What are you Training Mentally for?

Introduction

When it comes to physical activity, it can be easy to see that someone is training certain muscle groups to get stronger. They are running to get faster and build stamina, or they are training to improve at a particular sport.

But what about mental training?

Are you training your mind? To me, it is clear that the mind’s powers naturally regress and fall into laziness if not being trained for anything. This may happen earlier in our lives than we fear. Even when I was in high school, I distinctly remember that oftentimes I felt like a zombie, going through the motions.

Whatever the teacher told us was treated as fact and must be known for exams. In most classes, even if there may be room for dispute or disagreement in a domain, to disagree with the teacher was to guarantee yourself a lower grade. Anything the teacher did not cover must be assumed to be insignificant or irrelevant, even though in reality, of course, some topics the teacher did not cover must have been quite important.

My point is that sometimes you may feel that you are in training (e.g., taking a course or on-the-job training), but perhaps it is not enough. Are you truly training or just going through certain motions?

Here are some examples of what we can train our minds in:

Resilience

Having a resilient mind is critical to deal with the ups and downs of life. We all have problems that come up, sometimes when we least expect them, and we must be resilient to overcome them with calm and poise. We all know some people who are never fazed and never give up no matter how difficult things get. And we also know some people who give up on something as soon as there is a slight problem. This is the difference between people who are more resilient and less so.

To train your resilience, if you have certain routines that you always follow, you may purposely break them occasionally to make sure that you can manage or adapt either way. For example, if you always eat breakfast at 9 AM, you may occasionally eat it at 11 AM to help build resiliency. If you get used to that pattern too much, you may occasionally skip breakfast. (Of course, if you have any health conditions or concerns, speak to your doctor before trying any of this.) If you feel that you must do or have something in one way, that may be a good opportunity to practice your resilience by trying a new way.

Another key way to train your resilience is to train beyond what you think you need to. My friend Arthur, a mountain climber, recently told me that when you climb to the top of a mountain (metaphorically or real), you should keep on climbing after reaching the summit. You can do this through mental exercise (e.g., visualizations) or actual physical activity, depending on what you are training in (perhaps not actually to climb a mountain). Essentially, train yourself to go beyond the point to which you thought you would need to go.

Creativity

Most people that I know do not believe themselves to be creative. I always say we are all creative. Everyone dreams at night, and so our minds automatically create worlds, scenarios, characters, dialogue, and all in real-time. These are not scripted out in advance. Our minds seem to make them up at the moment. We can literally make stuff up in our sleep. So why couldn’t we do it while awake?

One of the easiest ways to train your creativity is to practice coming up with a list of 10 ideas every single day. (E.g., ideas for books to write, inventions, ways to save money, places to go on a date, things you could do with a paperclip, jokes to write, objects that could be used as a musical instrument, etc.). If 10 is too much, even 1 idea per day can make a difference!

Memory, Attention, and Mindfulness

Memory, attention, and mindfulness are quite interrelated, at least in how we train them. Often if you forget something, it’s because you didn’t pay proper attention to it in the first place. And if you’re not paying enough attention to what is happening around you, this indicates a lack of mindfulness in your life.

So the way to train any of these is to be more mindful. Use your senses and actually see and fully experience what is happening around you. Keep your mind on all that is there, not all that is not.

Avoid distractions, or rather, avoid the need always to be distracted. Our phones are, of course, an ever-present distraction. Most people I know could be doing anything – having a conversation, playing a game, or working, and when their phone chimes, they will check it right away. Perhaps find some hours in the day when your phone is not the most important thing and set it on mute.

In my case, I have noticed that a practice of meditation helps my memory, attention, and mindfulness. Often when I meditate, I end up remembering that night’s dreams in extra detail. I suspect this is because I am maintaining mindfulness within the dream, experiencing everything that is happening fully. And these effects are not limited just to my dreams. In real life, I will also remember more, observe more, attend more, mind more, and experience more fully.

Learning

Learning is an essential skill, so essential that we all do it even if we avoid doing it. As a practical matter, learning is often critical for being competitive in our careers. A person who doesn’t learn new things on the job may find in the best case that he never gets promoted and stagnates. In the worst case, he may lose his job and have difficulties finding a new job since he has not learned as much as other top candidates.

Beyond this, of course, learning is about exposing ourselves to new and interesting ideas. When you learn, you can prepare to understand and then create meaningful action in this world. What more reason to learn do we need?

This post isn’t just about performing an action but rather about training it. To train your learning, though, you must keep learning. If you truly want to improve your learning skill, you can also learn about learning. When you do this, you may learn some techniques that will help you to learn more effectively in less time.

When it comes to learning, sometimes we reach a point where we struggle to get any better at a given skill. This is why it is important to train ourselves to learn, to overcome such barriers. The best learners may work on learning in a variety of areas – physical skills, book learning, learning through experience, focusing on logical abilities as well as creative ones, abstract thinking, and also practical abilities. The best learners may also make it a point always to be learning something new. This way, you will always be training your learning abilities.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is about knowing how to find the relevant facts (especially when you have a problem) and then knowing how to come up with reasonable action steps based on those facts. Also, through critical thinking, you should be able to read facts and then be able to understand how some of those facts could influence the real world, or at least influence your own life. With critical thinking, you do not need to listen to everyone’s opinions. You can form your own independent opinions, just based on the facts.

To train your critical thinking involves many processes, and so this can be difficult for many people. But it is doable. Part of the training will involve searching for unbiased or less biased information sources. Also, it will involve learning to perceive when a source is biased. To learn what is more and less biased, at first, you should examine many different sources to see what they have to say about an issue. Withhold your judgment until you have read or experienced many points of view. When the information from different sources overlaps (or is the same), this is usually neutral or valid. If there is no overlap, the information may be less reliable in some cases, or in other cases, the source may have dug deeper to gain more information.

As another way to train your critical thinking, you may get used to reading facts and then coming up with your own viewpoints based on those facts. Rather than spending too much time with people’s opinions, you may focus on only learning the facts and avoiding opinions altogether. If you are not used to separating opinions and facts in your mind, you must get used to this. This will be an important process in developing your critical thinking. You will learn to give less weight to opinions in time and more weight to facts.

When you do give some weight to opinions, you should consider the expertise of the person who had the opinion. Often, you will find people giving opinions on topics where they have no expertise. You can safely discard such opinions or at least give them very little weight. At a minimum, to even consider someone’s opinion, perhaps they should hold a degree in the topic, or have read a wide variety of books on it, or have had a career or meaningful experience that relates to the topic. Ideally, they should have a combination of these.

As another way to train your critical thinking, you should get used to asking yourself a variety of questions to see how truthful any “fact” or statement may be. A key question I often ask myself is, “What is the evidence that supports this?” Then, you must ask yourself if the evidence is substantial, meaningful, and reliable. You can do this with your thoughts too. When I form a thought, sometimes I ask myself, “What is the evidence that supports this thought?” Just because you have a thought doesn’t make it true.

Concluding Thoughts

I believe it is important that we always work on training the mind. However, even if you do not consciously train, your mind is always being trained toward something. But if you are not careful, it can be trained in a way that ultimately works against you. You can train yourself to become less and less resilient, for example, if you do not have enough challenges in your life. Rather than moving in such directions, you should take control and train yourself toward something that will help you meet your life goals.

What are you going to begin training your mind in today? Or what have you been training in?

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I have written many books that operate as training manuals for the mind. Here are some of them:

7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By (to train resilience and more)

The Secret Principles of Genius (to train critical thinking and more)

Practical Memory (to train memory)

The Insightful Reader (to train reading abilities)

Idea Hacks (to train creativity)

No One Ever Taught Me How to Learn (to train learning)

Master Your Focus (to train attention and focus)