The Awakening

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by?making the darkness conscious.” – Carl Jung

Having taken a deeper dive into the Emotional, Physical and Spiritual Powerhouses in the preceding articles, we now shift our attention to perhaps the most nascent of them all – the Mental Powerhouse. The brain is the most complex and least understood organ in our bodies.

If you’re a movie fan like me, then as the story of the movie ‘Limitless’ revolves around taking a pill to enhance the brain and thus achieve ultimate success in all aspects of life.

Well let me break it to you, there’s no such pill, not yet anyways. The key here lies in enhancing the ‘Neuroplasticity’ considerably and opening your ‘Critical Periods’. Easier said than done, but who has ever achieved anything of value or meaning without hard work, true grit and sacrifice? In many ways, I am grateful for my struggle because without it, I wouldn’t have been able to take a deep dive into my inner realms and in the process, stumbled across my own strengths. I use the term “stumbled across” lightly, as these weren’t accidental discoveries but rather challenge areas at first, which were later turned into strengths by methodically attacking vulnerabilities.

You may remember I mentioned previously that the Mental Powerhouse orbits around the notion of self-awareness, understanding and unlocking hidden potential. But what I didn’t disclose, is that the scope of that potential is virtually limitless!

As with all the other Powerhouses, the first step begins with knowing thyself or becoming mindful and gaining total awareness of your surroundings and the environment in which you operate at any given instance.

What kind of being are you? Where does your motivation come from? What keeps you going? What brings out the best and/or worst in you?

Once you have answered these questions (and a few others) our aim will be to identify your ‘challenge areas’ as I like to call them, isolate them, and then see if they can be overcome or possibly even turned into strengths. ?As mentioned earlier the objective here is to significantly enhance your mental capabilities and neuroplasticity. The ability to tune out the noise when needed and focus with a laser-like precision.

Triquetra of the Mind

The Triquetra of the Mind revolves around a deep core called Memory Warehouse. The Triquetra of the Mind being Adversity – the plasticity between the conscious and the unconscious.

Structurally similar to the other Powerhouses, it is none other than the Memory Warehouse that forms the core of the Mental Powerhouse.

You’ll recall that a ‘structured’ Memory Warehouse is not something someone is born with, but rather it is something consciously designed, and constructed after rigorous mental training, utilising cutting-edge Neuroscience methodologies (which I will cover in more detail in the future).

The purpose of the Memory Warehouse is to allow a construct inside our brains to house a complex, multi-level library of sorts, which consists of countless archives of our lives; lives of those with whom we have interacted; and the events that surround us right up until the present. These archives are then powered up by a system that we have for the identification of patterns to cross-reference, analyse, run parallel hypotheses and draw conclusions of scenarios in real time.

Seeing as we’re trying to enhance our mental capabilities one can see how the ability to do so would prove most advantageous in any given situation.?

Who are you: Behavioural Aspects

Invest time to explore behavioural aspects of your personality. There are countless toolkits out there to choose from. You can start with the very basic like Big5 or DISC. Understand the traits and take a deep dive into self into the very core of each trait, and ask why that particular trait has developed or has it not developed at all? Trace-back everything to the environment you have interacted with growing up. Only then will you be able to actually start micro-tweaking your behaviours. Otherwise if you remain at the surface, you will always be caught in a vicious cycle of ‘Unconscious to Conscious to Behaviour to Habits’. ?Everyone wants to increase his or her IQ or Learnability or Memory, but everyone has to start as the very basic, that is, try to understand yourself first.

Only after this initial foray can you move onto more complex toolkits that Neuroscience offers today, but always through professional Neuroscientists or Psychologists.?

The Flipside of the Coin?

For no other Powerhouses are the drainage points so capricious as for the Mental Powerhouse. They are both common and applicable to all. Let’s take a deeper look at some below:

Stress is your friend: Not Sweating the Small Stuff

People like me, we need a certain amount of stress, the reason being that we’re only happy when we’re overcoming obstacles. Take that away from us and we start bouncing off the walls.?

Allow me to be direct here, if you cannot handle stress – you cannot handle success. Like the great novelist J. Gilbert Holland once said, “Calmness is the cradle of power.”

Stress and anxiety are two extremely powerful drainage points of the Mental Powerhouse and you’ll recall, that if left unchecked, will drain power from your energy reservoir, reducing its capacity, and leading to an imbalance and eventual destabilisation.

Management of stress and anxiety is all about picking your battles. Not every battle is worth it. The art of knowing when to throw down or when to throw in the towel and walk away is a skill that comes only with experience.?

Complexity breeds Simplicity

Simply put, the ability to handle complex scenarios. This is where you will see the Memory Warehouse spring into action and really learn to appreciate its value. In a world of endless information the swift processing of that information in a structured way, becomes essential, not just in your professional life but in your personal one too!

Remember the two empty floors I told you about in the multi-story skyscraper? Those floors were designed as infinite white spaces – a blank canvas where you can let your imagination run wild. They are most often used to craft the finest solutions after running complex, multi-scenario (best case, worst case, realistic and apocalyptic) analyses and making inferences.

In our quest for higher neuroplasticity, the creation of a ‘safe space’ such as this allows for the optimised processing and management of even the most complex problems. ?

You Do You

If you’re anything like me, then chances are you hold yourself to the highest possible standards. And lofty as our expectations may be, they still have to be met. But there’s a fine line between reaching for your true potential and raising the bar so high that you set yourself up for failure, or maintaining a constant state of stress rather than achieving a ‘state of flow’.

Remember back when I spoke about my ‘turning point’ I mentioned the importance of attainable goals? Well the path to the corner office is a marathon, not a sprint. Little victories bring you closer and closer to your ultimate goal; focus on winning the battles as well as the war/s, bolstering your confidence along the way as you accumulate more and more battle experience.

Without these little victories, the constant disappointment you would face in yourself (and possibly even others) would almost assuredly bleed energy from your energy reservoir. (Less is good more is bad).

All this being said, if you are able to abide by this code and make the best of any given situation, irrespective of how good or bad it is then you can spend the rest of eternity unlocking hidden potential – there is no limit!

I will leave you with a thought: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

― C.G. Jung