Mental Threats

I am in the process of moving. This will be my family's third move in three years. It is a hectic time and my wife and I are amazed at how much shit we have collected in such a short time after moving our family from Japan to the United States.

I have been thinking through some minimalist concepts that would help us downsize. The biggest issue is probably my mental connection to things in our home. These items may provide very little value to others. I, on the other hand, have some emotional connection to them.

For example, when we moved from Japan three years ago, we brought many toys with us. Many have sat in boxes for the last two to three years. A plastic toy train and an ambulance produce some cool Japanese siren sounds—gifts from the boy's Japanese grandparents. None of us will let them go because they connect us positively to memories of our past.

Pink Bunny. That is the name of the hairless, stuffed rabbit I have had since age one. It has traveled around the world with me. It sits in my closet today.

These connections to things may, in some cases, create mental blocks that prevent us from becoming better versions of ourselves.

One of the goals of my blog and newsletter is to focus on mental calibration and self-awareness.

Any journey to improvement starts with mental self-awareness. We need to take a personal inventory of what is happening in our heads and be open to areas we need to improve. Calibration is a self-assessment and adjustment to enhance one’s abilities, mindset, or behavior. It involves a continuous evaluation of our current state. We should always work to build the habits and systems that create the best opportunities for personal growth. We should make intentional changes to achieve greater accuracy, balance, and effectiveness in personal goals and performance.

Additionally, we should be aware of those thoughts that can be destructive or limit our ability to reach our full potential.

Ego

One of the most critical opportunities to grow and build life experience is through constructive criticism and feedback from trusted mentors. A strong ego can lead to close-mindedness or resistance to criticism and feedback. This resistance can prevent you from recognizing areas for improvement, especially when trying to learn from others.

A strong ego can significantly impact your ability to grow.

• Resistance to feedback. Feedback from trusted mentors, friends, and family is the cornerstone of any growth. Ego causes you to put up your defenses whenever you receive criticism or feedback. It creates barriers to the self-awareness required to recognize opportunities for improvement. You become blind to the input from others and block any ability to learn from them.

• Lack of accountability. An inflated ego prevents you from taking any form of responsibility for your mistakes. Understanding and learning from mistakes is one of the best opportunities to build new experiences. Mistakes and errors are essential for growth and teach us the adjustments we need to make to avoid making the same mistakes again in the future.

• Overestimation of ability. While it is always good to have stretch targets and push ourselves to go beyond what we are capable of, an inflated ego can inflate our sense of self, and we may take on tasks we cannot handle. This can lead to failure and frustration.

If we overestimate our current capabilities, it may also trick us into thinking continuous learning is not important. This would prevent you from taking advantage of new opportunities to develop new skills.

• Stagnation. An inflated ego can make you complacent, falsely believing that you have already reached the pinnacle of your career. Believing that you have already reached a maximum level of success can cause you to become complacent and stop seeking new opportunities for growth and self-improvement.

Strong guiding principles can help you deal with an inflated ego.

Try to cultivate humility. Remember that you always have something to learn, and other people have valuable insights that can help you.

Seek feedback. Ask questions. Actively ask for and evaluate feedback from others. Input from others provides invaluable data points that allow us to practice self-awareness. Self-awareness helps put our egos in check and identify opportunities for learning and skill stack creation.

Stay curious. Creating a foundation based on continuous learning and improvement does not allow much time for an overactive ego.

Complacency

I introduced complacency above as one of the negative impacts of having an over-inflated ego. Like ego, complacency can lead to a lack of self-awareness. A complacent individual will stop reflecting on performance, capabilities, and areas that need improvement.

• Stagnation again. Like ego, complacency can lead to a lack of motivation to pursue new goals. A lack of goals or systems that lead to improvement can lead to complacency. This creates a sense of satisfaction with one's current state, and an individual may stop seeking opportunities for growth and development. As you can imagine, this could lead to personal and professional stagnation.

• Missed opportunities - Have you ever kicked yourself in the butt for a missed opportunity? To this day, I kick myself for not investing in Bitcoin. I was aware of Bitcoin. I knew it could be an opportunity, but I did not invest any time and energy to learn about Bitcoin. I was complacent, and I missed an opportunity.

When you are complacent, you will miss opportunities for learning, improvement, financial gain, making timeless memories, and building critical relationships. This can result in missed chances to make financial gain, build new skills, gain experiences, or advance your career.

• Reduced performance. Complacency definitely leads to reduced performance. There is no need to improve or increase performance without a drive to excel. Your efforts will be half-hearted, leading to diminished results and success over time.

The best example I can give is being complacent about exercise and the food we eat. This quickly leads to poor health, too much weight, low energy, and degraded mental capabilities.

How do you overcome complacency? How do you fight against lowered ambition, decreased self-awareness, and the erosion of skills and learning?

Set new goals and build new systems for success. Regularly setting goals and measuring and tracking your progress can create the motivation you need to continue moving forward. For example, reframe your thoughts about exercise. Just having a goal of losing 50 pounds may actually lead to complacency because you do not have immediate results. Putting a system of daily exercise in place that makes exercise a part of your daily routine.

Embrace challenges to overcome complacency. We often become complacent because challenges can overwhelm us or create unnecessary fear and worry. Look at a challenge as an opportunity to grow and learn. Reframe it as something positive, understanding that if you push yourself, you will be a better version of yourself on the other side of completing the challenge.

Stay curious. Ask lots of questions. Building a system around continuous learning and improvement makes it difficult to be complacent. Curiosity leads to new opportunities, challenges, and motivation to learn more. Being curious helps us to learn, be self-aware, and become better versions of ourselves.

Try to surround yourself with ambitious people.

This quote highlights the influence that your close circle has on your behavior, attitudes, learning, and ability to be successful. If you surround yourself with positive, motivated, and successful people, you have a better chance of implementing similar systems that will lead to your success.

Conformity

Some level of conformity is essential in our lives.

There is a necessary balance between conformity and individuality. While conformity can provide stability and calm in your life, genuine character, growth, and greatness are forged through the exercise of individuality.

Suppression of your individuality. Conformity often requires you to suppress your unique skills, capabilities, ideas, treats, and preferences to fit with a group. This suppression can stifle your creativity, limit your ability to speak up and express your true self, and prevent you from fully exploring your growth opportunities. You could go through living a shell of your true self, waking up one day realizing you have let success and self-reflection pass you by.

Conformity can hinder innovation. When you confirm, you are less likely to think outside the box, which limits your ability to learn and develop new ideas or solutions.

Think about Kodak and the digital camera.

Kodak was once a dominant player in the photography industry. In 1975, they invented the first digital camera. However, the company's management decided not to pursue innovation aggressively.

They got stuck in what is commonly referred to as groupthink, which greatly limited their ability to innovate. Kodak's decision-makers value consensus over risk-taking and innovation, which led to a lack of diverse opinions and critical thinking.

They also feared the cannibalization of their profitable film business, and embracing digital technology was seen as a threat to their core revenue stream.

Management and employees conformed to their traditions. There was a strong corporate culture around their film technology. Management and employees conformed to their existing business model and avoided anything that would disrupt established processes and operations.

The result is that while Kodak hesitated, other companies like Sony, Canon, and Nikon invested heavily in digital camera technology and captured the market. Kodak eventually tried to catch up but had already lost its competitive advantage, which led to a significant financial impact and diminished market share.

This was an example of how conformity can negatively impact the corporate level. What can be done to limit the negative impact of too much conformity on our personal lives?

You can take risks. Step out of your comfort zone. Challenge yourself or set goals that require you to take risks and force you to embrace new challenges. You could take a calculated risk by leaving a secure job and starting your own company, which can lead to immense personal growth and learning. Take a risk and step outside your comfort zone to learn new public speaking or coding skills. You could travel abroad. I lived in Japan for twenty-two years. The experience was invaluable.

Learn to embrace your unique individuality. In my post, My Guiding Principles, I talked about developing your skill stack to achieve success by combining several everyday skills. This combination can create a unique and highly impactful skill set.

Poor Communication

Poor communication can have a very negative impact on our personal lives and professional careers.

We have all probably told our kids, "You need to do better in school. Just study harder!"

This sentence says it all, but it lacks specificity. There is no feedback to confirm understanding, and there is no actual support to complete the task or improve study habits. It is a generalization. It assumes the problem is simply a lack of effort versus other factors impacting our kids.

This can make our kids feel misunderstood and unsupported. Without specific guidance or direction, our kids may not develop effective study skills or other good habits that could help them later in life. The lack of open communication limits our child's ability to become more self-aware and overcome challenges independently.

A better message from a parent could be: "I've noticed you have been struggling with your homework lately. Let's talk about what's going on. How do you feel about your classes? Are there particular subjects or assignments that are giving you trouble? Maybe we can devise a plan together to complete your homework. I am here to support you, and we can discuss this together."

Poor communication can lead to a lack of specificity in a personal or professional work environment. It does not call out what areas need to be addressed or clearly define the problem that needs to be resolved. It does not clearly define the priorities or what "good" means.

In the example above, maybe complete homework was not defined well enough for both the parent and child to agree on what that meant. This leads to conflict, misunderstanding, and hurt feelings.

How many mixups have you had about deadlines not being clearly communicated at home and work? At work, it is usually a mixup in expected time between senior management and those actually executing the task that leads to missed deadlines. At home, it is being late to church or other appointments because the expected time to leave the house is only in the head of the parents.

Making assumptions about other people is the ultimate form of poor communication. The example above is an example of a parent assuming that the child knows how to do the homework.

Another example could be the boss at work, who is an expert in his field and assumes that his team understands the goal, priorities, and deadline of a critical project. How many projects have you missed deadlines on or received the wrong output for because these things were not clearly communicated and you assumed the other person could "read your mind?"

So, how can you improve communication? An entire book could probably be written about this, but the following are a few quick options.

Try to be more specific. Provide precise tasks for the items listed with detailed instructions or expectations for outcomes. Ensure each family member or co-worker understands their responsibilities and what is expected of them.

Give specific deadlines for the tasks you are trying to accomplish. Ensure everyone on your team understands the required date and time for the projects and tasks they must complete. Ensure your family members understand the movie, school, and church departure times. With your kids, help them learn the steps they need to take to ensure they are ready on time. Learning from the previous examples, do not assume they know how to get prepared on time.

Lastly, any good form of communication requires some feedback mechanism. If it is a professional setting, schedule meetings to check in and monitor progress. It is an excellent opportunity for the team to give you specific feedback on project assumptions, progress, challenges and risks,

We can all improve understanding and collaboration by providing clear, specific instructions, setting explicit deadlines, and creating some form of feedback loop.

Lack of Boundaries

Maintaining a clear sense of self-awareness is critical to maintaining boundaries. A lack of boundaries can limit personal growth in many ways.

You can become overwhelmed and burned out. Without boundaries, you might take on too much work or over-commit, leading to burnout and failure. Setting clear boundaries and communicating those boundaries will allow you to manage your time and energy better. Time and energy for yourself means more time for self-evaluation, development, learning, and building your skill stack.

When you do not establish your boundaries, it can be difficult to prioritize tasks and goals. This makes it very difficult to spend time on value-added activities like playing with your kids, exercising, and self-improvement. Speak up. Stand your ground on your boundaries. Identify your priorities. Communicate and focus on your priorities, allowing you to allocate time to what is most important to your growth.

Not having boundaries can lead to a loss of identity. You can constantly try to please others or conform to their expectations, which can dilute your sense of self and hinder your personal development. By standing your ground on your boundaries, you will stay true to your values, interests, and needs, fostering a strong sense of self. This will lead to personal growth, learning, and success.

In conclusion, I will restate that any journey to improvement starts with mental self-awareness. We need to take a personal inventory of what is happening in our heads and be open to areas we need to improve. Many mental risks prevent us from digging in and heading toward self-discovery and improvement. I hope this article helped give some understanding and guidance.

Let's take this journey together. I look forward to hearing from you.

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