Ah yes, a cheesy play on the early 2000's UPS Slogan.

Just like UPS branded an entire color due to its significance within their operation, (e.g. the boxes, the envelopes, the trucks, the uniforms, and the surface of the earth each delivery travels), your psychology is on the surface and at the depths of your brand, too. What makes you, you? Why do you like what you like? Why do you make the decisions you make? How do you form your habits? How did and do you develop your identity? How do you experience your inner thoughts and beliefs? How do you feel and express your magnificent and complex emotions?

Dr. Ellen Langer, social psychologist and author, takes us to another dimension in our attempts to understand our psychology, noting that our minds and bodies are inseparable. We, societally, have done a disservice by separating the mind and body, in research, education, health and medicine, and in our belief-systems. The mind and body and one-and-the-same, you cannot have mind with out body or body without mind. And so, it's more accurate to say we, individually are all a "MindBody." 

When we aren't aware of how our MindBody works, what it's doing and not doing, and why, we're mindlessly driving through life. It can be argued we aren't even making our own decisions, we're letting our environment influence and plan our next moves. We can even extend our metaphor to say, someone or something else is driving our life at that point. Learning basics of psychology, such as building a knowledge-base of human behaviors and mental processes, helps us to take the wheel and drive our lives where WE want to go. Learning psychology at its depths may allow us to more mindfully navigate our lives with fluidity, intentionality, and meaning.

Is that not what many if not most of us want out of life? Meaningful experiences, relationships, careers, impact...you fill in the blank. "Meaning" makes our time, energy, effort, and this beautiful life more than worth living.

Here is a Psychology Key, to take us a step closer towards driving with a little more self, or psychological awareness, and towards a more meaningful life. In its simplest form, our Brain has been built and evolved to serve two primary functions.

1) Meaning Making

2) Monitoring (conserve) Energy

1) Make Meaning:

Think back to a time when you didn't understand something, maybe it was in a relationship where you weren't grasping the other person's behavior or reaction at the time, maybe it was a problem you couldn't quite solve, or even something like a piece of artwork or a magic show.

How long did you think about that thing? Hours? Days? Did it take up further conversation? ...All in all, potentially longer than you wanted. When we struggle to make meaning of something, an interaction or situation, we can get stuck or "hooked" by that lack of clarity. What happens then... We may create a narrative that makes sense to us (whether accurate or not)  so we can "put a bow on it" and move along. Depending on the magnitude, our struggle may wreak havoc on our nervous system, alerting our stress response, dysregulating our emotions, and distorting our thoughts. Once meaningfulness presents, we can often then let go with ease... not every scenario presents in this way though.

Some reflective questions to consider when something isn't "making sense", in hopes of helping you navigate and alleviate stress...

1. How important is it, that I find clarity in this situation? How much energy is worth spending? (cue Brain Function #2...)
2. Is clarity within my control?
3. If yes, can I find a solution on my own, perhaps through further processing, perspective-taking, or giving it time and coming back to it.
4. If no, do I need to communicate to seek clarity?
5. If I can't communicate, problem-solve, and it's out of my control let me practice Acceptance, or maybe "Radical Acceptance" as Dialetical-Behavior Theory (DBT) says.

A note for Leaders, give attention to your clarity of communication, knowing how your "followers" brain's function. May you seek to "share meaning" and support clarifying questions as much as possible.

2) Monitoring (Conserving) Energy:

This is where the real fun starts as high-performers...I mean, depends on how you look at it, but why not call it "fun"?!

Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett, psychologist, researcher, and author, analogizes that the brain is like a bank. And like most banks, it wants deposits, not withdrawals. The Brain Bank wants you to conserve energy, store it up, find the path of least resistance, save for when you really need it, because you never know when you'll need to fight off an apex predator in the wild. As you can see, this may be a slightly dated evolutionary mechanism... most of the time.

So, if you're striving for big things in life, if you have audacious dreams, if you find yourself in stressful professional environments, and you seek a meaningful life... you'll need to override this evolutionary function. High-performers balance their Brain Bank. They deposit through rest and recovery periods, and they withdraw with purpose. If you want to find higher levels of performance, greater purpose and meaning on your journey, SEEK challenge, stretch yourself into your discomfort zone. Caution: don't flood yourself though. Like a rubberband, you want to expand it so it holds some tension, but not so much that you break it.

The easy path is often available to us, especially modern day as we navigate the current "Comfort Crisis," a term coined by Michael Easter, health and fitness journalist, professor, and author. Comfort doesn't grow us. Comfort doesn't allow us to learn, create, innovate, deepen relationships, or make mistakes. As you look back at that list, you'll also see that high-performers can not exist without this necessary list of mindsets.

Consider these small-but-significant strategies:

1. List your discomforts in day-to-day life, in order of difficulty. Pick the lowest hanging fruit and do that uncomfortable thing this week. Then move up the list each week or so.
2. Ask yourself, how balanced is your Brain Bank? Are you max-ing out on your deposits? (Or Withdrawals...for those of us overprogramming or overtraining and possibly experiencing burnout, pain points, or injury as a result). Take one step to balance your Brain Bank this week.

Take withdrawals, discomfort, and challenge head-on. But...remember... it's not about the achievement, it's about the purposeful pursuit. Being present on the path, doing the hard thing, that's what makes for a meaningful experience. As Erwin McManus, author and "futurist," asserts, "You have to care more about something in life than easy."

Let's do more of what we care about, be more of who we want to be, and let's go at it with a relentless tenacity. Use these Psychology Keys to unlock higher levels of performance, color our worlds like Brown does for UPS, and lead us towards more meaningful lives.

Kaelene Curry, MA, LPC, CMPC

Founder, Consultant for Mile High Performance Consulting LLC