Know Your Tells

We all have our tells, those things we do that signal our state of mind, the nervous twitches we don’t realize we have or the smile we can’t keep off our face. But we also have other kinds of tells and learning to recognize them can help to keep us on track.

For example the more frustrated I become the worse I do at keeping my workspace clean. This is an externalization of my inner mental state. The clutter of problems and worries that fill my mind cause me to fill my space with clutter.

This is one of my tells. When I start to see the room sliding into messiness I know I need to look for what it is that has gotten under my skin. When I can’t figure that out, I clean the room. Usually somewhere in the act of tidying up the physical space I find the answer I have been avoiding.

This is the power of knowing our tells. Sometimes if we change the behavior we can change the problem that causes it. The two are connected, the tell and the problem.