Your Daily inputs can have a major influence on your state of mind and ultimately your success. Young adults now spend over 5 hours a day on their smartphones!
If you want to succeed in life you need to take note of your emotional inputs and optimize their impacts.
1 List Your Inputs
Before you can optimize the inputs that you are consuming (on a daily basis), you need to take stock of what they are.
The main inputs to your emotional well-being can come from three main directions:
- Things that you see – This can range from binge-watching Netflix or looking at your twitter feed, to even the books and magazines that you read.
- Things that you hear – This can range from the music and types of radio that you consume to even your own Self-Talk.
- The People that you interact with – This can range from your family members, work colleagues or even the trolls on social media.
Open a table in google docs, MS Excel or whatever medium you prefer and list all of the inputs that you receive over a week.
2 Categorize Your List
Ideally, you should be able to say whether an input has a positive or negative impact on you. There will be some inputs that have the potential for both.
- Positive – Although we are all different there will be some common inputs that are predominantly positive. It would be uncommon for an activity such as listening to a guided meditation audio would have a negative impact on the listener.
- Negative – Watching an episode of “The Walking Dead” may seem like an obvious entry in the negative category but if you are a horror writer, this might be required for research.
- Both – Certain inputs have the potential for both negative and positive impacts on our emotional wellbeing. Self-Talk can be either positive or negative depending on your perspective.
Categorize your list from Step one and identify what type of emotional impact these inputs are having on you.
3 Balance Your Inputs
Once you have identified which inputs have negative or positive impacts on you (emotionally), you can take action to balance those inputs to help you succeed.
- Maximize – For inputs that are having a positive impact on you emotionally, you want to maximize these benefits. If 5 minutes meditation a day is enhancing your daily life, why not increase this to 10, 20 or even 30 minutes a day?
- Minimize – For inputs that are having a negative impact on you emotionally, you want to minimize your exposure to them. A toxic work colleague may be hard to avoid in your workplace but you can decide not to socialize with them.
- Prioritize – For inputs that have both a positive or negative potential impact, prioritize the positive impacts. If your self-Talk is both positive and negative, concentrate on the positive talk and prioritize that part of your relationship with yourself.
Balance the Emotional Impacts of Your Inputs! Click To TweetFinal Thoughts
The concepts in this article are fairly straightforward, to ensure that you get the most out of this process, I want to emphasize the three simple steps:
- Take Stock of all of your emotional inputs.
- Categorize them into Positive, Negative or Both.
- Balance their impacts, by maximizing the Positives and minimizing the Negatives.
It really is as simple as that!