If You Value Your Business No.9 – Free Your Mind

To be the creative genius your business needs you to be, you need to be able to not just step back from your business but to think creatively, your mind needs to be free of the huge amount of clutter that fills it daily. This is vital and will affect how successful your business will ultimately be.

Each day our brain filters out the gigabytes of information (around 34 gigabytes just during our leisure time or the equivalent of 100,000 words) that our senses take in. It has to because the processing power of our brain is very limited and can’t possibly handle anywhere close to that much information.

According to Daniel Levitin, author of the fascinating book, The Organised Mind, “The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information that we can pay conscious attention to at any one time.”

What does that mean practically? Well, to understand what another person is saying to us we need to process around 60 bits of information per second. That is why trying to understand what two people are saying at the same time is just about the limit of what we can process and usually not for very long.

We can happily drive listening to the radio or a friend speaking next to us and have little recollection of the journey. But as soon as we need to look for a specific turning or need to parallel park, we turn down the radio or ask our friend to stop speaking – we need to allocate our limited processing power to the task at hand.

So, no ladies, you really can’t multi-task in the true sense of the word – none of us can.

Even if we manage to escape the endless vying for our attention and manage to tear ourselves away from watching videos of cute pets, or ‘friends’ showing us pictures of what they’re about to eat, we still have our email box, our phones or other people demanding our valuable time and attention. Give in to these demands and your mind cannot free itself to simply think.

Eliminate all of that and our mind is still cluttered with the issues that we need to resolve and a whole host of things that we need to remember.

Clear your mind – take away that need to remember. Our brain was never designed to handle so much. Write everything down – create your lists, fill your diaries, talk into your dictaphones – whatever it takes – record that which clutters your mind and free it. Only then can the shy, creative genius that lurks inside make an appearance and help you formulate the strategies that will propel your business forwards and differentiate it from others.

Creativity is a key strength. Click here and see what makes a business really strong and test how strong your business really is.