Motivating Employees: Understanding Mind Management Part 1 of 6
Submitted by Erik Vermeulen on Thu, 2009-10-29 11:17
Why Mind Management?
Every action begins with a thought – not one thing you’ve done has been without thought. Therefore it stands to reason that, if you want to change your actions, you need to change your thinking. So let’s quickly explore a little bit of physiology to clarify the body-mind dynamic.
Every movement you undertake is driven by the careful and systematic contraction and relaxation of muscles. Muscles work collaboratively to move limbs precisely through the intricate interaction of relaxation and contraction. This is the essence of movement. Muscles though are driven by electrical impulses, called Action Potential, sent through the nervous system from our brain.
Thoughts, which drive our brain, originate from our thinking – a process that takes place in our mind as a result of our interaction with the world around us, which is facilitated through our 5 senses (see, hear, taste, touch and smell). As with everything in the universe, your mind is regulated by a set of firm principles, which I will briefly describe.
1. Your sub-conscious mind never sleeps.
Everything you have ever experienced has been stored in your sub-conscious. Even before you were born, your sub-conscious mind was active – absorbing the world around you and the environment of your mother.
To best understand this storage of experiences, it’s best to liken your subconscious to a filing cabinet – a very big one. If you were to manage your filing cabinet, chances are you’d carefully assign a label to each file and then file them alphabetically, or numerically, or in some form of order which you’ll understand. If you want information on your tax returns, for example, you’ll look under “T” and get the file named “Tax Returns”. Easy. And it won’t take you more than a minute!
Now suppose I came to your highly organized filing system, empty all the contents on the floor and ask you to find your tax returns information, what will you do? You’d likely tell me to call next week while you sift through the pile of paper on the floor. And that’s what your mind looks like. Unless you order the “files” and assign labels to experiences, the information becomes difficult to find.
If you want to improve your performance, lessen your mistakes and deliberately get the results you really want, you need to start creating order amongst your experiences and how they’re stored in your sub-conscious.
