Great Escape Podcast episode 48 - Measuring so you can track change

If you're ever wondering, whether you are bright enough, that actually means you're one of the brightest people in the world. Because dumb people don't wonder whether they're bright enough.
On this episode of Great Escape Podcast, I'd just thought I'd talk a little bit about questioning and inquiring mind. One of the constant challenges that we have when we're trying to escape a situation is, am I bright enough to find a new way out, or am I currently going to be stuck in this situation, or actually, sometimes just the embarrassment of how did I get stuck in this situation in the first place. Why didn't I see this coming? And the reality is that, the way our brains work, they like being stuck in the situations. And I've talked about it in some previous episodes, how the brain is such an energy-hungry piece of our body. Something like thirty-percent of our total energy consumption is happening in here. The thinking is actually a pretty expensive process. The brain tries to find simple ways of doing things. So you can find yourself stuck in a permanent behavior that isn't actually helping you move forward. You're stuck round and round and round and round the same cycle that you know isn't helping. That you know isn't working for you, it isn't actually delivering the goods. It isn't helping you move forward, so get out of the dodgy relationship, or give up sugar, my problem, or whatever it is, you're stuck in this cycle. And something that a friend of mine asked me to do the other day, literally a week ago, was to email her everyday, a number from zero to ten on how well I was doing with this particular aspect, That I was really struggling with. And even though, there've been good days and bad days but over the last seven days, there's been almost no average change. My understanding of the situation has improved massively, absolutely massively. And so now, I'm beginning to work out, ah, here are little things that I can do that are having an impact. So over the weekend, I had much better numbers than I did yesterday, for example. What was the problem yesterday? Yesterday, I just spent the whole day firefighting, so I didn't feel like I was in control. I didn't feel like I was managing the situation at all. I was just reacting to stuff. But by the end of the day, I'd built a much better way of coping with these things, within my team, so that I wasn't gonna have to do all the firefighting. But it was only because I was measuring the situation. It was only because I was able to keep an eye on what was going on, so that I was able to spot the good days and bad days. What was different from the good days and bad days. And I've often talked about evidence-based marketing. You know, people say, no we're gonna do this out there because we think it's gonna work. Well, measure it. See whether it's gonna work. If it's going to work, you'll know, because there'll be evidence. And if there is evidence, you can do more of what's works and less of what didn't work. But unless you have measured something, unless you've gathered evidence, impartially. Unless you've gotten over your own prejudices, you've actually pretty doomed and that's where I was. So even in a week, of just measuring this one sense of how I was feeling about something, between one to ten, really really crude, really really simple. It's actually helped me get my head into a much better place, when it comes to trying to solve this problem. So that's my challenge to you, for this little escape. What can you do to measure a simple thing in your life, how you're feeling about something. And therefore, use that measurement to affect change in that behavior and see how you can improve it.