ShareThisMental refers to matters of the mind that affect your flourishing. This includes what you think about throughout your day, your beliefs, mindset, perceptions and more. Some of the topics I've described relative to the mind include:
attention bias
flow
goal setting
grit
mental models
mind chatter
mindfulness
negativity bias
neuroplasticity
optimistic thinking
self-regulation
success mindset
svadhyaya
visualization
Knowledge is power! Enjoy learning about how your mind works.
Attention bias is a fundamental principle when looking at how the mind perceives reality. You may think that what you are observing in your world is the way that things “are” never the less your perception is biased. We perceive the world not as it is, but as we are. Research shows that people will bias their attention and what they focus on based on their beliefs and circumstances. Patients with anxiety disorder will be more likely to focus on faces displaying negative emotions longer than positive ones. People who are in a positive and grateful state are more likely to notice good things going on around them. Thoughts, beliefs and primers enable us to take neutral stimuli and interpret it with skewed perception.
When I ask a client who holds the belief, “it’s impossible for a woman to find a partner after the age of 30,” to list people she knows that are over 30 and single, she quickly rattles of a list of names. When I ask her to list people she knows that have found partners over the age of 30 she assembles a list; a rather long list. It just takes her three times as much time to come up with that list, even though it’s just as long.
My mentor, Dr. Karen Reivich calls this the Velcro Teflon Effect. Evidence that supports your beliefs sticks to you like Velcro. Evidence that disproves your beliefs bounces off of you like Teflon (the material used for bullet proof vests). So if you are constantly telling yourself you can’t do something, you’ll hold on to evidence around you to support the belief that you can’t do it. If you constantly tell yourself people don’t like you, you’re likely to dismiss the people around you that genuinely care and take an interest in you.
When you are actively working to increase your optimism, awareness to the attention bias is key. You can’t trust your own brain. Most of us go our whole lives and are not aware of this. We believe that if the thought came from my head it must be true. Your brain may says things like: “I’ll never make it,” “I’m fat,” “I haven’t accomplished anything,” or “She must think I’m stupid,” and “He thinks he’s better than me,” and it would hold on to evidence supporting those thoughts.
The key to increasing your optimism is to doubt your pessimistic mind chatter. Ask yourself where is there evidence supporting that belief? And most importantly, where is there evidence disproving it?
Need help putting this crucial principle to practice with your own mind chatter? Call me for a free coaching consultation at (212) F-L-O-U-R-I-S-H or (212) 356-8747.
The concept of flow is based on the research of Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (prounounces “chicks send me high"). Csikszentmihalyi studied states of intense absorption, or “being in the zone” that he calls flow. His research shows that being in flow and really feeling engaged in your work is a pathway towards flourishing.
Flow is achieved through a delicate balance of your strengths and skills with the challenge of the task at hand. If the work you’re looking to do is very challenging and your strengths don’t align with it, you’ll experience anxiety. If your skills outmatch the challenge of the work, you’ll experience boredom.
There are many ways to create more flow in your life. Even just creating a time pressure like “I will get this task done in X amount of time” can make a simple task more challenging and engaging. As tasks that initially bring flow become easier and less stimulating, we can continue to challenge ourselves to experience more flow.
To achieve flow, you need to know your strengths, balance them with the task at hand, turn off your mind chatter and allow yourself to be completely absorbed in your activity.
Feel like you’re not getting much flow from your work? Call me for a coaching consultation
Goal setting is fundamental to a successful and thriving life. It's what gives us the thrill and victory of feeling like we are active participants in life. For decades researchers have been studying formulas for effective goal setting.
An acronym for effective goal setting is SMART. That is, goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.
Vague goals like, "My goal is to lose weight," tend to fail more than specific goals, such as, "I will lose 10 lbs over the next 3 months." Research shows that setting a vague goal is actually more detrimental than setting no goal at all. In some ways, vague goals set you up for failure and lead to the belief, "I try to set goals, but I don't ever meet them." However, the goal itself is flawed.
Beyond SMART Goals, it's important that goals be an approach goal rather than an avoidance goal. An example of an avoidance goal is, "I will not drink any alcohol this week." Comparitvely, an approach goal would be, "I'm going to take good care of my physical health this week and have water or juice with dinner." Approach goals are things that you want to move towads, rather than just things you aim to avoid.
Goals should be paired with primers, or cues to remind you of your plans. This can be as simple as post-its on your computer screen with affirmations, to photograph, songs and scents.
The best book on the science of goal setting is Caroline Adams Miller's book: Creating Your Best Possible Life.
Grit is defined as perseverance and passion toward long-term goals (Duckworth et al. 2006). Gritty people tend to persevere, self-regulate and push themselves toward success. Drs. Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman (2006) found that the correlation between self-discipline and achievement was twice as large as the correlation between IQ and achievement. People with more grit earn higher GPAs even when they had lower SAT scores than. Gritty people experience more happiness than those who report to be less gritty.
Duckworth says that grit requires the ability to sustain effort and interest. Luckily, both are dimensions that can be increased over time.
A barrier to grit is what Dr. Carol Dweck refers to as fixed mindset. Believing that either you have what it takes or you don't, makes people less likely to persevere in the face of obstacles. Understanding that most things in life are not fixed, they are changing, inspires effort which leads to results.
Looking to make positive changes in your life? Need more grit to make those changes happen? Contact me and learn more about positive psychology based coaching!
In psychology mental models are called schemas; they help you to describe how the world works. Schemas are your belief system and provide the scaffolding upon which you build your concept of the world.
These mental models often develop as a result of heuristics, or general rules of thumb that help speed up the problem solving process. You are so constantly bombarded with information in your daily life, schemas provide a framework for quick decision making. Although these mental models might make decision making easier, it doesn’t always make it more accurate. For example, if your previous experiences have created the mental schema that “if you want something done right you have to do it yourself,” you will tend to be wary of others who want to help you even when evidence points to the contrary.
Often when you get upset or feel derailed, its oftentimes something about our mental schema that’s impacting how we feel. Imagine a couple fighting over the best way to parent their wayward teenager: one has the schema that proper parenting involves open communication and while the other parent believes that strict discipline is proper parenting. It’s not that either parent is wrong or right, it is just that there is incongruence in their mental models of what a good parent is.
Schemas are the glasses through which you see the world. My mentor Dr. Srikumar Rao taught me that you can’t leave your mental model—over time it leaves you. You can take steps to change your own mental models by first knowing what your mental models are. Once you identify any of your own schemas that might not serve you, start looking at other lenses through which you could view things. You can start to reinforce a new way of seeing the world and over time, you can create evidence in your reality to support the new mental model while the old one fades away.
Mind chatter is the constant stream of thoughts that go through your head. Some people call it ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts), while others call it your internal radio station. Regardless of what you call it, it's the little voice always playing in the background of your mind from the time you wake up until you go to bed.
It makes sense that you have so much mind chatter; the average brain has 100 billion neurons that make approximately 1 quadrillion connections. With a quadrillion neural connections, it’s no wonder thoughts can become so overwhelming and dizzying as they bounce from one connection to another.
Being aware of and developing the ability to control your mind chatter is the first step to personal mastery. Your thoughts not only affect what you do and how you feel, but how you perceive the world. With these factors in mind, your mind chatter creates your reality.
It’s impossible to totally silence mind chatter, instead you want to learn to work with it. Sometimes you need to turn up your mind chatter to really understand what your thoughts are. Other times you need to quiet the mind chatter, like when you’re trying to fall asleep and your mind won’t stop ruminating about your day. The more tools you have in your toolkit for recognizing and working with your mind chatter, the more flourishing you’ll experience.
To learn about ways of working with your mind chatter, contact me about upcoming Optimistic Thinking Programs.
The greatest service you can do for yourself is train your brain to be more mindful. Mindfulness refers to the ability to be fully present and choosing where your attention is focused. Numerous studies show that mindfulness meditation improves physical and mental health, ranging from reducing stress, chronic pain, insomnia, depression and anxiety as well as increasing vitality, positive affects and centerdness.
The easiest way to practice mindfulness meditation is throughout your day. The key to mindfulness is through your 5 senses. Imagine you're walking down the street and your thinking. You can be thinking about anything: where you're going, what someone said to you, what you're not good at, etc. That's the opposite of being present.
To become more present, first notice that you are not present. According to Eckart Tolle, just doing that brings you into the moment. Then connect to your senses, what are you hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting and smelling. That is an instant connection to the present moment.
Developing a seated mindfulness practice is powerful as well. Find a comfortable seat where your spine can be straight and supported. Close your eyes and breathe. Follow the sensation of your breath through your nose, filling your throat, chest, stomach and out of you. Staying mindful of your breath enables you to experience the tremendous power of deep breathing with mindfulness.
Another great seated mindfulness practice starts with your eyes closed watching the flow of your breathe. Then focus your attention on your body, part by part, from your toes all the way to the top of your head. Go slowly. Notice what each body part feels like as you breathe into it.
Coming soon... Guided mindfulness meditation recordings. Sign up for the newsletter above for free access.
Ever notice your brains tendancy to focus, fixate and ruminnate over the negative? Then with that same audacity, your brain negates or places less emphasis on the positive things that are working in your life.
Your brain is wired towards a bias for the negativity. Negative emotions, news and facial expressions tell our brain, warning there is a danger or harm that you need to pay attention to. The price to pay for avoiding the negative is much larger than the price one might pay for avoiding the positive. When our ancestors faced life threatening conditions, those that had quick responding negative emotions were more likely to survive and procreate. Thus, passing down that tendency to us.
According to Dr. Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada's research, we need to be above a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative experiences in order to flourish.
Say you submit a piece of writing to your boss, who responds to your submission telling you "Good job. Please use the spell-check feature next time since there were a few spelling errors."
What are you likely to fixate on? The feedback that the content was good or the typos? In order to feel good about your submission, you would need at least 3 pieces of positive feedback to out way that one piece of criticsm.
Another way of thinking about this is that in some ways, the default setting of our brain is negative. When left to it's own devices... your mind will chatter about all the things that aren't working in your life, or all the things you need to get done, or how you're not measuring up. When was the last time you were up all night, not able to fall asleep, ruminating about all the things going right in your life? Chances are it's been a while... if ever.
This means that if you want to experience more positivity, more happines... you need to do something. That "something" will vary depending on the situation. (If you want to learn more about the types of "somethings" you could do to increase your happiness, sign up for my free weekly newsletter ;-). But if you don't do something different, your brain will default towards neutral or negative.
For example, a well researched theory in psychology is adaptation. We adapt to the things in our lives... You buy a new car... and for the first few months you are in love with it... You love driving it. You get in the car, you love how it feels. You show it off to friends, they are excited for you! After a year or two, your level of happiness goes down.
If you don't do something different (i.e. savor your experience in your car and express gratitude for it), your brain defaults to taking it for granted.
So next time, if you are finding your brain swirling from one negative thought, judgment or worry to another, recognize that tendency to be both normal and controllable.
Contact me to learn more about positive psychology based activities to build your positivity.
Unlike computers or other complex electrical wiring systems, they way in which brain cells connect with each other are malleable; they can move and change. Another term for the brain's plasticity is long-term potentiation: eventually thoughts that “fire together, wire together.” Frequently repeated thoughts form stronger connections between neurons, while minimizing the recurrence of a thought weakens these connections.
The interesting things is that the more frequently two neurons or brain cells are paired, the easier it is to fire them and the stronger their intensity. For example, the first time a kid says to himself, “I’m so stupid,” it’s not that big of a deal. However, continuously repeating that thought starts to etch the patterns in the brain. This thought will pop up more readily and have increased strength behind it whenever it's repeated.
A good image for thinking about neuroplasticity is driving your car down and unpaved road. The first time your wheels go over the road, you’ll make some slight grooves in the road. If you never drive down that road again, the markings will disappear. If you keep driving that same route however, the troughs you’ve created will continue to become deeper and more fixed. Imagine your wheels create the thought, "I'm not good enough." If you never repeat that thought again, it'll fade from your memory. If you reinforce the thought, it will become a belief.
The important thing neuroplasticity teaches is that you have the power to change habitual patterns in your mind. By becoming aware of your mind chatter and negative thoughts, you can redirect your thought patterns and rewire the connections in your brain.
Optimistic thinking refers to a lot more than simply seeing the glass half full or empty. It is the way people explain what happens to them and it is fundamental for living a flourishing life. Dr. Martin Seligman's research shows that since optimism refers to a person is thinking style, it can be taught and learned. The process is a ellaborate one and it takes time to master. Here's a few steps. Begin with tuning into your pessimistic thoughts. By knowing your thoughts you can evaluate where they come from, how valid they are, what your unconscious mind is trying to communicate to you, etc. Once you are aware of your mind chatter you can talk back to it by asking it for evidence.
I call this, Taking Your Brain to Court. Your pessimistic mind chatter is the prosecutor and you are the defendant. When you're brain says, "You're so fat!" Dr. Karen Reivich's approach to transforming those beliefs is by talking back the way a defense attorney would. "That's not true because being 'fat' would mean I have an unhealthy BMI. My body weight is normal and overall I am healthy."
People have a tendency to believe that if it came from my brain, it must be true. So they let their monkey mind have a field day in their brain, making paralyzing judgments and affecting their emotions. You are the thinker, you are not your thoughts. Therefore you can take responsability for your thoughts; that is, the ability to choose how your thoughts respond to what happens around you.
To learn more about optimistic thinking and other flourishing topics sign up for my free weekly newsletter at the top of the page. Also, contact me for details about Individual Flourishing Coaching or the weekly Flourishing Group Coaching Program.
Self-regulation or temperance is the ability to delay gratification. Self-regulation is linked to achievement in school, emotional regulation and goal achievement.
Self-regulation isn't always easy. It is a finite resource that get's depleted when you use it a lot, then replenishes. Self-regulation is similar to a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. Research shows that enhancing your ability to self-regulate in one area of your life can improve your self-regulation in other areas. This is one of the many benefits of meditation where you learn to self-regulate your thoughts, which often helps people self-regulate their diet, stay focused at work and more.
There are 4 research based techniques for increasing self-regulation: distraction, reframing, avoidance and objectifying.
To learn how to use these techniques to increase your self-regulation and productivity, contact us today!
The leader in mindset research is Dr. Carol Dweck, a psychologist who has shown that even at a young age, we internalize schemas about how things like success, intelligence and ability work. Dr. Dweck seperates people into two categories, people who believe those things are a fixed aspect of ones being, either you have it or you don't. Or people believe that those things are malleable and can grow over time.
These beliefs strongly influence how a person feels and what they do in their life.
Believing that intelligence is static... either you're smart or you're not... leads people to constantly have to either maintain the appearance that they are smart or constantly compare themselves to others. These people are more likely to avoid or be resistent to challenges. If they are really smart at on one level, going to a higher level puts them at risk of losing their status. They are likely to choose challenges that are within their comfort zone. When faced with obstacles, they are more likely to give up easily. Effort is perceived as a bad thing, because if they were "good" at that thing, it should come pretty naturally and easily to them. Putting effort into things like studying are perceived as signs of weakness rather than paths to mastery. Feedback on how to improve is viewed as criticism and they are less open to it. Other people's success is viewed from the lens of a zero-sum game. "There's only so much room for success in the world, if someone has it, that means I don't." Other people are viewed as competition, rather than resources.
Growth mindset, on the other hand, is the belief that things change, our abilities improve as we work towards improvement. This leads to increased desire and curiosity to learn. They are likely to embrace challenges because they grow most when they are stretched. They persevere in the face of obstacles because they seek out creative ways of problem solving. Effort is a path to mastery instead of a sign of weakness. Criticism is perceived as useful and provides opportunities to learn. They welcome and rejoice in other people's successes because they can learn from them. They believe in non-zero sum games.
As a result, the growth mindset leads people to work towards higher and higher levels of achievement from a space of curiosity and positivity. Fixed mindset causes people to plateau in a space of limited potential and get stuck in judgment and anxiety.
To learn more about where these mindset come from and what to do to change it sign up for my free weekly newsletter at the top of the page. Also, contact me for details about Individual Flourishing Coaching or the weekly Flourishing Group Coaching Program.
Socrates once said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Svadhyaya is one of the niyamas of yoga, or guidelines for interacting with our inner selves; it refers to self-study. One of the pathways to flourishing is to know yourself—know your mind chatter, your triggers or what pushes your buttons, know your strengths and your passions. The essence of personal development is first personal self-knowledge. This is why it is so important to know your mind chatter; you need to know what your mental tendencies are before you can begin to truly change them. For example, when my computer is not functioning optimally, I don’t feel comfortable attempting to fix it myself because I am unfamiliar with its inner workings and individual components. I instead choose to have an IT professional make the necessary changes for me because they are intimately familiar with what they are dealing with. Before you can fix, grow, change, or expand, you need to first know yourself and the different components of self you are working with. You can practice Svadhyaya by tuning into your own thoughts, identifying your mental models, taking the time for meditation, journaling or self reflection. Know your body, both its strengths and its tight spots. Understand what your preferences, needs, and wants are. Ask yourself often, “What am I here to do? Who am I here to become?” Learn to look at your past and use it as a tool to understand yourself in the present.
Visualization is a powerful tool for manifesting your goals and highly supported with cutting edge research from sports psychology.
There is about an 88% overlap in brain activation when a person is looking at on object compared to when a person is thinking about that object. This means the brain does not strongly discern the difference between what it sees and what it thinks it sees. Research shows that visualization has such a strong impact on performance that it would take over 4,000 cases of visualization not working to reduce the statistics to chance.
To utilize the best of visualization to meet your goals, start with writing a vision for the end goal as though it has already happened. Use as many "feeling words" to describe the state that you will be in once this goal is met.
Them imagine yourself on a time line and zoom out incrementally imagining the process of getting that goal met. Create primers to keep that goal in your mind (post it notes, pictures, wristbands, etc).
Spend 5-10 minutes a day connecting to your vision from a space of gratitude. Staying in a positive emotion keeps you in a state of what positive psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson calls, Broaden and Build. It keeps your mind positively problem solving and thinking of creative ways to make your goals happen.
To learn more about visualization and other flourishing topics sign up for my free weekly newsletter at the top of the page. Also, contact me for details about Individual Flourishing Coaching or the weekly Flourishing Group Coaching Program.
