“Nothing can stop a person with the right mental attitude from achieving the goal; nothing on earth can help a person with the wrong mental attitude”- Thomas Jefferson
There are many terms in the personal development world to explain the concept behind thoughts and self-talk. You’ve probably heard them before: law of attraction, manifestation, etc. Well, for a minute, let’s explore the actual scientific explanation.
We have a part of our brain called the reticular activating systems (RAS). It sounds fancy, but it’s nothing more than a group of nerves located at the base of the brain stem – a very important group of nerves. The role of the RAS is to make sure our brain doesn’t get short circuited from all the data and that goes into it every second of the day. Essentially RAS acts as a filter. Whenever something comes into the brain through one or more of our senses, the RAS determines if this is piece of information that is important enough to bring to our attention. If it’s not, we take no notice of it.
For example. Let’s say you go car shopping. You walk into a dealership and there she is, a beautiful car right in front of you. You immediately react and your mind is thinking, “WoW! I love this car! I’ve never seen it before.” You love it so much that you take the car for a test drive and spend an hour asking questions as you flip through the brochure. You tell the salesperson that you’ll think on it and be back later. You leave the dealership. You don’t even realize it, but your entire RAS has been reshaped in that last hour.
As soon as you pull out of the car lot, you look in your rear-view mirror and , WOAH! There’s the same car behind me!” as you keep driving and turn into your neighbourhood, there it is again, It’s parked in your neighbour’s driveway. You can’t help but think, “Wow. This car has gotten so popular all of a sudden!” However, the truth is that car was always there. The car isn’t what’s new. You noticing it what’s new. Before you went to the dealership, it was just random noise for your RAS, so it got filtered out. However, the car suddenly has your attention and the RAS is letting it through.
Your awareness and focus on a subject is actually creating your experience in reality. Similarly, at work once you strongly believe in what you would like to achieve and repeatedly tell it to yourself, your team and to all stake holders, you will start realizing the set goals. This reticular activating systems (RAS) will help you realize it.
Example from our real life situation for Operations team:
Strongly believe in that we will realize our month on month target numbers of trips and achieve the year end goal of reaching 3000 trips a day, once this is registered in our mind RAS will help us reach the target and we all start working in this direction and do things that will help us achieve the target.
