Take Over Your Own Mind – A Book Review by Pat McLagan

I’d like to introduce a valuable, practical, and example-filled book about how to hack into your mind so that you better shape and influence your destiny. It’s Sir John Hargrave’s Mind Hacking: How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days.

Learning is always a mind-hack: something new happens to rewire and add connections (neuroplasticity), to add or replace ideas and habits, or to physically change and sometimes even add (neurogenesis) new neurons. And it’s interesting to hear the perspective on these amazing brain processes from somebody who’s brain is wired for humor (humorists see connections that most of us miss).

Sir John Hargrave, author of Mischief Makers Manual and Prank then Mokey is serious but sometimes playful in his Mind Hacking. It’s well worth picking up and filled with great tips that support, reinforce, and add to the Learning 4.0 practices you can learn in Unstoppable You.

Hargrave’s is an especially important book today because so many learning challenges are attitudinal: it’s our perspectives, assumptions, intentions and mindsets that most often require and can benefit from major change (learning). And we know that when we begin to view things differently, we often begin to do things differently. One attitude change can be more powerful than changing many discrete behaviors!

Here’s what I think you can get out of this book:

Read Part One (Analyzing) for insights about how your mind works (and doesn’t), the importance of attention and concentration, and how to get beyond the thinking patterns that keep you in a rut and interfere with your learning and change.

Read Part Two (Programming and Imagining) to help you develop your powers of imagination – and to imagine, not just a good future, but a truly great future for yourself.

And go to Part Three (Reprogramming) for practical ideas about reprogramming yourself to achieve the future you desire – through writing, simulation, reminding yourself about what is important, collaborating for support and creativity, and through one-foot-in-front-of-the-other determined action.

I see this book as a great complement to Unstoppable You: Adopt the New Learning 4.0 Mindset and Change Your Life – with many nice ideas to expand your learning.