When practiced daily, both disciplines: Build resiliency to be able to bounce back from setbacks quickly; Enable you to become an agent of change and to direct change; Refocus your thinking as the situation changes; Channel your awareness to deal with the situation.
In the book Hard Optimism, Price Pritchett writes, > > “The mind is now the main productivity tool. Thinking has become the key competency. People’s thought processes are the most important performance factor.” 2 This means that all human action begins in the mind – a confluence of our desired outcomes, imagination, and creativity.
Awareness * Mental Toughness * Focus Business school and/or your business experience taught you these mental skills, to a degree; the business professionals who learn them well and practice them consistently succeed.
To change your thinking, you must first re-wire your brain.
While they can build new roads via positive thinking – and lay down new pathways and habits to challenge, reduce and even overcome negative ones – the old ruts are never deleted.
Neurological pathways remain, and even new experiences can fall into those old negative ruts of thinking.
One of the overarching laws of the mind is this: Whatever your mind continually thinks about will most often become reality.
You have created a mental expectation – your thinking becomes first a rut and then a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To rewire your brain and to change this negative outcome, you must stop the negative thought and train yourself to think differently.
What outcome do you want from them? When you describe the outcome you want, your thought processes will not only gravitate toward achieving it, but your brain will begin thinking through the proper steps to make the goal a reality.
In the martial arts we are trained not only to control the quality of our thinking, but also to manage our emotions.
You work to change the quality of your thinking, which then directs your actions and speech.
You can re-wire your thinking by mentally focusing on how you will positively approach and change a similar situation the next time.
Enhance your awareness by stopping all auto-pilot thinking and multi-tasking without thought.
If you’re in a meeting with a client do you, without thinking, answer the phone and then give divided attention to both parties? Or, when engaged in a phone conversation, do you automatically smile or nod your head when you recognize a colleague in the office? Practice being “In the present moment.” Don’t divide your attention; be single-minded.
Focus and Effective Thinking Reckless thinking is defined as having uncontrolled, unfocused thoughts.
You are thinking recklessly when you are engaged in a conversation and can’t distill its main points, when you delegate tasks to others without having sufficiently thought out the assignments, or when you make a half-hearted commitment.
Effective thinking means that you target a goal and logically, rationally fill in all the steps and processes to reach it.
Effective thinking does not mean that you finish a task in a mechanistic way.
Truly effective thinking means that you creatively identify and solve problems.
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