How to train your brain for success?
Click to enagre the quote from the bookTraining the physical body is natural for most people. However, today only a selected few people are really curious about how to develop their brain and mind. And yet, most of today's business success depends more on intellectual work than on physical labor.
Your brain is neuroplastic, and this makes it a muscle that you should train too. Besides becoming smarter, training your brain also enables you to understand different processes within your own mind.
Learning general knowledge (as we do in schools) or professional skills are now normal parts of our daily lives. However, training to understand our mind mostly isn't usual as mental health has a stigma due to which also focus on mental wellness is often missing.
We lack intrapersonal education in our schools. We have physical education (PE), but no mental education (ME). Without ME we can't understand how our inner problems develop nor do we know how to spot the early warning signs and prevent those problems. We need both PE and ME, if we desire to see sustainable and engaging ways of working in our modern society.
TRAINING YOUR MIND ON WEEKLY BASES
Around 1980, we saw a small start to the physical fitness revolution. It culminated ten years later. On May 1, 1990, the U.S. President joined to start the Great American Workout. It was National Fitness Day led by the bodybuilding champion Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was back then leading the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
Primetime morning shows all over the U.S. forwarded this event, and later on, Arnold volunteered to visit all 50 states to put physical fitness on a high agenda.
Slowly this movement spread, and by now, going to the gym to train our physical body is considered a normal and even desirable thing. However, we still don't train our minds and brains with the same passion and dedication. That is why a while ago, we wrote a blog post about the need for the mental wellness revolution.
President George H.W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger kick-off the Great American Workout month on the South Lawn of the White House, May 1, 1990, photo from the Twitter feed of @Bush41Library.
HOW TO EXERCISE THE MIND AND THE BRAIN?
First of all, training, your mind should be regular. Like in the case of physical fitness, one day of exercise takes to nowhere. It may even trigger some setbacks as you realize that you lack competence.
So, how to exercise the mind? The best way would be daily routines that can include milder training like listening to inner silence, keeping your focus on the selected object, reading about psychology, or meditation. However, once or twice a week, you should take more serious mental wellness training in the Mental Wellness Gym.
Wellness Orbit is designed from scratch to combine learning the important inner topics and carrying out practical guided training sessions.
Your training here always starts with the self-evaluation test and feedback so that you can focus on what you specifically need to train during your e-learning sessions. And you can repeat your sessions until you master them.
We know that learning how your mind functions needs to come down to learning practical intrapersonal skills. Just like we need physical skills and work skills, we also need inner skills to lead our mentality, emotions, and awareness.
We also need to learn that some basic rules apply in our inner domain and knowing those rules is the key to success. For example, your heavily triggered emotions always restrict your access to rationality and cause inner reactivity that can lead to stress, burnout, or mental health issues.
Knowing how to lead different parts of your mind allows you to understand your own inner processes better.
Training and practicing self-leadership will potentially also save you from stressing out, burning out, and experiencing more serious mental health problems. But even more than that, it will allow you to focus, be creative, take initiative, keep calm, turn off your mind for sleep, etc. And those are just a few of the known benefits.
HOW CAN YOU START TRAINING YOUR MIND?
You can begin by browsing our free resources:
- Mental wellness blog posts;
- Mental wellness articles;
- A short video about stress and burnout prevention;
- A short video introducing the proactive mental wellness approach;
- Free e-book introducing the new proactive mental wellness approach;
- Free stress test.
From there, you can move on to the carefully designed mental wellness e-trainings that enable both you and your team to have a fit mind and a healthy brain.
How is training your mind to focus beneficial?
When you know how to focus, completion of any task becomes easy. Learning the process of focus in-depth takes some time and practice, but once you master it, it will save you a lot of time. It will also allow you to refocus if something interrupts you. We have an e-training "Getting Things Done" that explains this in-depth.
Both in open offices and also when working from home, interruptions lead to wasting time. This waste of time gets us tired and unsatisfied and even possibly irritated or angry. Have you shouted at your dog, spouse, or kids to shut up when you are busy and try to get something done while they also want your attention? Have you given your colleagues the angry and irritated look when they come while you are focused?
What if you could understand what irritates you and remove that inner reactivity that causes stress? Would it make your life easier?
I am sure it will!
I can share that I have established a daily routine to train my mind to stay calm. It consists of little things and something special that needed a bit longer training before it started to work well.
For example, getting out of bed is super easy for me as I have my daily goals and healthy morning rituals. I get up, make my bed, brush my teeth within 5 minutes and then sit down for at least 20 minutes for a deep inner silence.
During this period I sometimes prolong to an hour, I let go of all my thoughts and feelings and sit still. It took years to build this ability but I love it because it is a good way to train your mind to be still.
After experiencing my deep inner essence, I go over my daily tasks, shower, and have a small healthy breakfast. Only after this, the most important part of my day, I start doing other things from sending kids to school and taking care of my businesses.
A calm mind is a blessing, but your actions create that blessing!
I also write down at the end of the day what I need to do the next day. First, this way I don't forget things, and second, in the morning I know what to do after my inner silence (in this way, nothing pops up and makes me think instead of keeping silent). Third, it allows me to free my mind from bedtime worries (if anything pops up before bed as action/change for the upcoming day(s), I also write it down), and fourth it allows me to keep my promises.
I could bring plenty more examples, but the point is simple – a trained mind obeys you.
It allows you to work when needed, enjoy a silent mind when relaxing, and turn on sleep when it is time to go to bed.
You are the master of your mind only when your brain is fit and your mind is well. As with the physical body, we can hope it to be well without doing anything, but statistics show that this will fail to keep you well, fit, and healthy in the long run compared to training your body and moving it around.
The same applies in the mental domain, training your mind gives you inner sustainability and strength, even if you face challenges and obstacles.
As Arnold Schwarzenegger said it so well: "No matter what you do in life, it's either reps or mileage." And his rule to mastery was "Reps, reps, reps." (read his book "Total Recall" shown on the cover image of this mental wellness training blog post).
Conclusion
Training our minds is the key to working well and living well. Without a fit mind, it becomes difficult to aim for success.
A healthy mind is always interested in having a healthy body. As we read from the news, even athletes with world-class fit bodies don't always have healthy minds. They experience stress, burnout, and mental health issues.
Training your physical body can relieve stress and mental health issues, but not make them obsolete. That is why training your mind matters now more than ever. A peaceful mind is a great asset, and having it is 100% up to you!
So, what keeps you from starting to train your mind?
This mental wellness blog post is contributed by our Managing Director Kaur Lass. Updated 28.03.2024