The Unintentional Effects Of Thought and Action

The wondrous gift of imagination allows us to dream, ponder and lose ourselves in deep thoughts; we have fond memories from childhood to traumatic thoughts, being frequently played out in our minds.

We as human beings exist in a narrative, there’s always a verbal story going through our head all of the time, we use this to process information and assess the world around us some of these thoughts are temporary and some we carry with us our whole lives that often feeds or perceptions.

The brain is often viewed as an organ which has a lot of energy and has the capacity to expand but research from behavioural psychology and neuroscience tells us contrary to that popular view. The brain rather than being energetic is actually quite lazy and always defaults to a conservation mode, which means that it is easier for us to think about things that we have always thought about, hence why we have a lot of perception basis. We tend to find data that supports what we have been always thinking about, and when this happens the brain gets to use a lot less energy and is comfortable to defaults to its habitual mode.

You may ask why does it matter our thoughts and it’s hidden deep in our head, causing harm no one, but our thoughts have a way of showing up, and it does in a couple of ways, i.e. in the form of macro actions and micro-actions, the latter being small and nuanced, to give an example if you have an unconscious thought floating around your head that you are not good at presenting in front of large audience. download Our TOP TEN TIPS TO BECOME AN EFFECTIVE SPEAKER

Your macro actions could be that you just avoid the situation of presenting as much as possible, and your micro-actions could be that if you have to present than you don’t make any good eye contact and don’t engage the audience that much you just show up to deliver what you have to deliver

You may think that I have not have been focused on that thought at all but it has been floating around your head for a long time, which resulted in the action you took.

On the flip side our actions has also way of influencing our thoughts, as recent research on power poses and body languages have found that when we make a big expansive poses for just a couple of minutes similar to someone who finishing a competitive race and has their arms raised looking excited and having an expansive pose actually changes us physically the testosterone level in our body goes up and the stress hormones goes down, this can also have the opposites effect the when we have disempowering poses closed in body languages looking down. The testosterone goes down and stress levels go up and it only takes a couple of minutes for the body to feel these actions.

Other researchers have found that when you make a negative facial expression it actually makes you feel more depressed, the effect of our thoughts and action are frequently clocking around and we completely unaware of it or even thinking about it but they are showing up in our lives.

We need to be careful of what we are saying to ourselves and replace unintentional thoughts with positive ones because this is what we want to show up.

Communication is a fluid and dynamic process that is ever present in our daily lives (Clampitt, 2010). In light of this, Robbins and Hunsaker (2009:74) aver that it is “the basis for all human interaction and interpersonal relationships cannot exist without it. It is through communication that members in relationships interact to exchange information and transmit meaning”.

Communication is a complex phenomenon which should not be confused with simple information exchange. According to Kennedy (2009), these notions differ in terms of the concepts of meaning, quality, purpose and appropriate methods. Moreover, Quirke (2008) maintains that communication combines two strands, that is, information and interaction; and for communication to be successful, both strands must be intertwined.

Whilst information refers to the delivery and receipt of data, concepts and messages and how best to share, structure and extract meaning; interaction on the other hand, refers to how people perceive and relate to each other, incorporating the issues of relationships, familiarity, credibility, trust and collaboration.