THE SCIENCE THAT SHOWS SUCCESS STARTS WITH YOUR THINKING
A Book By Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller
We go through life without much thought to how our minds work or process our thoughts into ideas. Because so much goes on in our subconscious, it is easy not to question our thoughts the way we might challenge the thoughts of others. “Mind Your Mindset: The Science That Shows Success Starts with Your Thinking” by Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller provides us with a way to test our assumptions. They share stories from their lives as well as from research.
The authors have experience in helping people achieve the most from their lives. Michael Hyatt is the founder and chairman of Full Focus, a professional consulting group and has authored seven top-selling books. His daughter Megan Hyatt Miller is the president of Full Focus. She shares particularly interesting stories about her adoption of children from other countries.
They write about identifying our mindset, which they call the ‘narrator’ in our head. They believe that in order to be truly successful we should challenge the suggestions made by our Narrator because it is built mainly from our past experiences, which may not be broad enough for us to see alternative or true paths. They write, “If the only thoughts you are willing to think are the ones you currently have, then the only results you’ll get are the ones you are getting..”
“A gut feeling is not a gift or psychic power. Intuition is the knowledge you can’t quite explain. It is an inclination to trust or distrust a particular story in the absence of demonstrable proof. It’s a kind of knowing generated by your brain, just like reasoning, though it’s automatic instead of analytic. Your brain generates predictions all day long. They come from your subconscious mind and are based on your existing storehouse of concepts and stories. The brain’s big project, as we’ve seen, is to represent whatever you need from the world in your mind so you can think, move, and navigate successfully, moment to moment.”
Another important insight from the book is that “Achieving our goals and experiencing the results we desire comes down to working with the people in our lives and the constantly changing circumstances we find ourselves in.”
Other memorable takeaways:
- The challenges we face are “(1) based in the brain and (2) evident in the stories we tell ourselves about reality.”
- Our brains make faulty connections based on our prior experiences.
- 3 Steps to follow: (1) identify your problem and the story about it. (2) interrogate the story to separate fact from opinion (3) image alternatives on how to solve the problem.
- The stories we tell about reality resemble reality, but they are not reality. They are the Narrator’s attempt to represent reality to us. Another way of saying this is that stories are not facts by themselves. They are facts plus our interpretations and causal links.
- One way of freeing yourself from your Narrator’s initial advice is “pushing back against your brain’s default way of assessing a situation is to purposely hold contradictory ideas in your mind and let your brain puzzle on how to resolve the difficulty.
This is an excellent book for anyone struggling to achieve their goals.
You can purchase the book HERE,
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Dave Edwards Media 