Tara Swart Quotes

Note to self: we do not have to be slaves to our chronological age!

we live in a world where logic is massively overrated, emotions are seen as a weakness and decisions based on intuition have little or no place. We have forgotten where we came from.

To get the maximum benefit from this practice, you’ll need to write in your journal daily about your thoughts and reactions to events and the people in your life. You don’t need to write long entries, but aim to be honest and open about your emotions, motivations and behaviors.

As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.

Attract what you expect, reflect what you desire, become what you respect, mirror what you admire.

Once we give ourselves permission to open up and play with lots of potential ideas and possibilities, creativity rewards us, enabling us to spot opportunities in unlikely places. It means we can sense when to take a chance and when to question or pursue something. It helps us hone a strong intuition, giving us the flexibility to recognize possibilities that might bypass us otherwise.

Reassessing our own “failures” and rebranding them as “not yets” is a good way to start rewriting our own story: the internal narrative of our past struggles. When we decide to switch to abundant thinking, there is always a positive spin. Such is the stuff of success. It means we’re able to maintain the resilience to stick with our goals, rather than walking away at the first hurdle.

Quite simply, when you do allow your brain to be conscious of and focus on what you want in life, the raised awareness that results will work in your favor to automatically bring opportunities into your life.

Quite simply, when you do allow your brain to be conscious of and focus on what you want in life, the raised awareness that results will work in your favour to automatically bring opportunities into your life.

Sleeping in the side position is the most efficient for allowing the glymphatic system to cleanse the brain, so if I’m having a restless night, I take the opportunity to turn onto my side before I fall back asleep.5

Manifestation and magnetic desire are useful for raising your awareness of what you want and focusing your attention on it, guiding your actions to make it happen. Patience and harmony will help ensure you stick with your goals and that they align with your deepest self. Finally, becoming aware of abundance and universal connection encourages you to think about your goals in the context of other people and the wider world; to consider your place in it and provide you with a powerful sense of purpose that will guide The Source, making you more resilient, compassionate and integrated in your thinking. This shift leads to an exponential increase in the consciousness of your own power.

Physical” refers to what you feel in your body; “mental” is about what is going on in your thoughts; “emotional” is how you are feeling; and “spiritual” is about how you feel deep down, at a more fundamental level, in terms of your sense of meaning, purpose and place in the world. You will be reimagining all of these thoughts and feelings by conjuring up past memories of a time when you felt very negative, stressed or unhappy; followed by a contrasting situation when you were confident, happy and fulfilled.

Throughout this week, aim to adopt an attitude of positive encouragement towards yourself at all times. Praise activates the emotional circuitry associated with love/trust and joy/excitement which correlates to the bonding hormone oxytocin, making us feel warm towards others and ourselves.

What can you do to turn a bad day into a good day? To turn yourself during a difficult moment into your best self? Write down the answer to this in your journal, and make a mental note to keep your eyes peeled for images in magazines that could represent your positive self on your action board.

When I feel stressed about not finding the time, I remind myself of a wonderful story of a monk advising an executive to meditate for an hour a day. When the reply is that at busy times this won’t be possible, the monk simply states: “At those times you must do two hours a day.” The irony is not lost on me.

The neuronal mass of a number of regions of musicians’ brains is far denser than that of non-musicians. Some of this increase appears obviously located in certain areas: brain scans of violinists show that the area of their brain associated with the left (fingering) hand was far denser than the same area in the general population, for example.

Noting in your journal what happens when you follow your intuition/body instead of doing what is expected of you, or what everyone else is doing, can be an eye-opening exercise. Even minor deviations from your own needs (such as acquiescing to your partner’s choice of vacation destination or going to a work event because you feel you ought to) have hidden costs.

While motivation is what keeps us going when it would be easier to give up, resilience matches this drive with the ability to bounce back from adverse situations and adapt to cope better in the future. Having a clear “why” inspires us to look at obstacles flexibly when they stand in the path of our hopes. Defeatism isn’t an option for a motivated person, so if you’re serious about maximizing The Source and building a resilient brain it’s important to understand your own motivations.

we need to actively direct our brain to move away from prioritizing these unconscious biases, and to being more open, flexible and courageous about pushing ourselves towards our goals and choices that feel “new” and “dangerous.” Focusing on what we do want rather than what we need to avoid in order to survive will mean we are more likely to manifest it (in the same way that if you’re mountain biking, you should never look at the potholes and boulders you don’t want to ride over, but instead focus on the path through them).

As social creatures, we have a great need for belonging. The desire to foster alliances and act in a compassionate and collaborative way with other people and the world is a powerful motivator in neuroscientific terms because it activates the brain’s empathy pathways. Attachment emotions such as love and trust trigger the release of the neurochemicals oxytocin and dopamine, which contribute to feelings of bonding and pleasure as part of the brain’s reward system. Countless studies show that having a strong sense of meaning and purpose correlates with life satisfaction.4

Self-esteem issues resulting from a childhood where we were criticized at home or school or labeled as a non-achiever may mean we sabotage career opportunities because, at a deep level, we fear that we are not deserving of them. Similarly, if we start a healthy eating plan but believe that we won’t be able to keep it up, we can find ourselves easily giving in to temptation and making bad choices. This is because strongly emotional experiences that have shaped our brain pathways can derail our value-tagging system, skewing it towards what we think keeps us safe even if this is not conducive to thriving in our current life. Our selective filtering will prioritize avoiding shame or criticism over potential career success or romantic fulfillment.

we live in a world where logic is massively overrated, emotions are seen as a weakness and decisions based on intuition have little or no place. We have forgotten where we came from. Over time, we have neglected the limbic brain that got us to the pivotal moment in our evolution, and instead placed the cortex on a pedestal. We have demoted depth, passion and instinct and come to rely on the surface-level capabilities—such as exams, rote-learning or transactional relationships—that are more connected with material gain than true joy. We live a life dominated by stress and are too busy to really take notice of who we are, where we are going and what we want from life. We are now at a moment where technology will disrupt our minds and bodies more than we can begin to imagine.

It’s also highly energy-intensive. It is perhaps surprising that although the rumination that leads up to a decision requires mental energy, it’s the point of decision itself that is most energy-intense for our brains. This explains why reducing the number of unnecessary choices in our day (what to wear, eat, watch, react to on social media) is an effective way to conserve decision-making energy for bigger and more important decisions. This is known as “choice reduction” and can include a regular morning routine or laying out your outfit the night before, to avoid using up brain power on too many small things.

Activities like aimless lounging around, daydreaming, puttering and reading for pleasure rather than purpose all activate the default network in the brain. When this network flourishes, inspiration is more likely to strike and we are better able to free-associate and harness our emotional intelligence and intuition.

Some will have a scientific explanation, for example muscle spasms or migraines can be related to low magnesium levels, but some will have a unique meaning to us and it is down to us to decode them. I have a friend that has always said “By the time I get a mouth ulcer, I know that I have pushed myself too hard and my body is not getting enough nutrients to keep going.” I have taken note of that for myself. A cousin said that his stress always shows up as a feeling of toxins built up in knots in his shoulders. I recognize that one too!

When weighing up the pros and cons of a big decision, it’s important to try to remember this, although it’s easy to get paralyzed by overthinking and decision fatigue. As a general rule, once we have made a decision, it tends to feel as if it was not as bad as we thought it would be. The key is to make a decision and then make it work.

consistent meditation practice increases folding in the brain—and its surface area. These changes are situated in the cerebral cortex, the layer of the brain responsible for processing and regulating data from the outside world. Committing to devoting a few minutes each day to meditation will give you a new clarity of perspective on what and who are your real priorities in life, supporting your “higher level” brain regulation and improving your resilience, making you more considered and balanced in your approach. If you want to maximize the power of The Source, mindfulness really is a no-brainer.

Moment to moment, rather than skipping over a flash of recognition or achievement, or a fleeting pleasure in a quest for “What next?,” stop to feel gratitude for other people, circumstances or serendipity as well as your own qualities. This will harness your brain’s value-tagging system and make positive achievements and happy thoughts easier to recall in the future. Doing this regularly will attune you to abundance.

To actualize this in the real world, all I had to do was work on what I was good at, find the positives in my life—rather than focusing on what was wrong—and then this would have an impact on all that I touched.

directing our thoughts can influence not only our perception of “reality” but also our material life circumstances, our relationships, and the situations we attract into or tolerate in our lives. The way we think determines our life. This is a simple idea, but a powerful one.

The visualisation exercise above, along with those page 228 and page 229, will help you to get all your senses working for you, picking up clues and integrating your brain pathways and corresponding ways of thinking to bring your vision into reality.

when you do allow your brain to be conscious of and focus on what you want in life, the raised awareness that results will work in your favor to automatically bring opportunities into your life.

In short, the brain, being malleable, is capable of reversing a wide range of

The more you relive a memory and/or the more intense the emotions associated with that memory, the stronger the connection becomes.

neurons that fire together, wire together’.

The Source is the incredible, complex and sophisticated thing that is our whole brain—not just the cortex and our planning and data-driven decision-making abilities. The true power of the brain lies in being able to integrate what we think with how we feel—the cortex and the limbic system together—with what our gut tells us and what we sense throughout our entire bodies. This creates an experience of life of which we can take true ownership; one that is filled with a trust in our own amazing ability to navigate circumstances with every part of us aligned and fully immersed.

Developing metacognition, or “thinking about thinking,” and becoming “aware of one’s awareness,” rather than functioning on autopilot is one of the main objectives of The Source.

Our ability to thrive is governed by the physical condition of our (emotional and logical) brain and the quality of thoughts that we allow to arise from it. Whatever that condition and quality may be today, the elasticity of our brain means that we have the ability to change our brain pathways, and therefore our lives, for a better tomorrow. We will at times have to challenge the consequences of our evolutionary “hardwiring” and retrain ourselves to think in a more agile and positive way. But now’s the time to take action. This is not blind faith, but faith based in science.

The way we think determines our life.

There is a neuro-myth (that won’t go away!) that we only use 10 percent of our brains. It’s not actually true, but our fondness for this statistic belies the scientific truth that the potential to grow and change our brain and how it directs our lives is far greater than we have been led to believe.

Work I agonize over what decisions to make. I know I can be the best at something, but I’m not sure I’m doing the right things to fulfill my potential. I’ve never asked for a pay raise or promotion. My work bores me but it pays the bills. I have a fixed view of what I can and can’t do and I’m resigned to this. I get so tired and burnt out sometimes that I can’t get out of bed. I have a lot of ideas of what I want from my career, but don’t know how to make them happen.

Blame cultures in businesses rely on this behavioral bias because people are too fearful to question poor decision-making and challenge the status quo.

Positive desire is the mentality that we can make good things happen, and it’s the emotional intensity of that desire that drives it towards a tangible outcome. Intense emotion gives us renewed energy and confidence to carry out new actions that turn the positive desire into reality, rather than stagnating at daydreaming or hoping in vain.

Attract what you expect, reflect what you desire, become what you respect, mirror what you admire.” Unknown

You can believe in the unseen—and still be grounded in science.

We have demoted depth, passion and instinct and come to rely on the surface-level capabilities—such as exams, rote-learning or transactional relationships—that are more connected with material gain than true joy.

If you don’t know where you are going, every road will lead to nowhere.” Henry Kissinger

Visualization works because there is surprisingly little difference to the brain between experiencing an event directly in the outside world and a strongly imagined vision (plus sometimes imagined action) of the same event.

Abstraction Abstraction, or abstract thinking, is the ability of the brain to construct representations of things that are not present or definitive—to imagine possibilities, to see patterns where they were not obvious before and to join the dots. From abstract concepts, such as astrophysics, to the creative use of language, such as poetry, abstraction is the opposite of logical thinking where everything is set in stone and requires no creativity or imagination.

Visualization is a great way of turning away from logical dominance and accessing a more abstract and flexible way of thinking.

Physical” refers to what you feel in your body; “mental” is about what is going on in your thoughts; “emotional” is how you are feeling; and “spiritual” is about how you feel deep down, at a more fundamental level, in terms of your sense of meaning, purpose and place in the world. You will be reimagining all of these thoughts and feelings by conjuring up past memories of a time when you felt very negative, stressed or unhappy; followed by a contrasting situation when you were confident, happy and fulfilled. This should activate the same feelings that you felt at the time as you recall what happened.

Rest Sleeping less than the 7–8 hours per night that is optimal for most adults (according to a recent report by America’s National Sleep Foundation based on the advice of 18 leading sleep scientists) is not sustainable for 98–99 percent of the human population.3 Failure to fulfill this quota impacts on a whole host of measures of brain function. Over time, habitual paucity of sleep leads to an elevated risk of everything from Alzheimer’s disease to obesity and diabetes. The link between poor sleep and dementia is because the cleansing system of the brain, known as the glymphatic system, takes 7–8 hours to flush toxins out of the brain. These build up over time due to oxidative processes such as stress and alcohol, and potentially lead to the symptoms of dementia. This shows the long-term influence of sleep on The Source, but its immediate impact is also extremely damaging. Lack of sleep has a serious impact on the functioning of The Source, and if you’re serious about harnessing your full brainpower, you can’t afford to ignore it. A whole night’s missed sleep has been proven to impact on IQ.4

Neuroplasticity also ensures we can achieve forgiveness. Letting go of a past loss or hurt can be the hardest change to make in the brain but often this very pathway is the one that is driving the shame, mistrust and inability to forgive that keeps us stuck. Our brains are constantly evolving, refining and learning in response to everything that we experience—events, emotions and people—and we need to be aware of this and manage what we expose our brains to and how we deal with the impact. We can do this in real time, overwriting past hurts and cleaning up what is present.

There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” Rumi

Creativity is freedom. It enables us to direct the full power of The Source to create the life we envisage for ourselves. It enables us to draw on our other pathways, and use them in unexpected ways, using the law of attraction and visualization to manifest our desires.

Creativity gives us the power of interpretation. To be creative we also need to develop a certain level of confidence in our right to express our unique take on things; to value our own ideas and interpretations.

The following quote is often attributed to Kurt Vonnegut: We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. This illustrates the essential nature of creativity; it isn’t a frilly extra—it is the resourcefulness to think your way through difficult situations and challenges and come out flying.

The Mechanisms of Neuroplasticity In scientific terms, there are three distinct processes for neuroplasticity: learning, perfecting and retraining.

Brain scans show that all sorts of activities can induce change in the brain, but three factors in particular have the most impact. Ask yourself how much of each of the following factors you currently have in your life, and how you might be able to introduce more of them: Novelty: new experiences such as travel, learning new skills and meeting new people. Novel experiences can even stimulate growth of new neurons. When was the last time you tried something totally new? Aerobic exercise: this has been found to increase oxygen-rich blood flow to the brain and allow us to release brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), the endorphin that allows the growth of new neurons. Do you regularly walk 10,000 steps per day and do 150 minutes of aerobic exercise per week? Emotional stimulation: the more you experience something and the more intense the emotion associated with it, the more powerful is the effect on the brain. This is why even having shared a traumatic event can be very bonding.

An agile brain can: Focus intensely and efficiently on one task at a time. Think in many different ways about the same situation or problem. Switch imperceptibly between these different ways of thinking. Fuse ideas from differing cognitive pathways to devise integrated solutions. Think in a balanced way, rather than being wedded to one way of thinking (being rigidly logical, for example).

I use a model of brain agility which describes six ways of thinking that correlate with a simplified version of the neural pathways of the brain: Emotional intelligence: mastering your emotions. Physicality and interoception: knowing yourself inside and out. Gut instinct and intuition: trusting yourself. Motivation: staying resilient to reach your goals. Logic: making good decisions. Creativity: designing your future and ideal life. Acknowledging the benefits of each of these and then learning how to facilitate their power to work together and in balance—a whole-brain approach—gives us exhilarating control over our brains. This is the antithesis of black-and-white or lack thinking, and is key to developing an abundant and positive mindset.

Emotions: you might react with a pang of jealousy when you notice her engagement ring flashing in the sun, but mostly you feel a huge amount of fondness, recalling fun memories of times spent together in the past. Physicality: you feel a warm feeling in your belly and a skip in your step as you recognize and walk towards her. Intuition: when you greet her, you feel deep down the weight of everything she has going on at the moment and you are able to let her know you’re there for her. Motivation: you work really hard at maintaining your friendship and this has always given you the support you’ve needed in tough times. You feel motivated to do the same for her. Logic: you remember she was applying for a promotion, so you make a mental note to ask her about it and offer your interview tips. Creativity: you imagine the future of your friendship. You’ve visualized her as your bridesmaid when you get married and imagine yourself as godmother to her kids in the future. You understand you are building the foundations for your future bond right now.

Intuition, creativity and logic are more internal, personal functions. Emotions, physicality and motivation are external as they have an impact on how you relate to others. Bearing this in mind, allocate percentages for how effectively you drew on each of these pathways in the scenarios you have recalled.

It is particularly important to feel strong in terms of managing your emotions, knowing yourself (physicality), trusting your gut (intuition) and staying motivated to create your life as you want it, rather than to be mostly relying on logic to guide you. Perhaps you are more intuitive or creative than you initially believed. Or maybe you have been completely ignoring one of the pathways: blocking its feedback and function. Consider the long-term costs of these patterns and write down your thoughts.

Below are some classic reasons that one of your pathways may be blocked, based on my experiences with patients and clients. See if you recognize any in yourself: Emotions: you were brought up in a “big boys don’t cry” kind of culture, or your family had very high expressed emotion, shouting and crying a lot, so you find it difficult to control some extremes of emotion in your current life. Physicality: you were too small/too tall/weak/overweight/suffered from acne as you were growing up, or have low self-esteem hence you cower/have poor posture/don’t make much eye contact/aren’t good at reading body signals and you fear this may have cost you a promotion. Intuition: you were harshly blamed or ridiculed for decisions that you made as an adolescent or young adult, so now you feel you can’t trust your gut. Motivation: you’ve never had a strong sense of meaning or purpose in life. You’ve given up looking for a career you enjoy and stick with a stable job that has a good salary. Logic: you were told you weren’t clever enough to do or be something, so you avoided university and anything that involved exams or needing a good memory. Creativity: your teachers or parents said you weren’t good at art or music and that all the kids that went into creative industries had always excelled at the arts at school, so you’ve stuck to safer and more reliable professions and activities.

In terms of making these changes in the brain, it’s about developing new habits. It can take anything from 21 to 66 days for a relatively small and obviously tangible change like drinking more water to take hold. But with more complex, less tangible things, such as developing empathy, resilience and confidence, it is better to make a more qualitative assessment than to rely on numbers. Is it making a real difference to your life—improving your relationships or boosting your self-esteem?

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion.” Dale Carnegie

Start by building a picture of where your emotional strengths lie and your areas for development. Does your ability to control your emotions change with different people? How do your emotions shift under stress? Are you able to hold it together at work but feel short-tempered when you get home? Are you different on or after a relaxing holiday?

Whatever you do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Goethe

Whether your aims are work-related, romantic or have more to do with general self-development, I’ll be encouraging you to start disrupting your established pathways and creating change, using a mixture of simple and more involved exercises to turbocharge The Source. These exercises will build through a four-step plan. You can follow this over four weeks or four months—you decide the pace that works for you. The golden rule is only to move on to the next step once you feel you’ve received meaningful benefits and insights from the previous one. Where appropriate, continue the actions of the previous steps in unison as you move forward. The four-step plan is based around cognitive science, specifically the principle that lasting behavior change happens in four stages: Step 1: Raised Awareness (making the subconscious conscious and turning off your autopilot). You’ll have thought a lot about this already as you’ve worked through the book. Hopefully, you are already feeling motivated to change.

This provides the raw material to feed into Step 2 (Chapter 13): creating the powerful Action Board to design your vision for the future and set your goals for change. Turning your imagined future into reality requires action. This is where Step 3: Focused Attention (Chapter 14) comes in. Practicing new behaviors and training yourself to think in new ways will be helped by you being more present, using mindfulness and visualization to help you devote your energy to the things that matter. Deliberate Practice (repetition) is the crucial final Step 4 (Chapter 15), as you work on different aspects of The Source and embed new brain-friendly habits to ensure you can flourish, manifesting the full potential of The Source at its abundant best.

Turn to a fresh page in your journal and start by filling in what the words below meant within your family and close relationships when you were growing up. What examples can you think of? Roles: What was your “role” in your family? What other “roles” were there and how did you relate to them? Examples might include “go-between,” “scapegoat,” “peacemaker,” “rebel” or “deputy mother.” Secrets: What were the secrets and lies in your family when you were growing up? Who kept them? How did they influence your life growing up? An example might be: “No one talked about Uncle Ray’s drinking problem.

Exploring the “ghosts” we all carry, and thinking about how well they serve you now, is a revealing and rewarding process. Are there ghosts you have taken on without questioning their helpfulness or accuracy? Have you found yourself following “rules” that conflict with your deep wishes? Note down any insights in your journal. Try to keep these insights in the front of your mind and notice when they play out in real life. Make journal notes on how they show up in the present. Start to make small changes that can adjust these sub-conscious reactions over time. This is how you start to take charge of your future.

Each week in your journal, you should also choose three aims for the week. Choose a relationship (romantic or platonic) aim, a work aim and a personal development aim. These should be achievable small steps on the way to your big-picture goals. You’ll already have strong ideas about what these big-picture goals should be and the rest of this book will help you develop them further. Examples of micro-challenges to aim for weekly might be: Relationships: Make an effort to listen actively more often to colleagues/partner. (Big-picture goal: Develop my emotional intelligence and empathy to strengthen key relationships.) Work: Speak up more about my ideas, or research potential mentors. (Big-picture goal: Start my own business.) Personal development: Commit to repeating a new affirmation each day to boost my self-esteem. (Big-picture goal: Stop self-criticism and be confident and happy in my life choices.) Once you feel the benefits of these small changes, you’ll be more inclined to push yourself further in the future—to take a bolder stance on your home, work and commute. Ask yourself big questions:

What Is Presence? Put simply, becoming more present is the process of bringing our attention to experiences occurring in the current moment, which can be developed through meditation, mindfulness or other forms of training. I prefer to think of presence as a way of life rather than discrete practices. Personally, I consider mindful eating, mindful walking and paying full attention to people as we interact with them to be as important as formal mindfulness practices such as yoga or meditation. This everyday presence often gets forgotten and I encourage people to make this the focus of their mindfulness practice, rather than obsessing about getting traditional meditation “right.

And yet the menace of the years; Finds, and shall find, me unafraid … I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.’ Invictus, William Ernest Henley