The Power of Words
Starting Each Day With A Little Thinking...Unconscious
It’s amazing to me how sometimes things just “pop in to my mind”. Suddenly a new idea emerges that is crystal clear and cogent. I could have spent hours, days, and weeks puzzling on the concept and never come up with the idea that suddenly materialized. And these “out of thin air” ideas are often the best ones! Without even trying!
There’s a lesson here — we’ve got incredible power within each of us locked in our unconscious mind. The challenge is how to tap in to this wonderful resource. While I don’t profess to have all the answers on this topic, I have found a few things that seem to help me tap in to my unconscious:
- I constantly seek out, read, and learn about new things. I liken this to the “care and feeding” of the brain. I have absolutely no idea how the brain manages to take all of the information that I consume and file/organize it. All I know is that my brain has an uncanny knack for “giving back” pieces of information that I didn’t know were there. As a result, I feed my brain as often as possible.
- I constantly puzzle over problems and challenges. While it’s not often the case that the conscious puzzling solves the problem at hand, I truly believe that even if the answer is not emerging, all of these failed attempts are being sorted and sequenced by my brain. I liken this to “exercising” my brain.
- Third, I give up! By this I mean that at a certain point in time I stop puzzling on the question at hand. Perseverance is a wonderful thing, however sometimes it’s “just not the right” time for an answer to emerge. I liken this to “resting” my brain.
- Finally, I believe in my brain. By this I mean that I have the confidence that I CAN find the answer if I follow these three steps. While it may take a while, I stay true to the above process (feed, exercise, rest) knowing that it’s going to get me to the right place. I have faith that we’ve got more untapped capacity inside ourselves than most of us will ever come to believe
In my opinion these four steps — feed the brain, exercise the brain, rest the brain, believe in the brain — are all that’s required to let our unconscious mind work it’s magic.
With that in mind:
Do you have a plan to tap in to the power of your unconscious mind?
As always, thanks for the time.
Trades
Whether explicit or implicit, we all trade time for money. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just a reality. The bad thing — yes I’m taking a risk and passing judgement here — is when we make these trades unconsciously.
It’s reality that we are faced with constraints on an ongoing basis. Those constraints often limit what we perceive we can and can not do:
- Take the vacation we would like
- Attend more of the kid’s functions
- Help our friends and family out financially
- Spend more time with our spouse
- Retire from our job
- Spend more time exercising
- And the list goes on, and on, and on….
But are these constraints real? Is it really the case that we CAN’T do the items on the above list? Or is it the case that we’re not willing to make a conscious decision to trade off time or money so that we CAN do the items on the above list? Is it that we can not complete the items on our list, or is it that we are not willing to experience the pain or discomfort associated with making tough decisions? Read the list again. Ask yourself: “Would I be happier if I made a different trade off of time and money?”. Only you can be the judge of whether you answer this question correctly.
With that in mind:
Are you making the right trades?
As always, thanks for the time.
Persistence
We’ve all been there: you make a great plan, you spend the time executing, and it just doesn’t work out. What you do next defines who you are; and, in all likelihood, what you’ll eventually accomplish. There’s lots of possible options; however, they basically break down in to one of two paths:
- The “woe is me” path. This is where you bemoan what went wrong, makes up excuses, assign blame, and decide “this wasn’t a very good idea anyways”. You go “back to the drawing board” and start again. Congratulations, you’ve just locked in failure.
- The “persistence” path. This is where you reflect on what happen, identify the errors, find a way to fix them, and get back in the ring for the next round. You may not achieve success in this next cycle, but you’re one step closer to achieving success.
If you think successful people always succeed on their first attempt you’re dead wrong. The difference between those that succeed and those that do not comes down to persistence. Those that fail, give up. Those that succeed have the persistence to give it one more shot. It’s entirely up to you on which path you choose; and, accordingly, on what degree of success you achieve.
With that in mind:
Do you have persistence to try one more time?
As always, thanks for the time.
Generosity
Too often we focus on WIIFM — What’s In It For Me. That’s too bad as there’s a whole lot more OUTSIDE of us than INSIDE of us. Don’t get me wrong, I believe 100% it’s absolutely critical that we always focus on looking inward and focusing on how to improve ourselves. However, often the fastest way to self improvement is via acts of generosity via the aforementioned external focus.
And the best thing about this external focus is that it comes with it’s own set of bonuses:
- Acts of generosity are normally free.
- They normally generate huge amounts of joy and happiness in others
- They simultaneously generate huge amounts of joy and happiness internally
- Fate has a way of rewarding acts of generosity in the most unexpected and delightful ways
If you want to have a little bit of fun try this experiment:
- For the next week have the first task of every day be “Reach out to someone for no reason at all and do something to make their life easier or better”.
At the end of one week decide if it was worth the effort. If so, repeat.
With that in mind:
What was your last act of generosity?
As always, thanks for the time.
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