Howard Berg: Evaluating Your Mental Fitness

You want to succeed. You want to experience the full range of opportunities offered to you by life. You know that your brain plays a major role in enabling you to accomplish this and much more. Understanding your brain’s fitness level is an important step you need to take to begin improving its performance. A performance that will determine how well you achieve your life goals. Before you can begin to improve your cognitive ability you need to measure your brain’s current fitness level.

A fit brain enables you to experience a more fulfilling life with better relationships, rewarding experiences, and opens you up to fully developing your latent talents and abilities. Developing these abilities can make the difference between a life filled with success or failure. Which one do you prefer?

Just like a muscle your brain needs to be exercised or it becomes flaccid and unable to properly perform its job. So what is the first step on your journey to mental fitness? You must first measure your brain’s current state. I have created a series of questions you can easily use to accomplish this. Let’s get started with this easy evaluation right now…

1. Are you afraid of being wrong?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

2. Do you find it difficult to perform activities requiring coordination?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

3. Do you worry about people will think about you when you meet them?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

4. Do you struggle to imagine things that people are saying to you?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

5. Are you often indecisive?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

6. Do you avoid having to make important decisions because you fear making a mistake?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

7. Are you uncomfortable performing chores that require artistic ability?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

8. If something requires a good ability to work with numbers, or finding solutions are you likely to avoid it?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

9. Do you get easily bored?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

10. Are you afraid of being wrong?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

11. Is remember things challenging for you?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

12. Do you fully engage yourself mentally in whatever you do?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

13. How often do you describe experiences as exhilarating?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

14. Do you create a plan for your life events?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

15. How often do your purposely do something that is outside of your normal routine?

A) never ever B) rarely C) frequently D) almost always

Once you’ve answered all these questions, you can begin to evaluate your brain’s fitness level. Let’s learn how to do this now.

For the first 11 questions give yourself four points for an A, three points for a B, two points for a C, and one point for a D. For questions 12-15 give yourself one point for an A, two points for a B, three points for a C, and four points for a D.

Now simply add up your score, and then you can measure your performance.

A score of 60-64 is amazing. You are in wonderful mental shape. Good job!!!

A score of 45059 is quite good. You can benefit from some training, but you are ahead of most people already.

A score of 33-44 means it is time to start working on improving your brain’s mental fitness. Fortunately there are many exercises you will learn that will help you accomplish and much, much more.

A score of 20-32 is really poor. You truly need to start learning how to use your brain’s potentials, and right now. The good news is your brain is extremely flexible and able to make change quite readily.

Well how did you score?