Think Your Best Thoughts
How do ambitious leaders find smart solutions to complex challenges?
You’re highly driven to make a difference, so your brain is working all the time. Then you’ve got a personal life to organise and navigate too. Even if everything is going well, it’s still a lot. When things are hard, you get frustrated that you’re not making progress quickly enough.
Right now, you can almost feel a solution or idea in front of you, obscured from view. Whether that’s to do with work or life, it doesn’t matter. They all affect each other. You’re confident that if you could just get some headspace, the path forward would become clear.
There’s a good chance you’ve already tried scheduling undisturbed time but it doesn’t always work as well as hoped. Either you can’t stick to the plan; run out of time; miss the real “ah ha!” moment you’re looking for; or it happens inconsistently. The best ideas seem to happen at random times anyway, like when you’re in the shower.
What you really need are reliable, repeatable methods to access a state the poet John Keats called “Negative Capability”. First coined in 1817, it’s characterised by mental stillness and receptivity. Creativity here emerges not from logic, or from pushing and grasping for a solution, but from dwelling with the uncertain and the ambiguous. At its most basic, it means being able to do nothing for a while: not to procrastinate and get away from the work but to enable our best work to emerge out of that spaciousness.
Leaders would do well to learn from the wisdom of artists - even from seeing themselves as artists. For what are we trying to do, if not make the world a more beautiful place, in its highest sense?
I’ve found that moving into and out of a state of negative capability has three key stages. Firstly you need to switch your noisy thoughts off long enough so your best ideas stand a chance of being heard. Then you need a way of looking at a situation or question with a fresh perspective. As that “ah ha!” moment occurs, you’ll access untapped energy and inspiration that propel you into taking action and getting outside your comfort zone
Digital Detox is essential for this to occur. We’ve become addicted to dopamine hits from checking notifications and messages, scrolling and ticking things off our To Do list. How is your brain meant to think deeply and creatively if the moment you ask it to disengage from everything else, you’re reaching for your phone? Before you can do anything else, you must be able to break this habit of constant activity and input.
However, negative capability is not simply an absence of this addiction to busy-ness and distraction. It’s also a presence of curiosity and engagement with the world around you. “Switching off”, in the sense of just dimming the noise or numbing out, is not really living at all. The mental state we’re looking for is peaceful, yes, but also awake, vibrant and emotionally positive.
To counter the “tyranny of the www.”, I'm suggesting you to try an alternative three Ws.
Wind-down
Walk
Wonder
Together they help you cultivate the quality of attention we’re looking for here. Importantly, I'm not just going to talk at you about them now - leaving you with one of my good ideas that never becomes anything more than that.
This is your invitation to a free, online, 1 hour workshop that get's you taking action. As part of it, you’ll work out exactly how and when you’re going to fit this in during the following month. Because let’s face it, the methods aren’t rocket science. The real challenge is overcoming the obstacles to trying them out.
Before I tell you how to sign up, I want to briefly share why I'm personally fascinated by this process. Every time I’m on a retreat team within my Buddhist Order, someone will invariably check-in about having an idea for their talk during meditation. We’re not consciously planning it but somehow great thoughts appear when our minds are more settled. Then you have my own time studying at the University of Cambridge and now coaching undergraduates, staff and academics there too. What conditions enable these brilliant minds to thrive? The quiet, beautiful College grounds certainly help.
Finally, I’ve spent the 15 years’ of work since graduation needing to find my own smart solutions to complex challenges and questions. I’ve been a Buddhist and meditation practitioner the whole time, so my approach to professional problem-solving has been highly influenced by methods I’ve also used for personal and spiritual growth. I now live in the countryside, in a van with my partner and puppy. I have a very busy, ADHD brain. So although I'm surrounded by nature, I'm not in the mental states I'm pointing you towards all the time. It still takes a lot of effort. But when I get there, I see a huge difference in the quality of my work: whether that's writing an article like this or preparing for a 1:1 coaching call.
Ready to join me for a workshop? Email me at [email protected] with THINK in the subject title. I'll send you upcoming dates or you can invite me to run for your leadership team.
