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, and shows you how to advertise to yourself about goals that matter to YOU!
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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.
November 16th, 2008
Take Back Your Brain! is two years old and 100 articles deep!! I wanted to celebrate by giving something to you, the readers, so today I’m launching a free new coaching feature we’ll call “Dear Brain”. I envision it as kind of an advice column where you can tell us about a goal you have for yourself and receive suggestions about how you could use personal marketing to support it. Think of it as Dear Abby meets marketing geek.
November 3rd, 2008
The Small Talk hack uses one or more props to disrupt your visual presentation in a way that makes others feel safe, sympathetic, helpful, interested, or just curious enough to voluntarily begin conversations with you about a goal you have chosen. These conversations will remind you about that goal several times a day, cause you to return your attention to it, and give you the opportunity to reinforce the idea as you talk about it.
October 12th, 2008
Images get to us; we remember them and act on them. Sometimes we even seem to try to make our world look like it does in the picture. Advertisers know this, so they make sure to expose you to lots of images of their logos and products, especially pictures of people that look like you using their products.
This is one reason it’s so effective to visualize a result you want - to see yourself succeeding in your mind’s eye. Your brain sees the outcome in your imagination, believes it, and gets busy changing the parts of your world that don’t match that mental picture.
We can do even better than mental pictures, though, because technical toys like digital cameras and photo editing software give us the ability to externalize our visualizations, and then to repeat our exposure to them more frequently than we might remember to do on our own. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s advertising.
October 6th, 2008
I want to tell you what’s been going on for me with the Post-It note hack, because I believe the results I’ve experienced from these very simple steps we’ve taken illustrate a critical fundamental principle of personal marketing:
YOUR AD MUST ILLUSTRATE THE RESULT THAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE!! It cannot be about you WANTING it; it must be about you HAVING it. (As a corollary, it’s also very good if it makes you feel something.)
September 14th, 2008
This week we’re going to look at your goals and choose one that you’d like to make real progress on between now and the end of the year. Since personal marketing can help with almost any goal, I encourage you to choose based not so much on what you think will “work”, but on how much it’s something you want to succeed at.
May 26th, 2008
Personal marketing uses commercial and social marketing principles to help us succeed at goals we have chosen for ourselves. It’s powerful stuff that can really help your life. But the following feedback from a reader made me realize that some of you may be feeling overwhelmed about how and where to begin. This article shows you how to find that starting point, and then how to continue step-by-step to develop a great ad to influence yourself.
May 18th, 2008
You can’t advertise to yourself all the time. I guess you could, but it would be time-consuming and exhausting, sometimes you don’t really know what you want to work on, and other times you’re just busy with other stuff. Besides, if you do it too much you risk having your own ads become part of the mental “clutter”.
What you can do during the fallow or busy times is take advantage of the delivery channels you’ve already established to throw up very easy, low-maintenance messages that inspire or nourish you until you’re ready for the next round of progress.
March 3rd, 2008
Here’s a quick and easy ad hack for Windows Mobile users: write a text message on your Owner Information screen, and set it to display every time you turn the device on. It’s a great place to display a goal or affirmation that you really want to keep in your awareness for a couple of days.
February 3rd, 2008
For the past three weeks we’ve been looking at a tool that marketers use to understand and manipulate human motivation - Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I showed you how to locate a goal you have for yourself on the hierarchy of needs, intentionally frame your messaging about that behavior to a different layer on the hierarchy, and then design advertisements to yourself based on that strategy. See Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1, part 2, and part 3.
This week I’ll show you the details about how I used the instructions in those articles to make a group of ads for myself about exercising.
January 27th, 2008
In part one of this series, I showed you how to manipulate Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to decide how to best frame a message to motivate yourself. In part two we selected a slogan, took photos, and developed a creative concept. This week we’ll create the ads for your campaign and set up an automatic system for delivering them to yourself.
January 21st, 2008
In part two of this series I show you how to develop an ad campaign that targets a level on the hierarchy of needs, including how to select a slogan, do the photo shoot, and and discover your creative concept.
January 13th, 2008
Advertisers are very interested in what motivates our behavior. One of the models they use to understand motivation was developed in 1943 by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow studied healthy, high-functioning people and from that research postulated a five level hierarchy of human needs. Maslow’s thinking goes that humans are motivated to meet these needs in ascending order. So someone who is hungry, alone, or fears for their life is not that concerned with self-esteem or reaching their potential. On the other hand, people who have their basic needs handled are most motivated by needs that are higher up on the hierarchy. One of the strategies advertisers use is to bump their messaging for a product up one or more levels, from where it naturally fits to where they believe their target demographic is most concerned. You can use the technique of moving your message up or down the needs hierarchy to motivate yourself to reach your own goals, too.
December 21st, 2007
Alerting the people around you to your goals has many positive benefits:
* Someone else now holds the idea of you doing this thing in their mind, in addition to you.
* They are likely to ask you about it, which gives you an opportunity to talk about your goal.
* It creates the opportunity for them to inform you about resources they know about and offer other forms of support.
* It activates the psychological principle of consistency.
Postage stamps with a custom picture on them are a great way to activate all of these benefits, especially at a time of year when many of us correspond with people we care about, and who care about us.
September 19th, 2007
A key piece of our strategy here at TBYB is to borrow the tools that advertisers use to persuade us and deploy them in the service of our own goals. Before Phrases that Sell, the text usually felt like the weakest part of my ads because I didn’t know what I was doing. Now I have one of the same tools the pros use on my desk.
September 10th, 2007
Look around you. Most of the ads you see contain both text and images. With all of the zillions of dollars at the industry’s disposal to test the effectiveness of different advertising methods, one has to assume that we see the image/text combination so frequently because it works. With the addition of one word to my cell phone ad I’m now using that same method to reinforce my own dream of one day hiking the Wonderland Trail many times every day.
September 4th, 2007
How many of you have a photo of your pet as the background image on your cell phone screen? I must admit that I still do, even though I’ve been writing about personal persuasion for almost a year. Loyal readers know that I adore my dog. It makes me happy to see his picture and of course there’s nothing at all wrong with that. But I consult my cell phone many times every day because I use it for both a clock and a telephone, and I’m starting to wonder if I might be seriously underutilizing some really prime advertising space. In fact, I’m thinking that a picture in a display location I’m exposed to that frequently should probably be chosen very consciously; possibly to support very high-priority goals.
August 13th, 2007
I think of a campaign as several ads that work together to deliver persuasive messages about the same objective. I’ve found that making a group of ads around the same theme has the potential to create a very powerful synergy. Each of the ads can illustrate a different facet of your theme, and thus reinforce the larger message.
August 5th, 2007
Motivator is a free online tool that lets you upload a photo, add some text, and choose a border. It then spits out a really professional-looking poster that you can either order as a large print or save to your computer to use in ad delivery systems you may already have in place. You do have to pay if you decide to order printed posters ($15-$40), but saving the finished image to your computer is completely free.
I made several posters a week ago for my Google Sidebar slideshow and just love them. Something about the slickness seems to be very effective. Let me stress how easy it was, too.
July 18th, 2007
Here’s a very easy, low-tech way to put yourself in the picture. It works just as well as technology-based methods like Photoshop, but the only tools you need are scissors and glue. This project is cheap, simple and fun … and you may get to buy school supplies!
July 10th, 2007
Want to float the Amazon River? Climb Mt. Everest? Visit the Taj Mahal? No problem. Maybe you want to attend the Olympics, the Tour de France, or Burning Man. Heck, maybe you want to win the Olympics! You can use photo editing software to create a believable picture of yourself in any situation you can imagine.
Any photo editing software that supports layers will work, such as Photoshop or its less expensive sibling Photoshop Elements. I’ll write these instructions generically enough that you should be able to follow them using any photo editing program.
July 2nd, 2007
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX8 is small, light, phenomenally easy to use, and has one of the best designed user interfaces I’ve ever seen. This camera makes it really easy to do the thing I care about most - take decent pictures and transfer them to my computer.
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.
March 11th, 2007
The Hipster PDA is an ideal environment for personal ads. You proably already have cards in your stack for a calendar, to-do lists, and notes. To start advertising just include a couple more cards with personal messages or pictures on them. Once you have “installed” an ad, you will likely encounter it several times a day as you flip through your cards. Of course it’s ridiculously easy to move ads cards in and out of the stack, and I change them frequently to keep it fresh.
February 28th, 2007
This technique uses a gadget called The Quote to display one- or two-sentence ads to yourself throughout the day. The Quote is a great tool for displaying advertising concepts that are more verbal than visual. Like the Photos gadget, it lets us use the power of repetition - one of the tools advertisers use on us all the time - to magnify the effect of our messages.
The content for the gadget is contained in a text file that contains a list of statements, separated by blank lines. The Quote gadget randomly selects one of them at a time and displays it in a box on your Google Sidebar.
February 22nd, 2007
This is the article the whole gadget series has been building up to. As I said before, The Google Photos gadget is my favorite method for delivering ads to myself. It’s designed to display a slide show of images on your desktop, from whatever source you choose, and rotate them as frequently as you want.
Whatever else you’re working on, those pictures are rotating on the edge of your screen - and your awareness - all day. I think this is analagous to a lot of the advertising we receive in our environment. We’re not directly watching many of the ads, but some part of our consciousness takes them in. The slideshow method also takes advantage of another strategy advertisers use on us: repetition.
December 14th, 2006
Some of the ideas we want to remind ourselves about lend themselves better to text than images. For example, maybe you want to get in the habit of giving yourself positive messages. In the last article I discussed how to compose an effective text ad for yourself. Now let’s combine that technique with a little technology.
Backpack is an online service with several nice features, including the ability to send text messages to your email or cell phone. The free version of Backpack will let you schedule up to 10 messages at a time.
December 10th, 2006
The beauty of the Post-It note is the stark simplicity of the medium. Because producing and deploying your ads is so simple with this method, it offers the opportunity to focus solely on your marketing message. The centrality of message can be eclipsed in other, sexier, delivery systems, but not here. The zen of the Post-It forces us to look square in the face the question: What is my message? And that’s what makes this technique so valuable. Because even when we are enthralled by the delicious glitter of technology, message is all there ever is, really.
November 26th, 2006
For many knowledge workers the background image on our computer desktop is something we return to many times each day. The stock patterns and nature photos that come with your computer are nice, but one of the easiest ways to advertise to yourself is to take control of that image.
November 18th, 2006
One of the easiest methods I use to advertise to myself is to simply print a picture of what I want. The internet is a rich source of images for our personal ad campaigns. Do you want to work somewhere? Download their logo. Go somewhere? Find some great photos of that place. Own something? It’s easy to get a picture of it off of a website. Read something? Grab a copy of the book cover from Amazon.com.
November 16th, 2006
It seems that people choose to remind themselves of connections to others and fun times they have had in the past. And of course there is nothing wrong with that. But let me propose a slight tweak: in addition to reminding yourself of fun times from the past, what would happen if you showed yourself a picture of something fun you’d like to do in the future?
© 2008 Take Back Your Brain! 
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