Does your thinking serve you well?
/Using Your Amazing Winning Brain
Does your thinking serve you well?
7 Ways to Improve Our Thinking to Thrive
Everything we do starts with a thought.
Every solution depends on us creatively using our thinking.
Every reaction to a situation, positive or negative, is controlled in our brain.
Every conversation is guided by our thinking.
Everything we feel emanates from our mind.
Everything we believe about ourselves is in our mind.
Yet most of us don’t learn much about taking more control of our thinking and use it to serve us well.
We can often say, ‘I’m just like that’, or we pick a few things up along the way. Taking more control of our thinking helps us in every area of our life. That doesn’t mean denying our creativity or spontaneity, but rather being able to use those better. It means, knowing how we can reduce the thinking and attitudes that doesn’t serve us well and increase the thinking and attitudes that serve us well.
In the throes of a personal and professional maelstrom many years ago, I started to learn more about the brain and how we can take more control of our thinking – to consistently think more positively, believe in ourselves, manage stress, manage tricky situations in professional and personal relationships, achieve our goals. In effect, be more our authentic selves, be comfortable in our own skin and make a positive contribution for our own benefit and the benefit of those around us. Some would say, our best selves!
Developing our toolkit to use the power of our mind is an essential foundation in my equipped2succeed framework and programmes. Using Your Amazing Winning Brain is about reflecting on how to more effectively manage our thinking – positively taking control, rather than allowing some of our thinking to limit you.
So, what do I mean by, ‘Use Your Amazing Winning Brain?’
Let’s break it down:
use: take, hold, or deploy (something) as a means of accomplishing or achieving something; employ.
your: uniquely belonging to you – your thoughts, your attitudes, your actions;
amazing: causing wonder by using the limitless potential and power we have within us;
winning: the act of a person who chooses their future and wins the life they choose;
brain: the organ inside the head that controls and co-ordinates all mental and physical actions; thought, memory, feelings, and activity.
Just take a moment to reflect on all the work you’ve done on your thinking over the years. How has your thinking developed? If you’re like most of us, it’s happened in quite an ad hoc way by ‘osmosis’ – picking things up from our personal experiences, people we’ve met, reading, and our educational, community and professional environments. Some of us ‘pick up’ the things that help us, some of us find it more challenging.
It’s all in our mind – from our beliefs and values to how to ride a bike.
So how do we use our thinking to help us improve in all areas of life?
Here are 7 things to reflect on:
Learn More - Give Yourself Greater Insight
Learn some brain and mind basics - about how the most powerful computer you will ever know, your brain, works. I have been reading some of the essential elements of research about the brain over the past 20 years, and making sense of how we can use this to improve our lives. All this work underpins our, ‘Using Your Amazing Winning Brain’, and other equipped2succeed modules.
If you want to do your own reading, here are a just a few books that have informed my thinking and my work:
The Private Life of the Brain – Susan Greenfield
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind – Dr Joseph Murphy
Bounce: The Myth of Talent and The Power of Practice – Matthew Syed
The Chimp Paradox - The Mind Management Programme for Confidence, Success and Happiness. – Dr Steve Peters
Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking – Matthew Syed
Five Minds for the Future – Howard Gardner
Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain – John J. Ratey
Be Your Best – Sally Gunnell
Mind Change: How digital technologies are leaving their mark on our
brains – Susan Greenfield
You can start by completing one of our ‘Use Your Amazing Winning Brain’ workshops and using the follow-up resources, or complete the online module, which is coming soon.
2. Input – Output
You get out what you put in, and in nothing is this truer than in our thinking. This is not, however, necessarily dependent on experience. There are people who have been through truly horrendous situations and kept their positive thinking and goals in tact – they realise that no person or circumstance can affect their thinking unless they allow it.
Quality begins on the inside... and then works its way out.
Bob Moawad
Manage your memory bank and pull out stuff that helps you.
If you dwell on the negative, you add to its power.
If you dwell on the positive you add to its power.
It’s your choice whether you dwell on the positive or negative.
It’s your choice who you listen to, what TV programmes you watch and what you read.
Are you watching soaps full of doom and gloom and melodrama that reinforce all the negative sides of life or are you enjoying success stories and learning from inspirational people?
Are you listening to negative people who know what’s wrong with everything but are short on solutions, or are you surrounding yourself with positive, empowering people?
3. CHOOSE your thoughts
We can choose our thoughts, just the same way we choose our clothes in the morning. It takes some work to choose thoughts that empower and enable us but it’s worth the effort. It takes practise to filter out negative thinking habits that hold us back and choose thoughts that serve us well; that contribute to our wellbeing and achieving our goals, to replace:
I can’t with I can
I’m just like that with I can change
They are just dreams with My goals are
There is a limit to what I can achieve with I can achieve…
This is beyond me with I believe
4. R.A.S – We Attract What We Think About
Our brain wants to help us get what we want and the reticular activating system (R.A.S.) helps us spot the things we think about – our goals. There are millions of pieces of information and potential stimuli around us all the time and the RAS is the brain’s way of helping us to focus on those things that are important to us. It helps us to spot the things we think about, so we start to attract or see whatever we’re focusing on (whether that’s positive or negative!).
This means that we can programme our thoughts – every day – by focusing on what we want to achieve.
It is therefore vital that we focus on the things we positively want to achieve rather than negative distractions: what we want rather than what we don’t want.
If I want a yellow car – I start spotting them – especially if I have a wacky, humorous image in my head reinforcing the goal.
5. Overcoming the paralysis of FEAR
False Expectations Appearing Real
The brain doesn’t tend to recognise the difference between a real or an imaginary threat, e.g. running an imaginary argument or challenge over in our mind causes stress, the sight of an exam paper or large bill can cause stress, and we all know what happens when two angry people in ‘reptilian' ‘fight’ mode clash! An illogical rant that gets us nowhere is more likely than a calm discussion that moves us forward. In this mode, we don’t find solutions.
One: we need to recognise times when we do ‘go reptilian’ (let our survival instinct take over and unnecessarily go into Fight, Flight, Freeze or Flock mode).
Two: train our mind to view things differently and minimise the negative mental and physical effects of worry, fear, pressure and stress.
The bottom line is that we’re going to be frightened on occasions. If we want to improve our wellbeing and perform at our best when it matters, we need to be prepared to feel scared, acknowledge it and ignore it, or deal with it.
In her book Daring Greatly: ‘How The Courage To Be Vulnerable Transforms The Way We Live, Love, Parent And Lead’, Brené Brown talks about, instead of letting fear stop you, expect it to be there. Acknowledge it and, ‘Say, ‘I see you, I hear you, but I’ll do this anyway’.’ She goes on to say,
‘It feels dangerous to show up, but it’s not as terrifying as thinking, at the end of our lives, ‘What if I had shown up? What would have been different?’’
One of the things that can help overcome fear is gradually expanding our comfort zone – one step at a time. Think of a few things that scare you or will certainly challenge you and start to tick them off. Accomplishing one thing that challenges you will expand the whole of your comfort and you find yourself ready to take on the big stuff. e.g. Going to a new place, calling someone and asking for a meeting, doing a scary physical challenge such as a parachute jump or playing someone at sport you know is better than you.
6. Use Your Brainpower to Re-wire
The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
Our brain is the seat of all our learning, formal education and experiential learning, how to walk, talk and write, and all our positive and negative learned beliefs, habits, behaviours and thinking. We can grow and change throughout our lives – ditch the stuff that holds us back and develop the and thinking that takes us forward, serves us well, helps us to improve and makes us happier. The recognition and study of neuroplasticity has proved beyond doubt that we can use the power of the brain to improve everything in our lives: from health, mental wellbeing and quality of life to financial wellbeing, from being not quite good enough to being elite in our field, take us from C’s to A*’s, from struggling with relationships to managing relationships better, from being anxious in certain circumstances to overcoming fear and performing at our best. We can systematically use Relaxation – Visualisation and Mental Rehearsal to perform better:
learn new things and improve skills (such as driving on ‘the wrong side of the road’ when planning to hire a car in a country where they drive on the opposite side – we can only practice at home safely in our heads!).
improve our ability to perform well each day;
develop the ability to T.C.U.P. – Think Clearly Under Pressure when being at our best matters most;
improve our ability to manage personal and professional relationships
create positive habits;
use the power of imagination and creative thinking
build our focus and discipline
develop our winning mentality
equipped2succeed
Relaxation – Visualisation – Mental Rehearsal – The Process
Find a summary of this process and guided R – V – MR in the equipped2succeed Learning Tools on www.equipped2succeed.co.uk
You can download music and a guided R-V-MR track, especially designed to help you establish your own process. The music has been especially commissioned to help our brains make the right connections.
7. Look After Your Brain
REST
RELAXTION
WATER
FRESH FOOD
PHYSICAL ACTIVITY
SPACE
These all help our brains work better help our minds to take more control of our thinking, help us be more creative and stay well.
Are you doing the right things to powerdown and get proper rest and relaxation?
Our brains need to switch off or our thinking ‘batteries’ quickly go down. Rest, relaxation and physical activity helps
Are you using caffeine to give you false energy or are you listening to your brain and drinking more water?
Are you eating sugar to keep you going or having a piece of fruit?
Are you going for a walk, doing some yoga, going into the garden? What are you doing to move your body and help you think more clearly.
SPACE - time away from screens, time away from schedules and time pressures enable us to refresh and be better able think more creatively, find solutions and focus.
Life is a mirror and will reflect back to
the thinker what s/he thinks into it.
Ernest Holmes
To find out more about bespoke in person and online workshops, online modules email: harriet@equipped2succeed.co.uk