| Commentary
and photo credits.
About the song:
I wrote this song in response to two major elements of
influence in my life. The first was a book by Noah St. John
called "Permission To Succeed." The second was the
beginning of my exploration of a rogue branch of psychology
co founded by Richard Bandler and John Grinder called Neuro
Linguistic Programming, NLP for short.
I'm pretty sure that Noah St. John has
either had some training in NLP but the piece he brought to
the table was this idea that affirmations don't really work
that well. The affirmation as you'll recall is a little,
positive phrase you repeat to yourself kind of like a
mantra. The idea being that if you say it enough it will
replace the negative self talk, or "head trash" as Noah St.
John calls it. Noah coined the term "afformation" to
describe a new kind of affirmation. One that actually works.
The difference is that you pop the affirmation into a "how"
or "why" question. So to take a typical affirmation:
"Everything works out better than I can possibly imagine."
and make an af-FORM-ation out of it we add how or why and
get: "Why does everything work out better than I can
possibly imagine?" or "How does everything
work out better than I can possibly imagine?"
The critical difference here is that
you unconscious mind is preprogrammed to seek out answers to
the questions you ask. The scientific term is the
"reticular activating system." This is the process
that engages when you are thinking about buying a new car
and all of a sudden start noticing that particular kind of
car everywhere you go. So when you ask a crappy question
your unconscious mind finds evidence to support that. If you
ask a better question your unconscious mind finds evidence
to support that. It doesn't know the difference. Your
unconscious mind is just trying to follow your conscious
mind's directives.
The problem with most people's
questions is that they are not very good ones. If you find
yourself asking, "why do I never get what I want?" or
"why am I such a loser?", your unconscious mind
engages the reticular activating system and suddenly you
have a lot of reasons why your a loser and why you never get
what you want.
But change the question and change the
result. Ask "Why am I such a winner?" or "Why do I
always get what I want?" and you'll get evidence to
support that.
So that's a long, round about way of
getting to the reason why "Victory Song" is
not just another "feel good" song. It does have a
positive message. It's empowering and inspirational and
motivational and uplifting and all of that good stuff.
And it's also a great deal more...
I packed this baby with "why"
questions. Lots of 'em. Empowered ones. The way to use this
song is to listen to it a lot. Play it on low volume
and put it on repeat. Play it all day. Drive around playing
it in your car or on your I-pod or mp3 player. Once the song
gets stuck in your head, in your rostromedial
prefontal cortex (another article for another day),
it literally begins to program your neurology for better
results.
Have doubts? That's fine. Just do
yourself a favor and give it a shot. Play the song all day
one day and keep track of how your day goes. Then go through
another day without it. On the 3rd day play it again. Just
alternate for a week and keep a log. On a scale of 1-10. How
does each day rate. See if there's a difference.
About the photos:
The photos come from a cool web site
called www.flikr.com. The
deal there is that some of the world's best photographers
put their pictures up to share. You can't use the pics for
commercial purposes and you have to give a link back to the
photographer. So what I did is I went to the site and began
typing in the lyrics to the songs. It takes a bit of sifting
through but eventually I find shots that are perfect visual
representations of the lyrics and music.
So I hope you explore and follow the
links.
Mark
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