A warm, cozy place where no harm could touch you- that’s something we all wish our minds to be; a place to which you could retire from time to time and come back feeling rejuvenated, ready to tackle the challenges of life once again.
Unfortunately, this remains just a wish and not reality most of the times, as we all know. This state of affairs is rarely due to any personal shortcomings. Rather, the more probable reason is that we live in a world that demands us to engage with many things within our own mind on a daily basis- even if the day in question is ordinary.
Your entire world-view depends on the way you process information
Information fatigue & the challenge in evaluating information correctly
These multitude of things could be broadly divided into two categories : one is the raw information which we consume from the external world, from other people, the internet etc.
Some of this information may be useful or even necessary to succeed in your field or endeavor. But for most of us, a large chunk of the information would be irrelevant to any of our fields of activity. It may be true that some of this latter type of information, we may be consuming out of sheer habit without being conscious of the value- if any- that it brings.
Far be it from making a judgment on the type or volume of information that anyone consumes in the digital era. For one thing, even if a particular information isn’t directly useful for a field of activity, it may be tagged as ‘entertainment’ and we all know how sometimes the only thing that would destress us after a long day’s work is entertainment.
However, whether you make a judgment on the type of information you consume from the media or not, one thing we can all agree on is that most of us consume a large volume of information than is probably healthy.
One of the major ill-effects of this over-consumption is a shorter span of attention. Another, equally problematic effect is the reduced ability to discern or focus on what’s most important in your mind. The mind, in such situations could be considered as a cluttered room in which plenty of things call out for your attention at the same time, making you overwhelmed. Continue on this path of over-consumption for a while and you are sure to suffer information fatigue.
The second category of things we need to engage with in our mind is or own attitudes which form the basis of how we respond to a particular information. Actually, attitudes is too broad a term for this since it could also include our preconceived notions. But let’s stick to attitudes for conversation's sake.
These attitudes and notions have been developed possibly as response to experiences we have gone through in the past. Some of these may even be the wrong attitude to harbor, but which we had nonetheless internalised in a less matured period of our life.
What more, compared to the information we consume from the external world, interacting with these happen almost on a subconscious level. This in turn means that the way we process the information we obtain from the external world may be wrong, and not beneficial from a personal or business perspective.
Vision as yardstick for judging information
The twin problems of information fatigue and following wrong ways of evaluating information needs a special solution- one which couldn’t easily be found in the your day-to-day life.
To tackle the perennial distraction that information fatigue causes, you need to declutter the mind. That sound obvious but this decluttering could happen only if there is an objective on which you would focus so that the rest of the ‘clutter’ would move away and the objective looms even closer in view.
The intelligent approach is to slowly move towards True Personal Vision- a latent vision inherent in everyone’s mind. As the name implies, this vision is unique to each person. For a change agent, it provides the direction in which one should guide his or her team or organization. Also, this vision forms a yardstick using which you could judge a piece of information.
Temenos Vision Lab or TVL is a unique session developed by Temenos+Agility which helps change agents realize their True Personal Vision which lied buried in a mass of information in your mind. Developed based on 25 years of business consultancy experience, some of the best transformation coaches help guide you to your vision in TVL.
As for the problem of clearing misapprehensions and wrong notions that may have taken root in your mind, and which results in the wrong evaluation of a piece of information, TVL has the session called Clean Slate which is designed specifically to help you uproot such wrong notions from your mind.
A session that encourages introspection and which incorporates mindfulness as a practice, Clean Slate makes your mind baggage-free and helps you evolve as an even better change agent.
