The Master Skill

As a human being* with both a cerebral** and a limbic*** brain, the ability to accurately, and resourcefully, interpret and assign meaning to events and circumstance may well be the master skill of living well.

*  *  *

How do you interpret and understand your life?

Its events and results and your thoughts and feelings?

Your life isn’t something outside of you, it’s the world you create with, first your thoughts, and then the feelings that rise from those thoughts.

*  *  *

* And, as human beings are meaning-creating and meaning-seeking creatures, this skill is so vitally important.

** The cerebral brain is the newest part of our brain: the part that thinks about thoughts and allows us to examine our experience.

*** The limbic brain – aka the emotional brain – is the part of our brain we share with our cave-person forebears. The limbic brain is extremely sensitive to environmental stimuli, values safety and security over all else and processes incoming slightly before our cerebral brain.

Similar Posts

  • The Primacy of Emotions

    “People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.” – Zig Ziglar In fact, emotions are why we do everything. Logical, thoughtful, consideration may be a precursor to action, but without the animating energy of emotions nothing happens. Yes, our thoughts determine our lives, but emotions actually create our lives. I recently had…

  • What People Want From Leaders*

    Trustworthy. Respectable. Admirable. *  *  * Leadership, more than anything, is a personal relationship between leader and led. It’s not a hierarchical relationship, where one person has power and the other none. Sure, a leader must be technically savvy and proficient, s/he must know “the business,” but at its core, its most fundamental, leadership is…

  • Glow in the Dark

    Sometimes Seth Godin puts out something so good I need to share it with you, in its entirety: Some people are able to reflect the light that lands on them, to take directions or assets or energy and focus it where it needs to be focused. This is a really valuable skill. Even more valuable,…

  • The Power of Inertia

    Inertia is the reason I can say the following with absolute certainty about your immediate future: the most reliable predictor of what you will be doing five minutes from now is what you are doing now. – Marshall Goldsmith Inertia can either work for you, or against you. Because of this you must choose your actions, and…

  • Learners Are Earners

    Formal education will earn you a living, self education will earn you fortune. – Jim Rohn You know the quickest way to irrelevancy in the 21st Century? Stop learning. *  *  * The world is extremely connected and competitive and the pace of change is accelerating. You simply can’t finish school (whether it be undergraduate,…

  • Greatness Takes Time

    No great thing is created suddenly. – Epictetus It can seem that way, but that’s not how it works. Anything takes time, great or not. To paraphrase Earl Nightingale, the time is going to pass anyway, why not do something towards greatness – it takes time after all.