Mastery and Genius Cycles Part 2
Money, Mission and Meaning
Mark Michael Lewis
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Episode 30 - Mastery and Genius Cycles Part 2

In this episode Mark Michael Lewis of RationalSpirituality.com continues his description of how you can learn to get good and getting good at things. He explores the power of distinctions and describes a six step process you can use to become a master of any part of life – then how you can use it to make a tangible difference in your daily life.

Transcript

Transcript

Welcome to Money Mission and Meaning, Passion at Work, Purpose at Play: I’m your host, Mark Michael Lewis from MarkMichaelLewis.com, author, entrepreneur, and life coach, and you're listening to another edition of Seven Minutes To Success And Satisfaction, a series of short, to the point and practical ideas to help you Create Pleasure and Profit in the Business of life. 

In the previous episode, we introduced the fundamental importance of Genius cycles, so that you can get good and getting good at things, and explored the first 2 of the 6 steps of a genius cycle.  Now, let’s finish with the last 4 steps of a genius cycle and explore how to use it to make a tangible difference in your daily life.

The first two steps of the genius cycle are straight-forward, and we naturally use them around everything we are interested in, #1) Focus your Attention on something, and #2) notice or Distinguish patterns that occur in that something, in this case, how you feel 20-30 minutes after a meal. So, after you focus your attention and distinguish patterns, step #3) is to


          3) Re-Cognize the Pattern - Make it Distinct
         

As you maintain focus on how you feel 20-30 minutes after eating something, you will notice that some patterns recur again and again while others don't.  Each time you distinguish the same pattern it becomes part of your cognition, it gets imprinted on your cognitive processes, and you Re-Cognize it - you recognize it.

Each time you recognize the pattern, it potentiates your brain's ability to recognize it again, almost like wheels wearing grooves into a road.  It becomes easier to distinguish in the future, and it becomes more and more distinct in your awareness.  This is step number three: to focus your attention on the patterns you are distinguishing until they become distinct “things” in your awareness, so that when it happens again, you can recognize it and say “ahhhh, there it is again.”
         

Again, by breaking the process of a Genius Cycle down into its simplest elements, we can clearly see the pattern and be sure we are moving step by step in learning this fundamental skill.

So, as you run genius cycles on how different foods make you feel after you eat them, you might notice that there is particular type of heaviness or weight that you feel after particularly carbohydrate laden meal.  The more you focus your attention on that feeling, the easier it is to recognize, until you might find yourself saying “ahhhh, there is that heavy/weighty/yawny feeling I often get after eating starchy foods - I know that one.”
Now, the interesting thing is that even though you have felt that feeling a thousand times, it isn’t until you run the first three steps of the genius cycle that you connect the food to the feeling, because they are separated by time. 


So here is the first trick to understanding the power of Genius Cycles. – With each step of the Genius Cycle you perform on any aspect of your experience, the more that obvious facts you have been blind to, become apparent and obvious.  And THAT’s what genius is.  It is recognizing the obvious that no one else sees, then using it to create something that no one else can create.


Second, it is your ability to recognize patterns that allows you to create breakthrough insights that other people will call a genius, but which are obvious and straight-forward to you.


Now, once you have maintained your focus long enough, and have begun to experience these clearly distinct patterns in your experience, if you are ready to move on to the fourth step.


4) Make it a Distinction


Although we distinguish and even recognize patterns in our experience routinely, in order to turn them into the stuff of Genius, we must be able to use those patterns as objects of thought.  We must be able to easily manipulate and reason with them in our mind, like the concept “dog” or the image of a triangle.  We need to move our recognition from a distinct experience to a distinct concept or what can profitably be called a “distinction.”
To do this, we have to abstract the essence of the pattern, and differentiate it from other patterns, then assign it a symbolic representation, the simplest and most common of which is a name or a word.


For example, as you notice the particular “heavy” feeling you have after eating a baked potato or French fries were a lot of bread, or some other carbohydrate laden meal, you might give it a particular names such as a “carb crash.”  Now, once you have given that set of experiences a name, once you have given and abstract representation of that experience and given it a name "car crash," that you can use as an object of thought, it has moved from a distinct experience into a distinction.  It is now an abstract thought which you can apply it at will because you have a name for it, sort of like being able to pull a book down a bookshelf because you know its title.  Naming it and then using that idea in your mind is one of the most powerful ways to solidify that thought so you can begin to think with it precisely, with power.


And this is where the outrageous value of the genius cycle begins to evidence itself.  This is where we move from the unconscious process of just “noticing whenever it is that you notice,” to consciously understanding your world in a way that gives you power to recreate it consistent with your desires.
To Do What Matters, Well.


Because once you name that feeling as “CARB crash,” you can begin to integrate all of that experience into the totality of your human knowledge.  Until you abstract your experience into a distinction within name that you can manipulate in your mind, all of the patterns in your experience are unconscious and separated, like they are in small silos in the different realms of your experience and they cannot communicate with one another.  However, once you begin to name patterns you experience as distinctions, then you can begin to integrate and combined patterns from all areas of your life and begin to notice higher level patterns that allow you to make choices that other people don’t even perceive.  And that leads us To The fifth step in the genius cycle:


5) Experiment With The Distinction Through Conscious Choice


          And we are out of time for this episode, so we will explore the remaining steps of a genius cycle in the next episode.
I’m Mark Michael Lewis, host of Money Mission and Meaning, Passion at Work, Purpose at Play, on PersonalLifeMedia.com and this was Seven Minutes To Success And Satisfaction, providing you practical tools to Create Pleasure and Profit in the Business of life.  Make sure to subscribe for this pod cast on iTunes, or to learn about my books are audio programs on relationships in spirituality go to mark Michael Lewis.com
For text and transcripts of this show, or to get archives of previous shows, goto www.MoneyMissionMeaning.com, or check out all the great shows on our network at www.personallifemedia.com.  Talk to you next week.