Mind Optimization Part 9: Achieving Stability

You need a strong foothold before you reach for something new. Some changes in life add stability, and others destabilize. It’s important to make things as stable as possible before taking on a new challenge or intervention.

This video is part nine of twenty-six excerpts from a presentation hosted by SOUL Food Salon in March 2019.

You may check out the full playlist of this video series on The Art and Science on Mind Optimization here. Alternatively, you can also click here to watch the previous video and here for the next one.

Video Transcript

Another hugely important concept I take from climbing, and the climbing analogy says that you need to have three points of contact before you reach and try to get a fourth. Think about this for a second. To me, this is a stability problem. I think all of us should be asking ourselves before we take on a new factor, a new variable is the system stable. Because too many times people will have unstabilized factors in their lives. The kids aren’t doing great, the marriage is on the rocks, and you decide I need a job change now too. It’s not a good idea.

Pharmacologically we see the same thing. People will be on small doses of three different medications. They’re not sure what this one does, they’re not sure what that one does, maybe we should add a third one to make it better. That’s where people get in trouble because you’re just adding instability. At a minimum for me the lesson here is, I think, you need to think about the energy in the system and ask yourself, do you need more energy or less energy in the system right now before you take that next step. Because all of us tend to want to run, and all of us want to tend to go for the next best thing, but the reality sometimes is you got to stabilize your points of contact before you move onto that next thing.