Master Your Mind

Counterintuitive Strategies to Refocus and Re-Energize Your Runaway Brain

Roger Seip, Robb Zbierski

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781394190218, 9781119508182
• eBook ISBN: 9781119508175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

You'll get there faster if you just slow down

Master Your Mind offers a bit of perspective and a lot of insight for anyone seeking long-term success. Success in business is spelled M-O-R-E: better results, faster growth, more revenue, greater efficiency. Do more. Make more. Achieve more. And do it now. Eventually, ambition turns to stress, then to frenzy, then to emptiness as once-ambitious workers endlessly trudge the hamster wheel chasing the next promotion. While top-level performance is the holy grail of business at all levels, there is another, much better way to achieve it: slow down. Yes, you read that right—S-L-O-W. This is your permission to jump off of the hamster wheel.

Slowing down is not a luxury, it is a necessity. A frenetic brain simply doesn't perform at optimal levels. By maintaining a snail's pace, you actually achieve better results—at rocket speed—because you're firing on all cylinders. You'll think of new things, approach old problems from new perspectives, and breathe a breath of fresh air into everything you do. This book shows you how to achieve this state of steady, sustainable fire, and how to get further by crawling than you ever did while attempting to fly.

• Learn how slowing down can lead to better, faster results
• Achieve optimal performance thought patterns
• Enhance your creativity and effectiveness
• Build energy, revenue, and good health in a self-sustaining way

You know you're capable of more, but the stress is eating away at your body, your brain, and your soul. Relax, take a deep breath, and buckle down. Clear your mind, and then put it to work. Stop juggling and start doing. Master Your Mind shows you how to supercharge your trajectory by taking it S-L-O-W.

Part I
Slow Down Your Brain: Let an Elephant Do Your Work for You

In Part I of Master Your Mind, we’ll lay the foundation for why you and your brain need to slow down. This foundation will be both scientific and anecdotal in nature – we’ll draw from the latest research in neuroscience and quantum physics, plus the practical experiences of our clients and ourselves.

Our aim with Part I is to help you understand you a little better.

You’re going to learn about how your brain operates on its deepest levels (hint: It’s not just a little different, it’s often the exact opposite of what we see on the surface). You’ll learn about what happens when your brain physically slows down the frequency at which it vibrates. You’ll also identify some of the “default settings” we’re all preprogrammed with, and gain some understanding into how to stop sabotaging yourself.

We believe you’ll find Part I to be not just interesting on an academic level, but enlightening on a personal level, and extremely practical in your day-to-day activities. Enjoy!

1
Slowing Down, Speeding Up, and Your “Runaway Brain” . . . What Are We Talking About?

There is no such thing as overtraining . . . just underresting.

—Allen Lim, PhD founder, Skratch Labs

Slowing Down . . . What’s That Mean?

From Robb:

Having spent almost a decade in the cycling industry, I had so many opportunities to learn about slowing down in order to speed up. But my thoughts were usually going so fast I probably missed most of them. That is, until my friend Allen Lim dropped this nugget on me one day. Dr. Lim is one of the world’s leading authorities on exercise physiology, specifically in bicycling. Anyone outside of cycling may not know his name, but if we were to rattle off a list of athletes who have hired him to help them win races, medals, competitions, or contracts, that would be a heck of a list.

I first heard him say this right after he had finished consulting for a Tour de France team years ago. He was sharing his months-long experience with us and throughout the course of his stories, his quote made more and more sense.

For those who are unaware, and regardless of your opinion of cycling, the Tour de France is arguably one of the hardest, most grueling events in all of sports. And it requires quite an investment of suffering in order to complete the event. Competitors typically ride a minimum of 100 miles every day for three weeks straight. There are only two days off. The stages typically include climbing, sprinting, hours-long turns riding at the front to block the wind, and countless trips back and forth to the team car to gather food, water, and supplies. Got a bee sting? Road rash? Sunburn? Saddle sore? (Yes, that’s a real thing and at least as painful as you can imagine it to be.) Too bad. You must deal with it and fight through the pain, because many of the medicines used to heal these problems are banned in and out of competition.

So Al was sharing with us that his job is to help the riders figure out ways to stay healthy and strong up to and through the last week of the race. A lot of riders believe that they need to grind it out no matter what, all day and every day. They have been told “it will only make me stronger for tomorrow, so harden the “f” up!” This is a mindset that many professionals carry into their sales, customer service, clinical, insurance, real estate, and trade careers. Spoiler alert: There’s always a story about failure or burnout that follows the admission.

Al’s job was to help the athletes learn, understand, and apply different techniques for doing just the right amount of work exactly when they needed to while racing, so that their bodies could fully recover between stages. Climbers should ride their hardest only in the climbs. Sprinters can sit in until the last possible moment. Domestiques (the guys who do all the grunt work and protect the team leader[s]) can take turns, never going a minute longer than they need to at the front of the pack.

The lesson for these cyclists is this: You think you are tired from working too hard. That’s only part of it. You are actually tired from not taking the proper amount of time to recover. You waste energy doing things you don’t need to do to achieve the goal. And then you don’t value your “down time” enough to let yourself rest and recover properly. You are already thinking about tomorrow when you haven’t even finished today. You’re not fully present where you are right now, and instead you are creating turbulence, and that’s what’s exhausting you.

Cure for the Common “GO!”

Here’s the deal: most of you reading this book aren’t cyclists. But the lesson is still relevant for you, personally and professionally. Replace the word “cyclist” with “realtor” or “financial advisor” or “artist” or whatever your profession or your goal is.

Imagine a financial advisor studying for her Series 65. She spends a ton of time studying, typically after a full workday. She tries reading when she is tired. Her mind is elsewhere. She forgets what she read. And this happens over and over and over again. She starts thinking about what will happen if she doesn’t get her studying done. It stresses her out. She stays up late and doesn’t get a good night sleep. Every single appointment the next day is unproductive. Are you starting to see how the idea of “powering through” isn’t serving you? Are you starting to notice that taking a little more “down time” will help you operate more effectively during your “up time”?

Stop trying to “fight through” to get what you want. Stop ignoring reality. Start rethinking how you approach things. Start putting the appropriate amount of time, effort, and mental bandwidth into not only working smarter but also thinking smarter. Thinking smarter means less small thinking and more big thinking, less overthinking, and more relaxing.

Real-Life Examples

When it comes to slowing down in order gain progress, there are examples we can find everywhere to understand the importance of this tactic.

An airline pilot’s job is to safely travel from origin to the destination. If he can make it there on time, that’s a bonus! But the ultimate goal is to get the plane safely to the destination.

How many times have you been on the plane, in your seat, slightly overheated, wondering when this plane is going to take off. All of a sudden the sweet, soothing sound of “Boi-n-n-ng” comes over the loudspeaker, followed by “Ladies and gentleman, this is your Captain speaking. We are currently number 12 for takeoff, but don’t worry, we’ll make it up in the air. So for now, just go ahead and sit back and relax, we’ll be off the ground in just a bit.”

You might think the pilot needs to speed up in order to achieve his goal. He needs to fly faster than he had planned in order to get to the destination on time. But there’s more at stake here.

The pilot needs to get to the airspace where the destination air-traffic controller can get the plane in the queue to land. Once there, the pilot receives instructions on where to be and when (and at what speed) in order to keep the air traffic flowing smoothly.

Here’s the best and potentially most overlooked part. In order for the pilot to achieve the goal (landing safely at the destination), the most important thing he needs to do is slow the plane down. If the pilot does not decrease the speed of the plane, it literally can’t land, and he’ll never achieve the goal.

How many projects, conversations, activities, meetings, and so on never got finished simply because you never took a second to “lay off the gas” in order to let things fall into place, instead of having the emergency brake pulled, bringing everything to a screeching halt?

Here’s another example from football (the American type, not soccer). In order to snap the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I Slow Down Your Brain: Let an Elephant Do Your Work for You
• Part II Slow Down the Game: Counterintuitive Strategies and Tactics That Really Work
• Conclusion Next Steps: What to Do from Here?
• Resource Guide
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement