The Monkey Mind
Marshall Goldsmith
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by Marshall Goldsmith
Nearly 20 years ago, I wrote an article titled “Global Communications and Communities of Choice” for The Community of the Future, a book I co-edited with Frances Hesselbein, Richard Beckhard, and Richard Schubert. It’s turned out to be a very prophetic writing on a topic about which, in this case, I wish I’d been wrong.
In the article, I wrote “Today television addiction is one of the most underrated problems in the United States (with the average child spending thousands of hours watching ‘junk’ TV). In the future, media addiction (which includes TV, the internet, and video games) may well pass drug addiction and alcohol addiction, combined, as a social problem.” It’s happened, unfortunately, and the reason is because media is like amphetamines to the monkey mind.
Mindfulness Is the Solution to Overcoming the Monkey Mind
All of us have a “monkey mind”. It’s when your mind jumps from place to place with very little consciousness about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. When this happens, you are experiencing your monkey mind.
The solution to controlling the monkey mind syndrome is to remind yourself as often as you can to be aware of the triggers that are impacting your thoughts, feelings and ultimately, your behavior. To the degree that you can, breathe and acknowledge when you feel an impulse from an internal or external trigger. Then ask yourself, “What is the trigger?” “How am I feeling at this moment?” “What am I thinking” “What am I doing?” “Why am I doing this?” This is called being mindful. What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is just the placement of awareness and reflection between the impulse that follows a trigger and the behavior that follows the impulse.
Like almost everything that I teach. Mindfulness is not hard to understand. It is just hard to do, even more so as we are continually being triggered by a barrage of outside influences, from emails, cell phones, tablets, On Demand TV, movies, games, and social media to name but a few bits and pieces of 21st Century monkey mind candy.
The impact of these triggers can be very difficult to anticipate or even to understand. When we experience a trigger, it may set off a chain reaction of seemingly random associated images from our past. These associated images from our past may then lead to projected images for our future that may change our originally intended behavior – and derail our plan for the day.
Unless we really work at ‘connecting the dots’, we may be totally unaware of why we are doing what we are doing. Our brief moments of mindfulness can easily vanish – and we won’t even know why.
Content Engineer && BSD?STr?YR??
4 年Isn't stepping away from your routines and changing them every now and then one way to break the patterns of our automated responses and autopilot modi? Under time or other pressures at work, it's tough to step back, breathe and become aware without feeling helpless as you're being bombarded with notification triggers requiring a quick response as we are trying to juggle multiple complex projects, meetings (visually recorded nowadays exacerbating our anxieties and pressures), deliverables and messages from various communication channels. We can try as hard as we want to acquire mindfulness techniques diligently through practices like yoga/mindful meditations/mindful eating etc but to achieve a balance between productivity and being mindful especially at the present climate and in face of the reported burnouts spike today is an almost impossible and unsustainable feat in the long run. Moreso, as the IOT and this abomination called neuralink, the BCI brain to computer interface, is being developed/tested- who knows at what stage the military labs are/ahead. #monkeymindinternetofthings
Vice President, Engineering at Qualys
4 年Coincidentally, this is the third reference to similar ideas for me in the last two days. There is this interesting exchange in the TV Series Heroes where one character says to the other that "You can have a life of happiness or a life of meaning. To be truly happy, you have to live absolutely in the present. But for a life of meaning, a man is condemned to wallow in the past and obsess about the future".
In Pursuit of Brilliance ??? Entrepreneur & CEO, Executive & Corporate Training | Executive Coach | International Speaker | Personal Growth Facilitator | Leadership | Executive Presence | Communication | Team Building
4 年Just the day I needed to be reminded of it.
Entity HR Head at NUMERIC INDIA - A Group Brand Legrand | Strategic HR Value Creator | Content Creator | Mentor | NLP Coach |
4 年Very insightful sharings Marshall Goldsmith! As always pearls of wisdom
Consultant for Higher Education in Germany | Certified Career Coach and Counsellor
4 年Marshall Goldsmith, I always wanted to ask you this. Have you done the Vipassana course? These days I feel most of us are experiencing life only at the thought level. And then these "thoughts" are programmed by what we see, hear and watch across all media. We are not able to separate the thoughts from the thinker. So eventually this monkey mind in a way forming our identity, beliefs, and values. I have enrolled for a 10 days Vipassana course this month-end. With combination of daily questions and mindfulness, I am trying to get into the "I don't know" state. Blessed to meet Buddha through you once again.