What Is The Mind?

Many people believe that the mind is just the invisible aspect of life, like the ability to think, feel, and sense. Some believe that the mind is synonymous to soul, consciousness, and awareness.

Dr. Dan Siegel defines the mind as “an embodied and relational self-organizing emergent process that regulates the flow of energy and information.”

We define the mind as a process of interconnected functions.

Your mind is involved in attending, assigning importance, making meaning, deciding, acting, registering feedback, categorizing, predicting, and processing information.

Here are the first six:

Attending: Out of everything you can be aware of right now, what are you tuning into more closely? What are you (not) focusing on? What’s in your peripheral vision?

Assigning Importance: How much does it matter right now? Will this matter later? What’s the priority now?

Making Meaning: What does it mean for you? Is there anything else it might mean? What doesn’t it mean?

Deciding: What are your options? What does a good decision look like? How will you know when you’ve made a good decision? When is not deciding the right thing to do?

Acting: What are you doing? What are you not doing?

Registering Feedback: What happened? What did you learn? What do you know now that you didn’t before?

To read about the other functions, get the Mental Skills Training Manual on Amazon.

These interconnected functions (and others) form the dynamic process of our minds. Mastering the mind, in a sense, means mastering each of these functions.