The Misaligned Monkey

Background

At Sales Academy, we talked to thousands of people, all striving for success. Many seem to have a constant battle with what goes on in their heads and struggle to control thought streams that are distracting and mostly negative. Even when the thoughts are positive, they seldom come at a time when we can act on them. Whether positive or negative, these thoughts limit our capacity for awareness and focus.  Nowhere is this more pronounced or obvious than in a meditation practice where we aim to sit with an empty or silent mind. Anyone who has tried to meditate for 5 or 10 minutes and ignore the stream of thoughts knows how difficult this can be. Traditional meditation teachings call these thought streams the monkey mind, or Monkey and view these thoughts as a ‘chattering Monkey’ that distracts us, confuses us, and prevents us from being fully present in our lives.

This distraction or interruption from the Monkey is universal. You may be struggling with your meditation or mindfulness practice, suffering from procrastination, or just keen to focus all your efforts to create the life you really want.

Suppose for a moment it doesn’t have to be like this:

• Suppose your poor Monkey has been Misaligned and has suffered from bad press. What if the stream of thoughts they generate could be engineered to help you achieve your sweetest life?
• Suppose you could change the nature, content, and timing of the thought streams?
• Suppose if you worked in a different way, the actions of your Monkey would change?
• Suppose if we let go of the accepted notion of them as a problem, we could then experience a more positive reality?

Surely, it’s worth a try?

Our book, The Misaligned Monkey, challenges the idea that your Monkey is a problem and explores a new idea, that with some effort they could become your greatest asset.

Using what we learned from our work with thousands of delegates over the last 25 years, we offer a real alternative approach that works.

If you have read the book, our challenge helps you implement and test the ideas in just 12 weeks.

Working with your Monkey more effectively not only supports any meditation or mindfulness practice but also enhances your ability to perform in everything you do.

Traditional Monkey Advice

Our experiences of the thought streams often support the traditional idea of a ‘chattering Monkey’ who fills our heads with unwelcome noise. It’s easy to write the Monkey off as something that adds no value to our lives and only hinders us.

Traditional meditation teachings advise us to ‘rise above’ and ‘ignore’ the interruptions and distractions from the Monkey and provide a variety of different methods, such as watching our breath or chanting mantras, to help us silence the Monkey.

But this is not so easy – and many of us have little real success in doing this.

Mindfulness and meditation practitioners and even the full-time monks in monasteries all continue to struggle to ignore their Monkeys using the existing approach.

Accepted truths can be wrong

If we step back for a moment, we can view the traditional approach as only one of the possible approaches to dealing with the Monkey. This, in turn, generates limited options for coping with what may feel like an uncontrollable barrage of thoughts. A barrage that often occurs just when we need to focus all of our capability on something we want or need to do.

The Misaligned Monkey thinks we have it all wrong. The book and the website share a new way of thinking and working with your Monkey that’s simple, effective, and gets better long-term results.

It’s tough to argue with an accepted truth but we often find that the things we think of as truth are not quite right or not the whole story. Some of the hardest things to reconsider are the ones we have accepted as truth for a very long time.

We no longer think planet Earth is flat or that thunder is the gods fighting. Stories like Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes can help us question old beliefs and even move on to try on a new idea for size.

New ideas can provoke the establishment and stir the mud, strangely making it easier to go on believing something is true even when it clearly doesn’t give us the results we want.

Think about the establishment’s reaction to the idea that the Earth went round the sun and that we were not the centre of the universe as we had long thought …

Suppose the idea that the noise in your head comes from an uncontrollable ‘chattering monkey’ is equally unhelpful when it comes to you having the life you really want?

• What if this idea is out of date and untrue?
• What if our Monkeys have been repeatedly Misaligned?
• What if this idea limits our options to using methods that don’t work?
• What if the problem is really caused by how we work with our Monkeys rather than what or who they are?
• What if this idea offered a more permanent way to quiet the thought stream and achieve peace?
• What if your Monkey could be your greatest asset, your greatest supporter, and a foundation for all your success?
• What if you could engineer the stream of thoughts you experience now, as a distraction or unwelcome noise, into something that helps you achieve your sweetest life?

The Misaligned Monkey delivers an alternative approach. We suggest using a new viewpoint which gives a different perspective and, subsequently, a new way of thinking and working with your Monkey using well tested methodology that seems to get better, more permanent results.

Useful links

Get the book

Read more – what your Monkey wants to hear from you

Find the Challenge here.

Score your current relationship here.