What is inner game of productivity?
When gurus talk about inner game they often refer to The inner game that takes place within the mind of the player and is played against such obstacles as fear, self-doubt, lapses in focus, and limiting concepts or assumptions. It’s closely related to your confidence and self-esteem. While Alpha Efficient person posses all of those traits, we are expanding that theory with three additional pillars of inner productivity:
1. Motivation – This is the factor that is moving the world. Motivated people are moving the world and they are getting more things done, than non motivated people. This factor is separating successful people from failures.
2. Mind tricks – These tricks are a collection of mental skills that make tasks simpler and boost your creative potential. Sometimes when we usually don’t see the solution, one creative idea can be more productive than hours upon hours of work. Cultivating these mind tricks can be essential in keeping your competitive advantage in the labour market.
3. Habits – Are the corner stone of inner game. They make our lives so much easier. There are thousands of habits that we poses and we don’t even notice them. They are running on autopilot. You brush your teeth every day, but you don’t even consider that an accomplishment, while it is in a sense.
Here I will mention a couple of important mind tricks to acquire: Mental Contexts, Mind Mapping and Mnemo Techniques.
Why is inner game so important?
It is impossible to achieve mastery or satisfaction in any endeavor without first developing some degree of mastery of the relatively neglected skills of the inner game. This is the number one reason, why inner game is so important. Becoming a master of productivity means that all other goals such as: elimination of procrastination, saving time, changing your life, reducing stress and increasing wealth will follow.
Strong inner game will affect all areas of your life. It will increase your confidence, make you more capable and will change your demeanor to an extent where people will wonder what happened to you. It’s the component that you simply can’t be successful without. It is the critical component of your puzzle.
If you want to increase your output, you need to ensure that your foundation is solid. And Inner game is exactly that, solid foundation that you need to build upon. Improving this thing alone, is better than reading countless books and tips on how to become more productive.
How to develop inner game?
I pay a lot of attention to this question. Developing inner game is a lifetime endeavor. Now regardless of personal efficiency, every time we commit ourselves to develop a skill and become good at something, we are going through a massive change in our inner functioning. Inner change is a result of our thinking and actions that we are taking in order to reach our destination.
Developing inner game of efficiency is also a struggling task, but it’s the foundation of better self and time management. These are four areas that you want to develop first:
- Emotional Strength
- Motivation
- Habits
- Mind Tricks
Emotional strength comes from confidence and strong self-esteem. What are your sticking points when it comes down to your confidence and self-esteem? Are you lone wolf and feel awkward in the social situations? Or something else makes you feel disempowered. You need to find the cause of a problem in your life and tackle it, Daily.
There is no productivity if you are not feeling good about yourself.
Developing self-esteem and confidence is different for everyone and takes time, but taking this step in facing your unhappiness and things that put you down is essential. This step alone, makes the path of each and every one of us, different and unique. Your set of problems will always seem the most difficult and most complicated, but I can assure you, that is far from the truth.
Completing this step will take you a while. It might be a month, or it may be a year, it all depends on where you are right now. Some people have head start, while others are falling behind. But the very fact that you are doing something about the things that put you down, puts you light years ahead from the rest of the population, because you are dealing with your own setbacks.
Motivation – It will come hand in hand with developing your core self and your self-esteem. Here at Alpha Efficiency, you will see me a lot talking about motivation. You will know when you are motivated to do something, and when you aren’t. It’s like a light bulb switch. You are either on or you are off. Empowered and motivated worker completes more than 100% more tasks, than non-motivated one.
Motivation is gold mine of your mind. Having something to fight for, and knowing how the prize will affect your inner being is something that you need to taste for yourself. Motivation is like a fuel to your habit engine.
Habits – Somewhere I heard that you need to be careful what you think, because thoughts create words. You need to be careful what you say, because words create actions. You need to be careful how you act, because actions are creating habits. You need to be careful how you deal with your habits, because habits create your character. You need to take care of your character, because your character determines your destiny.
This short example should be reason enough to keep you motivated about building your habits. A couple of words on habits, never invest your energy to stop habits, rather invest your energy to replace bad habits with good ones.
Every time you want to eradicate bad habit, focus on creating new habit that is in direct conflict with the habit that you want to abolish. Never forget to nurture your habits and keep them fresh, with constant dose of motivation. Motivation and habits are closely interlinked and are determining factor in changing your destiny.
Mind Tricks – This is the thing that I am passionate about. If you are a frequent reader of Alpha Efficiency, you will know how passionate I am about technology. But on the other hand I love sheer brain power. I love being able to not rely on it, unless it’s really necessary. Keeping your mind strong and capable, will always allow leave you the space to complete some things faster, when your technology fails.
Mnemo techniques (memory techniques) will come in handy, once you don’t have access to your data. And they are the one of the factors that will help you even when you want to use the technology. They were developed by Greeks and further developed by Romans.
Mind Mapping – I know that you already see tons of people raving about how mind mapping is awesome, and they remain only on diagrams and misuse the concept. If you want to draw out the most of mind mapping, you need to develop it deeper and make it the part of your internal thinking. Interlinking your thoughts and connecting them, pretty much the same way that internet functions. Your own Mind network.
Mental Contexts – This is a phrase that I’ve coined from “GTD contexts” and developed it a bit further. I found out that we have certain way of grouping thoughts into categories. Simple example of this is anchoring your thoughts to objects. Next time you see your phone, you are going to attach all the things you need to do with it. For me, it’s checking my OmniFocus to do lists. For you it might be something completely different.
It’s creating habits, based on the objects around us. Another good example would be a no brainer, but perfectly describes what I want to represent here. Every time you leave the house, you remember to lock the door. You don’t use your “task manager” to remind yourself to lock the door. You do it out of a mental context. Door => Leaving the house => Locking the door.
It is automated to that degree that I have a whole set of mental rules that apply when I am leaving the house, and if I don’t complete them, I am 100% certain that I will do them, before I leave. I’ve expanded this simple concept and will strive to push it to the next level in my upcoming book: “7 Steps to Alpha Efficiency”.
What are your thoughts on inner game? How can you relate it to the productivity? What have you done so far to develop inner game?
