Your Internal Calculator may Lie About Your Potential
What is an Internal Calculator?
Every human has an internal calculator which acts as an analyst, a friend who wants our safety.
This internal calculator is an internal filter we created for ourselves to minimize the psychological impacts we face
In Building confidence and training mind, this internal calculator plays a major role.
If we want to train our mind, we need to understand about our internal calculator. This internal calculator plays a vital role in building our confidence.
It may be our best friend or worst enemy in feeding confidence to our mind. So understanding about it will make sure we achieve what we want with the help of this best friend.
How it works?
Our mind is trained from our childhood with the experience and situations we have faced so far. These experiences and situations molded our internal calculator. Think of it as an invisible internal analyst which influences our mind whether a task is possible or not, depending on past experiences.
The past experience may not be limited with the results we obtained in past, but the feelings we had also included.
People generally know what is IQ and how to build a good IQ. In similar way, EQ (Emotional Quotient or Emotional Intelligence) is a factor determining how much capacity we have to handle our emotions in a good way (1).
One major factor influencing the internal calculator is our Emotional Intelligence. Because, while deciding, our internal calculator also takes our emotions into consideration so it always undermines our output.
How negative emotions affect our judgement?
The negative emotions may influence our internal calculator in a wrong way, thinking it is precautionarily avoid failure & disappoint for us.
If Michael Jordan is asked to take a basketball shot, he would do it without second thought. If we are asked who rarely played basketball, the first thought we would have might be "I am not sure whether I can do it. What if it went entirely wrong and I am embarassed?".
Two humans were asked of same thing but one hesitates while one does it. If we present these scenario to anyone, they first analyse the difference in skill, experience between two of them.
But one more thing we need to analyse is, why we had the negative thoughts. The difference in experience and skill is obvious that we may or may not succeed(I purposely mentioned may or may not, because we have a slight chance that we make it happen even by fluke). But why we had the negative thoughts even before we tried?
This is where our internal calculator plays its role. As an analyst, it checks our skill and experience. Since we don't have much to take that shot, it then creates imagination of the failure and it results. From that time, it starts to strongly believe that our winning chance is very less and then it expends the imagination of failure to various scenarios, in all of them we face humility, awkwardness and rejections which may not happen ever.
It then projects them as a result of its analysis to our mind. Think about this analyst working in the backend of our mind, feeding these kinds of imaginations throughout our life, day in and out.
Now you may have a good idea about how these preconceptions, years and years of built-up experiences and our lack of emotional intelligence directly affects our judgement and output.
How to tackle this internal calculator?
The first step in fixing any issue is accepting we have that issue. Now we know the issue with our internal calculator, let's see how to fix it.
First, mentally fortifying our mind to believe that most of the scenarios we imagine may not even have the slightest chance to happen.
A simple method I try to make first step happen is, remembering the previous incidents. Whenever my mind starts generating the scenarios, I tell to myself, it is the imagination of the internal calculator.
Then I think about similar situation from my past experience. I try to remember how many worst case scenarios my mind perceived but how it actually ended. Usually the worst case scenarios never happened.
Then, I will do it for few other past experiences one by one to tell my mind, 'Hey, you are overreacting. See, in past we had these kind of failure scenarios imagined but the situation was handled without any of these happened.
By doing this exercise, I am feeding my mind with the data that none of these imagined scenarios happened previously. This is also feeding the mind with data to alter my mind's state where I can have control.
Once first step is done, you can feel that you have control over your mind, instead of your emotions control it.
The next step is to counter it with positive emotions and here comes again the feeding approach.
When you start to achieve small victories and feed those to the mind in a consistent way, your mind will start to believe your inputs, because your current inputs modify the existing experiences. These small victories will also counter the internal calculator with the positive feedback.
Story of an athlete:
Let's see one small story on how this calculator affects our belief,
There is a long jump competition for which our hero of the story, let's say, Steve practices every day. He always comes first in his school competition, but can't get past his personal best which is lower than his competitor from his rival school. He trains hard but still he falls short of the required length. He lost his competitiveness and psychologically accepted his defeat even before the tournament.
One day while walking in the neighborhood, he came across a dog who started barking at him and started chasing him. Afraid, Steve starts running while the dog chases. While running, he stumbled upon a blocked path which is kind of a dead end. He didn't have any choice but to jump over it. He didn't calculate its length and he didn't think about anything else. He just jumped over it with his full force and fell on the opposite side and ran away from the dog.
The next day when he crossed the same way, his calculative mind found that the distance he jumped was actually way more than his personal record. At that moment, his mental block broke and his mind started to believe in his ability and of course he won the competition.
His fear of failure and mental block made his internal calculator misjudge his capacity and it reflected in his performance. But once he was able to overcome it, he achieved more than he thought he was capable of.
But not everyone will have similar chances to overcome the mental block and through the data we feed we have to make it happen. Here comes the role of affirmation or visualization or other techniques which tells us to do it with a positive mindset. With correct data feed and the techniques with positive emotions to counteract the internal calculator, you can make your mind believe what you want gradually.
Let's say, if someone wants to earn a million, the mere wish won't let it happen. It's because your experience in earning money will be the biggest block to achieve the target.
But if you start it with the data your mind can believe, that to earn 1000 bucks and make it happen, your internal calculator now updated with success and so your mind starts to believe in the success. Then you can increase it to 2000, 5000,10000 and all the way to a million. Since you already fed a victory data, your internal calculator will become a positive analyst and start giving successful scenarios to your mind from its past experience(2). Once your mind starts to believe that your wish actually aligns with your experience, it will automatically believe it. The next step will be your mind unconditionally start to believe that you can achieve so you won't have any mental block.
So far, I have tried to explain about the internal calculator and how we can train it to be our friend. This process will train our mind to build confidence gradually to achieve what we want and I hope I haven't bored you with facts and some techniques but gave you examples and steps to achieve that gradually.
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References
1. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-emotional-intelligence-2795423 — Key takeaway: Emotional intelligence and managing emotions.
2. https://neurosity.co/guides/predictive-processing-brain-prediction-machine — Predictive processing and how the brain updates its predictions based on experience.