All posts by Sophie

Long term memory…


Connecting the dots… Cognitive performance… Cognitive activity… what am I talking about?

Cognition, according to the dictionary is “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.” Acquiring knowledge means: it stays… NOT merely understanding. You’ll see why later in this article.

As clients get better results nowadays, I am now really motivated to get better myself, to be able to help them get even better results.

So I read more books, watch more relevant videos, have extra conversations to home in on what isn’t working as well yet as I hoped it would, and what would.
How do I learn?

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How high can you go from where you are?


I monitor visitor behavior on my site… to see how they treat my articles… I spend a few minutes a week, in the morning. It often gives me an idea of what to write about, what to teach next.

This article is a result of that few minutes of looking today.

Oh, I mostly look at people who signed up to get an email notification each time I publish a new article… by the way. Those people have expressed interest, so I want to see what people who say “I am interested” are doing.

There are two kinds of “readers” that I have detected.

The first kind reads the whole article, reads the footnotes, and then returns later and reads the article again.
The second kind skims the articles. Skims 2-3 articles per minute, looking for something interesting to read.

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Fix Broken Sh!t First… AKA: remove what is broken


Fix Broken Sh!t First; I got an email with that title this morning, so I am using it. This is the perfect title for this article…

You see, human nature is weird… It tries to fix everything by throwing stuff at it making it more broken. Add stuff…

When you have indigestion, or when you are sick, or when you are tired… You want to put food on it. You buy stuff… You throw sex on it. Coffee on it. Complaining on it. The kitchen sink on it.

I have noticed that anything anyone says about you or your stuff triggers a self-protection mechanism, as if you have anything about you that is not perfect means you are wrong, or don’t deserve to live, or maybe deserve to die.

Totally out of proportion reaction to the size of the threat.
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Bored, listless, desirous… check your biology


Since it got really cold in Syracuse, NY, I have been having a difficult time maintaining a high level of cell hydration. Why? I keep my apartment cold, and I get sore throat from drinking cold water.

By last night I was running on empty. I had a hard time concentrating, I had a hard time having a good time. I had cravings… not food… mental craving. I had cravings for stories.

Last night I had wild and slightly violent dreams, and felt no desire to do any work this morning. I got up at 3 am.

So for the past three and a half hours I have been watching youtube videos…
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Is your life, the way you make your money, your living arrangement a good match for you?


I wrote this article seven months ago… and some of the emails I get tell me that people what to stay the same, do different without changing, changing themselves, or changing anything about themselves.

It is not going to work.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news… but someone has to tell you… reading a book, even taking a course won’t change you… and therefore won’t change anything…

At the end of this article I’ll share one thing that happened in the last day or two, that changed a long time student of mine, at least temporarily… read on…

As I am working on BecomeAnIdeaMachine, this is my second day of this spiritual practice, I notice that I am already looking wider than yesterday.

I am not feeling well, the psychic attack is strong, so I am a tad more intolerant than my usual self.

Intolerance normally manifest in me in distaste…

I thought I’ll check out Bosch, the televised version of my favorite detective… I closed it after two minutes.

But I had an insight that can be really significant for all of us, so let me put it into words here.

Ever since they put out the pilot of the Bosch series, I have seen how important the role of the person who casts the actors in the success of a film or a series.
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Principle: Make your plane land on the landing strip, regardless of the weather


I have been “harping” on this with my students: hear the principle first, and then hear the rest…

If I asked you (Cinderella) to separate the wheat from the chaff… what would you do first? If you are like me, you first find out what is the difference… in looks, in weight, and then start separating them accordingly.

I even used to use this capacity (oh, forgot to say, it’s a capacity!) to hire or not hire someone to work with me. I would ask someone to separate a pile of things by their category…
For you Everything is the same as everything else … except not always
Universally missing capacity… I found out.  The underlying capacity can be said with these words: be able to tell the forest for the trees.
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Are you stuck on the binary level of thinking? Let’s look


Most people, 99% of the time, are stuck on the systemic judgment level… where everything has an opposite, and it is either one or the other.
Binary thinking. What is Binary Thinking? Binary thinking, also known as dichotomous thinking, happens when even complex concepts, ideas, and problems are overly simplified into being one side or another. The gray area in the middle is ignored or goes unnoticed. Binary thinking helps us feel a sense of certainty.
Another way of looking: reality is 3d… Your thinking is binary… No match. No astuteness. No correct actions possible.

I used to live there in the binary. In fact every young child lives there… It is the under 3’s whole world… Binary.

But I was already an adult… And yet… I was utterly miserable… I was like an automaton… Kill it/love it, no in between.
Until 1998…
I was 51 years old when I saw it. Then a 15 year long process to get out of it…

It began with the idea of things are on a continuum… Not on a binary switch.

One of my Landmark coaches said about herself: Who I am is fully expressed greatness… And I heard the continuum for the first time.

I am not either great or sh!t… I can be great, even very great, and yet express just a little bit in one situation, and a whole lot more in others.

I can always look where I am at, in any given moment and say: OK… I am here… And be well. Strive to express more… But be really OK being exactly where you are at.

It didn’t turn on the capacity, because I already had the capacity… But I was almost 50 when this happened… And before that I had nothing between the two extremes… I was either great or not great. Either smart or stupid. Either accepted or not. Either respected or not. And the same about everyone else.

I could not see gradation and therefore I could not even look to see what made me express greatness less, be less smart, be less accepted, be less respected, etc. Because that didn’t exist for me.
And you can’t be responsible for what you can’t see… Not possible.
So that was the first turnaround for me.

The sentence: If it is to be, it is up to me suddenly made sense. Suddenly I saw no situation where I had no power… I always had some power, more or less, to influence the outcome.

Upon looking at this capacity I get a surprise: muscletest says: everyone has this capacity… And yet only about 1% of the time is it used… Is it seen… the rest of the time people just stay in the binary realm.

I watched this video with Alex Hormozi: he sees it as the number one reason people cannot move forward, people cannot use coaching to grow… Because even after showing it, they insist on the binary.

We can safely say that my personal evolution began with seeing that things have a gradation…
A whole new world opened up for me, the world of gradual, the world of shades of gray, the world of growth. The world of personal power.
Until that point I had no personal power… Because
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What is the 91% linchpin that keeps your foot nailed to the floor? Can you guess?


My job is a lot like tuning a car… but a car that has 160 adjustable parts… like a human… not so easy…

I love the joke about the guy who brings his car to the mechanic because it doesn’t work properly. The mechanic opens the hood, listens to the motor running, goes to his toolbox, picks out a big hammer and hits the motor, and voila the noise stops.

Then he writes a bill for $500. 500 dollars? cries the customer? for one hit with the hammer? Oh, you want an itemized bill? No problem. says the mechanic, and writes: hit with a hammer: $1. Knowing where to hit: $499.

I am that mechanic.

All the problems are invisible to the naked eye, maybe even to an X-ray machine! So it’s taken me seven years to learn where to hit… $1… learning it, a lifetime of experience and expensive learning: $499.
The sticky part

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Explained… the only path to happiness is…


Explained: That is the name of one of my favorite shows on Netflix.

We all walk around with some approximate knowledge of things… we know absolutely nothing exactly, deeply. At best we remember what we read, heard, but that is second hand knowledge. In a world where PhD’s have 7-10% truth value, second hand knowledge is virtually worthless. Even if you had the ability to repeat word for word what they said, your knowledge would be still just 7-10% truth value… sound dismal, doesn’t it?

So we are bumbling idiots in a world that is too big and too complicated, and unpredictable, and fuzzy for our taste… and we bang ourselves up, repeatedly, for no other reason than that we didn’t know.
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Alive Inside


I have been going to Senior exercise classes for two years now, and my life has a high point every week: the exercise class.

I just watched a documentary and I found out why. The documentary is introducing music through personal headphones and ipods to people with Alzheimer’s and dementia, showing that they come alive, and their memories, at least temporarily, return, and with it their sense of being a person, and joy.

I live in silence… and dance at the exercise class. I don’t have a radio, don’t have a TV, so I don’t listen to music, but when I accidentally do… I party. I celebrate… OK, too much information? ok… I shut up.
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