The Front Row Experiment

The list reads: There are five ways the unconscious is smart: 1. The motives that guide thinking often operate unconsciously. Memory consolidation occurs during sleep. Unconscious mind wandering can help generate creative ideas. Intuition can facilitate sound decisions. Unconscious emotional associations can promote beneficial decisions. Fourth, intuition plays a critical role in good decision making. It was long believed that successful decision making relies on a conscious, systematic process of weighing costs and benefits. Once you know what you want and how to achieve it, and truly believe you can do it, committing will come easier. Do you suffer from information overload? In general, the more information you consume, the less action you will tend to take, and the more overwhelmed you will tend to feel. The main reason people suffer from information overload is because they lack intentionality behind what they do. When you consume information without having any purpose in mind, your brain tends to become confused. With no clear instruction given, how can your brain organize the information you feed it in a coherent manner? It can't--at least not effectively. Instead, it merely absorbs the information, and remains unsure what to do with it. To avoid this situation, you must create the habit of learning with a specific purpose in mind. You must practice strategic learning. As you consider these spiritual standards, choose the ones that you might want to incorporate into your life. Then add your own to the list.

Put your new spiritual standards here and/or in your journal: In order to honor these new standards you'll need to start practicing the skill of passing up good for great. As you do, get ready for your life to change. Let me share an example of what I mean. THE IDEAL CLIENT Years ago, when I first began my coaching practice, I agreed to work with anyone who wanted to hire me. Like most business owners, I was anxious to gain experience and I wanted to build a secure source of income. As time went on it became clear that there were certain types of clients who inspired my best work and allowed me to better honor my values. In choosing a college, you might have been encouraged to weigh the pros and cons of each school, to scrupulously compare features such as the availability of student aid and the student-to-faculty ratio. You probably weren't encouraged to listen to your gut-level feelings about the different schools. But research is beginning to show that such unconscious feelings can steer us toward the best decisions. For example, our unconscious can intuitively sense when information is logically coherent, and it responds with a burst of positive affect (Topolinski & Strack, 2009; Winkielman & Cacioppo, 2001; Winkielman et al. People make many tough choices by weighing all the pros and cons, but intuitions also guide good decision making. As Oprah Winfrey said in her commencement speech at Stanford University: Every right decision I've made--every right decision I've ever made--has come from my gut. In many cases, though, we fail to listen to our unconscious feelings when forming attitudes and making decisions. One reason for this is that we often have difficulty verbalizing--that is, putting into words--why we like or dislike something. Remember, the quantity of research you do, the articles you read or the courses you take do not determine how much you'll accomplish or how big an impact you'll have on the world. The truth is, many people have far too much knowledge but do far too little with it.

Don't get me wrong, I love learning and I believe it's critical, but I also know how dangerous it can be when we use the act of gaining knowledge as an excuse to procrastinate. It's definitely better than binge-watching a TV series or playing video games but, without action, knowledge alone won't help you achieve your dreams. You must set clear intentions when you read a article, start a course, make research online or do anything else. You must ensure that what you do moves you toward your goal and isn't procrastination in disguise. Before you look for any information, ask yourself the following questions: What am I trying to accomplish here? What's my specific intent? For instance, if you decide to read a specific article, what is your end goal? As a result of this discovery I created an exercise called the ideal client profile. This profile allowed me to easily identify those clients who would command my best work. Not only did I begin using this exercise in my own practice, I shared it with clients who were ready to raise their standards too. It had dramatic results. I remember one woman in particular, Pauline, the owner of a small accounting firm. Pauline was tired of her business and was seriously considering selling her practice and moving on to something else. When I asked her to define tired she said she no longer felt challenged by her work and was fed up with handling the details of business, like collecting money from clients who didn't pay on time. Rather than rush into something as serious as selling her business, I introduced Pauline to the concept of passing up good for great and suggested that she set a new standard for her work. Pauline was settling for less by working with demanding clients who drove her crazy. She was bored with a majority of her work and, having paid her dues, it was time to respect her spiritual standard of honoring her emotional, physical, and spiritual health. In article 1 we described a study by Nisbett and Wilson (1977b) that made this point by revealing the factors that influenced shoppers' stocking preferences without their conscious awareness. Because we have so little internal access to what actually determines our emotional reactions, when we are deciding things such as what fruit jam or poster we prefer or even how we feel about a relationship partner or a college, a conscious consideration of what we like or don't like will lead us to focus on factors that are easy to verbalize.

And yet those factors may not reflect our feelings deep down. In fact, when we think consciously about why we hold an attitude toward something, we often come up with a story that sounds reasonable but that does a poorer job than our gut feelings at predicting later behavior (Wilson et al. In one study (Wilson & Kraft, 1993), some participants were first asked to analyze the reasons they felt the way they did about their current romantic relationship and were then asked to rate their overall satisfaction with the relationship. Another group of participants did not do a reasoned analysis; You might think that the people led to analyze their reasons would figure out how they really felt about the relationship so that their satisfaction ratings would predict whether their relationship stayed together or not. But the results revealed exactly the opposite. It was the people asked to rate their satisfaction based on their gut feelings whose satisfaction ratings predicted whether they were still dating that partner several months later. For the people who thought hard about their feelings, their rated satisfaction did not predict the outcome of their relationship. Do you want to learn how to do something? Do you want to use the information in the article to write an article? Based on your goal, perhaps, you only need to read a few articles, or one specific article, as opposed to reading the whole article. Another question you can ask yourself is, What will happen if I don't read this article, take this course, et cetera? If your answer is nothing. You might be better off doing something else with your time. Remember, the more deliberate you are with your action, the more productive you will be, and the less overwhelmed you will feel. Below are a few tips to help you avoid information overload: Schedule your learning You can reduce the risk of becoming distracted by setting a few clear goals at the beginning of each year. To do this I asked Pauline to reflect back over the last several years of her professional experience and make a list of those clients who were the most inspiring, fun, and rewarding to work with. Once she completed this list I then asked her to transfer the top 10 clients to a new list.

Next, I had Pauline identify the common characteristics that each of these ten clients shared. For example, were they mostly male or female? Was there a specific age range? Did they work in a particular industry, share similar needs or personality traits? As she identified these common denominators she began to see patterns that helped her with the next step. I then asked Pauline to review her list and choose the seven characteristics that she felt were most important. These formed the profile of an exceptional client, one who inspired her best work. Her list looked like this: A fifth way that the unconscious is smart is that our unconscious evaluations are essential for good judgment. According to Damasio's (2001) somatic marker hypothesis, there are certain somatic (ie, bodily) changes that people experience as an emotion. These somatic changes become automatically associated with the positive or negative contexts for that emotion. When people encounter those contexts again, the somatic changes become a marker or a cue for what will happen next, helping to shape their decisions even without any conscious understanding of what they are doing. Somatic marker hypothesis The idea that changes in the body, experienced as emotion, guide decision making. We can see this when we compare the decisions made by healthy adults with those made by adults who have suffered damage to areas of the brain responsible for social judgments, particularly the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Here's an example of a typical study. Participants are given a gambling task in which their choice of cards from four different decks can either win or lose them money. Two of the decks are risky; To do so effectively, decide on the few skills you want to learn or improve and a few major projects you want to complete. For instance, if you have an online business, you could decide that this year you want to learn: