Which part of your mind is captain of your life? The explorer? The navigator? Or the workhorse? Did you know that your mind has three parts? Each designed to work as part of a complex team?
Your explorer is settled in the right hemisphere of your brain. It's the part of your mind that is capable of discovering new ideas and request creative questions. Its tools are imagination and reflective thinking. It knows how to look at the same old patterns in life and explore new insights. Your explorer is always ready to take on the world, start a new business, quit a job, stare out a window, make up a joke, write a novel, ask a spicy question, or fly to the moon. Your explorer never worries about why it explores because the explorer is not restricted by logic. The explorer knows that exploring is what human beings do best. Sure, the explorer is impractical. Sure, the explorer sometimes makes discoveries that generate a huge mess for the rest of the mind. And sure, the explorer can be exhausting to clean up after. But without the explorer, we would still be at the mercy of the river. It was, after all, the right-brained explorer who dreamed up the very first boat.
The explorer alone, however, gets nothing done.
That's why we also have an analytical left-brain. The left hemisphere of your brain contains the mapmaker, the chart-reader, the navigator. Your navigator's job is to plan, straighten and manufacture your life. Your navigator lives for answers. Its tools are analytical and deductive thinking. What's more, it likes to make decisions based upon tasteless sense and past experiences. It's the navigator's thinking that causes you to put your spices next to the stove. After all, you know from past caress where you are commonly standing when you need your spices. The left-brain also worries a lot about how you look to others, since it knows from past caress the pain of seeing stupid. Your navigator lives a very methodical life. Bring it whatever new, and that newness will feel out of place until your navigator can determine how to classify it. This part of your brain needs to classify everything. So, if you introduce whatever that does not fit into a current classification, your left-brain will commonly classify it as unable-to-fit, and therefore irrelevant. That is why the analytical left-brain so often ignores the right-brain's reflective insight.
Reflective insights can be dangerous, messy and uncomfortable. The analytical mind knows that its job is to organize, prioritize, explore and protect. It does the job well. In fact, it sometimes protects the explorer right out of a job. The left-brain knows from past caress that the explorer can make foolish mistakes; and so, it tends to disregard any uncomfortable discoveries as nonsense. The trouble is that the analytical mind also tends to forget who conception up boats in the first place.
And what about that third part of your mind? The brother that I called the "Workhorse"? Well, have you ever heard of cellular memory? If not, have you ever heard of habits? Or, have you ever started doing something without thinking, caught yourself in the middle of the action, and then suddenly wondered what the heck you were doing? That was your workhorse. That was a habit. That was your cellular memory in action.
We all do things without thinking because our cells in fact hold the memory of past actions. Repeat any activity often enough, and that activity becomes a habit. We often leave our workhorse in charge of our lives because our habits are just so good at getting stuff done. But we should never leave our workhorse in charge. Workhorse does not know how to think. Workhorse is accomplishment without thought, activity without goals, reaction without wisdom.
Your workhorse often assumes ridiculous stuff because your workhorse doesn't think. Your workhorse causes you to automatically head home when you'd planned to visit a friend. It is also your workhorse that causes most car accidents to occur within a few miles of home. After all, you've driven home a million times, so your brain shuts off and your habits kick in. But your cellular memory is not expecting man else to make a wrong turn and you are caught unaware. Be careful. If you allow your workhorse free reign, your workhorse can take over your life and turn you into reaction without thought.
If you want to generate a worthwhile life, you need to get all three parts of your mind working in unison and spicy towards the same port. But in most of us, the three parts are at war, lacking the skills to work together. In some people, the left-brain is so busy saying no to new ideas that the right-brain has stopped providing insight. In other people, the workhorse has been left in charge so long that their lives have come to be one long, unquestioning habit. In still other people, the explorer switches direction so often that the navigator never has a occasion to take soundings.
The three parts of your mind are meant to work together. When they do work as a team, they have the greatest power. If you want your life to come to be a worthwhile journey, you need to say peace and get them to understand each other. Teach them to respect what each has to offer. When you do, you will begin to think strategically...
