Marketing professionals compete for your attention thousands of times every day. Their purpose is influence your behavior to meet goals someone ELSE has set for you.
Take Back Your Brain! teaches you how to use the technology tools you already know and love to reclaim sovereignty over your own attention by advertising to yourself about goals that matter to YOU!
Lynn has come up with a fascinating concept -- advertising to yourself. Its kind of like a life-coaching thing where you are the coach and the client.
Jennifer
Professor of Psychology
Your ideas are more than helpful. The way I'm going to use them, they will be transformational.
Christoph
I think this is fabulous stuff. I'll be sending my clients to TBYB.
Michael
Mental health counselor
Your site has opened my eyes to new possibilities/tools for the work I am doing! Thank you!
Calyn
Lynn is a geek from Seattle, USA who is fond of electronic gadgets and is particularly interested in how they can be used to remind us to do things that are more interesting and important to us than going to meetings.
May 29th, 2007
While Google bots are out crawling the internet to discover web pages, they also keep track of the pictures those pages contain. You can get access to that entire collection of pictures with a feature called Google Image Search.
Image Search is especially useful when you’re looking for a picture of something really specific. That makes it a great source of images for your ads.
May 22nd, 2007
I can remember vividly how difficult it was to learn how to drive nails. When I was training we used to practice by pounding hundreds of long, thin 16 penny box nails into a large beam - trying over and over to drive them all the way in without bending. Most of them did bend for the first few weeks until I learned the secret: focus all of my attention on the nail going in.
I think that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with the techniques I’m describing in this blog: keep our attention on the outcomes we want. Whether that outcome is a job, a behavior change, an adventure, an object, a relationship, or whatever - encountering images and messages about it regularly helps keep our attention focussed on that goal.
May 14th, 2007
This article is the last in our series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. The scarcity principle boils down to this: we want what we’re afraid we can’t have. Fear of losing out on something can be an extremely powerful motivator.
Availability might be threatened by limited quantity, a time deadline, or by competition. Whatever the reason, the item in question becomes more attractive to us if we think we can’t have it. Whether it’s a potential mate, a used car, or an item on sale, once its availability is threatened we WANT it!
May 6th, 2007
This article is the seventh in an eight-part series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion In this chapter, Cialdini convincingly demonstrates that most of us have a very strong tendency to follow the instructions of someone we perceive to be an authority.
This article has been more difficult to write than the others because so much of Take Back Your Brain’s emphasis is about taking back our own power. Why would we want to give it away again? The answer to that question comes from Cialdini. He says that anytime we see a technique widely used by compliance professionals it’s because it works. TBYB is interested in taking ownership of any technique that others use to hijack our attention, and applying it instead toward achieving our own goals.
© 2008 Take Back Your Brain! 
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