PERSONAL CRAP DETECTOR - Mental BS

Ciao

Quite the day on the economic markets yesterday. Black Monday! The Chinese are a powerful force in this world, whether they know what they are doing or not.

OK, before I get into today’s theme of learning to detect your own Mental BS, I want to sidestep back to something I introduced on June 8 when I spoke about the looking-glass analogy … the whole business of managing our personal energy.

I’m bringing it back here to elaborate on some things I only introduced back then because it’s important to this discussion about our personal BS. Here is that model again:

The Physical – the Quantity of the Energy
Our pure raw energy comes in physical form, controlled by our eating and activity level … the whole metabolic thing is huge to understand. But since you’ve both proven that you understand this I skipped that topic this month. In the analogy, this is the strength of the sunlight that we can access. If we start off with low physical energy there’s less to work with in life, regardless of our ability to harness it.

The Emotional-Social – the Quality of the Energy
Our emotional state (which is tied closely with the social) is analogous to clear or cloudy skies. Being stressed or self-absorbed or fearful or angry or (insert a hundred survival-based emotions) clouds the skies and keeps the energy from getting through; being emotionally connected and well-adjusted and maintaining a results-based (and also faith-based) optimism really helps to clear the skies. Any emotional troubles at all can significantly reduce the available energy that can be harnessed, regardless of how good you are of making use of what you have.

The Mental – the Focus of the Energy
Our minds are where transformation begins because it is with our minds that we can learn to focus whatever energy is available to us, not to mention using it to learn to control our metabolism (and get more raw energy to begin with) and emotions (to keep the skies clear so that more energy is available for use). I want to talk about some of the mental stuff today.

Our mind is like the magnifying glass … which can focus the available energy or waste it. In the analogy, the magnifying glass harnesses the sun’s light (physical energy) and focuses it on a specific spot with a chosen intensity … in order to accomplish something (like burning your girl-friend’s name in a block of driftwood). (in reality, our mind isn’t just like an ordinary magnifying glass though; it’s like having a magnifying glass that can increase the sun’s power as well as burn away the clouds!) But here’s the problem … here is where the BS shows up. Despite having this amazing tool to harness all available energy and use it to do some amazing things, we waste it (some people waste all of it) because we don’t take the time to learn how to use. Here are 3 ways in which we waste or negate our mental power to focus:

1. Multi-tasking: by definition, means we are not focusing on just one thing.
2. Unstructured thinking: this leads to having zero skill in focusing the mind.
3. Faulty storytelling (allowing bad lines of “code” in our head): this creates negative feedback to the energy quality (the emotions).

I want to FOCUS on just the first one today (so that I’m not guilty of the very thing I’m talking about). Let’s talk about the BS associated with multi-tasking.

Multi-tasking is one of the greatest deterrents to personal growth and development and it is certainly in the top two reasons why most people under-perform (the other reason is lack of clarity in what they are trying to accomplish). You have heard me speak about this for years … multi-tasking is a dysfunctional mental state that guarantees mediocre performance at best. Psychologists call it “polyphasic activity,” and in my experience, any time psychologists give something a fancy name it usually isn’t a good thing. Where’s the BS part? Many (most?) people actually believe that multi-tasking is a good thing … especially your generation and ones even younger than you. Study after study after study has proven that multi-tasking is mutually exclusive with high-performance. High-performers, from any field, actively work to defeat this in their life … even when not performing. Why? Begins how we train our minds in non-battle conditions is how our mind will respond when actually tasked with something important.

Here’s how the magnifying glass analogy makes sense of this. Imagine holding the magnifier in order to catch the sun’s rays so that you can burn a hole in a piece of wood. How long does it take to get the burn started? 10 seconds? 5 seconds? What would happen if you moved the glass every 2 seconds to a different spot? You could even move it continually back and forth between just two spots … and nothing would EVER burn. Why? Because some tasks/missions require focus and intensity and persistence in order to accomplish them. There is simply no workaround for this.

This mental BS has stolen people’s ability to concentrate for any length of time as attention spans have diminished to microscopic proportions. The hand-held technology is perhaps the single greatest contributor to this dysfunction, training people that it’s acceptable to be distracted by something every few seconds. I too have been sucked in and mesmerized by this Medussa, but I’ve learned enough to know that there must be times that I intentionally MUST ignore these distractions … just for the good of my mind. Thinking has almost become a lost luxury and workers around the world are complaining that they have so many competing demands and so many “number one priorities,” that they don’t have time to think. This is a big blind spot if we don’t think that this isn’t hurting us. It’s just BS.

One final thing about the magnifying glass; you know that your ability to control the sunbeam so that it can burn exactly what you want requires knowing how to hold the glass, as measured by 3 skills:

a) Finding the right distance from the wood (the focal distance);

b) Orienting the glass perpendicular to the sunbeam (for maximum intensity);

c) Keeping the glass steady.

In our mind, these three things are:

a) Establishing the focal point (discussed next week) so that we know where our energies must come to bear, and then focusing that energy through intentionality;

b) Our orientation towards optimism (results/faith-based) or pessimism (survival thinking);

c) Clarity and persistence and know to not give up.

With all love I say this to you:

“Cut the crap guys.”

J

Dad