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Listology 101

 Benefits of a List

The first step is a rather straight-forward creation procedure that involves using a list title to evoke reminiscences, reflections, feelings, emotions, instances, events, occurrences, attitudes, facts, and information that are stewing in your conscious minds and memories. A good list heading will elicit a wide and mixed range of responses. Generally, these “call outs” are the things you know you know…. things that reside in your more proximate memory.  

The second step is arguable the most important. It entails serious consideration – contemplation – of each item on a completed list. This kind of list-utilization helps you tap into a remote but powerful resource…. your subconscious self. It grants you access to the more elusive, often obscure, recesses of your mind and memory. This second step triggers recollections about things you don’t know you know, things that – once realized – can add significantly to your personal potency.

While the BrainFoodToGo.com web portal focuses primarily on Tip Lists,there is a large variety of list types, including those described below. 

Tip Lists enable you to tap into the knowledge and know-how of other experienced parties. They afford you advice, insights, counsel, suggestions, and admonitions from other people who’ve “been there; done that.” It’s third-party know-how that’s both important and useful. TipLists offer short, to-the-point, experience-based bits of advice and insight that, if seriously regarded, can expand the efficacy of your actions.

Me Lists are itemizations that prompt you to look at yourself, to delve below the surface of your thoughts and feelings and mine new understandings and appreciations. They offer a powerful “lens” which allows you to peer into your own private spaces and divine your own dimensions, They help you get acquainted with your inner elements, the ones that enable you to play, with gusto, your roles in life. Me Lists afford you an opportunity to build a new “me” on the foundations of the best attributes you already harbor. They empower you to forge your id, ego, superego, and all the “stuff” you’ve experienced and learned since age five, into a critical path of self-enlightenment and self-empowerment. In addition, Me Lists also prompt you to focus and prioritize. They’re results-oriented and motivational, -- even inspirational -- and aid in unlocking your latent potential.

Collaboration Lists help ensure rewarding communication and cooperation between you, your team members, and the “significant others” in your life. They are compiled and contemplated in concert with another party, such as a team member, employee, or spouse. This genre of list engages two or more parties in a cooperative list-making process. These lists can be extremely helpful since participants stimulate each other as they build or examine a list. The goal here is either the creation of a single list by multiple parties or the creation of separate lists, which are then shared among participants. These enumerations can be very revealing and can generate a kind of healthy debate and discussion that might not otherwise occur.

Self-Check Lists give you the ability to methodically self-evaluate. They are a subset of the traditional checklist and can aid you in evaluating our own performance. These lists typically don’t feature itemizations but rather depend on simple Yes/No answers or numeric ratings.

To Do Lists can help you clarify tasks and put them in perspective, thus reducing your anxieties about them. Such a list constitutes a “filing cabinet” into which you can stuff your obligations so that they can be assessed in an organized manner, at a convenient time of your choosing. To Do Lists, as everyone knows, are indispensable guides to getting through a day.

Learning Lists help you engage and employ the positive, enriching things you’ve learned throughout your personal life and professional career. With an evocative list title or heading – sometimes referred to as a “list trigger” – you should be able to readily recall and enumerate the helpful experiences, responses, actions, remedies, solutions, lessons, and discoveries you have benefited from while striving for success.

Self-conditioning lists help you pre-ordain and prompt certain behaviors by delineating and prioritizing elements of preferred personal conduct.

Self-Prep Lists prompt you to engage in important ongoing activities. Itemizations of such necessary activities can be powerful self-motivators. These lists serve as user-friendly “reminders” to do those things you might otherwise defer or forget entirely.

TTDBID Lists of “things to do before I die” can ensure a well-lived life for procrastinators or the otherwise reticent. They itemize the personally significant things you want to accomplish prior to a point in time.

Self-Scripting Lists help you emulate or avoid the life-ways traveled by your predecessors or peers. It’s a way of self-prescribing and adopting fresh behaviors that will afford you opportunities for new and different kinds of achievement and personal fulfillment in the various roles you’ll play on the “stage of life.”

Bugbear Lists force you to tersely describe your chief worries or fears and to memorialize them on a harmless piece of paper, thus extracting them from your psyche where they would otherwise, in all probability, continue to careen around, punching cerebral “hot buttons” and prompting all manner of unnecessary confusion and consternation. These lists aid in channeling your energies to meet and beat your fears head-on.