Three Actionable Insights to Improve your Mind
How self reflection, feedback analysis and cherishing your exceptions can enable you improve your mind.
Most humans from infancy to adulthood spend a lot of time learning about the world around them but barely spend anytime learning about themselves. This phenomenon means that some of us end up studying the wrong course, joining the wrong career, moving to the wrong city and doing many other things that are not aligned with who we are.
The aim of this post is to share three actionable ideas that I have picked up from studying books over the past decade. I want you to apply these concepts to your life right now. These three concepts are:
Daily Self Reflection.
Feedback Analysis.
Cherishing Your Exceptions.
Daily Self Reflection/Examination
Daily self reflection is the daily study of one’s own behaviour. The daily frequency provides two benefits; We get more data about ourselves; and Events are reflected upon when they are fresh in our memories. The practice of daily self reflection has been done for over two thousand years. Some of the benefits of daily self reflection are:
Builds your virtue.
Trains your memory.
Provides intentionality in your daily living.
Leveraging the method of daily reflection as described in the books Pythagoras:His life, Teaching and Influence by Christoph Riedweg and Improvement of the Mind by Isaac Watts, I present questions that can be used in your daily evening reflection. They are:
What have I learnt today?
What have I failed to do today?
Where have I been?
What have I done that is worth the day?
What have I done that I should I shun?
How can I apply what I have learnt today?
Feedback Analysis
In Peter Drucker’s book titled “Managing Oneself”, Drucker mentions how most humans think they know what they are good at and how spectacularly wrong humans get it. He suggests that the only way to discover one’s strength is through a concept called Feedback Analysis.
What is Feedback Analysis? Feedback Analysis is the active process of analysing the interaction of our actions and results over a period of time. It is a lifelong process. To put feedback analysis to practice, follow the three steps below:
Write down a decision or action you’re about to take.
Write down what you expect will happen when you take the decision or action in
Nine to twelve months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.
In comparing the actual results with our expectations prior to taking the action, you get to find out:
Where your strengths lie.
Where your weaknesses lie.
Where your intellectual arrogance is.
Cherishing Your Exceptions
We humans tend to forget or ignore inconvenient facts. Psychologists call this confirmative bias. A quick look at the wikipedia definition of confirmation bias states that:
Confirmation bias, coined by English psychologist Peter Wason, is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms or strengthens their beliefs or values, and is difficult to dislodge once affirmed. Confirmation bias is an example of a cognitive bias, and also of the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things, termed apophenia.
Charles Darwin was aware of this quirk of human behaviour. Darwin had as a rule to immediately write down any observation or argument that seemed to run counter to his theories. The actionable insights here are:
Immediately write down any observation or argument that runs counter to your beliefs.
Objectively examine the contrary belief during your study hours.
If the new observation can or has been proven to be true, consciously and willingly incorporate it into your mental model despite the best efforts of your mind preventing you to ignore this new fact.
Step 3 will probably have to be repeated for the inconvenient fact to become lodged in our subconscious mind.
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Thanks for sharing those actionable Ideas. Few nuggets to ponder on. Layout and writing style is easy and compendious.
Brilliant read. I like how you simplified these essential concepts into simple actionable steps that can easily be incorporated into a daily routine.