MindStore Part One: Before the course

There are many authors of books on personal development in the world, and many different techniques for reaching your goals, but for me MindStore has to be the daddy of them all.


I recently booked a place on my first ever course with MindStore. A one day "best-of" in Glasgow, one of my favourite cities.


Glasgow holds many good memories for me as this was the place where I went to sit the 14 ground examinations for the Commercial Pilot's Licence. The workload was crazy, and the levels of stress high, but in the end I succeeded in passing all 14, and each time I returned home on the train, I relaxed with the knowledge I had done my absolute best and I was confident of success.


I now find myself booked to return there for the next phase of my development, with a totally different goal in mind.


For those of you unfamiliar with Mindstore and it's charismatic leader Jack Black, all I will do is point you to his website, and let you fill in the blanks. This post is not a review of Mindstore or a comparison of different techniques, but how they work for me, and how they may work for you.


One of the most important techniques Mindstore outlines is that of 'programming' your day. It is to easy to fall out of bed, grab a coffee, rush to work, and spend the rest of the day lurching from one catastrophe to the next. And don't you see these people on a morning! They're usually 2 feet behind your back bumper, full of stress, rage, and in a state of complete unconsciousness. With the Mindstore method you spend time in a relaxed state soon after waking when your brain is producing natural alpha rythms, and you use four imaginary screens to plan out your day. The past, present, future, and consequences screens. For me, this works a treat. When I don't do it, I tend to have a bad day, when I do take the small amount of time (usually no more than 5 minutes) to programme, my day tends to be a very good day. And I mean this sincerely. If you don't plan, then chances are you will spend your day living someone else's plan. So I really do find that a short time engaged in planning can bring huge benefits. Like Jack says, it only works.


Now before you say it's all a load of coincidence, fate, random etc, I will point out that Jack's customers include Cadburys, GlaxoSmithKline, BP, NatWest, John Lewis, IBM, and others, along with many other non corporate individuals like me who subscribe to their methods.


A quicker method of accessing the power of your right brain and the alpha state is to use what MindStore calls the "Tip of the tongue trigger" and this is done by taking three deep breaths and placing your tongue on the roof of your mouth just behind your upper front teeth. Studies by brain scan have shown that this produces instant alpha rythms, and this enables you to come up with new ideas and harness the full power of your creativity, as well as programming parking spaces and taxis!


Another great technique is what Mindstore calls the "Night Book" and this is a book that contains descriptions and pictures of your top goals, and what you do here is to review this every night before you go to sleep. As your relax and move towards sleep, your brain goes naturally into Alpha rythms, and your subconscious mind can now get to work programming your goals and bringing to you the places people and resources need to achieve them.


MindStore has many other techniques, and I won't even try to list them here. They are in a constant state of development too as Jack overhauls, tweaks, and refreshes them to maintain their relevance in a changing world.


What Jack seems to have done is to distill the very best parts of the last few thousand years of personal development techniques, and put them all in a neat easy to use package. I look forward with great interest to seeing him deliver this course first hand, and see if the techniques I will learn about will bring real change for the better into my life.


Like many personal development programmes, MindStore has it's skeptics, but there are far too many success stories for it to be considered coincidence, so I think that as I intend moving into personal development as a way of life and as a career, I would be foolish to ignore it. While I have used some MindStore techniques before, I haven't really felt like I was doing them properly, and I felt a need to see the course delivered in person to get a handle on what to do and what not to do. 
I will arrive with an open mind, and a new notepad, and I will report back to you once I have completed the course. I will put into practice the tools and techniques and you can be the judge of how successful they are. Jack says that "They only work" and I think I'll take him at his word.