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Tracy Winchell

Is your 🐵 mind sabotaging your personal growth?

published8 months ago
2 min read

Hello Reader,

The first month of 2022 is all but finished. If you're like me, some (or all) of your personal growth objectives are taunting you.

Please do know, you are not alone if your key objectives have hit the skids. Most of us abandon our New Year's Resolutions mid-way-ish in January.

It's quite possible that your monkey mind is so loud right now that you can't hear your rational brain.

Journaling helps me acknowledge my monkey mind and keep it in its place. From there, I use a set of prompts to wake up my rational brain.

For the next 4 or 5 weeks, we are sharing tips to Tame Your Monkey Mind & Engage Your Rational Brain.

Many of the lessons are excerpts from Tame Your Monkey Mind & Engage Your Rational Brain, the ebook I published in mid-2021.

What’s a monkey mind, you ask?

It’s the part of your brain most connected to the ego, which contends that you can’t do anything right. It’s also the part of you that stifles creativity and prevents you from moving forward with your passions. The monkey mind insists on being heard, and sometimes it takes a lot of self-control to shut it down. It is also the part of your brain that becomes easily distracted, so if you want to get anything done in life, your challenge will be to shut down the monkey mind.
-- Diana Raab Ph.D. in a 2017 Psychology Today article (Calming the Monkey Mind: Do You Have an Inner Voice That Hinders Your Success?)

Through writing prompts, we can slow our brains, focus our mind on the here and now, and tell ourselves the truth about ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us.

Explain the term “rational brain?”

To many theorists, the rational mind is a thing or process that: (a) guides sensible or logical action, (b) avoids emotion or bias in judgment, (c) maximizes some good or function, and (d) produces universally optimal results.

-- Ed A. Wasserman, Ph.D. in a September, 2007 Psychological Science Agenda article (The Rational Mind: Thin Colonies of Reason Amid A Savage World)​

Next week's lesson will help you determine the “relationship” between your Rational Brain & your Monkey Mind.

To help you prepare for the next email, think about the following question for the next few days. (Adapted from Jon Acuff's Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking)

PROMPT: What is your monkey mind saying to you?​​

By tagging our thoughts, we take a step toward understanding what, if any, monkey wrenches are keeping us from moving toward the person we want to be in 11 more months.

Next week, we begin the process of untangling rational thoughts from your pesky monkey mind.

Until next week,

-Tracy

P.S. Two opportunities to score "bonus points."

BONUS 1: This week keep a running list of what you notice your mind is telling you.

BONUS 2: Share some of what you're noticing by replying to this email.​​​​​​​​

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