Our Best Thoughts Don’t Come From Our Hardest Thinking
➡️➡️ Free workshop this Thursday 9th October: Reclaim Your Attention: Stop Distractions Running Your Day. Reserve your free place here. ⬅️⬅️
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Here’s what I found myself saying to one of my clients earlier this year: our best thoughts don’t come from our hardest thinking.
It was one of those times, coming from deep exploration with the client, where I could feel a truth arriving in the moment in service of the client’s situation.
And there is undoubtedly a truth there.
How many times have you wrestled with something (a leadership problem in your business or a Sudoku puzzle or anything in between) only to leave it, come back, and straight away see things anew?
How many times have flashes of inspiration appeared at times you wouldn’t have expected it?
How many times have the solutions to the most knotty problems in your life emerged not in a hard thinking session, but as you walk or exercise or meditate or shower?
That last one, in fact, I’ve heard Adam Grant call ‘creative procrastination’. How it works is this: you set yourself going on a knotty problem, and then when you leave it, your subconscious keeps working on it and then… boom, provides a solution when you least expect it.
Grant recommends using this: if you have a knotty problem, start work it and then deliberately leave it for a few days. I’ve got to say, it works for me - I regularly use this when planning workshops or exercises I run with my organisational clients. (Or, indeed, the Meaningful Productivity Workshops I’m running this month.)
There are profound distinctions for us here.
It reminds me of something Robert Holden said in a workshop I took part in. Something like this, ‘our mind isn’t designed to think for itself.’
Slow down with that for a moment: what does it mean? Well, it means this - and I’ve heard the ideas of other leading researchers, like Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Kahneman echo this… it means that our mind is an expert at one thing, but not at everything. In today’s world, we would do well to remember that.
In my one-to-one coaching, I almost NEVER ask my clients what they think.
I ask them what they feel, what their intuition is, what their sense is.
This is because my clients are smart.
And they’ve mostly been trained by amazing education systems and employers to think in very sophisticated ways.
They don’t need more of what they’ve always done. They need to tap into new knowledge, new wisdom, new perspectives.
As Kahneman might say, the intuition is the hero of the story.
As Haidt would say, the thinking mind is the rider on an elephant, and in reality the elephant decides where to go, not a person with some reins.
As Holden might say, the mind’s job is not to make the choices, but to work on behalf of something bigger.
Something I might call (and in fact will in my new book, The Power to Choose, due out in November), the higher self.
Or the deeper, wiser parts of us.
If we want to do our best thinking, to have our best thoughts, we have to step outside of our normal ways of being.
That’s why I invite my clients into their feelings, intuitions or senses… That’s why it’s powerful to step out of the day to day and into a workshop or a coaching session.
That’s why we need slow times, as well as fast times.
As I shared on LinkedIn a few days ago, we can’t stop firefighting if we don’t step out of the fire.
Slow times, as two readers, Nikki and Jessica, reflected on my recent efficiency vs effectiveness article, are definitely not efficient in the traditional sense of the word.
And yet they can be vital from an effectiveness point of view.
Most people aren’t paid to crunch numbers, or crunch through admin work. And if you are, beware - AI is coming for you.
We are paid for something different.
Often, for one of the most amazing human qualities: our ability to think amazing new thoughts.
To have ideas.
To make connections.
And to do these things, we need to resist distractions that sap our attention (join me on Thursday for a workshop on that).
We need to create space to have our best thoughts.
But we don’t do that, counter-intuitively, by thinking really hard.
We do it by creating beautiful spaces.
Moments where Kairos, the Greek God of the Right Moment, can arrive.
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PS I’d love you to join me for the Meaningful Productivity Workshop Series - free, live sessions this month.
Last Thursday, in Workshop 1, one participant said:
“The message that resonates most is I cannot manage time! It’s actually liberating!”
That’s what these sessions are all about: freeing yourself from old definitions of productivity and finding a new way forward so can make a meaningful difference in your work.
Join us live for Workshop 2 on Thursday 9th October, 3pm UK time, and take the next step in the Meaningful Productivity Workshop Series - Reclaim Your Attention: Stop Distractions Running Your Day
The workshops each stand alone (i.e. you don’t need to have been to Workshop 1 to get powerful takeaways from Workshop 2). Together, they form a powerful series, which culminates in an intimate VIP Deep Dive where we’ll uncover what truly matters to you and how to carry it into every part of your work and life.
👉 Reserve your free place here: https://www.robbieswale.com/meaningful-productivity-workshop-series
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.