Using Your Amazing Winning Brain

Does your thinking serve you well?

6 Ways to Improve Our Thinking to Thrive 

Our brain controls our every function and everything we do starts with a thought. Yet most of us don’t learn much about taking more control of our thinking. We either say, ‘I’m just like that’, or we pick a few things up along the way. I was certainly like this until I faced some big life changes. A combination of divorce, wanting to be the best parent I could be – empowering and enabling my children – and a very demanding role in local government led to me becoming very sick with ‘stress’. I started to explore what I could do to improve my wellbeing, and ensure I maintained it.

Part of the answer was to take a huge, scary leap out of a well-paid stable job into the world of self-employment (with two young children some thought this was fool-hardy rather than brave). I did this because I found myself in a role that had taken me too far away from my purpose. I wanted to pursue my passion of enabling people of all ages to realise their potential, to develop those characteristics that make the real difference in all areas of our wellbeing but are not developed in the usual knowledge-based subjects of our education curricula.

 In this personal and professional maelstrom, I started to learn more about the brain and how we can take more control of our thinking – to consistently think more positively, believe in ourselves, manage stress, manage tricky situations in professional and personal relationships, achieve our goals. In effect, be more our authentic selves, be comfortable in our own skin and make a positive contribution for our own benefit and the benefit of those around us. Some would say, our best selves!  

Developing our toolkit to use the power of our mind is an essential foundation in my equipped2succeed framework and programmes. Develop Your Amazing Winning Brain is about reflecting on how to more effectively manage our thinking – positively taking control, rather than allowing some of our thinking to limit you.

So, what do I mean by, ‘Develop Your Amazing Winning Brain’?

Let’s break it down:

 develop:  to bring out the capabilities or possibilities of; bring to a more advanced or effective state;

your: uniquely belonging to you – your thoughts, your attitudes, your actions;

amazing: causing wonder by using the limitless potential and power we have within us;

winning: the act of a person who chooses their future and wins the life they choose;

brain: the organ inside the head that controls and co-ordinates all mental and physical actions; thought, memory, feelings, and activity.

Just take a moment to reflect on all the work you’ve done on your thinking over the years. How has your thinking developed? If you’re like most of us, it’s happened in quite an ad hoc way by ‘osmosis’ – picking things up from our personal experiences, people we’ve met and read about, and our educational, community and professional environments. Some of us ‘pick up’ the things that help us, some of us find it more challenging.

It’s all in our mind – from our beliefs and values to how to ride a bike.

So how do we use our thinking to help us improve in all areas of life?

Here are 6 things to reflect on: 

1.   Learn More - Give Yourself Greater Insight

Learn some brain and mind basics - about how the most powerful computer you will ever know, your brain, works.

I have put together some of the essential elements of the research that underpins my training workshops in a book that’s out soon, ‘Using Our Amazing Winning Brains’. If you want to do your own reading and research, here are some of the books that have informed my thinking:

The Private Life of the Brain – Susan Greenfield

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind – Dr Joseph Murphy

Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and The Power of Practice – Matthew Syed

More Than a Pink Cadillac: Mary Kay Ash 9 Leadership Keys To Success – Jim Underwood

The Chimp Paradox - The Mind Management Programme for Confidence, Success and Happiness. – Dr Steve Peters

Brain Rules – 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school – John Medina

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking – Matthew Syed

The Human Brain – Susan Greenfield

Five Minds for the Future – Howard Gardner

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Malcolm Gladwell

How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day

– Michael Gelb

Use Your Head – Tony Buzan

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain – John J. Ratey

The Inner Game of Golf – W. Timothy Galway

Be Your Best – Sally Gunnell

Mind Change: How digital technologies are leaving their mark on our brains – Susan Greenfield

2.   Input – Output

You get out what you put in, and in nothing is this truer than in our thinking. And this is not necessarily dependent on experience. There are people who have been through truly horrendous situations and kept their positive thinking and goals in tact – they realise that no person or circumstance can affect their thinking unless they allow it.  

Quality begins on the inside... and then works its way out.

Bob Moawad

Manage your memory bank and pull out stuff that helps you.

If you dwell on the negative, you add to its power.

If you dwell on the positive you add to its power.

It’s your choice whether you dwell on the positive or negative.

It’s your choice who to listen to, what TV programmes to watch and what you read.

Are you watching soaps full of doom and gloom and melodrama that reinforce all the negative sides of life or are you reading about success stories and learning from inspirational people?

Are you listening to negative people who know what’s wrong with everything but are short on solutions, or are you surrounding yourself with positive, empowering people?

3.    CHOOSE your thoughts

We can choose our thoughts, just the same way we choose our clothes in the morning. It takes some work to choose thoughts that empower and enable us but it’s worth the effort. It takes practise to filter out negative thinking habits that hold us back and choose thoughts that serve us well; that contribute to our wellbeing and achieving our goals, to replace:

I can’t with I can

I’m just like that with I can change

They are just dreams with My goals are  

There is a limit to what I can achieve with I can achieve…

This is beyond me with I believe

4.   R.A.S – We Attract What We Think About

Our brain wants to help us get what we want and the reticular activating system (R.A.S.) helps us spot the things we think about – our goals. There are millions of pieces of information and potential stimuli around us all the time and the RAS is the brain’s way of helping us to focus on those things that are important to us. It helps us to spot the things we think about, so we start to attract or see whatever we’re focusing on (whether that’s positive or negative!).

This means that we can programme our thoughts – every day – by focusing on what we want to achieve.

It is therefore vital that we focus on the things we positively want to achieve rather than negative distractions: what we want rather than what we don’t want.

If I want a yellow car – I start spotting them – especially if I have a wacky, humorous image in my head reinforcing the goal.

5.   Overcoming the paralysis of FEAR

False Expectations Appearing Real

The brain doesn’t tend to recognise the difference between a real or an imaginary threat, e.g. running an imaginary argument or challenge over in our mind causes stress, the sight of an exam paper or large bill can cause stress, and we all know what happens when two angry people in ‘reptilian' ‘fight’ mode clash! An illogical rant that gets us nowhere is more likely than a calm discussion that moves us forward. In this mode, we don’t find solutions.

One: we need to recognise times when we do ‘go reptilian’ (let our survival instinct take over and unnecessarily go into Fight, Flight, Freeze or Flock mode).

Two: train our mind to view things differently and minimise the negative mental and physical effects of worry, fear, pressure and stress.

The bottom line is that we’re going to be frightened on occasions. If we want to improve our wellbeing and perform at our best when it matters, we need to be prepared to feel scared, acknowledge it and ignore it, or deal with it.

In her book Daring Greatly: ‘How The Courage To Be Vulnerable Transforms The Way We Live, Love, Parent And Lead’, Brené Brown talks about, instead of letting fear stop you, expect it to be there. Acknowledge it and, ‘Say, ‘I see you, I hear you, but I’ll do this anyway’.’ She goes on to say,

‘It feels dangerous to show up, but it’s not as terrifying as thinking, at the end of our lives, ‘What if I had shown up? What would have been different?’’

One of the things that can help overcome fear is gradually expanding our comfort zone – one step at a time. Think of a few things that scare you or will certainly challenge you and start to tick them off. Accomplishing one thing that challenges you will expand the whole of your comfort and you find yourself ready to take on the big stuff.  e.g. Going to a new place, calling someone and asking for a meeting, doing a scary physical challenge such as a parachute jump or playing someone at sport you know is better than you.

6.   Use Your Brainpower to Re-wire

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

William James

Our brain is the seat of all our learning, formal education and experiential learning, how to walk, talk and write, and all our positive and negative learned beliefs, habits, behaviours and thinking. We can grow and change throughout our lives – ditch the stuff that holds us back and develop the and thinking that takes us forward, serves us well, helps us to improve and makes us happier. The recognition and study of neuroplasticity has proved beyond doubt that we can use the power of the brain to improve everything in our lives: from health, mental wellbeing and quality of life to financial wellbeing, from being not quite good enough to being elite in our field, take us from C’s to A*’s, from struggling with relationships to managing relationships better, from being anxious in certain circumstances to overcoming fear and performing at our best. We can systematically use Relaxation – Visualisation and Mental Rehearsal to perform better:

-       learn new things and improve skills (such as driving on ‘the wrong side of the road’ when planning to hire a car in a country where they drive on the opposite side – we can only practice at home safely in our heads!).

-       improve our ability to perform well each day;

-       develop the ability to T.C.U.P. – Think Clearly Under Pressure when being at our best matters most;

-       improve our ability to manage personal and professional relationships

-       create positive habits;

-       use the power of imagination and creative thinking

-       build our focus and discipline

-       develop our winning mentality

equipped2succeed

Relaxation – Visualisation – Mental Rehearsal – The Process

Find a summary of this process and guided R – V – MR in the equipped2succeed Learning Tools on www.equipped2succeed.co.uk

You can download music and a guided R-V-MR track, especially designed to help you establish your own process. The music has been especially commissioned to help our brains make the right connections.

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to

the thinker what s/he thinks into it.

Ernest Holmes

To learn more, look out for my next book,

‘Using Our Amazing Winning Brains’