Mindset Monday - Default Settings

This is episode 149 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast, where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, vitality and peak performance coach, Kari Schneider. Okay, I think we're on. Hello, hello, hello. Amazing humans. Happy Monday. Welcome to Mindset Monday, where we dive into all kinds of topics that can serve your best mindset. And it's certainly something that we can tweak and challenge. And that's what I want to do today with today's topic of default settings. Questioning the default settings. I've had a couple of computer issues in my time, and oftentimes it's going back to the default settings of the computer or the phone or the software system. And then you are saved by going back to the default settings. And it got rid of whatever the programming or glitch or whatever the thing was. So I looked up the definition of what a default setting was, and. And the definition is a setting that is automatically given to a software application, computer, program, or device. And I thought about that in terms of us and our brains and how we do our behaviors in our workplace, in our home, in our functioning, our communications, and what our default settings are as humans. And it was really interesting to me. And as I dove into this a little further and did a little research on it, a researcher came up named Geert Hofsted. And this person from the Netherlands had researched mental programming. And the coolest thing about this was that the foundation, the bottom, largest part, largest section of the pyramid that he created to depict this. This is human nature, just human nature as part of our just default programming, our mental programming that is inherited, that is universal. And what I thought was so interesting about this was that we are simply starting off as a human. We have our default settings, too. And our most primary default setting is that we're human. And sometimes we forget that, that we're human. Human. That we have mistakes, that we naturally want to be comfortable, that we're naturally afraid of a lot of things, that we really want to seek pleasure. And we forget that that's just plain our default setting of being human. And if we can offer ourselves that grace or remember that we're just human after all, then sometimes it allows us that greater awareness of knowing that, okay, I'm fallible, I make mistakes, it's going to be okay. So we have this default setting of being human. That's the most bottom basic thing that Geert Hofstede found in his research that then after that, the Next section of this pyramid is something that's not naturally inherited. It's learned. And this is some of our mental programming. And the learned part is our culture. That's that second part of the pyramid is that we have. We've grown up in or we've experienced through our families, a specific culture that's specific to a group or category. And being specific to a group or category, we learn these things that we just naturally take on as though it's a default setting, as though it's part of our life no matter what. But it's not. It's not necessarily default. What happens when we have this learned part of life that becomes so normal for us that we think it's our default setting? We think we have to do things this way. And I remember discovering this so clearly when Paul and I lived in Turkey and when I wasn't familiar with Turkish culture, I learned a number of things. One of the things I remember in going into any sort of office, it could be a banker's office, it could be a doctor's office, that when you went in there and you're wearing your street shoes from outside, you do not walk into someone's home, doctor's office, any place like that that's sort of personal, without putting these little booty coverings on over your shoes. Even if it was more of a public place, you'd be putting these booty coverings over your shoes to. To protect the interior, to keep the dirt or whatever out. All sorts of reasons why, I guess, but it was just something that wasn't a custom where I came from. Another custom I learned was that everywhere you went, didn't matter whether you were riding the ferry or whether you were in the doctor's office, you would be offered politely, some chai, which is tea and a little tulip cup, and it'd be about this big, almost like a shot glass, and you'd have this tea. And that was part of the culture, but it was very unusual to me. But this is an example of what we think is normal. That simply is something that we've learned and we've taken on as normal. Think of police officers who put on a uniform, and it becomes so normal for so many years that I've seen a number of police officers that even though that uniform is off, their identity and who they are become part of them because of what they've trained into them, their culture, their identity in that community. Now, there's a last part of this pyramid that Gert Hofstede had created in this Mental programming, what I consider our default human settings. And the last one is our personality. Now, our personality is not only inherited, some genetic traits are going to be passed to us, but it's also learned. And so when we have these learned traits that we from our experiences, our programming, from our family, but different experiences that bring into our own nuances specific to the individual, that that becomes our personality. Now this too is learned, but also inherited. And this is a really interesting thing for me as well, because I have a half sister, but I didn't know I had a half sister for over a decade of my life. By the time I was, I think, 13 or 14 years old, I learned that I had a half sister that was eight years younger than me. That was the most curious thing when we got to know each other, because even though she had not grown up with me, even though she wasn't around my parents or our common father, she had all these characteristics and traits and these mannerisms that were exactly the same as me, that were similar to our father, and yet she had never grown up with us. So it was a very interesting thing to note that although she didn't have the learned experience that I did, she still had those traits or characteristics in her personality that were simply inherited. So when we question our default settings, this is our lives, what's going on? What we often think of being the norm, being our default, just being who we are isn't. It's part of our culture or it's part of our learned personality. We've got so much, the majority of our lives that we have our influence over, not just the fact that we're human. And so I see this as a double edged sword that works for us, that our default settings go right back to all of us, the entire world, every one of us simply being human. And that is our common connector. It is a universal thing that we all have these same types of drive. We want to be connected to our family, we want safety, we want comfort. We have this amazing fulfillment with growth, with accomplishing new things. And that is universal. So if we can remember that as our primary default setting and that everything beyond that has influence that we can influence other people can influence. But we remember that we're human above all, and we're connected above all with that humanness, then our next step is to decide what we want our default settings to be within our culture or our small groups of family. And then we can decide what do we want our default settings to be as an individual, as a specific human, Do I want to nurture more happiness? Do I want to nurture more enthusiasm or playfulness? Do I want to add those into my personality? Because I can. Because it's learned. Yes, there's some traits and characteristics that are inherited as a personality. However, there's so much there that can be done simply because I want to. Because I want to learn that. So I want to offer that today, on this Monday to take a look at your week. Look at it from the eyes of. Wait a second. If I peeled back everything, I'm just a human, after all. And then anything else around my culture or my individual personality, I have got the opportunity to learn or add whatever I want. Because it's not just inherited, it's learned. And we can learn whatever we want within our cultural environments. And we can learn and add whatever we want with our individual specific personality. So that's what I offer you today on Monday to kick your week off. Kick into this week powerfully. Do what you want. You don't have to be a certain way or do a certain thing. Play with it a little bit, see what you want to shift or tweak in your default settings. We default to the same things because it's convenient for our brain, but you can adjust and tweak your default settings to decide what you want. Try that on for this week, play with it, get curious about it, and have an amazing, powerful week. So much love to you. Go out there, get it. If you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team Podcast, you'll love being on the team. The Empowered Team runs year round. It is our group coaching and accountability program where we take mindset and physical performance concepts and break them down to usable action steps that optimize results. To join, email us@infopowerconditioning.com with subject line team. That's info powerconditioning.com we can't wait for you to be on the team.