by Latrone Walters
How good do you want to be? When looking to improve your performance in anything, this is the question to internalize. When answering this question you will realize that once you move in the direction of your goal, you will need to attribute how much you are truly willing to give up to attain that goal. Surely the attainment of good comes at a cost. You may not see or appreciate the cost but it exists within a continual cost/earning relationship. To even occupy the space you use has a cost. We're not solely speaking in monetary terms either. We're speaking in terms of anything that is given up or lost in the pursuit of something else. And that's not the problem.
The problem is when we don't carry values or when we don't value anything as relevant to our space and time. Although this mindset is cultured on a biological level in the absence of key neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin in the developing mind, it is also cultured in social and developmental psychology. The cost that a population pays to hold that stance is worse than actually calculating the cost of existence. When we fail to evaluate cost we neglect our true impact and responsibility for our space in time.
Another issue that happens in failed cost attribution is we fall subject to the cost attributed by "higher powers" whether they be wrong or right. This is seen often in cases where corporations are able to extract personal data from an unassuming population to use or sell to other organizations for entirely different purposes. The exploitation of the environment and of mass populations throughout time have occurred up until the cost outweighed the gain associated. This happens when we neglect to view the sedimentary costs at minimal scales. A grave example of this is during The Vietnam War from 1965 to 1968 when the Johnson Administration chose to use a gradualist military strategy opposed to a conventional military strategy against primary enemy positions in North Vietnam. By not calculating the true cost of time, resources, and decisive action the US ended paying a much higher cost than expected.
We can relate these sorts of examples in a way to our day to day lives. Oftentimes we don't measure how much we are missing out on fulfilling our true purpose by mindlessly commuting to underpaying jobs where we may not be most satisfied. Or when we are out too late binge drinking the weekend before a major assignment that requires increased mental acuity on Monday. But alas! I truly believe that not only in corporate life but in day to day life our civilization will be driven to acquire for more subsequent and consequent data associations. Our populations will become more cognizant on the biological effects of chronic stress, personal unfulfillment, synthetically altered environments etc. Which are the costs we sometimes pay for modernized society. The question is; is it necessary?
Maybe this is more of my personal intentions or the underlying mission of my company, The Mind Resource. To make more people aware of the true costs associated with common ideologies that is known to lower cognitive performance and collaborative efforts. Whatever the case may be it is essential as a civilization to be able to locate consequential and subsequential effects in our daily lives as well as in chronological spans of time.
I will leave here 3 things you can do to enhance your ability to effectively measure the cost to gain ratio of all of your daily decisions. First an individual must identify the 9 categories in which they may fulfill roles in day to day life. Those are:
- Current job, profession, or career
- Intimate personal relationship
- Family (however you define it)
- Relationships with money and finances
- Physical health, diet, and exercise
- mental health and emotional well being
- Friends and community
- Ongoing education; personal and spiritual growth
- Hobbies, fun, travel and enjoyment.
By taking the time to create a mental snapshot of what each of these areas mean to you and the level of importance in each category you can determine the value of each one of your daily decisions.
The second thing you want to begin doing is allotting time to yourself to highlight in which of these categories are you getting the most fulfillment and rank the categories from most important to least important. It is truly enlightening to do this as I often see during my executive coaching sessions, when the individual realizes that they have been operating on autopilot, while simultaneously putting too much stock and effort into things that ranks lowest on their satisfaction matrix. The crazy thing is that many of us don't realize it until we force ourselves to write things down and question them. It is sometimes tough for individuals to do this, especially if they have been auto-programmed in a sense to operate under their routines for awhile. But just like a medical evaluation or financial consultation we must take time to reassess our internal level of satisfaction in personal fulfillment and the costs of our daily decisions in relation to them.
After you identify the 9 categories and then rank their priority levels, the third thing to do is just simply create novel experiences or try new things. Whether that be taking that new cooking class you may have been interested in or just taking a different route to work, your brain (when healthy) is good at making connections between old routines and the novel experiences that you are trying. It's like exercise for your mind but now instead of using different muscles in response to a different workout you are activating new synapses. This new synaptic activity will weigh out the new options using the known information from the normally used synapses. We are verging into neuroplasticity which I will cover in a later blog. But we will digress, for now, on the neurobiology concepts.
So, there it is. Hopefully, if anything this excerpt encourages critical thinking. And now you are equipped with the tools to work with your always advancing cognitive awareness. Now is truly a good time to make our generation and generations to come aware of the inherent capabilities within all of us. The Mind Resource is a catalyst to this progress forward in collaborative learning environments around the world. To join our email newsletter contact us at themindresource@yahoo.com. To your success!