Why is our right brain so powerful? To answer this let’s have a brief look at the results of Dr Emile Coué who in the early 1900s was achieving a far greater recovery rate with his patients than were his fellow medical doctors. Naturally they wanted to know what he was doing that they were not. Surprisingly, they found that he was prescribing the same medications as they were to treat diagnosed illnesses.
However, they also found that he encouraged his patients, as part of their treatment, to look in the mirror first thing in the morning and last thing at night and say to themselves in a convincing manner: ‘Each day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.’ This statement when repeated over and over again with conviction gradually became a belief and their minds simply instructed their bodies to conform with the belief.
Emile Coué subsequently formulated Coué’s Law which states that: ‘Whenever imagination and willpower are in conflict, imagination will inevitably win.’ In other words, if we have left and right brain conflict and are attempting to achieve our goals by means of willpower alone, there is a very good chance that we will sabotage our own actions unless and until we ensure that our right brain, our imagination and emotional mechanism, is working with and not against left brain willpower and discipline.
One of the major functions of your brain is to sustain life and protect you from what it perceives to be pain. Consequently, whilst you may have tremendous willpower and discipline, this will never be enough if your right brain imagines the short-term pain that might result by virtue of taking the action steps that you are contemplating. The trick here is to use autogenic conditioning regularly so that you bring to bear the fantastic power of the right brain onto your goals and use your imagination and emotion to focus on the long-term pleasure that will result from taking the action steps contemplated.
You can also use your imagination to focus on the much greater long-term pain that will result from NOTtaking the action steps. Your brain will always do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure.