Lifehacks for the Mind | Part 1: "Permission Slips"
Let's face it, the mind dominates most aspects of our lives.
We think constantly, we overanalyze, we worry, we compare, we weigh our options, we wonder if we made the right choice, we doubt our own path when others say we have made a mistake, we find ourselves at the whim of societal pressures to conform to pretty much anything one can have an opinion about these days...
We're all up in our heads!
The issue with the one hard approach
Many people who studied Eastern traditions and philosophies will advise you to "find a way to quiet the mind and to make seizing the endless chatter of thoughts your prime aim, instead of creating new concepts to further weigh you down."
But what if you can't quite get into that? What if meditation seems too far of a leap from where you are now, hopelessly chained to the all the commotion going on inside your mind? What if you need it on a conceptual level first, to approach it in a different way?
Meditation was never quick enough for me. This calming the mind approach seemed like a possible solution to my over-reliance on thinking in the longterm - at best... If I was ever able to get that point before losing all hope for my own path.
I knew I needed relief from my mental deadlock - on an intellectual level - before I could move on.
All my life the mind had been my unquestioned main tool for gauging the world and for dealing with new experiences.
It had been useful, maybe too useful to simply discard it now. And the mind was important to me. It was an essential part of my identity.
I felt that meditative approaches didn't quite address the worries I had either. Or their merit. And I felt these worries were even quite reasonable at times.
I would have to find a hack for dealing with this now, to lay a short-circuit to my mind's obsession somehow, within the same mental framework of thought I had grown so used to.
To try and find a way to bridge that gap in approaches, so to speak.
And it was worth the search.
I stumbled upon a concept so easily graspable, I was dumbfounded that I had never noticed it before. Not only that, I saw my mind quiet down considerably, using this new approach. And it quieted down fast.
Enter: Permission Slips
The mind can be a tyrannical child, but it does have its place if one could only find a way to pacify it. The mind is not your enemy. It has brought you to where you are today, and you have to make it your ally in the journey of life. A loyal servant, rather than a reckless tyrant.
A friend of mine sent me a link to a video which would lay the groundwork for me to eventually grasp this idea.
If you create any sort of work out of sheer passion, this video will be well worth your time. And Elliott explains it way better than I could.
Be like a bird!
Powerful analogy right?
Kinda freeing, huh?
I wondered why exactly I felt so free all of the sudden. And then it clicked.
Here was someone with success on his own path, telling me that it was OK not worrying about other people's evaluations of me or what I had created. It was OK to not take their criticisms and judgments to heart all too much, and it was OK continuing on my path regardless of what others said about it. Just be like that bird!
I was amazed. Not only because of the message, but of its ramifications. I hit me how important it is to find someone on a similar mission as myself, telling me that "it's OK". Nothing more.
A cascade of thoughts came into my mind, but all of them were fresh and supportive. My assumptions flipped towards optimism in a heartbeat and I felt great.
I saw how being the first man to protest a rise in bus ticket prices would give ample permission to the second one to follow suit if they felt a similar way. How revolutions could suddenly break out because of somebody daring to be the first one to speak up.
It was a dam-breaking concept! It could make new ways of being and break established institutions without any effort.
I saw a transformation of society before my very eyes if only enough people started to act in accordance with their convictions, and letting each other know about their success.
Granting each other permission to go do it.
This is probably one of the most graphic examples I can think of.
You can apply this hack to any area of thought if you are able to formulate a somewhat specific question about your uncertainty. And then find someone who already does it.
Not sure you will be able to support your family when you finally dare to become that surf-teacher on Hawaii? Find others who have done so and listen to them all day long, talking about how this is possible and how it was totally worth the risk.
Not sure you can ever get those basic principles of trigonometry down in time for your test on Thursday? Find a teacher who can give you the confidence and the evidence that it can be done. Get obsessed with their vibe of positivity about the thing they love.
It's contagious.
We learn faster from passionate people who are farther ahead than ourselves.
Read blogs. Use video platforms. Find your motivators.
Eliminate worry by using other people's experiences and certainty about what they are talking about. And you will become more certain of what you are doing. The disheartening chatter will start to cease. You will start to trust yourself again and ultimately the path you chose for yourself, no matter how "crazy" it seemed at first with no 'human support' behind you.
A nice side effect is that in listening to those that came before you, you will also pick up a barrage of skills and knowledge relevant to the area you are interested in.
Seems like a win-win to me.
We only ever learn from people we like. And from people who are talking about what we are interested in or passionate about. If one is not interested in something, learning will become a painful and often futile exercise.
If you don't believe me, try to remember a basic conjugated sentence in French from your times in high school right now!
I thought so ;)
Me neither.