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!
Hey, Brainers - if you're ever interested in buying a book or gadget mentioned on Take Back Your Brain! I'd really appreciate you clicking to Amazon from the links on this site. It costs you the same and I never see any of your personal information. The only difference is TBYB! receives a small kickback for the referral. Thanks for your support!
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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.
October 19th, 2008
If you’ve been following along with the back-to-school personal marketing campaign you have now finished one quick and easy ad about your goal. I suggest you let that ad run for awhile on your bathroom mirror, and notice any ways that it seems to influence your thoughts or behavior. This week we’re going to dig [...]
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.
September 28th, 2008
it’s my pleasure to review Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth because it’s so relevant to the work we’ve been doing on our back-to-school personal marketing campaign. Steve’s first published book reads like a volume of personal development’s greatest hits, but not in the tawdry, exploitative way that you might see on a late night info-mercial. Instead, you realize immediately that this is a guy who has read widely, thought deeply, applied fearlessly, synthesized intelligently, and then done us the enormous favor of writing down his observations. The result is a comprehensive yet simple framework for personal growth that helps you make sense of everything from diet to career choices to religion.
September 7th, 2008
Regular readers will recognize that I’m just returning to TBYB! from a couple of months off. It’s been a great summer break for me, and I hope for you as well. The first article in the new series is called How to choose a goal for your back-to-school marketing campaign. In it, we take a look at your goals for 2008 and pick one that you’d really like to kick some butt on before the end of the year. Look for it in your favorite feed reader next week.
June 18th, 2008
TBYB is a strong proponent of identifying the life you want and trying to get it. I notice that the life I yearn for lately has more leisure and fewer commitments; unexpected morning adventures and lazy afternoons. So I’m going to take a break for a few weeks, and then I’ll be back with a new season of posts about personal marketing, in which I’ll show you step-by-step how to take control of your own attention by advertising to yourself. If you’ve not done so already, you can subscribe to my RSS feed to be notified when the series begins again.
April 20th, 2008
TBYB is on vacation. Your assignment this week is to go back and implement one of the suggestions you’ve read about in a previous article. We’ll return next Monday to your regularly scheduled blog.
February 11th, 2008
Hey guys. I sat down late last night to publish the article I had written for you this week and discovered to my dismay that due to problems with my host (don’t get me started!) that version of the Wordpress database has vanished. ARGH!!!!! Hopefully this is a temporary situation that can be resolved from either their backup or mine, but in the meantime I encourage you to browse the article index for tips about personal marketing that you may have missed.
November 18th, 2007
Take Back Your Brain! is one year old this week, and what a year it has been! Researching and writing these articles for you has been a fascinating, exhilarating adventure, so thanks to each of you for a great ride.
I have plenty of new articles planned for 2008, including a series that should be really interesting about the psychological hooks copywriters use. Of course there will also be a bunch of ideas and tips about ways to create and deliver advertising to yourself, using things like Vista widgets, audio reminders and passwords. As always, we’ll cover both technical hacks and easy low-tech projects. Plus we’re going to get a pet.
October 29th, 2007
All of a sudden I saw a huge tree growing out of a dry wash. It could have been the only tree in the county, as far as I knew. As I drove closer I noticed there seemed to be something hanging from the tree. Lots of things, suspended from the tree in large clusters like huge wisteria blossoms. I was nearly on top of the tree when I realized that these giant blossoms were composed of shoes. Hundreds of them. What a odd thing to do with your only tree! It would have been funny anywhere, but in a landscape where I’d seen little but sand and sagebrush for several hours it was hilariously bizarre; radically out of context. It sure did get my attention!
October 14th, 2007
For the next 3 weeks I’m celebrating the achievement of a huge goal with a three week road trip in my new RV. Seeing America, baby! Normally I stay pretty close to topic on this blog, but since I believe it was personal advertising that got me into the position to be able to do this, I’m considering that anything that happens during the trip IS on topic.
April 26th, 2007
Take Back Your Brain is very honored to be nominated for a Blogger’s Choice award in the Best Marketing Blog category. If you have enjoyed reading these articles I would be extremely grateful if you could take a few minutes to vote for this blog.
December 4th, 2006
Here in the northern hemisphere it is the darkest, coldest season of the year. Bears hibernate during this season. Honey bees retreat into the hive and huddle together for survival. Many other insects simply die. Trees lose their foliage as the sap flows deep inside. The tops of other plants die off completely for many months while growth only occurs underground. Most living species in this ecosystem respond to the absence of light and the plummeting temperatures by drawing inward for a long period of quiet regeneration. Except humans, who plan parties, decorate their homes, and flock like manic lemmings to shopping malls.
© 2008 Take Back Your Brain! 
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