Master-Mind Alliance: The Key To Less Work, More Life, Balance

Reverse Your Fortune In Just 3 Minutes A Day
Written & Copyrighted by Richard Paris Borough, Ph.D.

The Best 3 Minutes Of Your Day would have to be the time you spend doing two mental activities: 1) Reviewing your accomplishments of the past 24 hours, and 2) Previewing what you'll be doing next. This is mental review and preview rehearsal activity.

Years ago I learned about the value of these notions from Dr. Charles Garfield. In his early years, Garfield was employed as an engineer by NASA at Cape Kennedy during the Apollo Missions. In his first few weeks on the job, he noticed that most everyone working there arrived early for work and left late, very late. And unless near death, people didn't take sick days. Puzzled as to what drove the engineers to toil at their jobs so enthusiastically Garfield asked his manager if he had an explanation for this extreme dedication to the work at NASA. The manager said he'd be glad to explain and then did something odd. He told Garfield to come back at midnight the following Tuesday and at that time, he'd explain everything.

Garfield did as his manager said. The next Tuesday night he drove out to the Cape, close to midnight, and looked for his manager. Upon finding him, Garfield again asked for the explanation. The manager smiled at him and said, "Follow me."

Garfield's manager took him out the back door of the building, out past the parking lot to a remote corner of the perimeter fence. Then he simply said, "Charlie, we work long and hard here because President Kennedy said we're going up there." And he raised his arm and pointed up in the night sky directly overhead, straight at the moon -- the brightly glowing full moon. Garfield got it. Inspiration -- Kennedy's vision of sending men to the moon was the reason why the NASA engineers worked the butts off. There was more than a paycheck involved in their work. A whole lot more.

Turned out Garfield didn't stay with NASA for long. He had other plans. He went off to Berkeley and got a Ph.D. in psychology then dedicated his professional life to expanding upon the lesson he learned that night standing in the glowing moon light at Cape Kennedy. He made a career out of researching and writing about Peak Performance, the conditions and circumstances that drive people to unusual levels of hard work and accomplishment. Garfield got famous for a time and I met him in the early 1980s.

One of his greatest achievements in my opinion was the development of the Mental Review and Preview Rehearsal. This is really great. Here's what you do. Near the end of the day, take a quit few minutes to think back over all that you did during the day just coming to and end. If you made any mistakes or annoying errors you wish you hadn't made, mentally replay those activities in your mind, except, as you rerun them, this time make them come out as you had originally intended, that is, perfectly.

You see your mind stores all your daily activities as memories. And your mind doesn't understand the difference between images of big mistakes and images of perfection. It stores in memory whatever you leave with it. But you have a choice. You can choose to store the mistakes you made during the day or, you can change the recollections of those events so that you only store images of success in your memory. So ask yourself if you'd prefer having a mental storehouse of goof ups or of perfection. I think you know what to do.

Once you have reviewed the day and mentally corrected any activities you want to be better, then stored these images into your memory you're ready to look ahead. You can think ahead to what the next day or two will bring and mentally preview and rehearse your this soon to be behavior -- again seeing only perfection in your mind's eye.

You may know that athletes routinely utilize mental rehearsals techniques. But you may not know that a considerable amount of research, some of it Garfield's, shows that mentally previewing and rehearsing activities before doing them, helps improve performance, some times considerably for athletes and for anyone, even business people. If this stuff didn't work, athletes wouldn't bother with it, and professional sports teams would not employee experts in this stuff, sports psychologists. Indeed the field of sports psychology would not exist if it did not directly relate to the goal of sports which of course is to win as much as possible.

In the world of achievement in business, the world I work in, I encourage all my clients to utilize mental review and preview rehearsal as a matter of routine. And it helps them win more often too, just like athletes.

Conclusion: Set aside a few minutes at the end of the day for a mental review of the events of the day. Do mental previews and rehearsals of what's coming up. Try this for a couple of months and see if you don't notice an improvement in your work. You will. And you'll probably notice that you're happier too. And those are good results. With a little practice, you can indeed make this time be the best 3 minutes of your day. And 3 minutes is all it takes.

I have a passionate interest in the simple and complex behaviors associated with human achievement and the underlying psychological principles and motivations. I love this stuff. I do. Helping people get more done and have more fun doing it is my life.

Ultimately we all want the same thing -- delirious contentment for ourselves and those we love, plus a great place to live and work. So as my Grandmother Paris used to say, "Hop to it." Start going after all that you want today…and learn to use those 3 best minutes of your day. It'll help.

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Richard Paris Borough, Ph.D. , is President of Strategic Business Development; a Humboldt County, California based small business consulting firm. He is director of The Master-Mind Alliance -- and also publishes “Keys To A DONE BUSINESS” -- a monthly newsletter featuring business management best practices.