Keep thinking…

By thinking we understand the world outside and we are able to take decisions based on our perception.

However, as our life develops, thoughts repeat and old experiences restrict our capacity of embracing the unknown. There may be a point when routine has taken over…

Routine is good, it works as a pipe that enables the water to reach the whole house; it channels our energy and makes life easier. Without a routine, a person would be like a hose connected to water, but with nobody holding on… lots of water, but no clear focus.

To prevent that, it is important to dare, to challenge assumptions and to experiment. It does not mean to refuse reality or go against things for the sake of it, just reshape reality.

The alarm goes off anytime we feel we are taking the same decisions as before without a proper reflection, anytime we feel routine seeping into our minds and our lives look less bright than the day before.

To help with that, let’s ask powerful questions that shake our beliefs, meditate or contemplate. Let’s allow the mind access to a new fresh source of possibilities every time.

The power of reflection

Reflecting is a powerful tool. Before taking over his first term, President Obama talked about in relation to leadership and I guess from time to time all of us start to think on things we have to think about… Clear?

However, the power does not come by thinking or speaking. Reflection is something much more complex and at the same time, very simple to do: you let your thoughts go deep and deep into the roots and branches of any situation.

Still, that concept is not enough. After all, people who are used to brood onto something do that all the time and yet, they don’t look so powerful.

For instance, let’s say your company is starting to cut jobs and yours is in risk. A normal person would probably think something like this:

Oh no, they are going to fire me! What can I do, I don’t have any qualifications!! They can’t do that, can they?

Now consider an optimistic person:

Nah… they are not going to fire anyone. It is just another rumor. How can they fire us, who else are going to do the job? In fact, I think I am about to get promoted…

A reflection process would start like this:

They are firing people… let me understand the owners’ point of view. Of course, they have to save their investment and by cutting some people out, they will save money. However, if they save money like that, the remaining people will get more tired and productivity in the middle term will decrease, causing customers to go for another place.

The three samples are based on real thinking process. The main difference between reflection and other ways is that the person goes into a Detached Observer stage.

It is like playing chess: your strategy only works because you are out of the chessboard. Maybe if you were part of the game, you wouldn’t sacrifice that horse… Reflection means detaching from reality, without ignoring it, and then let your own thoughts go for its solution or conclusion.

Maybe your lifestyle does not allow you to stop and reflect, but at least once a week you just should do exactly that: just reflect about life, understand its process and find the best way to deal with it.

I was thinking…

One of the things that touched me about 30 years ago was to find out how thoughts are processed and lived.

I am not talking here about a scientific point of view, but from a humanist and spiritual point of view. It was so impressive that a consultant friend of mine during many years used to give that information to his clients.

It should be obvious that by understanding how the thinking process works, we could have innumerable benefits, such as: better decision-making, enhancing the leadership capacity, innovation, etc.

However, we don’t hear about people looking into that so much. Last time I heard a leader talking on the need of thinking (reflecting, contemplating), it was just before Obama was elected for the first time, during a talk with the French president of that time.

Our society as a whole acknowledges actions and results, instead of reflection and contemplation. Children receive marks when they are right, not when they are still thinking… And just try to tell your boss you are thinking of what to do about that project, in which you are delayed!

And that is really a mistake. Perhaps by jumping into action and solving things In a Ramboish style we have got many results, but as Peter Senge said in his first book, The Fifth Discipline: problems of today are yesterday’s solutions. By not giving time to human reflection, we were unable to prevent deterioration or the misuse of ideas.

If you really want to be a leader and provide long-term solutions, just do one thing: THINK!

The general process

Every human being has three main functions, in relation to the thinking process:

·         Archive. We store all experiences we have in our lives. These experiences will help us to make decisions when the same situations or similar ones come in front of us.

·         Mind. It is the “screen” where our thoughts and feelings are projected. It is the area of thoughts and emotions. When we say I am thinking, it means our minds are working on something.

·         Intellect. It decides what our next action. It takes into account whatever the mind has, your present state of awareness and your knowledge.

The internal process is easy to understand:

1.       An input comes from outside, sometimes unknowingly.

2.       This awakes an old experience, stored in the archive.

3.       That experience is taken by the mind; in relation to the present circumstances and consciousness, thoughts and emotions are generated.

4.       Whatever the mind has is given to the intellect, which has to make a decision in terms of a response to the input.

5.       The response is acted out. That turns into another input and is archived along with the experience for future references.

Our archive

It is easy to realize the archive is out of our hands. It stores what we experience and that is it.

But we can conduct our experience in a better way. For instance, we can learn from a bad experience, turning it into a good one and the opposite is also true, as due to a bad day we can make our experience going back home as bad as possible.

The trick is in one point specifically: to manage better our intellect.

The effect of making a conscious effort in terms of which experiences I really want to store is impressive:

A bad project can be the birth of a wonderful business. That is the case of Post-It, a glue that didn’t work.

Bad marks in school can generate a genius. Einstein, anyone?

A divorce can give you your best friend back. Look at your neighbor!

When the experience is polished, next time the same situation emerges, no need of thinking of a response, as it will be stored in the self already.

Controlling your mind

At a time where distraction is omnipresent, controlling the mind can be an advantage in pursuing success in life, and it doesn’t require much.

First of all, it is important to understand that at the extent we can control our mind, we can control our thoughts and their quality. Better thoughts create better words and actions. If we don’t control our mind, it will weaver according to the circumstances, giving happiness and sorrow despite what you desire.

The higher the quality of thoughts we want, more control we need to exercise.

·         Relaxation. It is the basic point in terms of controlling our mind. An easy trick is to create a nice physical environment, with some soft music playing, and thoughts will go towards it.

·         Reflection. The art of thinking purposely. Take a good thought, a book or even a quote and let your mind work on that, analyzing, synthetizing of just experiencing in the laboratory of your mind.

·         Contemplation. It means silence, in its deepest sense. Although it requires discipline, it works as a balsam for the mind, cleaning it of unnecessary and sometimes hurtful thoughts and emotions.

·         Meditation. Making your mind creative is very useful, and that is one of the roles of meditation. It helps to create a flow of positive thoughts and generate an impact in our inner archive.

·         Yoga. It means concentration and focus. Although it requires as much discipline as contemplation, it is extremely useful as it helps to change your inner archive. In a stage of yoga, you have total control on your thoughts, feelings and emotions.

Focusing your intellect

The intellect is probably the most important faculty we have.

First of all, it manages our consciousness, which means it manages our own experience. It is the intellect that really creates our archive and helps us in our future experiences.

But consciousness comes as a fruit of knowledge and experience, and that is the key to focus your intellect and generate better decisions, and so better files in our archive.

·         The knowledge that comes to the intellect is not so much the literal knowledge of letters and numbers, but the deduction and inference that come from it. So, it does not work to know something by heart… It has to touch your heart.

·         Many times we assimilate a knowledge that is incoherent. For instance, your mother can tell you it is bad to tell lies, but she seems satisfied when you lie by telling her friend she is not at home. That creates a form of corruption, and so via reflection, it is very important to clean it up.

·         It is common we have an interesting experience we fully don’t understand. By going after a knowledge that explains that experience in a coherent way, we help our intellect to strengthen or even create another stage of consciousness.

·         Sometimes we have experiences that go against our common knowledge. That may happen with the knowledge we receive from our relatives or religion when we go for work. Reflection and contemplation can help to conciliate experience and knowledge, giving a sense of confidence.

Thoughts of a leader

·         They are based on reflection.

·         A leader’s response is not emotional, but it comes from the depth of their heart.

·         All experiences are good, either because they create pleasure or they teach the leader something different.

·         Every day the leader works on cleaning his or her mind, polishing thoughts and emotions.

·         Whatever the situation is, the leader’s intellect is making the best decisions possible as her or his consciousness is in a very high position.

·         Because the leader’s response is the best, his or her archive also is in optimum state, helping to solve critical scenes in life.

Learning wisdom

You can learn knowledge in many places using different methods. Especially during certain times of our economic cycle or our own lives, the knowledge we have is measured and taken in consideration. You can earn more or less according to how much you know, and not only money: that can help you in relationships, your health or spiritual choices.

But there is a moment when knowledge is not enough. If two tech guys apply for a job, yes, their knowledge will be taken in consideration, but sometimes their experiences are more valuable. So, at some points, knowledge becomes less important than skills. In normal life, it is that moment when your son does not believe in what you say but in what you do...

Then, later, success starts to be important and that is a very crucial point in anyone's lives, when that really starts to matter. So, it is not only knowledge - now at the bottom of priorities - but your experience will be considered according to how much success you have experienced, and not only that: success that matters for the company in case. It is when your son does not believe in your actions anymore, except when they give good results.

Again, there is a subtle point in life when success is not that crucial. Maybe because people tend to be surrounded by peers and one successful person among many others does not count so much. It is in that point your wisdom starts to be valued.

In our world, as I said, there are so many places to learn knowledge and many different methodologies. The same applies to skills and there are easy tactics to get experience and to reach success. What about wisdom?

That is probably the last place in a person's timeline. It is that point when the person feels completely assured by whatever he or she does. She does not bother so much with others' opinion and he has a wise smile in his face all the time.

The question is: how to learn or attain wisdom? There is no school for that and no management tool to help you get it. And as it is the end of our success pathway, it is good if we can really work on that. I have a few suggestions, and I hope they are useful for you:

• Reflect about your path. Take out some moments of your busy schedule to just figure what happened in your life up to this moment.
• Be holistic about your life. Although we tend to compartmentalize, it is important to know life is just one... look at it as a whole thing avoiding focusing more on your work area than your relationships, for instance.
• Contemplate about your future. Planning is good, but for wisdom, contemplation is much more valued, which means take some time looking into the horizon of your life with your intuition or your spiritual awareness, accepting what is coming and embracing it.
• Meditate daily. Meditation awakens certain parts of the self that helps wisdom to come faster and faster.
• Before making any decision, stop even for a minute and talk to yourself. It does not matter if it is a big or small decision, stop and reflect on that.
• When in doubt, talk to a wiser person. Not Google; ok, "talk" to Google, but then go and talk to a wiser person about the issue in your mind.
• Value silence more than sound. An easy way to recognize someone wise is his or her silence, which is deep and powerful.
• Enjoy life as a child. Wise people are like children, they are able to play, sing and dance, and enjoy good and innocent fun.
• Don't think too much. A common mistake is to feel wise people think a lot; that is not true, their time is more in contemplation, reflection and meditation, states of mind when thoughts are fewer.
• Speak what is necessary. To know exactly what to speak is an art a wise person masters.
• Act as if everyone is looking at you. A wise person always acts as if she or he is giving examples at every step.
• Act as if nobody is looking. A wise person does not act according to others' opinion.
• Treasure the contradictions in life. For an ordinary person, contradictions are synonym for confusion, while for a wise person it means an efficient way to generate a powerful thinking.

And much more... If there would be a university with a Wisdom course, that would take a couple of years, and it would be different for each person. My feeling is that when you start to awaken your own wisdom - which is how we learn it - then success becomes easier too.

Thinking...

Do you know the feeling when you feel something is "after" you? For instance, a book?

That happened to me: I kept on seeing this book. Its white cover, very simple design appealed to me. Its thickeness did not appeal to me. But after seeing it about, what, four times in different cities in the world, I decided to take it.

I am sure its long writing will make my process to read it pretty slow, but I am starting to get benefit from it. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman is more than a book, it is a manual for living. Click here for a review which looks like a small summary.

It contains many points and ideas that explained to me several things, and I am in the first chapters. But, beyond that, there is this person who wrote (or co-wrote) this whole magnificient book on how humans think.

2002 was a great year for him, as he got a Nobel Prize in Economics, even so he himself is a psychologist... After purchasing it and reading it is that I realised one of the big reasons for me to admire, appreciate or study and research someone else's book was there: he overcame a limit.

If you read The Economist, you will realise the economists are a different kind within the human species - even though it is a magazine, they call it a newspaper... Well, the same applies for ITC engineers or taxi-drivers, I know, but I just wondered how is it that a person with an inclination for the subtle aspects of mind could be attracted to numbers, so much, that they gave him a Nobel Prize.

Kahneman, whom I don't have the pleasure to haver personally met, is one of those rare people who are able to use both capacities, the intuition and logic, the human view and the stadistical approach.

Most of people are used to live in just one half of his or her potential, spending their lives by thinking the world is a rose garden or a bunch of numbers. It is wonderful to see someone who sees the world as a rose garden AND a bunch of numbers, depending on the moment, integrating both possibilities.

That is the depth of thinking, when you are able to not be restrained, not even by your own tendencies, so that you can see beyond the present horizons. Because it is only then that you can really understand and assimilate a situation fully. How to do it?

For Kahneman, his story is told in the link I've shared before. For myself, whom I like to think I am a balanced guy even though I am still in the process, it was meditation and a spiritual life that enabled me to see the rose garden without leaving the bunch of numbers behind.

What about you?

The deep lack of thought

One of my favourite moments was my first (and upto now, the only) visit to Trinidad-Tobago, a small island in the Caribbean. I've enjoyed those moments, and I also had the opportunity to serve others in English, a language with which I am still getting comfortable (in fact, I've just learned I speak Globish). During a moment of leisure, I've started to read an article where Peter Senge, whom I've just met a month ago, was clarifying his position.

He was saying how people were looking forward a leader on a "white horse", instead of a leader who could think. More than a decade later, I still agree with Senge.

There is a deep lack of thinking deeply, understanding and reflecting in a world where everything has to be done for yesterday. Ironically, doing without thinking deeply makes people double-do their work. Even their lives.

Did you ever try to think very deeply? I am not saying about a boring thinking process, but something that enriches you and others, something that makes your life more valuable than ever. Try it, and see the results in your life.

Take care!