It’s all in the mind

Welcome to the second installment of Bill’s Body, Mind, Heart and Soul series. This week, he talks about keeping your mind in shape. How do you exercise your brain? Share with us on our Facebook Page.

WHEN WE talk about our minds, we think in terms of our ability to analyze, reason, think abstractly, use language, visualize and comprehend.

In the book, The 8^th Habit, Stephen Covey suggests 3 ways to develop our minds.

• Study and education
• Developing self- awareness
• Learning by teaching and doing

Study and education are pretty self-explanatory and is each while we are attending school of some sort, however, the challenge is to continue to read and find ways to learn new things.  This will help you adapt to the changing realities of life.  One simple solution is to reduce the time spent watching TV and read more.

A powerful way to develop self-awareness is to learn about personality styles.  We are all born with unique preferences in terms of how we relate to people, tasks, time, and situations.  There are other factors that influence our personality development, but our personality style tendencies are the strongest underlying factor.   By learning if we are prone to being verbal or non-verbal, extroverted or not, more interested in tasks vs. people than we will be better capable of managing our behaviors to improve communication and relationships.

You learn best by teaching and doing, which happened to be our 4-H motto when I was part of the club as a kid.  Basically speaking; to know and not to do is really not to know, to learn and not do is not to learn.

Bottom-line is to consider your mind like your body.  You need to keep exercising it to keep it in top shape and to be sharp.