by Dr. Cecil Clements (10th January 2012)
A few years ago there was a movie released called ‘A Beautiful Mind’ based on a true story of John Forbes Nash Jr. The story was about Nash and the brilliance of his mind and how he had to deal with a mental disorder called schizophrenia and how it kept him from fulfilling his potential. Throughout his adult life he dealt with the voices in his mind. For a large part of his career he succumbed to them; he chased rabbit trails and couldn’t really understand what was real and what was not. They were all real in his mind. He eventually got married and his wife stood by him during those days. From the time that he joined Princeton in 1947, the dark years of his life in the 70s and 80s resulted finally in him coming to terms with this disorder and eventually winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994.
‘A Beautiful Mind’ is a beautiful picture and is highly recommended. It talks about somebody understanding where he/she is and looking at the reality of situations, trying not to chase shadows. I often think that you don’t need to be schizophrenic to listen to voices in your mind. We do it all the time. At a very micro level, all of us have voices in our minds that try to shape us, govern us, and shape our reactions. How we deal with them lets us know whether we can enjoy life, fulfill our potential or get drowned out by these voices and follow rabbit trails that have nothing to do with reality of situations and circumstances.
All of these voices in our minds are really distractions that can keep us from fulfilling our potential especially if we choose to dwell on them. The key is to keep our heads in the game. Dov Seidman in his book ‘How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything…In Business (and in Life)’ says, “The important thing is to be able to keep your head in the game; to be able to look at the voices, to hear the voices and then think – is this something that I should listen to or is it something that I should shut my mind to and move on?” He talks about how it is so easy to lose sight of our main objectives and to have joy stolen from us when these distractions occur.
He quotes a story told to him by a friend about a businessman who left a high-paying career selling enterprise software to major corporations in order to strike out on his own. With his wife and brother-in-law, he opened a gelato store in a Los Angeles neighborhood to sell epicurean Italian ice-cream with various flavors – lemon cello, basil, chocolate martini, etc. The store was an immediate success, tripling all expectations right out of the gate. But when I asked him how the first month went, he told me that they spent almost their entire profit in legal expenses, fighting with the litigious neighboring bakery owner about whether the ham and cheese croissant they were selling, technically qualified as a sandwich or a pastry and whether it violated their lease by impinging on the bakery business. It was all he could think about. The joy of a first month that just exceeded all expectations was taken away by something that was peripheral to what he was doing.
Sometimes you can help it and sometimes you can’t. Things come onto your plate and you just have to decide where it is that your joy rests. What is it that you have to celebrate? Distractions happen all the time. He goes on to say, “Recognizing this and learning to reduce the distractions that take your mind out of the game, can make you a step quicker than your competitor, make you more focused and help you to use your energies more productively. Keeping your mind in the game, that is, learning to recognize and tame, both the voices in your head and how it affects others, is a constant challenge, but more important than ever in a time where small lapses can mean large costs.”
I wonder whether distractions happen to you. They do for me, all the time and sometimes it’s such a temptation to chase those voices, to begin to play with fictitious scenarios and characters and before you realize it, you’re emotionally drained and far away from where you are, in terms of being productive in the things that you are doing.
Seidman goes on to give an example of how this can happen. He says, “Suppose you walk into a bakery to buy a roll. Behind the counter in plain view is the sandwich preparation area. And on it is a large bread knife. You order your roll and when the counter person hands it to you in a bag, you ask her if she will cut it in half and butter it for you. She looks at you sweetly and says, ‘I’m sorry, but we don’t cut.’ You look again and just as sweetly point out that there’s a bread knife sitting in plain view, obviously used for cutting bread. She again refuses telling you that it’s against bakery policy to cut rolls. Then she hands you a plastic fork and some butter. How do you feel?”
“Well, on one hand, we get upset and then we try to rationalize it – maybe this is policy, maybe somebody got cut. But no rationale will ever resolve the basic incongruity of the situation. So we react – get angry, feel put-upon, feel slighted, even yell at the counter person, probably make a scene. Or you may just grumble and sit and have your roll and tea. But this emotional response is called dissonance, or more precisely, cognitive dissonance. It results when the mind is asked to accommodate new ideas that conflict with already held beliefs. You know that it is possible to have that roll cut and yet they don’t do it for you.
How often in our day, in our work, in our corporate world, we come across situations where we know that it is possible to do something and yet for some inane reason, it doesn’t happen. Then the voices in our heads go berserk. Studies actually say that when this happens, the reasoning parts of our brain give way to the emotional parts. Dissonance physically impedes our ability to think clearly, to act with reason and make good decisions.
That’s a sobering thought! So often we allow dissonance to happen in our world. We allow ourselves to be taken in by these thoughts. We get an email and then we look at it and then have one of these reactions:-
A few years ago there was a movie released called ‘A Beautiful Mind’ based on a true story of John Forbes Nash Jr. The story was about Nash and the brilliance of his mind and how he had to deal with a mental disorder called schizophrenia and how it kept him from fulfilling his potential. Throughout his adult life he dealt with the voices in his mind. For a large part of his career he succumbed to them; he chased rabbit trails and couldn’t really understand what was real and what was not. They were all real in his mind. He eventually got married and his wife stood by him during those days. From the time that he joined Princeton in 1947, the dark years of his life in the 70s and 80s resulted finally in him coming to terms with this disorder and eventually winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994.
‘A Beautiful Mind’ is a beautiful picture and is highly recommended. It talks about somebody understanding where he/she is and looking at the reality of situations, trying not to chase shadows. I often think that you don’t need to be schizophrenic to listen to voices in your mind. We do it all the time. At a very micro level, all of us have voices in our minds that try to shape us, govern us, and shape our reactions. How we deal with them lets us know whether we can enjoy life, fulfill our potential or get drowned out by these voices and follow rabbit trails that have nothing to do with reality of situations and circumstances.
All of these voices in our minds are really distractions that can keep us from fulfilling our potential especially if we choose to dwell on them. The key is to keep our heads in the game. Dov Seidman in his book ‘How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything…In Business (and in Life)’ says, “The important thing is to be able to keep your head in the game; to be able to look at the voices, to hear the voices and then think – is this something that I should listen to or is it something that I should shut my mind to and move on?” He talks about how it is so easy to lose sight of our main objectives and to have joy stolen from us when these distractions occur.
He quotes a story told to him by a friend about a businessman who left a high-paying career selling enterprise software to major corporations in order to strike out on his own. With his wife and brother-in-law, he opened a gelato store in a Los Angeles neighborhood to sell epicurean Italian ice-cream with various flavors – lemon cello, basil, chocolate martini, etc. The store was an immediate success, tripling all expectations right out of the gate. But when I asked him how the first month went, he told me that they spent almost their entire profit in legal expenses, fighting with the litigious neighboring bakery owner about whether the ham and cheese croissant they were selling, technically qualified as a sandwich or a pastry and whether it violated their lease by impinging on the bakery business. It was all he could think about. The joy of a first month that just exceeded all expectations was taken away by something that was peripheral to what he was doing.
Sometimes you can help it and sometimes you can’t. Things come onto your plate and you just have to decide where it is that your joy rests. What is it that you have to celebrate? Distractions happen all the time. He goes on to say, “Recognizing this and learning to reduce the distractions that take your mind out of the game, can make you a step quicker than your competitor, make you more focused and help you to use your energies more productively. Keeping your mind in the game, that is, learning to recognize and tame, both the voices in your head and how it affects others, is a constant challenge, but more important than ever in a time where small lapses can mean large costs.”
I wonder whether distractions happen to you. They do for me, all the time and sometimes it’s such a temptation to chase those voices, to begin to play with fictitious scenarios and characters and before you realize it, you’re emotionally drained and far away from where you are, in terms of being productive in the things that you are doing.
Seidman goes on to give an example of how this can happen. He says, “Suppose you walk into a bakery to buy a roll. Behind the counter in plain view is the sandwich preparation area. And on it is a large bread knife. You order your roll and when the counter person hands it to you in a bag, you ask her if she will cut it in half and butter it for you. She looks at you sweetly and says, ‘I’m sorry, but we don’t cut.’ You look again and just as sweetly point out that there’s a bread knife sitting in plain view, obviously used for cutting bread. She again refuses telling you that it’s against bakery policy to cut rolls. Then she hands you a plastic fork and some butter. How do you feel?”
“Well, on one hand, we get upset and then we try to rationalize it – maybe this is policy, maybe somebody got cut. But no rationale will ever resolve the basic incongruity of the situation. So we react – get angry, feel put-upon, feel slighted, even yell at the counter person, probably make a scene. Or you may just grumble and sit and have your roll and tea. But this emotional response is called dissonance, or more precisely, cognitive dissonance. It results when the mind is asked to accommodate new ideas that conflict with already held beliefs. You know that it is possible to have that roll cut and yet they don’t do it for you.
How often in our day, in our work, in our corporate world, we come across situations where we know that it is possible to do something and yet for some inane reason, it doesn’t happen. Then the voices in our heads go berserk. Studies actually say that when this happens, the reasoning parts of our brain give way to the emotional parts. Dissonance physically impedes our ability to think clearly, to act with reason and make good decisions.
That’s a sobering thought! So often we allow dissonance to happen in our world. We allow ourselves to be taken in by these thoughts. We get an email and then we look at it and then have one of these reactions:-
- this is not what we agreed to;
- this really turns me off;
- why did you CC my boss on this;
- are you trying to make me look bad;
- I’m offended, I don’t find it funny at all;
- why are you filling my inbox with this stuff
All these thoughts come crowding into one’s head. We can chase them or we can choose not to. We can choose to live in consonance rather than in cognitive dissonance. And the only way that we can do it is if we stop, look at those voices and ask ourselves: Is this worth pursuing? Is this going to be productive or not?
Many years ago, Rheinold Niebuhr, the great theologian, wrote this prayer which has been called the Serenity Prayer. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”
So many things in our day, are things that we cannot do anything about. We can’t do anything about getting somebody to cut a bread roll for us if they’re not going to do it. We can lose so much of joy and angst by thinking about that. But what are things that I can change and need courage to change. The key is to know the difference and for that we need wisdom.
My prayer for all of us on this call is that we would ask God to give us that wisdom to be able to know the things that we can change and the things we cannot; the things that we need to apply our minds to; to disregard those voices that we don’t need and to focus on the things that we should.
God Bless Us All.
Many years ago, Rheinold Niebuhr, the great theologian, wrote this prayer which has been called the Serenity Prayer. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”
So many things in our day, are things that we cannot do anything about. We can’t do anything about getting somebody to cut a bread roll for us if they’re not going to do it. We can lose so much of joy and angst by thinking about that. But what are things that I can change and need courage to change. The key is to know the difference and for that we need wisdom.
My prayer for all of us on this call is that we would ask God to give us that wisdom to be able to know the things that we can change and the things we cannot; the things that we need to apply our minds to; to disregard those voices that we don’t need and to focus on the things that we should.
God Bless Us All.
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