Mind Gym (2 page)

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.

T
his 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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):

We label things and experiences to help us understand how they fit with the world around us. For example, you see someone crying and automatically think,
Crying equals sad;
therefore, that person must be upset. Your automatic response prevents you from considering alternative explanations. The person crying could be acting, chopping onions, or laughing so hard that tears are streaming down his or her face. But when you are caught in the familiarity trap, you are unlikely to consider these alternatives. The familiarity trap explains, say, why security officials at the airport rotate roles. If a person looks at an X-ray screen for long enough, a nuclear bomb might go through without that person noticing. Some pianists learn their pieces away from a keyboard so they won’t become too familiar with it and fall into autopilot when they perform.

Of course, we all see the world through our own eyes. My eyes are different from your eyes. But when we try to consider an issue or solve a problem, we tend to assume that the way we see the world is the
right
way to see it. Why wouldn’t we? And yet our view isn’t always the right one. Thinking creatively demands that you look at a familiar problem with fresh eyes—using a perspective different from your own. To actually achieve this, you need to recognize that your mind is functioning on autopilot, temporarily fixed by your worldview and your life experiences.

To demonstrate that pressure often leads us to behave in autopilot mode, psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson asked a group of seminary students to prepare a talk on the Good Samaritan parable.
¹
With the parable at the forefront of their minds, the seminarians were then asked to walk to the location where they were expected to deliver their talk. So far, the task seems pretty straightforward. However, this is where the cunning psychologists made life difficult. They had arranged for the seminarians to come across someone lying in the road, coughing, spluttering, and calling for help. To make matters more difficult, the psychologists had told half the seminarians that they were late for their talk and the other half that they had plenty of time. How many would stop to help the injured person? And which ones? Of those who were told they had plenty of time to reach their destination, 61 percent stopped to help, but of those who were told they were late, only 10 percent stopped. According to the observations of the psychologists, some seminarians literally stepped over the actor pretending to be injured. The slight change of situation moved the rushed seminarians into autopilot, making them forget what had been on their minds just moments before.

There is nothing wrong with letting your autopilot direct mundane activities you have to do and have no desire to change, like mowing the lawn or folding laundry. But as the study just described shows, there are times when you must take control of your thinking or risk missing key opportunities (in the case of the seminarians, the opportunity to put into action the very message they were about to deliver at a lecture). Being in autopilot is unhelpful when