Recovering From A Childhood Brain Injury
A brain injury in kindergarten set him years behind his classmates in reading. The effects of what he called his “broken brain” lasted for several years after that. It wasn’t until he met the successful father of a college friend, that Jim Kwik realized he’d had everything he needed to not just catch up, but to excel.
Jim is now a leading international expert on accelerated learning and memory. He is proof that anyone can achieve mental superhero status if they want to. All it takes is the right motivation, the ability to be present, and the proper mechanics.
Jim had believed for many years that his intelligence and his memory were fixed. There was no room for him to grow. Two head injuries made this belief even harder to shake. The meeting with his friend’s father forced him to look at things differently. This man challenged Jim’s beliefs. He introduced him to the power of journaling and the classic books on personal development.
Learning How To Learn And Increase Brain Power
Jim Kwik has made it his mission to share with others the secrets of learning how to learn. This mission is made difficult because of beliefs many of us hold about our ability to learn new things. It is complicated by the information overload we undergo every day. This overload is so pervasive that a new term has been coined called “digital dementia.”
We are in a time where brain power is more critical to our success than the muscle power of the Industrial Age. Unfortunately, our school system has not kept pace with the challenge. Student motivation is dulled. Techniques for retaining information are not taught. Creativity is not encouraged.
When we take personal responsibility for our learning and model how others have done it, we are better able to compete and to create conditions for our happiness. Success does leave clues.
There are a few things that go into Jim’s recipe for achieving this super learning status. He has an acronym – F.A.S.T. – that can help us take our learning and memory to the next level. The F stands forForget. We need to come to our learning with a beginner’s mind. We can’t do that if we are filled with negative programming and outdated information. We need to forget our imagined limitations. We also have to discard information we may have taken in that has caused us to believe things that don’t serve us.
The A stands for Active. We need to fight passivity and our consumerist nature. We have to replace it with good questions and a spirit of creation and co-creation.
The S is for State. Our mood and physiology affect our learning and memory.
Finally, the T stands for Teach. When we learn something with the intention and desire to teach it to others we are more likely to embrace and retain the material.
· “When you teach it, you get to learn it twice.”
Learning How To Fully Harness The Power Of Our Brain
We may have the superpowers waiting inside of us but to release them and to serve others, we have to strengthen our motivation, our ability to observe and be present, and remove internal and external distractions.
To be at our super accelerated learning best, we have to pay attention to diet, eliminate negative self-talk, have an exercise habit, take brain nutrition supplements, create a clean environment, practice good sleep hygiene, physically protect our brains with things like helmets and avoid activities that could injure our brain, engage in novel learning situations, and have a program for stress management.
If we do these things, we can step out of the trance that so many of us live in. A trance that has us believing we have a fixed and limited potential, and that we are flawed. Jim says that “we are the superheroes we have been waiting for” and, after all, we need superheroes now more than ever.
