when a person is reaching the zone of the alpha state and it’s happening through thought, through reflection, through a way of thinking and harnessing the right side of the brain, the right side of the brain is the genius generator. It’s where savantism happens.

They did studies with a gentleman named Alan Schneider from Australia. He is a doctor and he has a technology called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. What they do is they put these electrodes and they place them on the scalp on the left side of the brain. They send magnetic and electrical current into the left side of the brain, which temporarily anesthetizes and numbs the activity of the neural fields of the left frontal temporal lobes of the brain.

As a consequence, the right side of the brain is allowed to be operating freely of the critical nature of the left side of the brain. These people that can’t draw well at all start to draw, literally within 15 minutes of this application. These people that have really poor perspective drawing skills start doing beautiful drawings.

They do the same thing with proofreading. People that have the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, TMS, are actually proofreading so much better than people that don’t have this ability through the artificial stimulus. So the people that are proofreading after Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation are literally not making mistakes at all, catching the double the and all of the mistakes that would escape the eyes of editors.

This proof that the right side of the brain is a spatial savant, and what happens to us is, in the modern world, our left brain is way overactive and our right brain doesn’t have an opportunity to be invited to the party. Michael, we did an interview once in the program that we have



for Advanced Whole Brain Power Secrets where we talked about this concept of having the right brain invited to the ball.

See, the left brain’s always been going to the ball. Then one day, the CEO for the company says to the left brain, “I want you to bring your right brain brother, and get him a tuxedo and bring him to this event,” and the left brain’s embarrassed about bringing the right brain to the event in a tuxedo. Before the night’s over, the right brain, the brother that’s creative and imaginative and uninhibited, is the life of the party. They’ve never had such a good time at a party because the right brain was the star of the show.

The CEO says to the left brain, “Make sure you bring your brother to every one of these events coming up, because this guy is the bomb”. Eventually the left brain, on the way home, says to the right brain, “Hey, you were incredible. How come you never told me how good you were?” “Because you never invited me”.

This is a good story here about how we have two hemispheres in the brain, and when we seriously reflect on the asymmetrical nature about how we actually harness the potential of the brain, we have to come to the conclusion that our left brain is dominating the activity, and the right brain, where genius resides, is sitting there idly and basically twiddling its thumbs.

Until we become proactive, we actually invite the right brain to be a participant, an equal partner, in the brain’s function. That’s basically how creativity starts to manifest in individuals.

Michael: John Edwards asks, in the effort to optimize creative energy, Michael, is there a best hour of the day to do this?

Lavery: I think that any hour of the day is where we can have creative juices. We can be dreaming at 5:00 in the morning and then wake up and go, “Wow, that was such an incredible dream”. If you write down these dreams, there’s all kinds of research about dream interpretation. When you have a dream, sometimes it’s good to write it down.

Salvadore Dali was a great painter. He was a surrealist, and his imagination about clocks that were drooping over the side of a table, just the way he portrayed things in a realistic yet surreal way. Oftentimes it was cat napping that allowed him to come up with these concepts.



So he would force himself to take a nap, and as legend has it, he would put a spoon between his knees and he would have a plate between his feet. He would drift off, and as soon as he lost consciousness, that spoon would drop and would wake him up at the threshold of sleep between the conscious and the subconscious.

He found a window where creativity would be unleashed, and he would immediately start to draw and paint what he had dreamt. Oftentimes today, we don’t have enough original awareness because we’re not allowing ourselves an opportunity to become divorced from the media.

It’s always attacking us. Too much input and not enough output. If one really wants to optimize the creative energy, I believe that having a journal with a person all waking hours of the day would be a great start, so that if an idea comes to you and you’re driving down the road, you might pull off the highway, you might pull into a parking lot, and write some of these concepts down.

Think about it. Most of us when we’re driving around in our cars, are listening to the radio. We don’t have that time where we can actually think original thoughts, and that’s one of the times when I do my best thinking, when I’m on a long drive. Turn the radio off and listen to the inner voice in my brain, but also write every day. Write not in terms of keyboard, but actually write on a piece of paper in a journal.

End of Part 2

Beginning of Part 3

Michael: PK asks, Michael, is it true that creativity is in the right hemisphere and that women are primarily right-brain thinkers, and that men are primarily left-brain thinkers?

Lavery: Well, there’s definitely a lot of scientific proof that shows that women definitely have more access to the right hand than men in general. So if we would box people in a way where we say the guy’s a bean counter. So he’s an accountant, he’s in the classification of a bean counter.

Maybe the guy’s an incredible musician, but he didn’t want to starve at music so he became an accountant. What you’ve done is you’ve basically classified this person and given them this identity of a bean counter. You’re an attorney. Attorneys are sharks. Well, I know a lot of nice people that are attorneys.



What happens to us is we box these concepts. There’s a book called Men Are From Mars And Women Are From Venus by John Gray. However, I’m not buying into the concept that we can’t change our personality. We have to accept the fact that women have a certain intrinsic personality and men, and we can’t do anything about it because we’re from different planets?

No, we’re both from the Earth. We couldn’t live on those planets because the environment would be too hostile to even have life for 10 minutes. The situation is that we paint ourselves into a corner metaphorically. There are many men that have tremendous right brain hemisphere activity, and there’s a lot of women that have very little right hemisphere activity. They’ll say to me, “I’m completely a left-brainer”.

I think that we have the capacity to be whole brain thinkers by not necessarily making people think that their strength relies on just one hemisphere of the brain, but by accepting the fact that the brain has way more plasticity to it and that we have the ability to get into both sides of the brain, and to use them in conjunction with each other, and to modulate ideas back and forth.

I think that creativity is something that can totally be inspired by anybody. I mean, think about it for a second. Birds of a feather flock together. Isn’t it interesting that out of England, a small country, comes some of the best modern music? What is it about the English environment that creates these incredible bands that come out? They literally are very small in relationship to the size of the United States, but most of the great music that’s come out in the last 40 years has emanated out of England.

Michael: I consider myself average at a lot of things, be it music, composing, sports, and work. I don’t feel the creative spark, that uniqueness or that genius people say is inside everyone. How can I tap into that? How do I access this genius within me, be it in sports or music or relationships, or any other part of my life that can help me stand out from the crowd?

Lavery: That’s a great question. If you are doing what the crowd is doing, then you should probably expect the same result. If one is going to absolutely find this creative avenue and ignite the creative spark, then one has to basically travel down a road that very few people are willing to navigate; especially you have to practice the opposite theory.



Personally, I have not been watching the television and watching the movies of the modern world to any level of frequency, and the reason is because I believe it takes away from my creative ideas. I’m not looking in books for the answers. I’m seeking the answers from my own original awareness.

I formulate my concepts. I’m basically an individual that likes his creative freedom, and I don’t really care what people think about my concepts. I’m not allowing them to rain on my parade. I’ve come up with ideas that people mock me for, and then they’re working on me.

Yesterday I was doing an event with a golf tournament and these people looked at my creative methods of striking a golf ball, and they were just going, “How did you figure that out? What made you think about that?” I go, “Original acceptance of ideas”. I’m letting my right brain actually dictate a lot of my life.

I’m telling my right brain, “You silence that left brain,” and the left brain realizes that he doesn’t want to rain on the right brain’s parade, because the left brain is benefiting from a lot of things in life. My left brain is a very creative hemisphere of my brain.

There’s now proof that you can’t just box creativity in the right side of the brain, the left side of the brain. It’s the whole brain. There’s now evidence that the brain works as a hologram. There isn’t any one specific area where you can say that the memory of an event is placed right there. No.

Memory is connected all throughout the brain, and creativity and sports enhancement. The fact that the brain’s connected by a trillion cells, and that you just don’t have once cell going on and off. The brain works as a wave. It’s almost like a wave of water that’s coming towards the shore.

The wave is moving, and you don’t even sense that a wave just passed through you, because you’re on a boat, but as soon as it starts to hit the third reef, it starts to boil and the white water starts to actually effervescence. So it hits the second reef. By the time it hits the first reef, it’s going to be a huge breaking wave with a beautiful shape to it.

So oftentimes ideas and creative influences happen by coupling up our whole brain and thinking original ideas, but it’s kind of hard for a



person to come up with original ideas when one’s constantly being downloaded. Today we are a nation and a world of downloaders.

People walk around, they can’t even put their iPhone down. I mean, they’re walking into telephone poles now and light poles. They’re walking off the edge of a curb. They’re walking off the edge of a pier, because they’re so constantly downloaded and connected to media. They don’t even have any free time to actually think a thought thoroughly through.

Today we don’t have any composers that are creating music that rival Chopin and Bach and Beethoven and Mozart. It’s almost like we’re copying, but we’re not really creating original scores that one can certainly identify as original sound. We’ve lost that capacity in the modern world, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we’re constantly comparing ourselves to what we see on a screen, instead of saying I want to be an original, and we’re losing the individuality in our culture.

They say there’s no I in the word team. I happen to be an individual first and foremost, and we’re all succumbing to the team mentality. We have to belong to a party, an association, a church group. We’re crushing creativity and individuality in our culture. If one person wants to truly manifest their potential, one has to actually tap into the brain, research how the brain can be harnessed, and use the whole brain.

Michael: My question is, to best open up the brain and enhance creativity, what is the one key exercise I should practice daily, and how can I best apply it to my copywriting, and in parenthesis he says he writes business-to-business marketing communications, and I translate English and Japanese both ways. Thank you, Matt Bole, writing in from Japan.

Lavery: That’s a wonderful question. I think that he’s writing in two different languages. That’s a really creative thing to do because you have to know the Japanese characters. That’s a very creative transposing from one language to the other, and they’re completely opposite of each other in terms of the formatting.

That is causing creative energy to be unleashed. Again, back to the concept of creating original awareness through one’s copywriting, the more that one actually puts pen to paper and the more that one journals and have the consciousness, a stream of ideas that flow from



one day to the next, and the constant practice of this, and the constant storytelling and utilizing our capacity to speak properly.

This is one of the concepts that I’m constantly reminding myself to practice. Think the thought thoroughly through. Use variety. Avoid redundancy. Use the full plethora of your vocabulary. Be more specific and detail-oriented when you answer a question.

A lot of people go, “Okay, yeah. That’ll be fine”. I have a tendency to say, “I appreciate your recommendation, and I’ll have to do some research on your accreditations to be even more motivated to do some research on this field that you happen to be an expert in”. So that takes a lot more energy to speak that way.

Yesterday at this event, someone says to me, “If you spoke that way all day long, you would turn so many people off,” and I go, “To the contrary, my friend. People are interested in what I’m doing because they are losing it. They are not finding improvement”.

They’re in their late 40s or 50s, or even their 30s, and they’re already hitting the wall. They’ve hit basically that plateau where they hit the glass ceiling and they can’t break through, and they’re frustrated. So what happens to us is we don’t think things thoroughly through in our imagination.

The front part of the brain has a prefrontal cortex, and that’s where ideas are formulated. We’re not activating that part of the brain. We’re letting our amaglia, which is our reactive reptilian brain, do our talking for us. When one is aware of the usage of their language and avoiding redundancy, and are constantly having a variety of expressions and phrases, it makes the brain much more alert.

It makes the brain fire in these areas that are normally dormant. When one is a storyteller, and has the capacity to be detailed oriented in one’s description through both the written and the spoken word, one automatically has an enhanced ability to be a copywriter.

Michael: Robert has a question. He’s a photographer. He asks, Michael, a photographer needs to be simultaneously creative and physically precise in camera operation, steadiness of hand. Can your training help the millions of photographers create better photographs?

Lavery: If the gentleman has a tripod that he’s always relying upon, that’s going to give much better still photography because the camera’s not



shaking. One has the ability to be aware of their motor capacity and to be able to maintain steadiness of hand. One’s going to be able to actually set the composition and pan the subject matter so that we have the appropriate focal points on a particular image, and this is going to result in better photography.

If one actually has better drawing skills, one can be a better photographer. If one is looking at the juxtaposition of certain things in relationship to other subject matter, than one’s going to become more creative and people are going to say, “Wow. That photography is exceptional. What is it about this photograph that’s making it so attractive?”

It happens to be because we’re not mimicking each other, we’re finding an element that actually works in a photograph. There’s an old saying: Monkey see, monkey do. We have a tendency to mimic each other. When one is actually out there looking for that unique shot, and one has the capacity to see what elements are going to work and see in negative space.

See, there’s a woman that wrote a book called Drawing From The Right Side Of The Brain. When Betty Edwards was working with artists, she was teaching them to see the space around the object, not to see the actual subject matter but to see shapes in terms of abstract shapes. Photographers can also use the same methodology.

Take the abstraction of a representational image and see it as interlocking pieces of abstract shapes that can actually make a very interesting composition. When one is actually using drawing enhancement technique, a photographer would start to draw more. He would have a capacity to spontaneously find an image that is unique and very original, and that’s what we’re looking for.

Michael: Jerry Kuzma writes, Michael, as a writer and musician, I know well that the mind holds such strong labels and associations that it can be difficult to break out of mental ruts. Can you share a simple exercise that will help me to break out of this rut and into fresh creative ideas?

Lavery: This person’s coming from a musical approach, and the concept is very few of us are playing a musical instrument on a daily basis. We’re constantly being downloaded with other people’s creativity. This leaves very little room for our own originality to manifest itself.



I think that one has to be more childlike with one’s time, and whistle more, and hum more. Write down concepts. Constantly work on one’s ability to output stories. I’m a storyteller, and I’m a person that’s written quite a few original songs, and I use my life’s personal experiences to influence the way I write my songs because I think people are interested in original stories.

When you’re writing music, you have to use a lot of personal experiences. So how can you really write about something that you’re not familiar with or you’re not really in tune with? I’m an artist so I write songs about being an artist. I wrote this song called The Renaissance Man, and the words go:

I’m a Renaissance Man but the problem with me is I happen to be born in the wrong century,” and even though I did graduate from the university with that fine art degree, I found it difficult to bank on the creativity, and my old man didn’t quite understand as he was talking to mom. He was concerned where he had gone wrong with his son, a jack-of-all-trades, a master of none.

This is storytelling, and when I sing the song people find a lot of humor in it, and they find a lot of their own personal experiences in my lyrics, in my original thought, which is constantly flowing out of my brain. The reason that’s happening for a person such as me is that I’m really staying away from being downloaded.

If ideas are constantly flowing into your brain from the media, you can’t really have your cake and eat it too. You can’t be constantly bombarded by a barrage of information that’s part of the machine, part of the matrix, and than find an opportunity to have this original awareness well out of your system. It doesn’t happen that way.

Michael: No, that’s a good answer, and it makes me think, all the copywriters out there who stare at a blank piece of paper or blank screen, and they don’t know what to write, or they flip through all their swipe files that they’ve invested from all the people who are marketing copywriting-related products. The swipe files are a shortcut to creativity, but again, it’s other people’s creativity.

I think the copywriters in just what you said, and how you described writing your own song from your personal experience, many people; it doesn’t even dawn on them to write about their personal experiences.



They can find all the creativity within themselves, within their life, and it’s just right there waiting to be tapped into, but so many people are programmed to believe that other people’s material will be more creative than their own story and themselves. Does that make sense?

Lavery: It makes a lot of sense, because we’re constantly being judged by the work of others. A person says, “Did you see that art show?” I said, “No, I wasn’t really interested in seeing that art show. I’d rather be doing my art”. I really don’t even want to be influenced by the other artists. I don’t want to study their brushstrokes. I want to be original with my own.

Oftentimes people go and learn to paint, and then they have a professor, and it’s almost like the mutual admiration society. When you’re painting the way a professor likes you to paint, you get the A, but when you do something that he doesn’t appreciate, he gives you a C.

“Well, how come I got a C?” “Because your painting’s too detailed”. “That’s the way I like to paint”. “You don’t paint like me, and see this other person? They really were very expressive and creative with the abstract impressionism, and they got the A”. I’m looking at it. I go, “Yeah, that guy just slapped that thing together last night,” and there wasn’t really that much creativity there. He basically was telling a story about what the painting means.

It’s interesting. They did studies with monkeys and they gave the monkeys some paint and some canvasses. Then there were art critics that looked at the work and said, “This is absolutely a genius of renown,” and then when they found out it was done by monkeys they were going, “You’ve got to be kidding me. You fooled me”.

People read into things and say, “Well, that’s a stroke of genius,” when it’s really not. It’s what we think is genius. The whole concept about being able to have one’s own original thought, one’s own identity, essentially our world today has an identity crisis. We’re so bamboozled into specialization that we’ve lost our childlike thinking.

When you think about it for a moment, if you go by an elementary school with kids in first to third grade, there’s a lot of laughter. Ha, ha, ha. You can hear it, it’s laughter. Then when the children, they go into middle school, between sixth and eighth grade, there’s not nearly as much laughter now because it’s stating to get serious.



Cliques are forming. People are starting to basically criticize each other for the way they look, or their personal taste in things and clothing and such. Then when you get into high school, it gets even more severe. Then you go to a college campus, and everything’s so serious now.

We lost our spontaneity, our childlike thinking, that makes us have thiscreative surge. A lot of people, they don’t foster it and manifest it. I wrote a song called Boy-Man, and the words go:

I’m a Boy-Man, a Peter Pan. I live in Joyland and I sing songs by the sand. I ain’t no boy toy, I’m a real McCoy. The Robin Hood of my neighborhood. I’m a Boy-Man. See, in men of all ages, the voice within rages. Let me be the kid again, to play as if I was 10. See, back then I could be Robinson Crusoe, to [inaudible 20:19-20:20] like Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett, become Buck Rogers flying in my own space rocket.

I cowrote the song with another gentleman named Claude Ames, and Claude was inspired one day when he saw me. He said, “Michael, you are such a boy-man. Gosh, when are you going to grow up?” I said, “I’m not going to grow up. I’m a man but the boy runs my life,” and that’s the way I really enjoy living.

A lot of us have gotten rid of the boy in us, the girl in us. We don’t listen to the child, because the child is imaginative. You look outside the window at some kid in the backyard and the parents go, “What is he doing out there?” He’s having fun, honey. Leave him alone. Come on, you’re too serious about life. You’ve got to let that child be a child.

That’s what happening to our [inaudible 21:10-21:11] today. We’re not letting children be children. We’re kicking them into adulthood too early. If you want to be creative, go back and be a childlike thinker, and all of a sudden ideas will flow from you.

How often do you see a couple and the man might be cracking up, and the wife will say to the husband, “Honey, act your age, for crying outloud. I mean, shoot. You’re such a goofball,” but the guy wants to be childlike. He works hard to enjoy his play, but then we stop us from being playful, and that’s part of creativity.



Playful thought, imagination, letting one’s curiosity and spontaneity flourish, and when you constantly write ideas out. There’s a book called The Artist’s Way and it’s about constantly journaling. Then through the act of journaling comes this creative spark that you can build a huge empire around, one concept.

So when people are hitting the wall on spontaneity, they might want to read that book called The Talent Code and realize that talent is not necessarily something that you’re born with, but something that you actually grow. Creativity is something that you grow as well. The more you practice this creative concept of communication skills, and one of the greatest gifts that we have is the ability to speak verbally so then when we’re taking time to actually manifest our thoughts through creative detail-oriented speech production, it can influence our ability to express ourselves through the written word. That’s what a lot of people that are interested in doing in terms of their copywriting.

End of Part 3

Beginning of Part 4

Michael: Michael Armen asks, do you believe that an activity which includes word associations, for example working a crossword puzzle, is an effective way to stimulate the imagination and promote creative thought?

Lavery: Well, personally I don’t do crossword puzzles. I believe that the techniques that I use are actually creating more spontaneity and creativity because what I do is I harvest words out of the dictionary. I stay very attentive to the words that I’ve already chosen to utilize, and then I think around those words and I come up with something that is unique to the present.

I’m thinking on my feet, and I’m speaking with clarity. Oftentimes doing crossword puzzles is a regurgitation of known information. I ‘m interested in exploring the new, and I’m constantly working on being a wordsmith. So there’s a blacksmith, there’s a gentleman that’s a wordsmith.

A wordsmith is a person that becomes fluent with their native tongue, or multiple languages, and then is able to construct sentences one after another that actually is very much appreciated by the listener. One is absolutely maintaining the attention of the receiver of the



information, because there’s such variety, there’s such unpredictability in what the person’s going to say.

It all is coming from this concept of training the brain to be able to output ideas so that it almost becomes subconscious. If one is required to speak with much more description, and you say to the person, “I would really appreciate listening to more variety in your vocabulary,” and then they say, “Okay, all right. Yeah, I understand.” Seriously, can you speak to me and use more detailed orientation?

I want to hear three, four, five, six, and seven syllable vocabulary words. The person goes, “Why would I do that?” I said, “Maybe if you explained how you stumbled across the information, you might say, instead of ‘I came across this article,’ I serendipitously stumbled across this information, which had reminded me of some research I had done previously upon the way that Leonardo da Vinci stimulated his imagination.”

Think about speaking now with five syllable vocabulary words. You have to make a concerted effort to do it, and as a consequence, your brain is now more alive, and it’s firing, and it’s having to think around the mundane, bland speech production that we’re now completely indoctrinated by.

They’re now proving that most people that are savants have extraordinary activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, and most of the time these idiot-savants, as they call them, have had some type of deficiency or neurological damage to the more logical part of the brain, which primarily is located in the left frontal temporal lobes.

So when people such as the Rainman, the Dustin Hoffman character, when people such as Daniel Tammet have had these experiences of epileptic seizures, or a person has a major blow to a brain, a person such as Moe Norman, that was literally a ball striking genius. When these people are actually analyzed and we see a common trait of some type of injury or some type of birth defect, and we realize that this person is a savant, an idiot-savant.

The common denominator is there’s excessive amounts of activity that’s emanating from the right frontal temporal lobes of the brain. The good news is that we now have technology to prove that all of us have an opportunity to experience savant-like skills. It’s not as though we’re going to be able to have photographic memory, or become some



creative super-genius, but this is one of the ways that we can actually stimulate and actually have access to this creative vein.

Just imagine that creativity is a gold vein that’s in the mountain. You’re so close to getting in there, but then logic and deductive reasoning says this is worthless. This is stupid. Other people, they maintain the course, and they don’t give up on their vision. They have a breakthrough. They go, “My gosh”.

There’s a gentleman named Adam Vogel, and Adam used to work for a company called Global Debt Management. He was doing debt consolidation. His life changed radically. He started using my process of [inaudible 05:27-05:28] production and harvesting vocabulary words.

I would say, “Adam, you must give me five words that begin with A, five words that begin with B, C, D, E, F, G, that have five syllables each, and I’m going to put you on a stopwatch,” and he would be successful at doing this really quickly. He said, “Coach, this is helping me think on my feet,” and he improved his sales quota by 100% in a relatively short period of time.

He did so well working for this company that he actually left the firm and started his own music business, which was, for him, very bizarre because he didn’t really have much of an interest in starting his own music company. He created a new direction in his life, and he feels that it was the practicing of the tenets that actually initiated this.

Michael: Dear Michael, in this modern technological age where our brains are inundated with smartphones, tablets, PCs, and social media on top of our multitasking high demand work and job requirements, how does one set the reset button and clear the mind to stimulate an environment conducive to creativity and imagination?

Lavery: That’s a very interesting question. It’s difficult not to have to pull oneself away from these technological devices. I personally don’t text people. Someone sends me a text and I call them. “How come you just didn’t text me back?” “I want to speak to you. I’m not texting, I’m sorry.” “But that’s how we do business.” “I do business by speaking on the phone, so what do you want to speak about?”

What happens to us is we are constantly abbreviating everything. Everything now is in sound bites. You’re required, what’s it, 144 characters, and that’s it? That’s how you have to express yourself? If



you can’t express yourself in 144 characters, they won’t even talk to you?

What happens to us is we’re rushing through everything, and ideas are difficult to formulate because give it to me now; I want it now, now, now. I can’t wait for you to formulate these concepts and let them ferment. I want it now.

Essentially, this is not conducive to creativity and imagination. We’re having to try to reset the button. That’s almost like being on drugs and saying, “Okay. Now that I have to report to work, I want to be able to clear the drugs out of my system and be completely sober to do my job,” but it doesn’t work that way. Form is constantly enslaved by their tablet and iPhone and all the social media, on top of the multitasking demands of one’s work.

Then it’s difficult to be a double agent. My personal opinion about these concepts is, take serious time away from these gadgets. How about if you take a small vacation and say, “I’m not doing it. I’ll answer my cellphone, but I’m not texting, and I’m going to journal. I’m going to read some books that definitely have attracted my attention, and I’m going to practice some creative things in my life,” which would maybe include a musical instrument, maybe I’m going to write a screenplay.

How about a person actually writing their own book? I think everybody should write a book. Doesn’t necessarily have to get published. You could just write a short book. Write a short story. I mean, the art of writing short stories is now basically kind of dying in our culture. Writing an original score, how about writing words to a song and finding a musician that wants to actually put a score to your words? This is what will help hit the reset button.

Michael: Doug asks, Michael, what are the best mental and/or physical exercises that one can practice on a daily and ongoing basis that will promote a healthy creative imagination?

Lavery: Well, I think Doug should read Whole Brain Power and look at some of the drills that are in the Whole Brain Power Workbook. Practice ambidexterity in not only physical exercises but also in cognition drills. You can attest for yourself, Michael, that by doing the drills with Whole Brain Power, it’s definitely added to motor dexterity and you didn’t even lift weights and you’re healing your rotator. You definitely have changed your physique, and it looks like you’re in the gym, doesn’t it?



Michael: Yes, it does. I’ve had a lot of changes since integrating whole brain power daily into my life. I have to thank you for that.

Lavery: Michael, do you believe that you’re actually physically changing the myelin in your brain?

Michael: I absolutely believe. It’s evident by what I can do now and compare it to when I first started.

Lavery: So when you’re doing 4000 hits off of a sledge hammer, do your forearms display more vascularity?

Michael: Definitely. They get quite a workout.

Lavery: Okay. If your forearms are displaying more vascularity, don’t you think you’re getting more blood flow there? Of course you are. What happens now is if we are seeing our body transform through the drills in Whole Brain Power, then one can actually imagine that there must be more blood flow on the motor strip of your brain then prior to doing the exercises.

This is also aiding your brain vascularity. Your brain has the ability to make new hasilary systems. So when you’re flowing blood into the right part of your brain by doing things such as mirror image writing and writing out original ideas, and actually having to abide by this concept of thinking clearly through what one wants to convey verbally, it definitely changes your alertness. Don’t you think so?

Michael: I would agree with you.

Lavery: This is a behavioral modification. You now have been exposed to this concept so that when you go out in your environment, you see a common trait happen, don’t you, with people when you speak to them? People are not really avoiding ambiguity. Most times, people speak with a generality, and there’s a lot left up to question.

So people aren’t really utilizing the ability to speak and paint pictures with words, and that’s one of the secrets to doing great copy. One actually is able to form in the receiver’s mind the image through the written or spoken word, and this is adding to a very healthy imagination.

Michael: That is exactly it. That’s what a good storyteller and copywriter wants, and if he’s practicing this daily, then when he sits in front of his



computer, with pen in hand, with paper on his desk, he’s going to be much more apt to output creative copy if he practices this on a daily basis and uses some of the methodologies explained at wholebrainpowercoaching.com.

Here’s another question by Harry James. Michael, do you use visual tools, such as mind maps, to help stimulate imagination and creativity?

Lavery: I’m absolutely using mind maps and I’m doing this with the way I navigate through the 50 states. I’m seeing myself after I go to Colorado, I stub my toe in Boulder, Colorado, and then I have to jettison over to Connecticut where I was conned by a podiatrist, that I had to pay $500 for the advice of dipping my toe in Delaware where George crossed the river.

Then I realized that I wasn’t too far from Florida. So I went down and played a round of golf. Then I went back up to the Master’s, and the round at Augusta National. So now this is a map. I’m seeing the 50 states and I’m going around the country. I’m seeing myself at specific locations. This is my form of mind mapping.

I also know that the brain has four lobes on each hemisphere. So I know that I’m going into my right brain. I know that my using my left hand that I’m forming activity on the motor strip of my right hemisphere’s M-1 section where my propioceptors and my sensory neurons on my hand, on my left hand, are activating my motor strip and sensory motor strip in my brain.

What happens to us is we have the ability to use this mind mapping. This has been promoted by people such as Tony Buzan, where he talks about mind mapping and creating a tree of ideas that starts from the trunk and goes up the branches into the smaller extensions of the trees, where everything is connected. So this is a wonderful way that one can actually use imagination and tap into creativity, and uninhibited thought patterns.

Our right brain is very uninhibited. We need to get in there. When you paint pictures with words and you formulate concepts through both the spoken and written word, this is definitely adding to your ability to be a great copywriter.

Michael: Louis asks, how can we train our brain to look at problems from many different perspectives so we can create or design the best and most appropriate solution for the problem?



Lavery: That’s a really good question. If we actually look at a problem as being a chess game, and think about the fact that when two people are playing chess, they’re usually sitting down and they have the board on the table, but they can’t see things from the perspective of their opponent. They can’t get up from the table and look over their opponent’s shoulder at how the game looks from the other side’s point of view.

It’s an interesting perspective when you think about it in that way. Sometimes when you’re watching a person play a game of chess, you go, [inaudible 15:47-15:48] if you move your bishop over there, dude, you’ll put him in checkmate, and you don’t see that move, or you don’t realize that you’re going to lose your queen, because you’re inside the game.

Sometimes what we need to do is get outside of the game, sort of be affecting the outcome of the game from not being in the game. That takes a different way of thinking. That’s using your imagination. I’m going to rise above this problem, and maybe remove myself from emotional attachment. Maybe if I just look at the thing objectively, then I could come to a better conclusion.

Sometimes we get too emotional about things and we can’t really solve the problem because our emotions are running wild and our amygdalais actually overactive. Instead of thinking things thoroughly through, what we do is we basically react.

Recently in my own endeavors something happened which made me very upset. So I said to myself, I’m going to reason it through. I’m going to have a 48-hour window of cooling down, and then I’ll approach this person on resolving a conflict that happened, something that made me really agitated.

Instead of just getting on the phone and calling the person up and saying, “Well, this really upset me,” I’m saying to myself, just let things resolve. You don’t need to burn a bridge here. Just relax and let’s see if we can solve this problem. It’s going to work out fine.

Michael: Jim asks, how much of a role does visualization play? Much of the other materials, a/k/a psycho cybernetics, Catherine Ponder, etc., focus on self-image and imaging.



Lavery: Well, how much does the role of visualization play? This is the cybernetics. So psycho cybernetics is essentially seeing things happen. Almost what’s happening in What The Bleep Do We Know and The Secret. You have a vision board. A lot of people will adhere to this philosophy of you must be able to see your goals, and you actually have to have a vision board.

You’re constantly thinking about it, and you’re seeing yourself in that beautiful car, you’re seeing yourself being successful. You’re not allowing negativity to actually run your life. You’re seeing yourself in an elevated position. A lot of visualization happens.

I personally am a gentleman that sees things progressing for me. I’m an artist, and I’m a thinker, and I’m a musician. So visualization, definitely a major part of what I’m doing.

For instance, someone says, “Well, what do you suggest for this painting?” I say, “Well, I think that something that would be a really wide panoramic would work for this particular environment in your home, because of the nature of where the painting is hanging. If you’re always going to be looking at it from eye level, then you definitely want to have a high horizon line”.

So I can see in my mind what I want to do, because I’ve always constantly accessed the right side of my brain where visual images are forming. So to the question, a major role is involved with visualization, and as far as focus on self image, you have to essentially see yourself as a winner.

If one is seeing themselves as a loser, and then you have this identity crisis and you think that you are basically inferior, then you are going to emanate that vibration. When one thinks that one is deserving, then oftentimes things start to manifest for them. This is part of the whole concept of quantum physics, and I think, therefore I am.

Michael: Michael, which academics and authors were the biggest influence on your way of thinking regarding imagination and creativity? Whom do you most relate to?

Lavery: I am more of a thinker and an original idea manufacturer. I’m not really into reading a lot of novels. I like information about the brain, and I’ve read a lot of information on how to expand the brain. I’m really a fan of Harry Lorayne. I’ve read Tony Buzan’s works. I’ve read some of Michael Gells’ works.



I’ve studied a lot of art history. So a lot of my influence has been from that of Dante and the concept of how genius is actually stimulated through the process of whole brain thinking. A lot of my influence has been through imagination, self-induced. You either are a participant or a spectator.

End of Part 4

Beginning of Part 5

Michael: Michael, here’s a question from Linda Michael White. Michael, I am a 72 year old widow. I would like to study to become a brain coach. I just signed up for your course, Whole Brain Power Coaching. I have a good imagination. How can I tweak it?

Lavery: The concept of tweaking your imagination is something that’s self-imposed. You have to have a burning passion for this type of activity, and one of the best ways to tweak your imagination is to do things that would be considered to be creative, such as writing original thoughts, poetry, drawing, doing water colors, maybe oil painting, playing a musical instrument, composing an original song.

Imagination is really about originality. It’s not necessarily the regurgitation of what you’ve already known, but a concept or an idea that is uniquely your own production of thought. Everything starts with thought. So when you are trying to take your brain to the next level by forming visual imagery, this means that you’re using the right side of your brain.

So one of the best ways to activate this is to start understanding how the brain can be trained and what technologies are out there that can actually prove that the right side of the brain is much more active than normal. Most people today have, literally, a left-brain dominant working brain because the media is doing all of the processing for us.

So it’s forming all these images and giving us all these ideas, and giving us radio and stereo and CDs that we can listen to. Most of us have consented to be spectators. Instead of being the actor or actress on the stage of life, we’ve resigned ourselves to be in a position where we’re sitting and watching or sitting and listening instead of being proactive and actually invigorating the brain through coming up with something that would be unique and completely something that you manifested on your own accord.



That’s where my suggestion is for you. We all have the potential to brainstorm and to come up with something that would be completely unusual, and one of the greatest ways to deal with it is to put pen to paper, especially beautiful cursive penmanship, or even calligraphy. So when one is formulating the idea, it just doesn’t evaporate.

A lot of times people have great thoughts, but they literally dissipate into the atmosphere. You go, “Gosh, I had this great idea. I just can’t quite figure out what I was thinking about and all the details and nuances of this original concept. I was going to write this letter, and gosh, now I’ve kind of lost it,” but when you’re proactive every day, and you’re writing in a journal, as in an artist way, and you’re putting your ideas to a permanent record through the pen and the beautiful shapes of letterings, these ideas become permanent.

You’re able to reflect and go back to them, and you’re able to utilize this in your own endeavors of being a great copywriter or a person that is able to write stories, or even books. This is the edge that anybody will have if you practice this on a regular basis.

Everybody else will be tapping away their ideas on a keyboard terminal, and you’re putting your original thoughts in a journal. Now you can transpose those to the copy that’s basically the accepted medium that people are used to looking at. This will be your secret.

People will say, “I can’t believe it. Your copy is so good. These ideas are just so original. How are you doing it?” Well, you might want to share it with them, or you might want to retain that advantage that you have because of the fact that you’re originating these ideas the old-fashioned way. The old-fashioned way worked pretty good. There’s a lot of great stories out there that were originally manifested through penmanship.

Michael: Here’s a question from Pat Scholar. He says, Michael, so when trying to be creative for content on a specific niche, is it better to brain dump all the information from the broader niche and then narrow down, or narrow down right from the start?

Lavery: That’s an interesting term, brain dump. My concepts have to be reiterated in terms of other endeavors that I’ve done. I’m an artist. So when I see this composition in my mind, I sort of see the overall composition. From there, I detail it. If one gets too detailed early in a painting, oftentimes things can get out of proportion.



So the generalized idea is what we’re first after, and from there we build into the nuances and the details that we’re after. The overall broad spectrum of the concept is our original goal. From there we refine it. That’s why you have the 1st draft, 2nd draft, and 3rd draft, and sometimes even the 10th draft before you’re ready to present your final product.

If one gets too detail oriented right away, then oftentimes you’re missing the mark. You need to have an overall general scope of what you’re presenting to the person that you’re interested in attracting attention.

Michael: If you had to distinguish out one or two of the most critical elements to stimulating originality, what would they be? For example, habits, practices, ways of thinking, etc.?

Lavery: I often see people that, as we age, the child in us goes away. I think that one looks at being creative, but we’re compromised with our creativity because we’re not listening to the inner child inside of us. Watch children play. Watch children draw. They’re not so caught up with the critical aspect of their brain.

Children happen to be very right-brained, and then we teach them to be left-brained. So oftentimes what happens to us is we’re hypercritical. Just imagine that your right brain is the creative genius, but the left brain, the older brother, is constantly badgering and teasing the younger brother, saying, “You’re stupid. That’ll never fly”. So a lot of times creativity has to be let out of the bag, metaphorically.

You have to open Pandora’s Box and you have to go with the flow and stop the left brain’s over analytical attitude towards things. The integrator is the right brain and the analyzer is the left brain. So when one allows the right brain, the integrator, who sees the whole picture to fly freely without interruption, oftentimes great ideas manifest, but if you’re always hypercritical, worried about what people think, you’re never going to really step outside of the box and present an original idea that’s very novel, where people go, “That’s fantastic. How did you think about that?”

Well, I let my left brain basically stay on the sidelines, and I allowed my right brain to manifest its uninhibitedness, and its intuition, and its passion, and its compassion and empathy, and it really tied me back to



my childlike activity. See, the way the brain works as a child is that it’s free and open.

Ask a kid that’s seven years old what they want to be when they grow up, and they tell you they’re going to be a baseball star, a doctor, and the President of the United States. If you ask that to a 30 year old man, and they tell you that answer, usually they’re asked to go see a psychiatrist.

Michael: Kim Armstrong has a question for you, Michael. He says, it has been said by a lot of creative minds that there is nothing out there truly original. Everything is an adaptation of a product or idea that has come before. Living in the Information Age that we do, how does one sift through the haystack of information out there to find that one idea that can lead to a revolutionary breakthrough? Are there any tools or techniques you recommend to use in directing one’s focus?

Lavery: I believe that from my own experience, one of the greatest ways to stimulate originality is through the mirror writing. Leonardo da Vinci was a mirror writer. I’ve been doing thousands of pages of mirror writing. When one starts to initiate mirror writing, you’ll look at your writing and say, how did I even think about that concept? That’s so wild.

It’s as though the brain is stimulating its own hallucinogenics. So our brain is a pharmaceutical factory, and we come up with radical ideas when we let it free flow. However, because we live in the Information Age, and most of us, 99.9% of us, are constantly inundated by visual stimulus from, essentially, the [inaudible 09:52-09:53], however if you do artistic expression through doing drawing, through doing painting, through sculpting, through looking at things in an abstract way, of course you’re going to have an original idea.

So there are new things under the sun. Even today we think that jeez, that’s already been done. Someone else already thought about that. That’s not necessarily true. We have all kinds of new concepts that will be coming on and innovation. So one has to stay open-minded and not think that we’ve already seen everything and done everything.

Michael: Here’s a question from Dennis. He says, I don’t seem to have as much trouble with creativity as I do getting distracted from my creative work. In other words, thoughts of outside pressures and the mundane seem to ruin what is usually the most enjoyable part of my work. Do you have any suggestions of how I can stay more focused?



Lavery: In today’s society, in today’s economy, a lot of times people aren’t getting compensated for what they’re truly worth, and as we have noticed, the cost of living goes up but our wages aren’t going up in relationship to the inflation index. A lot of times people today are stressed by the mundane of having to pay bills, having to be stuck in traffic. The world’s way more competitive. There’s a lot more distractions in the world.

So if you have creative concepts, then you have to basically give yourself an opportunity to stay creative in these windows where you say, right now this is an hour to two hours of time dedicated to my creativity, and I’m going to turn off my amaglia, I’m going to stop that reactive brain, that fight-or-flight part of my brain, from interfering, and stops me from the flow that I’m achieving.

For instance, if a person is up there in the afternoon and they’re playing a round of golf, they should just shut off the cellphone, they should shut off all the concepts of what am I supposed to do in this business relationship, and just focus at having fun. What happens to us is our brain gets scattered. Sometimes people might even be in a condition of ADD or ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

So oftentimes you have to basically look at the brain and say, brain hemispheres, we’re going to have some creativity going on right now. Let’s not think about having to go down to the Post Office and deliver that package. That can wait until tomorrow morning.

We’re in control of our thoughts, and we have to tell our brain that we’re wagging it. It doesn’t wag us. We’re the big dog and the brain’s the tail, metaphorically. We tell the brain what it’s going to do. We stop these concepts right in their tracks, because we get distracted. So we basically have to focus, and doing the penmanship, and doing the journaling, and writing your ideas down, and staying after these concepts is one of the best ways to do it.

These concepts are spelled out explicitly in our wholebrainpowercoaching.com site. So please give it a thorough investigation.

Michael: Here’s a question from Stefan. Michael, how do we get past the self-sabotaging mechanism of the mind to use what you teach in your Whole Brain Power Coaching system?



Lavery: That’s a great question. What I tell people to do is make a fist out of both hands, and butt them up next to each other, look down on them. You tell the brain, metaphorically, that this type of activity is no longer acceptable. When people have their self-destruction mechanism on, that’s called the amygdala. The amygdala has been part of our brain anatomy since we’ve been human.

Oftentimes in the past it’s saved our life from a confrontation with a wild animal, or to escape death’s doorstep by evading some arrow or some club or some mortar shell. This part of our brain, the amygdale, is on constantly in the modern world because we are constantly being stressed passively.

So when one stops the passive stress and says I need some quiet time, oftentimes people are trying to be creative with some serious rock-and-roll music in the background. You’ve got no control over it. You’ve got some DJ, you’ve got some commercial, and you’re always being bombarded. The constant is to [inaudible 14:39-14:40] the amygdala, quarantine its activity, and allow for a free flow of ideas, and have some calmness.

Back to the game of golf. If a person’s trying to make a very important putt, usually the crowd isn’t cheering. The officials say, “Quiet, please”. The person needs to concentrate. In the modern world today, we have so much white noise in the background that’s constantly distracting us. I think that we need more quiet time, we need more self-reflection, and then we’ll find that inner peace and that zone. We’ll be able to find that meditative state, that alpha state, where we can actually tap into our creative powers.

Michael: Here’s a question from Shalley Bay. So much of what is commonly being taught is contradicted by modern neuroscience discoveries. What is the best way to protect one’s self from old and bad inaccurate information?

Lavery: If you look at the ocean, it looks like the sun is going into the sea. There’s still people living in very remote regions of the world that believe the world’s flat. We believed the world was flat until we were able to prove it through telescopes and modern astronomy. People have a certain dogma by which they live, and the concept that the right brain is only creative and the left brain is only logical is now actually being put to rest.



The brain is way more complicated. It shares information. The left side of the brain has creativity emanating from it. The right side of the brain has logic emanating from it. So if one says a woman has certain personality traits, only that would be part of a woman’s personality make-up and a man is a certain personality, or a lawyer has a certain personality, all we’ve done is we’ve basically blocked things.

We’re now realizing that it’s way more integrated, and there’s a lot of concepts about neuroscience that was happening 40 years ago that’s being completely torn down now. They told us the brain couldn’t make new neurons. The brain constantly has neurogenesis.

They say that if we had certain brain damage, the brain couldn’t repair itself. The brain is very plastic. The brain can reroute itself. There are many case examples of people that have completely removed a brain hemisphere in a young child where the person grows up to be completely normal acting.

So the brain has way more flexibility then we ever perceived it to have. One has to stay open-minded and realize that a lot of concepts about the brain that we established decades ago are completely false in relationship to the new information that’s coming on the market.

You have to just basically keep an open mind, and there’s a lot of people that will give you resistance and say that’s a bunch of hogwash. One has to keep the eye on the prize, and the concept is that we have this technology now that totally confirms that the brain is a work in progress, like we’re a sculpture and it’s a wet piece of clay.

We can mold it, and we can develop talents, and we can learn way past the window of opportunity that was once said to close. So if one stays optimistic, one can absolutely tap into the power of their brain.

Michael: I’ve been using holosync technology from Bill Harris. They’re CDs, and I’ve been doing them for about an hour a day for about 10 years. While in alpha-theta state, use affirmations, which haven’t seemed to produce any results. Do affirmations actually work?

Lavery: Well, I’m not up on holosync technology by Dr. Bill Harris. However, I do believe that visualization methodologies can work. However, one can visualize something all day long about getting a new car, or moving into a nicer house, or winning the lottery, but my concept is to become way more proactive.



If you’re going to write a book, you can’t just think about writing a book. You’ve got to actually do it. If you’re going to get better at playing the guitar, you can’t just be thinking about playing the guitar better. I mean, it does work in many regards, and they’ve done studies which prove that people can actually think about playing a musical instrument and get better, but there’s nothing to substitute good old-fashioned hard work and practice.

Perfect execution of your practice makes for perfect practice, or perfect play. So essentially a lot of people are living and dying by this concept of visualization, and we have the history of The Secret. The Secretwas very successful. The Secret was very successful until the economy hit the skidders, and when the economy went over the cliff, then a lot of people said The Secret’s not working for me, because I was thinking that my boyfriend was going to get me a new necklace, or a new diamond ring, but that didn’t happen.

A lot of times people are disappointed with the concept of visualization. I think the thought has to manifest first, but one has to actually do it. I can think about doing a painting all day long, but if unless I do that painting, it’s not going to manifest itself.

End of Part 5

Beginning of Part 6

Michael: Here’s a question from Rafael Martinez. How would you be able to develop this new creativity skill and retain it when my life is void of any free time to set aside to learn a new skill like this? Also, how can it be developed so that when it matters most, I’m executing at the top of my game all the time, or at least most of the time?

Lavery: The concept that you’re void of any time at all for creativity is, as far as I’m concerned, absolutely unfounded. Everybody has time for creativity. Think about it. Get up in the morning. Get in the shower. You’re in the shower for 5 to 10 minutes. You have time to think original thoughts.

You don’t need to bring a TV set in the shower now, or the radio. Do you have to have the radio playing on in the background? Can’t you have some silent time to yourself? Can’t you do some of the exercises? Can you think an original story? Can you write a poem? Can you write a self-deprecating poem about yourself? Can you be funny? Can you tell a joke? Can you mimic somebody’s voice?



There’s plenty of time for us to be creative. We’re in our car. Most of us spend thousands of hours in our cars within our lifetime. I mean, if you could actually add up how much time you’re actually sitting behind the wheel of an automobile from the time you first started driving until the time you no longer need your license, it is thousands of hours.

So we have plenty of time to be creative. Think about how much time you’re watching TV, how much time you’re doing mindless surfing on the internet, how much time you’re reading some National Enquirer or some recreational reading when you can actually be creating something original. There’s definitely time that you have on your hands. So just start applying yourself.

I take it that you’re a carpet cleaner, Rafael, and you have plenty of time to think original thoughts when you’re working solo on your job. If there’s this two to three hour job that you’re doing, you could do the states in alphabetical order and make up a wild story, or start to learn the peg system, or even memorize some literature or memorize a deck of playing cards, where that takes a lot of creative energy to be able to assign three different names to each card.

So that’s 156 names that you’d have to have. Those would be nouns, and you would have the verb, and then you would have the actual celebrity associated with that card. I explain how to do this original awareness on my wholebrainpowercoaching.com site. Hopefully you’ll investigate it.

Michael: Here’s a question from David. I would like to know what you believe are the primary factors that keep many of us focused on mimicking the style and originality of others instead of owning our own unique style, experiences, and creative expression?

Lavery: Well, there’s an old saying that we’re keeping up with the Jonses. So we’re always looking over the fence and seeing the grass is greener over there. It’s all perspective. What happens to us is we are constantly looking at what everybody else is doing. We go, “Whoa, that’s working for him. I’d better start doing that myself”.

So we have mirror neurons in our brain. These mirror neuron systems are essentially copying what we see. It’s the 100th monkey concept, and literally what we do is we mimic each other. What happens is we try to improve on what somebody else is doing, and give it our own edge and our own creativity, and put our own mark on it.



What happens to us is we’re constantly being inundated with the media and how to think. So essentially it’s a think tank, it’s the thought police. Basically what’s happening to us is we don’t have enough of our own time to reflect and to be creative, and we’re constantly looking at what somebody else has done and saying, “Well, it’s working for them. I guess I better start doing it myself”.

Someone says to me, “You can’t have a letter that’s 11 pages long for copy. You can’t have this copy that’s going for 15 pages,” but some of the most successful copywriters have some of the longest letters ever. One has to basically use the frontal lobes of the brain and activate the prefrontal right hemisphere of the brain, and form visual imagery, and constantly be on guard, the amount of media that we’re being exposed to.

So if a person wants to write music, you can’t just be listening to other people’s music and saying they used A minor, and then they went over to G, and then they went over to B minor, and E minor. No. You have to practice your guitar playing or your musical instrument and create your own original melodies, and that’s how you’ll have something that is uniquely your own. This is my advice to you. Practice, and you’ll start to experience some original thought.

Michael: Here’s a question from Ronald. Michael, I’d like to come up with blue sky, or out of the box solutions to everyday problems. The problem I encounter is the negative feedback I get from my associates, family, and friends. How do you tune out the negative responses you get to innovative ideas and solutions?

Lavery: You have to understand that we are always looking for acceptance from our family, friends, and contemporaries. So when one steps out of the box and thinks originally, and has a concept that is deemed to be absurd or never going to work, then of course the moral majority’s going to say, “That’s so stupid”.

We’re birds of a feather and we flock together. When one sinks and soars with one’s creativity as an eagle, and you have a whole bunch of turkeys hanging around, of course the turkeys aren’t going to soar with the eagle. One has to realize that you’re going to be ostracized. You’re going to be ridiculed when you come up with great ideas.

Great ideas are always mocked by the population at large. One has to just put up a deflector shield and have a thick skin, and realize it’s



going to be water off a duck’s back. When I was doing mirror writing, for years people looked at me and they go, “This guy’s really losing it,” but now people go, “Does that mirror writing help you play guitar? Does that help you hit a golf ball better?” Of course it does.

Then they start practicing it, and they go, “Hey, you wouldn’t believe what I’m doing now”. I said, “Well, I do believe it”. One has to be true to one’s self, but if you believe that your concepts are valid and that you’re enjoying being creative and you’re not hurting anybody else, then have it.

With our Whole Brain Power Coaching program, we’ve developed instruments in terms of templates that you can practice these creative concepts, and to do your mirror writing and to work on your fine penmanship. You’ll find all this at wholebrainpowercoaching.com.

Michael: Clark wants to know, how can I change myself using the powers of my brain to go from a poor performer in a job to a star and shoot to the top of the banking levels, and become a director that is highly paid? I can’t seem to focus and make a success of anything.

Lavery: One of the greatest gifts that we have is our ability to communicate. Our creativity and the way we actually relate our ideas to other individuals is one of the greatest assets that we possess. I believe that if you became more creative at your writing in terms of your penmanship, in terms of journaling, and putting out a stream of consciousness that completely makes sense, that’s completely applicable to your endeavors in your banking world and your association with other people in the same industry, and you elevate your intelligence and you improve your ability to articulate yourself and speak with grammatically correct English, you raise the bar and people that come into your inner circle realize that you’re extremely well spoken.

This is going to give you an intrinsic advantage on your competition. This is something that I practice constantly. Articulate your thoughts in your frontal lobes of your brain, and then think thoroughly through what you want to convey to somebody. Then speak grammatically correct English. If you do this every single day, you will elevate your position in life.

Oftentimes people will scrutinize us by the way we communicate verbally. When you’re speaking to someone on the phone, you do not have the access to look at that person unless they have Skype. So



what happens now is you’re judging that person on the way they communicate verbally, and your full plethora of vocabulary usage is a must. These are some of my ideas that I hope you appreciate, and hopefully you’ll visit wholebrainpowercoaching.com and get onto the program.

Michael: Michael, here’s a question from Patrick. He says, Michael, I will be 64 years young next month. I live with the challenges of extreme ADHD, which is a double-edged sword. What protocol can I apply to cause my brain to focus on a train of thought or task in such a way that will help me to truly stay on task and follow through to develop the success I know I am capable of?

Lavery: Well, my suggestion is that you create a to-do list. If you’re extreme ADHD, then this means that you are not in control of your impulses. So you start to do something, and then you get distracted to do something else. My suggestion to you is to start getting on all the tenets of doing whole brain power.

You’ll find that at wholebrainpowercoaching.com. Get into the handwriting, get into the hammer drills, get into the memorization drills, and distract your brain from being in a state of mutiny. To continue to answer your question, Patrick, regarding your extreme ADHD, you have to ask yourself a few fundamental questions.

How much television have you logged in your lifetime? How much free time have you wasted? Have you ever disciplined yourself for playing a musical instrument? Have you ever disciplined yourself to doing memorization? Have you disciplined yourself to play sports? Have you ever stuck to any endeavor where you did it on a daily basis? Have you ever developed beautiful penmanship? Have you been playing video games, or do you play computer-type of games such assolitaire or speed chess on the internet?

These are all questions that you have to ask yourself. I don’t know your behaviors. You’re just a person that’s asking these questions. So essentially I’m answering them blindly, but this brings to mind a story about a man that’s now 26 years of age. He started doing Whole Brain Power Coaching approximately eight months ago, and his life was in a tailspin.

He was unemployed. He was playing video games about six hours a day. He was watching a lot of violent movies. He was basically floundering. He was feeling as though he was aging prematurely. He



was anxiety-prone, and he was experiencing mild depression. That man’s life has changed immensely since joining the program.

My recommendation for you is to take a serious look at your habits and change those habits, because there’s still plenty of time in the ballgame to change your direction in life. Patrick, if you visit wholebrainpowercoaching.com and you invest in the program, you’ll hear Nathan Thomson’s 50-minute interview where he explains exactly the transformations that he experienced once initiating the Whole Brain Power program tenets.

Michael: We all hear about the Napoleon Hill quote that he got from Andrew Carnegie, what the mind can believe and conceive, the body can achieve. What can we do to make ourselves believe in what we conceive?

Lavery: I think one of the concepts behind Napoleon Hill and his book Think And Grow Rich, and whatever the mind can believe, the body can achieve, it really all starts back with thought. It all goes back to the brain. We have the initiation of a concept, and then we can actually speak that idea, we can write that idea, we can actually perform, and we can send signals from our brain to our body to achieve motor skill enhancement.

My concepts for you would be to start to journal, start to work on your penmanship, start to work on writing out what you want to achieve, and make it realistic. Think about going on the Whole Brain Power Coaching program and start to improve your motor skills, start to improve your mental acuity, start to improve your cognitive function, start to improve your working memory, your long-term memory and your short-term memory.

Start to improve your ambidexterity skills. Start to improve your vocabulary usage. Improve your ability to communicate verbally. Start to sing. Start to do things that will be considered to be whole brained. I believe the revolution is whole brain powered thinking. We no longer have to work on the model on which one side of the brain is essentially the non-dominant side. The brain should work as a completely functioning, integrated whole brain powered organ, and that’s my inspiration to you.

Michael: Besides extreme tools like drugs and binarrow beads, what are three simple things a person can do to increase their ability to instantly gain focus and clarity? We all want to feel limitless, just like in the movie.



Lavery: My suggestion is you would get on the Whole Brain Power training program, because the tenets of whole brain power require phenomenal discipline and focus, and it’s all detailed oriented. You have your assignments. You have the tools. You have the hammers. You have the penmanship. You have the memorization. You have the ambidexterity training. This is totally making a person dedicated and focused.

You cannot have a wandering mind and stay after these drills. You must stay focused. So what happens to us in the modern world today is we are completely bombarded by media, and we are totally distracted.

Michael: Conrad has a question. What can I do to enhance and strengthen or develop my ability to think quickly on my feet? I usually think of a good answer or solution after the fact.

Lavery: That’s a very good question. This is how I train my clients. I ask them to think the thought thoroughly through, and then to articulate grammatically correct English every time they respond to a question. Most people can’t do that, because they’re amylgala is running the show.

So most people will reply, “Okay, yeah. Right. Okay,” instead of saying, “I’ll make a concerted effort to abide by the rules of engagement’. We don’t practice our phrasing; we don’t practice our response to things. If one isn’t exposed to social interaction with people on a regular basis, then one is at a disadvantage.

You have to practice your ability to communicate to people, and one of the greatest ways to do it is to journal. If you’re not writing out your ideas and your innermost thoughts on a piece of paper, and you don’t have the ability to express yourself through the written word, then you’re going to be compromised when you’re having to communicate your responses to people in vocal expressions.

So my suggestion is that you practice. Be an actor. Play the role of a person asking you a question, and then how you would respond. For instance, if a person gets stopped by a police officer and the police officer approaches him, if the person has their hands on the steering wheel, it makes the police officer much more comfortable because he knows where your hands are.



What happens now is as he asks you to roll down the window, he sees your hands. Now he’ll ask you some questions. “You know why I stopped you?” “Officer, I’m unaware of why you stopped me, but I’m listening to every one of your commands,” because when a person isn’t prepared to deal with stress, one fumbles. You have to constantly practice as though you are the lead actor in the play.

Every person is a production, essentially. I’m using a metaphor. Everybody is the actor on the stage of life, and you are also your producer. You’re also the director. So your brain can be controlled. Oftentimes people will say, “My G-d, I wish I had said that to this person, but I fumbled”.

If a person ever has a microphone stuffed in front of them and a TV crew is there because you were there by accident, or you’re a witness to a tragic event, or some phenomenal experience and the person’s on the evening news, and they go, “My G-d, I was so bad there. I didn’t even know what to say. I was fumbling”.

So you have to practice your expression. You have to get a dictionary. You have to find words that you want to utilize in conversation, and then you grow your working vocabulary base, and then you practice it until it becomes subconscious. Then these problems dissipate completely.

michael senoff interviews brain expert, michael j. lavery ... · michael senoff interviews brain...

Documents