Productive By Design
In my work with leaders and teams, the bottom line is always productivity. But what really makes you more productive? People look to be productive through external processes such as streamlining their business, following tips for organizing and prioritizing, and changing the furniture around, and increasingly by internal processes such as trying to think positively, not sweat the small stuff, and calming your mind through meditation and other techniques. This is because there’s a growing awareness that the thing that interferes with your productivity the most is an overactive, stressed and busy mind. As long as your mind is overactive, you’ll lack the mental clarity required to be really productive.
What’s missing in this picture is the awareness of something built into you that allows your mind to be calm, present, and as a consequence, productive. Understanding this design for optimal mental functioning allows you to get before you create all that unnecessary thinking, which you are then trying to help with techniques like meditation. Your mind is designed to be productive; you just have to understand the nature of its design.
The principles that revealed the fact of this innate design for mental clarity and productivity were discovered over 40 years ago by a man named Sydney Banks. In essence, once you see the logic of these principles, it dissolves the illusion that you can experience anything outside of you – a busy work schedule, difficult boss, problems at home – and it becomes crystal clear that in fact the only thing you ever feel is your thinking in the moment about such events and circumstances. This simple but essential shift in perception cuts out enormous amounts of unproductive thinking. It’s the key to aligning with nature’s design for a productive mind.
My wish for every leader and team member is that you begin to experience the incredible power of this built-in system for mental calm, clarity and productivity. Nature is so much better at designing things than we are!
