Morning Espresso: Create Your Daily Narrative

Morning Espressos are 5-minute insights and lessons to help you
build the skills researched by some of the top minds in the
world.  Charles Duhigg recommends that you spend time
creating your own narrative and visualizing your day.


 


"One of the things that we know is that the key to building
mental models, to being able to sort of sharpen your focus, is to
be able to tell yourself a story about what’s occurring as it
occurs.


One of my favorite examples of this is a series of studies that
were done with people like for instance firefighters. They found
that the best firefighters are the ones who walk into a burning
building. As soon as they walk in, they start telling themselves
a story about what they expect to see. And so as a result, when
they walk into a room that’s on fire, they tell themselves, okay,
I’m walking into this room. I expect to see in that corner
flames. There’s a staircase over there. I expect to see that
there will be a bunch of flames on that staircase because
staircases burn quickly. And then when they walk in and they
looked in that room and what they don’t see is they don’t see a
bunch of flames on that staircase, it sets off alarm bells in
their mind, and it tells them, look, there’s something wrong with
that staircase. Don’t go walk on that staircase because it
doesn’t look like what you expected it to look like.


Similarly, we know that people who are most productive at work,
who tend to almost have this ESP about what they should be paying
attention to and what they can safely ignore, they tend to be
people who tell themselves stories about what they expect to have
happen during meetings or what they expect to happen in the
morning versus the afternoon. This is a really important lesson
which is that our brain tends to make sense of the world by
finding some narrative that it can grasp onto.


The best way for us to try and determine what’s going to happen
next or what I expect to happen this afternoon or what I should
focus on tomorrow morning is by telling ourselves a story about
it because when we tell ourselves stories, our brain has this
ability to take that story and to expand upon it, to use it as a
template for determining this is what’s important and this is
what’s not important. Once we do that, we’ve sharpened our focus
to a degree that we have the ability to decide almost within
milliseconds that, oh, when someone comes in and they interrupt
me during my meeting, I can safely say, no. Let’s put this off
until tomorrow because I don’t have time to talk about it. But
when the phone rings and it’s someone I’ve been trying to get
ahold of, I should pick up that call because that fits into the
story about what I’ve been telling myself about what I expect to
get done today."