My GP’s theory

My GP is a fascinating man. He knows all these obscure things and treatments. He always likes to see me because I have exotic symptoms that he regards as a test of his trivia trove (and they are trivial). One of his trivia titbits is that there is a part of the brain called the locus coeruleus which is responsible for filtering out unwanted sounds.

Which explains why we don’t hear ourselves snore. How many times have we been outraged by our sleepless partner’s claim that we were snoring, when we are convinced that we did no such thing? I think my GP might be pulling my chain because I Googled this and couldn’t find any supporting evidence, but there must be some explanation for our ability to be blissfully unaware of a Metallica level snore.

God knows we see enough evidence in our lives and businesses of our ability to blithely ignore glaringly obvious failings and flaws which could be fixed with a little attention.

Here’s the thing. Successfully improving our performance could fail at any one of the three stages of change:

• Awareness: if you aren’t aware of your own underperformance, you won’t change.

• Clarity: often the clarity is the reverse of what you’ve become aware of – I don’t want this, I want that instead

• Commitment: nothing changes until you decide that it will. What you get from your life and your business will be dictated by what you are willing to do. Not what you’d like to do or think you should do, but what you’re willing to do, as in where you will deploy your willpower.

It’s summed up in a lovely phrase: what you don’t change, you choose.

If you’re aware of an unsatisfactory result in any part of your life, but you do nothing about it, then you choose it.

What are you choosing?