Recently I’ve been in a season of being mind hammered. Which is ironic because I run mental fitness bootcamps which is all about building the mental muscle needed to intercept the wrong thinking and access the part of the brain where right think occurs. I know it works because my colleagues, clients and I have all experienced the fruit of building the mental muscle needed to build a healthy mind.
What is Mind Hammering?
Mind hammering is the constant bombardment of unhealthy thoughts running through your mind. Thoughts about yourself, others and the circumstances and situations that you are in. Like the pounding of feet on a pavement experienced while running is the pounding of negative thoughts on the pavement of your mind. The results are far reaching. Negative emotions, energy depletion, self-doubt, drop in confidence, less tolerance and compassion for others, negativity bias, drop in motivation levels, decreased hope for future possibilities, victim thinking, the list goes on
From the bedroom to the board room mind hammering is a thing we daily contend with and yet every resist the opportunity to take back control of the hammering and manage our mind.
Why, do we fail to make mind management a priority in our daily lives?
After weeks of mind hammering, I literally felt I had lost control of my life. My negative thoughts were dictating the lenses of everyday life. I felt tired miserable and could barely recognise who I was, the conversations in my head and then out of my mouth were filled with hopelessness for the kind of life I desired to have.
Then a few nights ago in one of my late-night rants with my thoughts I suddenly realised I had been mind hammered.
Right then I thought how on earth did I get here? It was simple, I had let the daily discipline of managing my mind be overtaken by the undisciplined life of letting my thoughts manage me.
The Certainty of Mind Management
The one thing we have control of in this season of eminent uncertainty is the opportunity to manage our mind. The brain craves certainty so its important to consider how we can give it what it needs.
Where there’s little else, we can be sure of in life, mind management is not one of them.
It is totally our personal and professional responsibility. People can encourage, affirm give advice etc to us but in the end the problem is ours to solve. If you want things to change, if you want to change, if you want to design your life to look a certain way then make it a priority and put things in place to manage your mind.
How do I learn to manage my mind?
Through learning and applying the Positive Intelligence Operating System into your daily life.
Did you know there are 3 core muscles to managing your mind so you can generate positive lasting change.
- Intercept the negative thought and emotion
- Do PQ reps to quieten the negative thoughts and activate the positive side of your brain
- Build the mental muscle that helps you shift from the negative to positive part of the brain
How do you build your self-command muscle?
You build the self-command muscle through doing PQ reps. Just like you would do reps using a dumbbell to build the bicep muscle you use PQ reps to build up your mental muscles. When you have crazy mind chatter interrupt the thoughts by doing a PQ rep.
What are PQ reps?
10 seconds of focused attention on one physical attention instead
Try this
Give 10 second of focused attention on the sensation of touch. Take one finger on each hand and rub the two fingertips together. Feel all the physical sensations of this PQ rep.
If you put your brain under an MRI machine at present, you would find that region of the brain that were producing those negative thoughts would get quieter and the positive part of the brain would get activated. The more reps greater the stronger your mental muscle is.
Time to get intentional about managing your mind?