[This is the seventh in a series of posts about overcoming setbacks. To see the first, click here.]
When a setback knocks you on your butt, you’ll recover faster if you give yourself a worthwhile goal to pursue. Right away.
The brain is a goal-seeking organ. At a primitive level, it automatically moves you toward the things that will help you survive and away from the things that can hurt you. You don’t have to think about pulling your hand away from a hot stove. Or lifting your head to take a breath when you’re swimming.
These are survival behaviors. We share them with all other species that have the power to move in response to their environment.
Does a jellyfish think about moving toward water that’s richer in nutrients or away from danger? Not likely. Instead of a brain, the jellyfish has only a relatively simple network of nerves that guide its behavior.
The more highly evolved human brain can move us in the direction of abstractions, rather than just the physical environment. It’s attracted or repelled by ideas, dreams and goals–things you only think or imagine, rather than what you can perceive through your five senses.
Our seeking of abstract goals appears to occur somewhere between conscious thought and unconscious action. Whether you’re aware of it or not, your brain moves you almost reflexively toward the images you see clearly in your mind.
Have you tried to hit a golf ball down a fairway with a water hazard to the right? If you obsess about the water as you swing, you might as well kiss your ball goodbye. You’ll hit your shot smack into the pond. Your swing occurs so fast that your conscious thought process can’t control it. Your muscles rely on the guidance of your unconscious mind, which responds to the picture you show it as you swing.
The more reliable way to get past the pond is to stop thinking about it before you swing. To do this you have to replace the negative thought in your mind with a positive one. It doesn’t help to tell yourself not to think about the pond. Instead you have to visualize your ball going toward some other target – say, the marker at the center of the fairway.
A ski instructor taught me that when you’re going through trees at high speed, you must concentrate on the path between the trees rather than on the trees themselves.
This is a good strategy for moving quickly around all the obstacles and setbacks in your life.
The key is to guide yourself in a desirable direction by choosing what you think about.
For more on this, have a look at Psycho Cybernetics by Maxell Maltz. It’s as much a classic read for salespeople as Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
For a quicker results, try using mental rehearsal to improve your performance.
– Scott Silverback