By Judy Churchill

With the plethora of information both good and bad available on social media, we could spend our time simply whiling away the hours viewing without realising that this may be stopping us from ‘doing’.

The brain is unable to distinguish between perception and reality which in many cases works in our favour. In training courses for example, we can practise a skill in the training room and then directly transfer that ‘practice’ to the reality of the outside world. This works particularly well with public speaking. The brain believes it has performed the speech confidently and then goes on to reperform confidently in public. There are many examples from NLP which show how easy it is to convince the brain of certain ‘realities’ whether good or bad.

The real danger appears to lie in spending hours reading on-line advice on everything from the right and wrong foods to eat, to how to lose fat, get fit, fix your drains and repair the car and then not actually doing anything about the issue to be tackled. We love to watch others ‘doing’ as our brain tells us they are doing the work for us.

It is easy to get the feeling that you have actually changed your diet just by watching a video about how to change your diet. Fitness clubs actually rely on this phenomenon of passive enthusiasm to get as many people as possible to take out annual subscriptions while knowing that only a fraction of that number will actually turn up to ‘use’ the gym. If everyone who had taken out subscriptions to different clubs and associations actually used the facilities, the system would collapse! The same goes for hotels. Have you noticed how many hotels now offer spa facilities and yet judging by the size of those facilities only a tiny proportion of the guests would actually be able to use them? Hotels know that when guests choose a hotel they base that choice on what they imagine they will do when they get there but reality hardly ever corresponds to the fantasy. This is good news for the hotels who would never be able to accommodate all the guests into their tiny spa facilities.

Just by signing up for something we feel that we’ve actually done it!

The happy medium seems to be to use and select social media channels that are issuing helpful advice and then actually transfer the viewing into ‘doing’. In fact, if we get the ratio right we should probably be doing 1/5 viewing (or less) and 4/5 doing.

The information you feed your brain will convince it without you even having to try but you actually have to turn that information consciously into action to see any results, and that’s the hard part. If you are reading a column written by a nutritionist, the ‘doing’ would probably be to treat yourself to a personalised consultation to enable you to enact what you have just read. If you are watching an exercise video, the idea would be to either hit the gym shortly afterwards and try out the programme or use it at home.

If we are honest most of us don’t ‘do’, we just prefer to view others doing and then tell ourselves what a good job we’ve just done or that for sure we’ll get around to doing it tomorrow.

All of this takes place at the subconscious level so there is no point blaming yourself for what you were unaware of. Yet you can now add that level of awareness and just stop and ask yourself how you are going to capitalise and benefit from the wealth of information available.

Never before have we had so much help and information available to us. The trick is to go from viewer to doer.

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Judy is based in Monaco and specialises in transformational coaching working with both individuals and companies. 

Judy is also a qualified language teacher/trainer for adults and children in French, English and Spanish.

If you would like to receive coaching, communication skills training, language tutoring or certified translating from Judy, you can contact her on:judy.churchill@eloquencelanguagesandtranslations.com or judy.churchill@orange.fr via Facebook messenger and www.judychurchill.com