The Master Skill

ByMatthew

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

  • Think You Don’t Have Enough Will-Power? (No One Does… )

    ByMatthew

    It’s not your fault though. There are two reasons why it can be (very) hard to change, start or not do something: will-power is a finite resource and scarce within each day in-the-moment awareness is required to exert will-power Once your will-power is gone on any given day, it’s hard to do something hard (or to not do something……

  • What’s In Your Language?

    ByMatthew

    Less than three minutes in to the latest episode of the Good Life Project I heard something that I had to write about. In introducing how he went from soccer-playing college freshman from the ‘burbs to immersed in indigenous Amazonian culture, Tyler Gage talks about how stewardship was part of the language of an indigenous tribe he was “with.” It…

  • What (Real) Optimists Do

    ByMatthew

    Optimists are those who go after Moby Dick in a row boat with a bucket of tartar sauce. – Zig Ziglar First off, nobody beats Zig for deep truth delivered well. Second, the key take-away here (I humbly suggest) is that the Optimist is one who takes (intelligent/bold/authentic/useful/necessary/game-changing) action. So many people pooh-pooh optimism and…

  • How To Be of Value

    ByMatthew

    Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. – Albert Einstein Success is an abstract, relative term. It’s a made-up thing, it doesn’t actually exist anywhere, like “time.” (You can show me a clock, but you can’t show me time . . . .) And it…

  • What I Do

    ByMatthew

    Work is changing. Life is changing. Much of what worked before simply won’t anymore. Whether you know it or not, you’re playing two games. The first is the Outer Game – this is what you do, your profession, your career, your job. The other is the Inner Game. The Inner Game is what will (really) make…