Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success

Chapter 1

How to Reprogram

Your Brain

What does it take to rewire a brain? Not much. You only need three things, and one of them is optional:

Focus

Repetition

Emotion (fear, happiness, hate, love, passion, etc.)

You can rewire brains fastest with an emotional turbocharge, but focusing on and repeating a reframe without emotion will also get you where you want to go eventually. Your brain builds new structures in response to whatever stimuli you’re pumping into it. Focus and repetition move an idea (or reframe) from conceptual to physical, meaning physical changes in your brain structure. Adding emotion can make the rewiring happen faster, but again, that part is optional.

If you want to add emotion to a reframe to give it more impact, you can start with a reframe that is conceptual, such as this familiar saying:

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

To add emotion to the reframe, think about what accomplishment this new strength will help you achieve. Do you need to gather strength to demand a raise or to win a competition? Focus on an emotionally powerful endpoint and imagine it often. That emotional energy will make the reframe burrow into your mind faster.

Writing and speaking on the topic of success for a few decades has taught me that people like their advice in simple, accessible forms. In addition to giving you the new reframes in this book, I also recast the strongest ideas from my prior work as reframes because that makes them easier to remember and share.

If you plan to share reframes with others—especially teens—it isn’t always practical to ask them to read a book. But most people can digest and remember a two-sentence reframe. If they like what they hear, perhaps they will double-back later and read the source material (this book).

Reframes are easy to learn, easy to remember, often influential, and portable—which makes them easier to share, post, text, and embroider on a pillow. And you’re about to experience a lot of them.

Because reframes are quick and easy to learn, I packed more than 160 of them in this book, which raises the odds that at least one of them will change your life.

That’s enough priming. Let’s get to the good stuff.