Brain Fact Friday ”Priming the Reticular Activating System to Achieve Our Goals in 2023” A Tribute to Bob Proctor

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost: this is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” --Henry David Thoreau from Walden Welcome back to The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast where we bridge the gap between theory and practice, with strategies, tools and ideas we can all use immediately, applied to the most current brain research to heighten productivity in our schools, sports environments and modern workplaces. For returning guests, welcome back, and for those who are new listeners, I’m Andrea Samadi and launched this podcast almost 4 years ago, to share how important an understanding of our brain is for our everyday life and results. On today’s Episode #272 we will cover ✔ An Introduction to Season 9: Going Back to the Basics by revisiting our past Brain Fact Fridays. ✔ A reminder: What is the Reticular Activating System and How Can It Help Us to Achieve Our Goals. ✔ A Review of The Creative Process or Turning a Fantasy into a Fact. ✔ Priming Our Brain to Set Worthy Goals  ✔ What the Most Current Brain Research Says to Help Us to Improve Our Goal-Setting Process ✔ Research-Based Tips to Prime Your Brain to Achieve Your Goals in 2023 This season (Season 9) we will be focused on Neuroscience: Going Back to the Basics as we revisit our past Brain Fact Fridays, narrowing in on how anything new from the field of neuroscience can be tied to improving our productivity, our results, mental and physical health. Why are we going back to the basics? When we are building something worthwhile, something that we want to last, going back to the foundations will help us to strengthen our understanding of our brain, and our mind, to our results, providing us with the extra strength we will need to overcome the obstacles and challenges that will come our way. My hopes are that this step backwards will help us to become better prepared to move forward, towards our goals, or whatever it is that we are working on this year, with this strong foundation in place. Today’s EPISODE #272, we will go back to our very first Brain Fact Friday, that we released as a BONUS EPISODE on March 5, 2021[i], called “Using the Reticular Activating System to Set Your Intent and Achieve It” and we will dive a bit deeper into how this system in the brain (our RAS) can actually help us with whatever it is that we want in 2023. But before we get to the science behind our goals, I want to take you on a trip, that goes back to my early days of working in the seminar industry, with motivational speaker Bob Proctor, who taught me how to dream. You can watch our interview on EPISODE #66[ii] where he marvels at how he watched the dream I envisioned all those years ago reveal itself over the years, as I took his work, and created a book for teens to improve their grades, their results with sports, or sharpen their skills, that eventually was made into an online course. I remember talking with Bob about this first book, The Secret for Teens Revealed[iii], (that was really just my notes that I’d gathered over the years listening to him in the seminars helping adults to achieve their goals, written so that a teenager could apply it), and I remember telling him that I thought there was something missing that was preventing kids from embracing the concepts written within the pages. We all know how learning works, and how important it is for a student to be engaged and motivated with whatever it is they are learning.  He picked up on what I was getting at, and affirmed that  “it is missing something very important” and went onto a lesson for me, standing in this hallway at this seminar he was speaking at, about the Creative Process. He said “you’ll want to think about how the creative process works” and then he got on the phone and called someone and put me in contact with someone who would take the words in this book, and help them to come alive, visually, with video, he suggested. I never did end