imapMyTeam Blog

Mental Traffic Jam; 70,000 per day

The first step in the imapMyTeam success process is self-awareness. Once self-awareness is achieved you can begin to make choices that will allow you to effectively manage yourself. Those two parts of the success process are internal to you and set you up for the external steps three and four: successfully managing relationships and achieving your defined success.

I reconsidered the self-awareness/self-management connection again this weekend after I started reading [yet another] book about the human brain.

It is estimated that we generate a minimum of 50,000 thoughts per day and most likely closer to 70,000 thoughts per day. That is A LOT of processing and thinking. Assuming 16 hours per day of awake time, between 50,000-70,000 thoughts means you are generating up to 72 thoughts per minute.

It is a mental traffic jam of epic proportions.

That is also a lot of internalization because there is no way that you are communicating or in any way sharing the vast majority of what you are processing. Some of that is good of course, we think about things we shouldn’t share – but we are also missing out on many important thoughts that ought to be shared.Can all this thinking and non-sharing lead to us losing touch with ourselves and others? Maybe.

So how is this important to you as an imapMyTeam® user?

Technology is great. Having an important report in less than a minute that helps you understand yourself or someone else is incredibly powerful. The ability to read reports is a great way to understand yourself [self-awareness] and stimulates ideas of how you can more effectively manage yourself [self-management]. Technology itself however can lead to further isolation. Spending hours in front of a monitor, laptop, tablet, or smartphone can further our separation or remoteness from others.

Remember the third step in the model is managing relationships. Focus on the relationship part.

Just don’t read reports; talk about them.

Get a cup of coffee or tea or have lunch and start a dialogue and actively engage and discuss and share your reports with your colleagues. Make it an active rather than a passive exercise.

imapMyTeam® will help you harness the power of some of those 70,000 thoughts so you can be more productive.