My neighbor has a bearded dragon which most of us would call a lizard. He says when the mother has eggs in the wild, she will dig a deep hole and deposit them, then cover them up. The parents never see the babies.

You can’t put the babies in with the adults because if it moves, its food to them. This is the basic lizard brain; eat or be eaten, fight or flight. Until the last 100,000 years when man’s brain doubled in size and added two new brains we had the same reactions.

Now we have the ability of discernment. Our lizard brain hasn’t changed, but the limbic, neocortex, and prefrontal neocortex can analyze the lizard brain input and make new decisions.

But our basic instincts are the same; run, save yourself!! So how do we get from fearful to fearless?  Well the truth is, we are rarely fearless if something is important. If the outcome is in doubt, then we fear not getting what we want.

Two things I have learned about fear. We fear something because we see it as being larger than our capability. If we can take smaller bites, we reduce it to manageable size.  Secondly, if we don’t base our whole lives on the success or failure of this one achievement, we won’t be so fearful.

On the flip side, if we see our happiness and identity as very distinct from any single success or failure, then the event is even less intimidating. For example, if we have trained for something and now comes the test, we will have some anxiety. Depending on what the outcome means to our lives determines how much anxiety we have.

To continuously have the courage to face meaningful events, we have to have a concept of our selves as being so much more than any one achievement and also know that failure to reach a short term objective just requires a new strategy and more time. (Read Life Begins at Inspiration)

To really enjoy life, we want to have meaningful events every day. So yes, we can develop a capacity to manage fear. I have seen this fear management called taking leaps of faith. We don’t know what will happen, but at the moment of trial we have to face the fire breathing dragon.

The fact that we are willing to face the dragon to test what we think we know, is the only way to get from one side of the gates to the other. I keep learning this lesson in surfing. In my first lesson, the instructor says you have to trust that standing up is more stable than riding the board until it slows down.

I have kept testing that axiom and found that it is 100% true although I have had fearful moments in its execution. I have stood up before I knew what would happen and rode through a crashing wave and found that I made it to the front of the foam and was home free.

There is that moment where it either happens or doesn’t that creates the need for courage. Whether or not it happens, that moment is where the adrenaline exists. That’s when the lizard brain is alive.

So the first necessity is the commitment. The second necessity is to have accepted the results in advance regardless of the outcome. The third necessity is to know that this is not the beginning or end of our lives, but just another great adventure.

When you learn to face off the lizard and look for excitement with courage as your friend, you can go through those gates to heaven every day.

Download  Free 17 page E Book “Life Begins at Inspiration”

Download  Free E Book “Inspiration and Leadership vs Boredom and Death”

See Video  Inspiration http://youtu.be/U3NgzQ9Pcsg Life is Like a Cup Of Coffee

Purchase Patt Lynn Kyle’s Book Heal Your Mind and Rewire Your Brain around $12.

Look for my new upcoming E Book, “The Will to Win”

Ever have a day where everything goes wrong?

Some people even sum up their lives like this.

There are a lot of things that cannot be controlled. Sometimes coincidence even creates the perfect storm that wrecks our day, career, or relationship.

Jonathan Fields a well known blogger signed a lease to open a yoga studio on 9/10/2001.

But as long as mother nature isn’t after you, you have another day to live, love and be you.

You are more than the events that surround you. They are just events.

Your life is an experience that begins when you are born and will continue until you die, so you have lots of time to make up for bad events and still blossom into the perfect you that was born.

But if you are not appreciating who you are and in the process of becoming more, your life will be the events. This is why people can get suicidal.

Take stock of yourself. You are a bundle of energy that can produce results in any direction your mind points. You are a physical body that can enjoy the input of 5 senses.  The last of the four brains formed in your skull is the one that separated us from animals.

It gave us the capabilities that made us humans. It has a center that monks have found is actually a happiness lobe that can be reached directly through practice.

Evolution or God or however you want to see it, gave you capabilities to be happy and peaceful and loving and kind. So start building the you, you were meant to be.

Being you does required discipline otherwise your life will be all over the place. Get focused on developing your body and mind to operate at optimum. You don’t need to be an Olympic athlete, but exercise everyday or every other day will balance your brain and your mind.

Proper nutrition starting from eliminating the bad stuff and transcending to mostly the good stuff will support your body and your mind/brain.

As you start to see an improvement in how you feel, your perspective of your possibilities and potential to reach other goals will open up. Discipline can lead to commitment. Commitment will be required to achieve any worthwhile endeavor.

Commitment will be necessary to overcome bad days. So commit first to being the best you that is separate from all events. Then commit to putting the best you to work to make a contribution. Bad events only take down people who don’t know who they are.

See a video on http://youtu.be/VkCFeNeqyHk Don’t Ever Quit

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Download Free E Book   Inspiration and Leadership vs Boredom and Death

Email me if you have a good story.

I know this is a bold statement. It isn’t completely crazy.

I don’t want my tomb stone to say “He was a great exerciser”.

But lives like focus and balance. If you were in the highest of states like a monk, you might release yourself of needing to have a life of purpose, but most of us aren’t there yet.

We seek purpose and meaningful activities. We want fulfillment. We want peace. Boredom to many is a result of taking too many wrong turns or a lack of opportunity.

Life for most needs direction. Even if we don’t have a goal, movement into the positive sets up capability when the opportunity we seek arises.

Let’s get control of our own rhythms. Let’s set up our mind and body so that it is operating at its optimum. Let’s get prepared to take on bigger challenges. Preparation breeds confidence.

Confidence creates courage. Courage is needed to accept risk. Risk is needed to advance into something meaningful.

Exercise requires discipline and the desire to explore our potential. It runs a parallel path to finding out who we are as productive individuals in the career world.

As we exercise we are in tune with what our body is telling us. The mind wants to say stop but the will says the body can do more. As the body does more the mind gets on board and says “let’s do this thing.”  The mind might get excited and start setting higher goals.

Exercise should be done in patterns of high output and low output. We should test our limits and on other days give the body a rest to build our reserves. The mind and body should get in concert with what is reasonable and what would be exciting.

In exercise there are no upper limits or ceilings.  As we contemplate the reality that we can accomplish surprising feats of endurance we realize we can do the same in other realms.

We have trained the mind that with a little courage, some risk and forging forward with a will to be more, we can accomplish what we previously thought was not attainable.

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Download Free  8 page E Book   Inspiration and Leadership

Download Free 17 page E Book  Life Begins at Inspiration

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. The truth is you can.

Neuroplasticity is the term given by scientists to the adaptability of the brain to take on new challenges. In fact, if you start something new, the parts of the brain that are challenged will grow.

What shrinks the brain’s capacity is continuously feeding the same old thoughts and especially if they are negative. You can actually wear down the genes.

2500 years ago Buddha categorized our need to be special as suffering. Today we call the continuous striving for success, acknowledgement, and material possessions as stress. This striving takes us in the opposite direction of happiness.

“Our culture creates high standards for success that most of us can’t meet..” Patt-Lynn Kyle

It is difficult to find happiness when we try to win what we think are important measures of success instead of finding our own process of self expression.

Rather than place our center on what others expect of us, we need to explore what we can be. We need to start on the inside and work to the outside. We need to evolve. We need to develop our talents and find a place for them.

We can start with personal leadership. By developing the discipline to guide our own energies and drives, we can direct our focus into meaningful activities. I like to start with the discipline of building my exercise and improving my nutrition.

I take control of my own mind.

Then I like to point my focus to things that have importance to me. It is best to have just a few things that we concentrate on and try to minimize the distractions. Boredom has been categorized as being caused by too much input into the brain minimizing its ability to focus on meaningful activities.

If we are always connected to music and messaging, and cell phones, the brain never has the necessary downtime it needs to refresh. Even the body needs to rest from exercise.

Take control of your body. Reduce your distracting inputs. Focus on a few meaningful activities. Set up your concentration and rest on these activities just like you do in your exercise program.

Create times and rhythm patterns for when you do your best work. These times have to have priority in your schedule. I write best in the morning and usually write from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. in my first session. But I will get up at 2 a.m. to write if something hits me that I want to capture.

Your prime focus has to have top priority. I build in boredom time two or three times a day to refresh my creativity.  By building in boredom, I actually can be more productive.

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Inspiration and Leadership vs Boredom and Death

Very few people are inspired and most people are bored and stuck. It takes courage and discipline to start your process moving, but once under way there is no stopping it. Eliminate boredom forever.

Free 11 Page E Book    Download Now

Competition is buried deep in our psyches.

We don’t even know why we enjoy competition. If we are not capable of  athletic competition, we still enjoy watching it. Aren’t most of us arm chair football, basketball, baseball, and tennis competitors?

If we have played a sport and these days most women have played soccer or swam in their youth. They are doing most everything men do. It helps us enjoy the points where you really need to perform in watching a contest.

We know where the mental mistakes are and we know when the pressure is on, who is able to perform at the highest level. And that is where it is most  exciting and where we get the adrenaline rush; who can pull it out in the last two minutes.

The difference in many contests is who feels the greater entitlement to win. Everyone wants to win, but when the pressure is on, who can enforce more positive energy on their opponent.

When I watch Roger Federer play tooth and nail into a tie break and then win the crucial points because he won’t be denied, I realize I am seeing entitlement at the highest level. Peyton Manning has it and not only Drew Breeze but his coach Sean Peyton.

Some athletes cannot be denied. Some teams cannot be denied.

The reason we love the rush is because we wish we could transfer it to our own lives. Our own lives are dreary by comparison to a big athletic contest on TV.

We often live lives that have no challenge other than paying the bills. How much courage do we have to do something meaningful? We get trapped into something that pays and don’t have the freedom to do something for which we really feel passion.

We wish we could face that last two minute drill, or do we? We love James Bond and Harrison Ford because they face death and only quick thinking and great skills help them escape death.

Maybe deep in our psyches we remember stalking a wooly mammoth or eluding a saber tooth tiger. We remember deep in our DNA what it was like to feel the adrenaline rush of survival every single day.

Now our lives are milk toast by comparison. How dangerous is filing papers or talking to a prospect on the phone. It’s just not the same. Our souls cry out for more.

Most people will say they don’t have and can’t find a passion. I realize how surfing satisfies a large part of this need. Each time the circumstances are different. You can be successful in catching a wave and you can get smashed if don’t do it right. When the wave is moving, there is a big adrenaline rush in facing which outcome is going to be your fate.

How can we find adrenaline without being physical? I also find writing creates an adrenaline rush for me. If nothing else, can I put my thoughts on paper. Can I do it every day?  I used to look for courage in physical feats and I found the non physical feats were more difficult.

How can we challenge ourselves to test our minds and our will? How many people cannot control their diet or muster an exercise program. These two items would be the first move off the couch to test our will to win.

How about doing work or art or developing a skill in which we are not adept? How about learning a language or becoming more proficient on the computer or learning how to manipulate the internet?

There are quite a few things we could start that would require mental toughness and therefore commitment to see through. But isn’t that the toughest of all challenges we don’t have the will to face—Commitment?

Vince Lombardi said “Everyone has the will to win, only a few have the will to practice.”  It’s the everyday fight in the trenches to develop the skill necessary to face a major adversary that we don’t have the will to face.

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Download Free 11 page E Book  Inspiration and Leadership vs Boredom and Death

How to take control of your desire for inspiration by building courage and discipline. Personal leadership is the first step out of boredom and towards a life of excitement.

Finding Happiness

The economic environment has changed. With the change, many of the old rules and goals for finding security and happiness have been destroyed. Companies are not employing. We need a new strategy for success in our work  and have to redefine the meaning of happiness. This is a two part book and the first part is Free.

Part 1   Happiness and Work Free 8 page E Book. Download

Part 2 Life Begins at Inspiration Free 17 page E Book.  See Below

Life Begins At Inspiration

You are perfect and meant to be here now. You can find the right way to express who you are by using the energy that is waiting to pour through you. You have the same opportunity as the those achievers you admire most.

Free 17 Page  E Book Download

I hadn’t exercised in a few days and knew I needed it. I like to run up the 40 wooden stairs between my street and the beach. I can look at the surf while I’m working out and see everyone biking and walking their dogs on the boardwalk below.

As I started, my mind said this wasn’t going to be a good day and I probably wouldn’t be able to do the stairs many times. I attributed it to just my body being out of rhythm or tired although I felt it shouldn’t be with the two days rest.

As I kept repeating the climbs I was thinking my body felt fine regardless of the cautions my mind was throwing at me. I soon went past 20 climbs which is my average and decided to try 40. I soon went past 40 and headed for my record 60. I decided to prove my mind really didn’t know what it was talking about and set a new record at 80.

I was somewhat inspired by my daughter Alex who recently tried out for her college travel soccer team that is one of the best in the nation. She made it and just wanted to prove to herself that she could.  We are continuously testing ourselves to prove we can achieve and break the shackles of our mind’s limitations.

The mind can be a natural inhibitor. It wants to sit on the couch at home and watch TV rather than try something new and adventurous that could result in failure. Its basis is the lizard brain which warns of danger, warns of starvation when you diet, is worried about rejection if you want to meet someone, and is worried about getting tired if you want to push your body.

The mind has limited energy and courage.

The Spirit is connected to endless energy. The earth is part of the endless energy of the universe that has planets spinning and orbiting and bodies of water charging and receding.  There is power in hurricanes, tornados, lightening, and earthquakes.

Man is capable of vision and dreams and power that can connects him to the energy that is constantly flowing in waves through our atmosphere. He has an emotional energy that when properly connected can push him to phenomenal heights of physical and artistic achievement.

The mind feels most comfortable coloring inside the lines. Wonder where that came from? Coloring outside the lines is throwing caution to the wind.

To really find out who we are, we have to get outside of our minds. We have to connect to the boundless energy of mother nature and let her help us express ourselves. We are the wind and the tides but we can cook and write and paint and dance and sing and whatever it is we want to do.

The next time your mind says you can’t do something, try not listening.

Download Video   http://youtu.be/VkCFeNeqyHk Don’t Ever Quit

Finding Happiness

The economic environment has changed. With the change, many of the old rules and goals for finding security and happiness have been destroyed. Companies are not employing. We need a new strategy for success in our work  and have to redefine the meaning of happiness. This is a two part book and the first part is Free.

Part 1   Happiness and Work Free 8 page E Book. Download

Part 2 Life Begins at Inspiration 17 page E Book.  See Below.

Life Begins At Inspiration

You are perfect and meant to be here now. You can find the right way to express who you are by using the energy that is waiting to pour through you. You have the same opportunity as the those achievers you admire most.

Download Free 17 Page  E Book. 

Where as you and I might never tackle a big guy, the loss of spirit could keep one from getting out of bed in the morning or all day.

Nothing can pin a big man down as fast as the loss of spirit.

It is powerful.

It is hard to believe the highs and lows that can be created by Spirit. It isn’t just brain power.

When we connect to our force, it can push us beyond human expectations or endurance. It can push through unbelievable challenges. We might attribute great feats to adrenaline or emotional desire, but the will is behind any great feats.

And yet a few unkind words can wreck a spirit. We humans don’t really understand our power. We don’t understand energy.

We are like a million volt transformer that is or is not plugged in. With all the power of nature that could be harnessed and channeled through our will, some still stay stuck with boring jobs and not hooked up to the available  juice.

The emotions are hooked to the brain, but spirit can connect us to revelation, vision, and dreams, that harness emotion and create powerful energy.

I watched waves yesterday come to the shore and release the energy that had been in their swell maybe from across the ocean. A swell has great energy that reaches the shore and dances for a few minutes as a wave and then the energy is gone; forever.

It’s like humans. We are born perfect with the ability to tap an emotional energy that is connected to the power of the universe. And then we are gone. We are born and we have time to dance if you choose.

It is a shame if you don’t tap into expressing who you are. It is where your joy and real happiness lay hidden. The other day I was out with 25 surfers enjoying great waves in the sun and I thought this is a real play ground. Time after time we harnessed the waves for a big smile into shore.

I have noticed how even Seagulls and Pelicans revel in the energy of the wind often sailing down the coast at 30 mph without having to flick a feather.  They are enjoying a gift.

The earth and life are like that. You have to kick up your heels and overcome all the reasons that would keep you stuck. You have to forget judgment. You have to find someone who really supports you and tell them what outrageous goals you have.

All the stars are playing in the Universe and you are entitled to shine for a few minutes.

See a great video on Inspiration   http://youtu.be/dCgYXAJOvkk Inspiration

Download Free 17 page E Book  Life Begins at Inspiration

This is an introduction to a new E Book I just completed. I have written so much about inspiration and realize the hunger for Inspiration and flight from Boredom have a lot to do with our pursuit of happiness.

The problem is partly with the definition we have grown up with for happiness. Happiness has so often been defined as the result of something else happening first.

In the past 50 years, life was more predictable and we created paths and goals. It was clear if our parents worked hard they could have a good life for themselves and their children.

More recently it has been touted that if you got good grades and went to college you could get a good job and have a better life than your parents.

But everything is gone. Parents have seen their investments halved and retirement plans often scuttled. College graduates can’t find quality jobs that have real personal meaning.

The future is extremely uncertain.

Now what is happiness?

It has to be redefined. But the glass can be seen as half full. This is a real opportunity to find the true meaning of happiness.

Happiness is not really the result of an event or accomplishment that creates happiness. That, at the most is temporary satisfaction. If our happiness is a function of an event, then we will soon be looking for another buzz.  Even a QB winning the Super Bowl soon wants to win another one.

Happiness is a constant state of mind that says we are happy with who we are and why we are here. It is not job related and we are not our jobs. At the most our job might be an expression of who we are but it is not a definition of who we are.

We have to see a larger picture.

In the attached video from YouTube, “Life is Like a Cup of Coffee” the producer makes the point that we often miss the real significance because we seek happiness in things.

Real happiness would be a revelation to most people or an aha, if they had not stumbled on it before. It has to be acceptance of the fact we are perfect as we are. We are not really more perfect in the Universal sense if we lose 10 pounds; that is vanity.

Real happiness is having the opportunity to express our appreciation of who we are. Inspired chefs, football players, writers, singers, have a passion for what they do. They are happy expressing themselves in the most complete manner they can muster.

The modern world has minimized and trivialized who we are. We have often become widgets. We are destroyed by the economy because our happiness is tied to our surroundings and possessions.

Before modern times, man was self sufficient. He was connected to nature. He understood the order of things. It is time to regress to our feelings of self sufficiency but incorporate the advantages of the modern era to express ourselves.

We don’t need to kill wooly mammoths anymore, partly because since then, evolution gave us two additional brains; the limbic and frontal cortex. Now we can muster our courage, develop discipline, and use our brains to create someone that has a new perspective.

We can develop personal leadership where we grow and then  we inspire those in our closest circle.

It is time to break the chains and reclaim our entitlement.

http://youtu.be/U3NgzQ9Pcsg Life is Like a Cup Of Coffee

Finding Happiness

The economic environment has changed. With the change, many of the old rules and goals for finding security and happiness have been destroyed. Companies are not employing. We need a new strategy for success in our work  and have to redefine the meaning of happiness. This is a two part book and the first part is Free.

Part 1   Happiness and Work Free 8 page E Book. Download

Part 2 Life Begins at Inspiration Free 17 page E Book.  See Below.

Life Begins At Inspiration

You are perfect and meant to be here now. You can find the right way to express who you are by using the energy that is waiting to pour through you. You have the same opportunity as the those achievers you admire most.

Download Free 17 Page  E Book.