I enjoyed reading this clever reflection below on mental operating systems by author David Kadavy. The 4C’s mental toughness framework teaches you to better regulate your emotions you can more readily identify with his comparisons to a computer so for me the buttons he mentions are the 4C’s of mental toughness.
David suggests that to keep improving and do great work, you need to reprogram yourself on various levels.
Over to you David.
I think of it like this:
- Your brain and body are a computer.
- Your beliefs and philosophies are an operating system.
- Therapy, journaling, writing and behaviour modification are programming languages.
- Your systems, processes, habits, rituals, routines etc are software.
- Mantras, visualisations and other tools, both mental and physical, are a graphical user interface .
I came to this realisation whilst talking with Mark McGuiness on my podcast who explained that visualisations can work like a button on a piece of software.
You click that button and it runs a process.
By having the right buttons to push in your life and work, you can upgrade your mental operating system. Having those buttons makes it easier to follow your systems. Those systems can reinforce or change the beliefs and philosophes that guide you.
So having a notebook that makes it easier for you to capture ideas or having a mantra you turn to when you get stuck, these are like buttons you can clock.
These buttons run underlying code.
It beats having to do everything form the command line.
For more from David Kadavy read his latest book How to Write a Book.