Overcoming the mental road blocks

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Dr. Forqan Uddin Ahmed :
Stress and strain are the sources of mental blocks. Emotion is a bye-product of mind. By stress, strain and pressure human brain collapsed. So it is most essential to be stress free. There are ways to remove or avoid mental hazards. By mental hazards and pressure mantal block are created. The cause of emotional block is pressure. Almost any college student can tell us how well-studied facts have vanished from his mind under the pressure of taking a final exam. We often think that people produce best under strong stimulus or competition. That may be true in running a foot race, but when we are seeking new ideas or tying to solve a knotty problem, increased pressure is more likely to cause a mental block.
When we face a serious problem and have been strenuously working at it without getting anywhere, “sticking to it” may be a mistake. Under pressure our brain has probably developed something similar to a “feedback effect”-it goes round and round, and nothing new can get in. So leaving the problem one can for a while-go fishing, paint the house, visit a friend. By giveing your mind time to clear its circuits and let the flow of ideas one can begin again. When we come back to our problem, we may find a completely new approach. Psychologists find lies in pre-conception, a pre-arrangement, so to speak, of our brain circuits that limits our thinking. If we have ever misplaced an important paper on a cluttered desk, we know the effects of this. We shuffle through everything again and again, but we just can’t find what we are looking for. Then someone else comes over and spots it at once.
The paper turns out to be a little different color or size than we remembered, and that preconception kept us from recognizing it.
Education, ironically, can be another source of mental block, especially if students are taught to approach every problem in a rigid textbook fashion. This is true not only of formal schooling but of our learning of everyday things as well. A Swarthmore professor once asked his psychology students to retrieve a ping-pong ball from the bottom of an upright rusty pipe. In the room were a hammer, pliers, rulers, soda straws, pins and a bucket of dirty wash water. The students began by fishing around vainly with the various objects, but finally about half of them saw that the solution lay in pouring the dirty water into the cylinder and floating the ball up. Afterward the professor repeated the experiment with other students, but with one difference-he replaced the bucket of dirty water with a pitcher of ice water, set on a crisp tablecloth and surrounded by gleaming goblets. Not one student solved the problem. Why? Because each one “knew” that fresh ice water in a pitcher is for drinking, not for pouring into a rusty pipe to solve a problem.
One of the most successful methods of countering mental blocks is the conference technique called “brainstorming.” The rules are these: (1) anything goes, (2) the wilder the ideas the better, and (3) nobody may criticize any idea. Someone records all the ideas and only afterward do the brainstormers go over them critically and choose any useful ones. It’s a technique we can use in our own family, our business or social groups, when we have a problem to solve. We can even do it by ourselves: by deliberately sitting down to think-about our job, our home, our budget-and jotting down ideas as fast as they come into our mind.
We might also try to imagine what different people would say in response to each idea. By playing such mental games we may find an ingenious way to solve our problem, be it a financial matter or family dilemma.
Finally, if blocks still prevent any body from seeing the solution, we can sometimes break the log-jam by simply starting-anywhere, but at once. Finding in the middle of the consequences may abruptly change our perspective. A prominent writer about the awful time he used to have trying to get a good beginning for an article; it cost him days of wasted time. His solution: start anywhere and get going. When he’s through, he finds it easy to back up and tack on a beginning.
Many problems are less difficult than they seem and deserve less attention than they get. In these cases especially it is wise to begin at once. It’s like deciding whether or not to jump into cold water. Once we jump, the problem doesn’t exist. There are many road blocks to creativity. We must be aware of the road blocks and their remedial measures. To avoid those road blocks we must be attentive to some prescribed tips and there by to follow. The first tips may be narrated as- An Executive or planner Whatever the idea, decide that they have not got time. People who have time make it out of the same hours-per-day allotted to everyone else. As a beginning writer, One had to learn that it was better to write one paragraph standing up, en route to somewhere else than to wait for unlimited time. That great day light come when the writer didn’t have to go an office or keep house, but should have nothing to put into it-no craft no knowledge no habit even.
It is necessary to make hasty judgments of ideas. Every mind generates ideas all day long, because life by definition is a series of problems and solutions. Some ideas aare merely operational: whether to have an egg for breakfast or go to Rome on our vacation. Others have potential for growth and control: may be we want a college degree; or a new job; or to study law, the piano, golf.
Again we must give our mind anything to chew on. Nobody stops eating at age 20, but starved imaginations are common-place. If you never read a book, ask questions or travel, no wonder our intellect is under nourished.
One of the simplest remedies for this-and it’s free-is to take a book out of the library that we are fairly sure we either won’t like or won’t understand, and read it all the way through.
Another prescription is to hide our talent under a bushel. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said that between arrogance and false modesty he would take arrogance any day. Arrogance at least accomplishes something, and false modesty never does. If you really want to stifle your mind, smother it with statements like, “It’s nothing; anybody can do it; it’s just common sense.”
Besides, we must do something else instead. If we want to try something alarming, sitting down with the intention of thinking about something for ten minutes-a decision that’s been facing us, a report we have to make, even such a mundane thing as planning menus for a week. In 30 seconds we will have discovered a job requiring our urgent attention. It is the cleaner’s day, and we haven’t got the clothes ready; we promised our neighbor a check for the charity drive; the library books are due.
Other prescription, we may note down or mention as expecting instant acclaim and to foist half-formed ideas on somebody else. Again there are suggestions not to be specific. One can assume that everything has already been thought of. One can also suppose that thinking is cold and not quite human. Watch a child who has just learned to read, and we will know how false that supposition is. our mind is most exciting asset. The ugliest men and women can be the most attractive because of our minds.
Our mind is the one thing that never grows old and never has to. Its resilience is astounding. It can lie dormant for decades and still spring forth like the morning. So mental road blocks are not at all a problem to any professional to attain creativity. It is our firmness of mind by virtue of which we can achieve and reach the desired goal or destination. Where there is a will, there is a way.
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