How to use your mind better

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How can we possibly turn a topic as big as using your mind better into something that you can read in less than 5 minutes and still walk away with eye-opening and results-improving tactics?

That’s the challenge I’m thinking through as I sit down to write this. I’m not sure I can do all of that, but let’s take a bite out of that question, and I’ve also included a link to another post in case you’re on the fence about whether understanding the mind is worth your time.

What useful things could you walk away with after the next 5-10 minutes? Let’s start with that:

• The mind has some structure - let’s understand that first so you have a map of your brain and can explore how the mind really works

• Using the map is very useful to you - once you know what’s what, you can actually push thoughts to different parts of your brain, dramatically changing the kinds of thoughts your brain produces

• You can use the map to help other people - it’s not just your own brain that has these parts. You can actually steer thoughts to the best parts of other people’s brains, too, dramatically increasing your influence and helping them make better choices

See Also:

• Why we should understand the mind

Understand the mind

To understand the mind best, it’s essential to understand that the brain is not one big thinking object. It’s actually a bunch of little thinking objects. It’s useful to think of the different parts of your brain like they’re the different departments of a college campus.

In this metaphor, your brain has a science department, able to form hypotheses, experiment, understand, and evolve. It has an art department, able to create novel, interesting, unexpected, creative things. It has a library, filled with the knowledge you’ve accumulated through a lifetime that has included schooling, lived experience, reading, and conversations. And it has other departments and abilities that help you care about others, protect yourself, and more.

So, if your brain has all of these different departments, let’s make one thing really clear: where your brain routes your thinking (where you send your thoughts) has everything to do with the kind of thinking your brain does.

Have you ever met a person who seems to be consistently positive? How about consistently negative? How about someone who consistently refers to their own lived experience and knowledge? Or someone who always wants to come up with a new way of doing things?

Of course you have.

And now you finally understand why this is happening. In their brains, there are traffic cops consistently directing the majority of traffic to specific parts of their brain. This is what we see as their preferences, motivations, and patterns of behavior. People can be dynamic, for sure, but the patterns you see in yourself and in others are foundationally rooted in how each person’s brain prefers to manage traffic.

Now that you know there are regions, routes, and traffic cops, the question is what good, better, best looks like. For that, we need a map.

Mapping the Mind

I’ll draw up a visual for this at some point in the future, but let’s talk about the map in the most basic terms and we can dive deeper later.

We will start with 6 critical regions in your brain. Each region or department is responsible for managing your mentality, focus, and what kinds of thoughts you have. Here’s what they are:

1. Attention (what feels important to your mind at any given moment)

2. Safety (the security department keeping you safe)

3. Memory (the history department and library with your knowledge, skills, experience, preferred approaches and patterns)

4. Logic (the science department, exploring causality)

5. Creativity (the art department, imagining and breaking rules)

6. Compassion (your humanities department, considering what’s best for human beings)

There are real parts of your brain responsible for these things, including your thalamus, hippocampus, anterior insular cortex, prefrontal cortex, and more. While you don’t need to be a neuroscientist by any means, it is helpful to understand that your brain has all of these different parts with different jobs, and that being your best is just as simple as making sure you’re using the right part of your brain (and keeping the wrong parts at bay, no matter how right they feel).

So, how is this useful to you?

The very first step is to become self-aware and intentional. We’ll dive into much deeper ways you can use this map in the future, but for now, here’s a simple checklist to develop a habit of using:

1. What department is doing the thinking right now?

2. What is the ideal department to be doing the thinking right now?

3. How might my brain fight me in switching from the active system to the best system?

4. What are the rewards of using the better system?

A very common situation you’ll face in life is when your brain wants to keep doing things the way you’ve been doing them in the past. In this case, the department doing the thinking right now is the history department, using your own personal history and memory to get stuff done.

But in many cases, the way you’re used to doing things isn’t the best way. Instead, the science or art departments could give you new and more effective ways of doing things, and asking question 2 might make that pretty obvious.

Then, you’ll confront question 3: but my brain really, really, really wants to do it the way that is more proven, comfortable, familiar, has worked in the past, etc. See, the instinctive parts of your brain are extremely overconfident. They fully believe and try to convince you that they are right, whether it’s a preference for familiarity like in this example, or if it’s your instincts convincing you of anxiety, risk, that you should be angry or resentful, or that your attention should go to a distraction. In each of these cases, instincts are confident, trying to convince and rationalize why they are correct, when they clearly are not.

So, understand that your brain will absolutely fight you, and you need to learn a new way of meta-thought, where you start to see your brain trying to convince you like a child would convince a parent that they NEED more ice cream.

The fourth question will hopefully help you convince your brain otherwise. A better understanding of the upsides of a better approach can start to tilt the scales more clearly. When we fail to do this step, we often miss just how big of a difference we leave on the table by being intentional instead of instinctive.

Building this habit is huge, and you will quickly feel superhuman, even if you felt pretty great to begin with.

How is this useful in working with others?

This same list of questions is going to be happening in everyone else’s head, too. If you’re managing people, pitching ideas, influencing, or just trying to get through something as well as possible, get in the habit of doing the same for them. Take a guess at:

1. What department in their brain is doing the thinking, or is likely to do the thinking when they react to what I say?

2. What is the best department in their brain to do this? How can I steer things toward that part?

3. How is their brain going to fight them? Have I seen any patterns in the past? How can I help the best part of their brain win?

4. Do they understand the rewards of a better approach?

Sometimes, it’s just as simple as coming to conversations prepared to navigate these four questions, helping them see the map, too, and send thoughts to the best parts of their brain. It can often be as simple as just saying this in the meeting:

• We are going to talk about X, and that is likely to make people’s minds go directly to (wrong part).

• Instead, I want us to try to use (best part). Try to activate that kind of thinking in your mind as we talk, even if it’s really hard.

• It might be really hard to resist the temptation to (do things the wrong part wants to do). We might be convinced that (wrong part) is right, but let’s fight that temptation.

• If we are able to get this right, we will have (good outcome) happen instead of (potential outcome from the wrong part of the brain).

Keep in mind, the wrong part of the brain cannot and will not produce the kind of thinking the right part will. Start steering brains to the best thinking centers, both yours and others’, and you’ll see dramatic change in pretty much everything you do, especially if things feel arduous and mistake-ridden today.

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