“Your brain is the most powerful weapon on Earth. Your brain is the only thing you have, it’s the only resource you can use anytime, everywhere. If you can’t control your brain, your brain controls you. If you can’t control it, it’s over” – David Goggins on “How to master your mind”.
So, how can we take control of our brain, our thoughts and our lives?
To find an answer, we need to reverse-engineer this question and ask ourselves; what is it that takes away control of our brain?
The answer is now easy: the lack of focus and attention due to all the distractions we have nowadays.
Focus is the ability to focus on one single task, so it’s the ability to achieve whatever you want to achieve in your life; constantly distracting ourselves and losing the ability to focus on what we have to do makes it impossible to achieve what we want to achieve, and this leads to a radical increase in the causes of anxiety and depression in today’s young people.
But, how can we exactly rebuild our focus and our attention?
Monk mode is the best answer you can find.
Monk mode is a period of enhanced focus, discipline, and productivity where you commit yourself to completing a goal, so thanks to this protocol you can improve yourself and achieve any goal you want to achieve in your life.
The core structure of monk mode is based on three I’s:
Introspection
Isolation
Improvements
Introspection is fine-tuning your focus. It means looking inwards to examine your thoughts and emotions. As a result, you learn more about yourself and who you are. It makes you identify your weaknesses and accept them.
Isolation is giving yourself some space and freedom to acknowledge your weaknesses, desires, and goals. It is separating yourself from other obligations.
Improvement is formulating a plan of action to tackle what needs to be done.
To build your own monk mode protocol, you have to give yourself the goal you want to achieve and the time in which you want to achieve it.
After that we move on to making a program based on what you need to reach your goal in the established time; then write down the top 3 points you want to focus on (the non-negotiables, points you can’t afford to not respect) and the other 3-4 points you would like to focus on but are less relevant than the previous 3 (negotiables, points in which you can cheat 1-2 times during the duration of the protocol).
For example, if my goal is to lose 5kg in the next 3 months, my monk mode protocol could be something like this:
non-negotiable:
❧ eat healthy
❧ exercise for 30 minutes a day
❧ eat 500kcal less per day
negotiable:
❧ don’t go out to dinner
❧ spending afternoons on the couch watching Netflix
❧ have good quality sleep
A good tip is to work into it gradually and find ways to boost your mood when you need it. As Arnold Swarzenegger advises, “When you start something new, take it easy. You’ve gone your whole life without it, why overburden yourself now?”
Most people who decide to start any new program, start from 0 and give 100, and then find themselves after 7-8 days they give up and go right back to where they were at the beginning.
For this it is important to work gradually in order to get used to the change and make sure that we carry out our goals.
I conclude with a sentence from President J.F. Kennedy: “If not now, when?“
and it is exactly the same thing that I want to leave to all of you:
If not now, when? Now is the time to take action, now is the time to regain control of your mind and start achieving whatever goal you want to achieve in your life.
Author: Andrea Monsalina, participant to Health is Wealth project
