CA088: Why you need mind management

WHY do you need mind management? What do you want to change in your life? Do you want more or less of something or to learn a new skill or experience different things? Or do you want to change something about your relationships or body or work or finances? It doesn’t have to mean you hate your life or work now – but you just want it to be better in some way.   Yes, we all want changes but WHY do we need mind management to do it. ‘Life management begins with mind management. The quality of your life is influenced by the quality of your thoughts.’ Robin Sharma  Your marvellous mind Your brain is amazing and has enormous power. Its big job is to keep you alive and it does that by keeping you safe which tends to mean maintaining the status quo – because that’s what’s worked so far. This is fabulous for keeping you alive – but it’s not always so fabulous when you want to make changes – in other words you want to move away from the status quo in some way. It’s important to know that although you think you make your decisions and plans – including what you want to change – much of your thought processes go on at an unconscious level and decisions are made without you being aware of them much of the time. It has to do this. We have control over the conscious part of your mind, and although amazing, your conscious mind has limitations. It loses focus easily and typically holds about 7 chunks of information at any one time. This is why the subconscious takes control of most of what’s happening in our bodies. It’s the engine driving us – leaving our conscious mind to focus on other things.  Changing your mind This is critically important when we want to make changes, because your unconscious mind, which is a million times more powerful than your conscious mind, is running the show.  And it does much of this based on the beliefs and habits you’ve built up over your lifetime – not all of which are serving you well. Both parts of your mind are crucial not only to survival but also to getting the changes and living the life you want. The real trick is to get them working together to make this happen. This enables you to use the whole of your marvellous mind brain to work for you and not against you –otherwise it’s all to easy to end up self-sabotaging what you want to achieve. We’ve all done that! Why when you want to lose weight do you still eat the very thing that you know will not help you get the body you want?  Because your mind is screaming at you that you’ve hungry and want to eat and want to eat something that tastes nice – and your belief and experience tells you that cream cakes – especially a Victoria sponge with butter cream icing – will fill you up quickly and taste nice, and you’ve had a hard day so of course you deserve a little treat. Now that might be irritating and throw you off course a little but it also happens in really important decisions and situations. You want to leave a job and set up a new business for yourself, but your subconscious is screaming at you – ‘are you mad,  you’ll never make a good business person, why do you think you can do it, you never see anything through.’ Or whatever it might be for you, based on your past experience. Mind management is about becoming aware of the impact your thoughts have on yo,u and using your mind to your advantage.  Your Thoughts Time to take a step back - because underlying all of this is the notion that the way we think and the thoughts we think, influence what we do.  Our thoughts influence how we feel, which influences what we do or the actions we take, which impacts how we live our lives. It sounds obvious when you say it like that – but just take a moment to think about it and see if you really believe this is so or if you’re aware of it in your day to day life. The thoughts you think lead to the action you take. It therefore follows that if you change your thoughts (that’s the way you think) then you can change your actions. This means you can make the changes you want in your life, work or business.  You are not your thoughts It’s a fabulous concept to accept and goes hand in hand with the concept that your thoughts are things.  Your thoughts are not you and you are not your thoughts.  You are not defined by your thoughts.  Which means that you can change your thoughts to help you live how you want to live.  That’s what we mean when we talk about mind management. We’ve been talking about why you mind management to help you make changes, but it’s not just about doing things differently. It’s also about improving the everyday experience of being alive. After all, one of the changes you could look for is to be happier in your daily life, or more enthusiastic for life. It’s not just about things, its about ‘being’ as well. And mind management is the key.  Do we have to learn mind management? Yes - to a large extent we do have to learn mind management because we’ve not been taught how to manage our minds.  We don’t learn it at school – although some schools teach subjects like critical thinking but that’s something different. At best, we may have learnt something about the component parts of the brain and its functions. Most of us don’t pick it up from our natural interactions with our parents, probably because they never learnt it themselves. But this is your opportunity to learn about mind management now.  So what do we know about the mind? We’ve talked about the two major components of the mind being the conscious and the subconscious. And we know that our brain is in effect an information processing system, containing nerve cells (neurons) which are connected through synapses.  These neural pathways are influenced and strengthened by what we do, the influences in our lives, our previous experiences, beliefs and values we have stored in our minds. And these neural networks or pathways are strengthened by repetition. One of the potential problems of the mind is that it can be consciously (by our thoughts) or unconsciously influenced (by our subconscious). And the subconscious is the more powerful. We’re suggesting you get the conscious and the subconscious to work in harmony through mind management. So there’s no dissonance or disagreement between the two component parts of the brain and between your actions and your beliefs. That is the key to getting what you want and making the changes and why you need and want mind management. We know we can influence our conscious mind – we can determine our thoughts, so we need to influence our subconscious so it aligns with the subconscious. We also know that our subconscious mind was itself programmed, and can therefore be reprogrammed, but the process is slow and incremental.  The captain of your ship It’s likened to a super tanker (the subconscious) being controlled by the captain of the ship (the conscious).  The captain (the conscious mind) may be in charge, but the instructions the captain give take a long while to affect and influence the super tanker that is our subconscious. But the subconscious, like the formation of any habit, including thinking habits, can be influenced through repetition. Advertising relies on this repetition of key messages to get you to believe and then buy into their product, concept or ideas. This is why you can recall adverts from years ago, even your childhood, because of the power of repetition. Particularly when you add in a few tricks of the trade to make it even more memorable, tricks incidentally we can use to our advantage in mind management terms. The bottom line is mind management will help you change what you want to change and achieve what you want to achieve.   HOW to manage your mind You manage your mind by training your mind to think in certain ways – so you develop habits and ways of thinking to support change, happiness and success for you. Training your mind might sound a far out or like some sort of trickery, but all it means is using certain techniques and ways of thinking that you can develop through practice. With the result that you can improve and transform your life and business through your thoughts, self-beliefs and the action you take. What techniques help us manage our minds Key mind management techniques include: Goal setting or vision setting Affirmations Visualization Hypnosis Mindfulness and Meditation Learning and internalising new skills through repetition and practice Developing yourself through reading and writing. These are the very techniques we talk about here at Brilliant Living HQ and on the Changeability Podcast. They’re also captured into a 10 step framework which shows how they all fit together and build one on the other in the Changeability framework. You will find the full version of this written out in a logical practical step by step framework on Amazon in the book Changeability: Manage your Mind - Change your Life either in Paperback or in Kindle.  This is the best place to get the full explanation and exact steps. Or you can of course listen to the last 88 episodes of the Changeability Podcast! But it will be a lot quicker to read the book! Episode 88 of the Changeability Podcast Hear us discuss all of this and more in episode 88 of the Changeability Podcast. Links Changeability: Manage your Mind - Change your Life book on Amazon Thank you Thank you for being here and being wonderful.  If you like listening to the show please leave us a review on iTunes. If you’ve read the Changeability book please leave a review on Amazon.