Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Control”

20 Apr 2011

Emotion and engagement

‘What is the emotion the potential customers want to feel or what is the emotion they have right now? Take that and play with it. Find a way to make that emotion motivate them or find out how they could learn from it. For example, if you have business owners in your list or your funnel, one of their biggest issues right now is the economy. That is an emotion—it is fear. You can turn fear into motivation by reassuring them that it can be okay, that they can make it through troubled economic times. Because it can be.’

Scott Stratten in UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging. is discussing the use of emotion to engage and then make something go viral. It immediately made me think that he’s describing the core lever for human psychology. Leveraging our attention by triggering our emotion via our limbic system. Dr Boeree describes the limbic system as ‘primarily responsible for our emotional life, and has a lot to do with the formation of memories’

‘We are feeling creatures that think’

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Posted in Control, Focus, Psychology and tagged , , , | Leave a Comment
23 Dec 2010

Oxygen, Glucose and the Brain: spend it wisely

JB comments on Will I? : The Frontal Cortex, ‘I have to question the opening statement of this post….”we can’t help but talk to ourselves”. While it’s true that our brain automatically reverts to operating “in the default mode” when we don’t give it something more demanding to do, it turns out this mental chatter uses as much glucose and oxygen as giving the brain a more demanding mental task. Mindful-awareness meditation trains the brain to just be present for whatever sense perceptions are happening without that ongoing commentary and when a decision about action is required, one automatically discriminates between the choices based on whether the action will be helpful to self and others or not. This is truly getting in touch with one’s intrinsic power and wisdom and compassion and saves energy’

The average amount of mental chatter is scary. However, when we consider our energy as a finite daily resource which is expended via lack of focus, our human interest in focus and attention starts to look like an evolutionary adaptation in action.

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Posted in Communication, Control, Deliberate Practice, Energy, Focus, Mindfulness and tagged , , , | Leave a Comment
18 Jul 2010

The Management of our Attention

‘The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. We need attention in order to truly listen to others – and even to ourselves. We need attention to truly enjoy sensory pleasures, as well as for efficient learning. We need it in order to be truly present during sex or to be in love or when we are simply contemplating nature. Our brains can generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day.’ - Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel

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Posted in Control, Deliberate Practice, Focus, Happiness, Mindfulness and tagged , , , | Leave a Comment

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