Why Should You Build Your Attention Bandwidth And Develop Emotional Neutrality?
Edition #119
The ContraMind Code
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The newsletter shares the source code through quick snapshots for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Meditation Changes Your Brain. Here's How.
In The Harvard Gazette, Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discusses his decades of research on meditation—enabled in part by a collaboration with the Dalai Lama—and dispels myths about how it works and when, where, and how it can be done.
Here is a selection of some key insights from this article and research insights shared by Richard Davidson:
Experienced Meditators had brain oscillations called gamma oscillations, which are very fast frequencies. These gamma oscillations, which had very large amplitudes, were present for minutes, not seconds, in these people. They are highly synchronized among different regions of the brain, so these people are aware of more things at any given time than most ordinary people.
Meditation helps regulate our capacity for both attention and emotion.
Meditation is a family of exercises that involves the intentional use of mental capacities to improve well-being and nurture human flourishing.
Read the entire article here.
Scott H. Young On How to Build Mastery In Anything.
In this conversation, Scott H Young talks about what does it take to build true mastery in any skill or profession:
Here are some key topics that are discussed during this conversation:
Differentiation between mastery and excellence
How mastery motivations and performance motivations are different
How an apprenticeship mindset can help you build mastery
Why variability is better than repetition when it comes to learning something new.
Strive to define your profession to help you define the mastery you need to achieve.
Listen to this entire episode on:
Apple | YouTube | Amazon Music
How To Manage Your Emotions.
What does it take to be emotionally mature? Let’s step back a bit and ask ourselves what it means.
This TED_Ed Video put this in perspective very well. The key questions it tries to answer are:
What are the root causes of emotions?
Why do some people overcome emotions better than others?
Is there a mental model for managing and overcoming emotions?
Is it necessary to have only happy emotions and try to avoid bad emotions?
Finally, emotions are unavoidable in a world where you have results or outcomes for anything you do. The best ones find ways to look ahead and don’t get stuck with the past and keep ruminating as to why this happened.
Why Should You Build Your Attention Bandwidth And Develop Emotional Neutrality?
You are many times evaluated or constantly confronted with questions like these:
“Does this person have the capacity to handle this new role?”
“ Can this person fill the huge void left by somebody who was earlier in that position?”
“ Do I have the capacity to handle the new responsibility being given to me?”
“Do I even have the capacity to do what I am asked to do?”
Maybe the word capacity here can also be used interchangeably with capability too.
When you dig deeper into words like capacity and capability, you will find that attention and emotion define the ‘Measure of Strength’ of capacity to handle any situation.
You will find that the best people develop an ability to have insanely long attention spans. William James, who is considered the father of psychology mentioned attention as “It's the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” Attention span is the time spent concentrating on a task before getting distracted. We often get distracted when we are unable to control our attention, and it gets diverted to another activity or sensation.
Research often points to the fact that you have longer attention spans when you take up anything that you want to do only when you are ‘Intrinsically Motivated’. When you can practice to perform a task fluently, it increases your attention span. This is why sports players, musicians, artists, researchers, etc., have significantly long attention spans. Some leaders have incredible attention spans and energy to focus on the mission they have taken up, as there is an internal drive to achieve them. Also, taking up something you have not done before or something challenging to accomplish requires a different order of attention span until it becomes second nature. The ability to improve one’s attention span differentiates the ‘Brilliant’ from the ‘Best’ and the ‘Average’.
At the other end of the spectrum is emotion. As you put more attention, focus and effort into what you want to do or achieve, there is an outcome or a result. In the path of doing it or getting an outcome - either positive or negative result creates several emotional states inside you. The need to be ‘emotionally detached’ from the outcome or the result is the true test of a leader. When you are ‘emotionally neutral’, you start to see things through a new lens. You give more importance to the process of how you are doing it and not the outcome, as you are mindful of the fact that you are not always in control of the outcome. You need to be emotionally neutral during high-stress, crises and even extremely happy moments. This is when a flood of thoughts and feelings crowd your mind as you start to first imagine the impact of the result or the outcome of all your efforts when, in reality, it still may or may not have happened. The ability to delineate that is the first true test of emotion. The second test of being emotionally neutral is your reaction or behaviour when the outcome of your efforts is either positive or negative. Great leaders have the ability to react emotionally neutrally to both positive and negative outcomes. The best ones rise the next minute, irrespective of the positive or negative result and get to focus on the next milestone at hand.
As the research mentions, meditation trains the brain for this state. It develops the capacity to increase attention and regulate emotions. Ancient practices in India were replete with examples of how to achieve this state, and a mental framework and daily regimen were built to work towards this state.
When you regulate attention and emotion, you develop an infinite capacity to take on anything you wish to accomplish.
Some lessons we learnt from this week’s missions:
Meditation has the ability to change your brain.
Be a lifelong apprentice to build mastery.
Find as many exhaust pathways for your emotions.