Over the years Dr. Michael Gervais has helped Super Bowl winners, Olympic gold medalists, Fortune 500 companies and more dominate their field by molding thei...
I wanna introduce a new and fun concept, we’ve got an ancient brain that’s working in modern time, and our ancient brain isn’t as fast as adapting as modern technology, it’s rapidly changing. So our ancient brain is designed for survival, informations coming to your brain in two ways, the high road or the low road. The high road is done to your thinking brain, and the low road is down to the amygdala, the emotions centre of the brain, and it’s coming to the fight flight response mechanism, at twice as speed, informations coming to the amygdala is twice as much and twice as fast before getting it to the thinking brain. So what happens now, is you gating out, no this is it, no this is it, this is okay, this is okay. So our brain is designed to figure out if we’re gonna be safe here or not, so what is our modern day fear? FOPO... Fear of Other People Opinion. What other human thinks of us... What do we do to protect ourselves, we become hypercritical of ourselves. We’re beating ourselves up and tenderising ourselves up in not a good way, so that we don’t face those casualties publicly. Our brain is great at picking up these signals from other people... so that we can adjust and provide some sort of mechanism to protect from being exposed of not being good enough. So our job... is to love others and not give a shit of what they think of us, but not in a cold way, but to really love other people, because we only get one emotion at a time. Either you are anxious or you are joyful, you can’t get the two at the same time. So our job is really to find the right state we want to be in, the right emotional place, and use that and rather let the brain win. And the brain wins by saying, what are they thinking, what are they thinking... Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? And if that is untrained and unconditioned, it will win.
Meditations in uber competitive environment has baggage to it. There’s two main pillars of mindfulness, one is awareness, and the second pillar is wisdom. If you be more aware of your thoughts, your emotions, your body sensations, and the environment, you will be a better perfomer. I can’t be a wise person and all of the sudden be wise, you can’t hijack wise, you can’t shortcut it, you can’t read a wise book and suddenly be wise, you have to reveal it. You have to do the alone based work of silence and listening, and you have to reveal it, that’s how it happens, and that takes time. It takes time for this busy mind, that is so scattered all over the place, external stimulations and internal dialogue, to quiet it down, to let go of the noise and get to the signals. And the more time we spend to connected to the signals, which is the present moment, we reveal glimpses of wisdom, everything changes. Science would suggest to train 8 to 20 minutes a day of training mindfulness or meditation, for the most part, the more is better.
