My Chimp is a bit of a pain in the ass.
From embarking on the long-term commitment of leaving my footprint on the world *(bloody ambitious I know😊) Note to self: should probably remove this* I have been battling a little voice inside, we all do. There’s always going to be a voice inside whether it may bring uplifting positive thoughts or spew negativity; we’ve got to learn a system that helps ourselves to deal with it. After indulging myself with Prof Steve Peters book “The Chimp Paradox” I’ve realised your limbic, a small portion of the brain often referred to as the “Chimp” within the book, and how you manage the Chimp is what determines how far a person will succeed at their endeavours in life.
The limbic is an area of the brain that is responsible for your emotions. This particular section is very self-reliant and almost acts as a totally separate second brain within your mind. A common scenario, to see how the Chimp works, may be that time you were told something by a friend, parent, partner or colleague and instantly you jump into defensive mode without realising they may have been trying to help you. In this situation your Chimp overacted without allowing you to sit there and assess the information you were told. The Chimp means neither good or bad, it is just an emotional part of your brain which just happens to intercept what we hear, see and feel before allowing the rest of your mind to take things in.
Back to me, I’m a dreamer. Close friends and family occasionally believe I’m slightly a delusional one at times, but I’m a man with a plan to say the least. Within my heavily hoarded vault of dreams, creating elegant products that impact lives just happens to to be the one I cherish most and work towards daily. I work with a fantastic team of young talented individuals on creating digital products for our hand picked clients. We’ve been on this journey for 1 year and 3 months at the time of writing this. Taking one step at a time we work on the dream of being a cool ass young company that’s blessing the technology industry with mouthwatering aesthetics and divine emotive user experiences.
I love the feeling of sitting down and devising a plan on how I can achieve something, especially those cumbersome challenges that many people face in daily life. It’s all easy to say work hard on your plan, day in and day out, if you want to succeed at whatever you’re doing, it can be energy taxing and that’s where the Chimp gets time to shine and interjects whilst you cling on to that thin strand of motivation. You get those thoughts about driving the Mercedes-AMG S63 Cabriolet on a summers evening through the South of France. Dreamy stuff isn’t it? But… reality kicks in, and I’m left realising I’m only driving a Fiesta through Salford to KFC on a whim because the going got tough and I occasionally bitch out.
In all seriousness, understanding how my Chimp works and ways to manage information without being rash or jumping to conclusions is invaluable. From knowing how to keep my thoughts rational and decipher what I see, feel and hear it’s allowed me to improve relationships, self motivation and how I create things for the clients of my company. It sounds fun and looks cool being an “entrepreneur” (quoted because it feels corny calling myself one) but the challenges I’ve faced since starting up Shuffzco have been difficult. Often my mind tells me to quit; I work a 70 hour work week, hardly get great sleep, don’t find much time to see my friends, lastly I probably don’t spend enough time finding myself and doing things non-work related. When I put it like that it doesn’t sound that fun but from the journey I’ve been on so far I can say the highs are second to none. When things are going your way, you feel omnipotent.
*Side note coming to think of it, if I put this much effort into academic efforts when I was at Uni maybe I wouldn’t have been a drop out 🤔.*
I’ll end it here. Dreams are cool and all but if you don’t put the work in they will only be a dream, and that is why I work on my Chimp daily.
