Mind Gym

Sebastian Bailey, Octavius Black

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062331465
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

The international bestseller that will help you transform your personal and professional life by changing the way you think.

Today, the pressure to achieve is intense. To be at our best, we need our minds working at peak potential. But unless you train it, your mind stays on autopilot, stuck in unhealthy thought patterns that lead to self-sabotaging habits and behaviors. As with your body, you have to exercise your mind to get the most out of it.

Sebastian Bailey and Octavius Black, founders of Mind Gym, help you change your mental default settings through a series of "workouts" that have been tested and experienced by more than one million people from around the world and from companies such as Google, NBCUniversal, Shell, Pfizer, and PepsiCo. This hands-on guide presents a fitness program for the mind that tackles the most common challenges at work and home:

• How to adopt a positive mindset
• How to repair broken relationships
• How to resolve conflict successfully
• How to influence others
• How to minimize stress and gain energy
• How to be more creative

Insightful, proven, and practical, Mind Gym is the essential mental workout that will wake up your mind and help you be your best in life.

PART ONE

Reset Your Mind

THE COMPUTER CRASHES before you could save that all-important document. You forget to buy the vital ingredient in the meal you’re cooking for your hot date. The bad weather is going to make you miss your flight connection. All of these circumstances could make you believe that you’re unlucky or that the world is somehow conspiring to get you. But is it? Or are these just random circumstances you have no control over? Maybe the real question you should be asking yourself is this: Is my mind conspiring against me—creating negative thoughts around innocuous situations or unrealistically positive thoughts around truly negative situations?

It may surprise you to know that one of the most significant discoveries in contemporary psychology is that we all choose how we think, react, and respond to situations. Sounds obvious, right? Well, it’s not. For years experts thought we were preprogrammed in our early, formative years, that our minds were hardwired like a computer. The theory was that when a person encountered a specific stimulus, only a specific reaction would occur. Of course, there were other experts back then who challenged this theory. But at the time, these experts theorized that our thinking, reactions, and responses to stimuli could only be changed as a result of our being rewarded or punished. Basically, we weren’t given credit for a powerful ability: choice.

The truth is, you have control of your thoughts, reactions, and responses. And once you understand how powerful that choice can be, you’ll be able to change more aspects of your life than you can imagine.

In this first part of the book, you’ll learn how often you operate on autopilot—a state of “going through the motions” of your life without really paying attention to choice. Being stuck in autopilot can not only lead you down the wrong paths in life and at work, because you’re not paying attention to possible pitfalls, but it can also result in fantastic opportunities passing you by—a new relationship, a career opportunity, or an experience of a lifetime.

You’ll also learn how and when to flip the switch on habits, keeping the good habits and eliminating the bad. If you’re unaware of your habits, you’ll soon become aware—and be able to swap bad habits for positive lifestyle choices that can get you where you want to be in a heartbeat. Maybe you want a job promotion. What bad habits are holding you back? Do you want more money? What good habits should you focus on more?

Finally, we’ll show you how your perception of the world impacts your behavior. You’ll learn how to adopt a positive mind-set and how to turn good thinking into good activity, which, in turn, creates phenomenal results. In fact, as many Mind Gym users report, this simple switch in thinking is the single biggest catapult that can change everything.

Most important, the first two chapters that follow are going to prepare your mind for the rest of the book, where we’ll dive into specific areas of your life.

Get ready to get set—your new mind-set.

CHAPTER 1

Flip the Switch on Automatic Thinking

This is your life. You have goals you want to achieve, dreams you want to pursue, milestones you want to reach. To get there, you need to think deliberately and make the right choices day in and day out in order to reach your highest potential. Unfortunately, your hectic life often leads you to simply go through the motions, doing the same things over and over, following familiar habits of behavior and thinking. In short, you get stuck in autopilot.

Sometimes these habits are tremendously helpful—thank goodness you don’t need to figure out how to use your toothbrush every time you use it. But there are times when your mental habits—or thinking shortcuts—need revisiting. Like with many other habits (such as using a toothbrush), you may not even realize that you’ve created a mental habit. This chapter explores how to spot your mental shortcuts, how to switch to more helpful thinking modes, and how to break bad mental habits.

Attention! Attention!

Imagine for a second that you could tune in and listen to other people’s thoughts. What would you hear? If you listen in to our friend Janelle’s inner monologue, you would hear the equivalent of a talk radio program—a nonstop conversation about everything and anything: What if interest rates go up? Where would that leave me? Perhaps I should pay off my loans. Then again, it would be great to go hiking in the Himalayas.

Without pausing, Janelle moves abruptly in her mind from subject to subject. Oh look, broccoli is on sale. I wonder if something is wrong with it. Is it old? Is it covered in pesticides? Maybe I should just buy a frozen dinner instead. There is a low-fat version I could buy. I better not. It might be disgusting. But I should stick with my healthy diet. Then again, Kate has put on weight recently. She’ll probably get offended if she sees me only buying healthy food. I wonder when is the best time to go hiking in the Himalayas.

To put it mildly, there’s a lot of chatter happening in Janelle’s head. However, if you asked her what she was thinking about at any specific moment, she would be able to confidently share her thoughts, in detail and at length. But not everyone’s like Janelle.

Our friend Catherine’s internal dialogue is extremely different. Her mind sounds more like static noise—a consistent buzz without much focus. If you asked her what she was thinking at any given second, she might actually be startled by your question and reply, “Um, I was just zoning out.” Or she might say, “I can’t get this song out of my head.” Or, “I wasn’t really thinking about anything specific.”

Catherine’s static noise plays in her head while she fumbles through the motions of familiar routines, like grocery shopping, cleaning, or commuting to and from work. How many of us have driven past our destination because we were zoning out? How many of us have arrived at our destination and “snapped out of a trance” with only a vague recollection of how we arrived there?

The difference between Janelle and Catherine is their focus. Janelle is an example of someone with an exclusively internal focus: she is always aware of what she is doing and what she is thinking, almost like an observer of her own mind. Catherine, by contrast, has an entirely external focus: she is oblivious to how she is thinking and what she is doing—she is just doing it.

Internal Focus

When your focus is internal, it’s much like you’re having a conversation with yourself. Consider the voice you hear in your head as you read this book. Even while you’re reading our words, another dialogue might be asking if it’s worth continuing to read this chapter or if now is the time to have a cup of coffee. You might also be thinking about whether you left the oven on, where to go on vacation next, or how to deal with a cranky coworker.

When your focus is internal, you are conscious of the fact that you are thinking; you can hear and pay attention to the running commentary in your head.

External Focus

Assess where you are at the moment. What is happening around you? What noises do you hear? Who is nearby? What colors do you see? What do you notice that is new or different?

External focus is an awareness of the things outside your own head. And when you focus in this way, you aren’t aware of what you’re thinking. Your attention is on what is going on, not on what you think about it, how to interpret it, or whether it could have an impact on your future.

When you are really caught up in something, whether it’s the thrill of a football game or the latest twist in your favorite reality show, you are externally focused. And when you find yourself thinking, Why am I wasting time watching this ridiculous reality show? you have returned to an internal focus.

Of course, as soon as you ask yourself where your focus is, your focus automatically becomes internal, which is one of the reasons why it is easier to move to an internal focus than to an external one.

Where Should Your Focus Be?

Your mind is always occupied in one of two places: what is going on inside your head or what is going on outside your head. It is impossible to focus at the same time on both what’s internal and what’s external, just as it is to focus on neither. What is possible, though, is to switch between them, which, with a little mental discipline, you can do pretty much whenever you want.

Try it for yourself: Grab a blank sheet of paper and a pen, and draw a picture of a house in the countryside on a sunny day. While you are drawing, there will be times when you think to yourself, Am I doing this right? or I really can’t draw very well. At other instances, you will be so absorbed in, for example, making the smoke coming out of the chimney look realistic that you won’t be aware of what you are doing. You will find it impossible to be aware of the conversation in your head and be absorbed in your artwork at the same time. But you can quickly move between the two, going internal by asking yourself a question, like How well am I doing this task? and going external by focusing on the picture or some element of it, like The smoke is heavy and thick.

So, which is best? Do you want to be more like Janelle—internally focused—or more like Catherine—externally focused?

The answer is neither, or both. Different personality types tend to spend more of their time in one world than the other, but all of us spend time in both, and we need to. It is both natural and sensible to switch between an internal focus and an external focus. Both have a helpful side and a harmful side.

Either focus, internal or external, is helpful when it increases your likelihood of success, effectiveness, efficiency, or elegance. And it is harmful when it keeps you from achieving your goals or performing at your best, whether you are trying to relax, give a presentation, or argue with your partner.

The Four States of Mind

Combining the different types of focus (internal and external) with the different ways of focusing (helpful and harmful) generates four distinct states of mind: autopilot, critical, thinking, and engaged.

Your challenge is to spend as much time as possible in the helpful states and learn to swap neatly between thinking and engaged to support your desires. To accomplish this you need, first, to be good at spotting which state of mind you are in.

FLIP THE SWITCH ON AUTOMATIC THINKING

Autopilot: Recognizing Habits of the Mind

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and hearing this: “Good morning. My name is Mark and I will be your autopilot for the day. We will be setting off for work this morning five minutes late, as usual, and then traveling along the same route we have taken every day for the past three years. Later, someone will ask how we are, and we will reply ‘Fine, thank you’ without a moment’s thought. There is a possibility of turbulence at the one P.M. meeting, when someone makes a statement we disagree with. But don’t worry: we have a stock response of tired and familiar arguments we can shoot back at them.”

Silly as this scenario may seem, everyone has an autopilot inside that is taking mental shortcuts every day. Without these mental shortcuts, you would get very little done. However, because you take these shortcuts, you tend to miss out on opportunities and fail to perform at your best. In effect, the lights are on but no one is home.

Autopilot kicks in when you allow what was once exciting and challenging to become boring or mundane. You stop thinking about the situation and, instead, respond in preprogrammed ways. There are several factors that can turn on the autopilot (and turn off your thinking mind):

The Familiarity Trap

We label things and experiences to help us understand how they fit with the world around us. For example, you see someone crying and au...