Most of the time, thinking is just like breathing. Thoughts just seem to enter and leave your mind without much effort. At other times, when you are feeling excited or anxious, your mind begins to race, accelerating your thinking, even to the point of being overwhelming. And at other times, your thinking might be labored as you struggle to find ideas, solutions, or simply the words to say. But, thinking is not breathing. Your breath draws in vital oxygen from the world around you, while thinking draws from the world within you.
You can expand your breath capacity through exercise. You can improve your stamina, increase the length of time you can hold your breath underwater, and even learn to slow your breathing down, so it is barely detectable. You can control your emotions and increase your mental focus by managing the rhythm of your breaths. Breathing helps you seize control of your thinking when your mind begins to race. And by controlling your breath, you can take control of your muscles during things like childbirth, when steeling yourself to move heavy objects. To carefully focus and sharpen your aim, instructors teach that breathing will increase your eye-hand coordination.
Expanding your capacity to think isn’t quite so easy. It isn’t that thinking is hard; it’s changing how you think that tends to be challenging.
How you think about things defines who you are. Your sense of self-identity is nothing more than what you think of yourself. The Bible’s Book of Proverbs notes, “as a man thinks in his heart so is he.” Wayne Dyer phrased it this way; “as you think, so shall you be.” It’s not only about how you see yourself; what other people see in you is a product of how you think too.
As the saying goes, your actions speak louder than your words. People will tend to judge who you more by what you do than what you say. But what really matters is not the actions you undertake; it’s the consequences of those actions. You are measured by what you accomplish.
Whether you accomplish much or nothing at all is a product of the choices you make. How well you have prepared yourself, how dedicated you are to your performance and how important the outcome is to you will inform what you accomplish. All these conditions are a product of your choices – and how you behave is informed by your thinking.
Whether you accomplish much or nothing at all is a product of the choices you make.
Some things of great consequence involve little thought. Your need to breathe, for example, is an involuntary process. You have no choice about your need to breathe; however, poor decisions you might choose to make may lead to circumstances where you cannot breathe —with serious or even deadly consequences. Your ability to make choices, and therefore your thinking offers you the capacity to bypass even the most basic human systems that safeguard your life.
Just as it is impossible to live without breathing, it is impossible to stop your mind from thinking. Medically speaking, death occurs when a person is determined to be brain dead. (While the kind of brain activity that is measured offers no indication of conscious thought, anecdotal evidence suggests that people even in deep comas report access to their physical senses and some recollection of thought.) Being alive is to think. And the quality of your thinking will determine the quality of your life. More specifically, what your life means and what you accomplish comes down to how you think and the decisions you make.
Being a Leader Means Thinking Like a Leader
As a leader, the measure of your performance is entirely a matter of the quality of the decisions you make, and more importantly, what you accomplish. How you choose to comport yourself may add or subtract from how your accomplishments are recognized and valued.
Personal characteristics like courage, valor, and virtue may determine how you are perceived, and most importantly, whether people might freely follow you. It is the quality of your thinking that drives these leadership qualities. Your character or behavior traits will never replace the need to accomplish things that matter when measuring your success as a leader. To be a leader, you must think like one; and to be an exceptional leader, you must think exceptionally well.
Your ability to think evolves with maturity. Initially, thinking is involuntary and reflexive. You think about food because you are hungry, fuss when you are wet, and coo when you are warmly cuddled. Your thinking is a direct consequence of what you feel. In time, though, you discover that you can put your mind to work. You begin forming questions about your surroundings and search for meaning in your experiences.
Eventually, you venture beyond merely interpreting the world and begin to impact it. You discover the power of imagination, the strength of your will, desires for things and experiences, and the means to control your environment. You become naturally curious, hungry to learn and discover your creativity. As you become more senescent, you also become constrained by your fears of both the things others teach you to be afraid of and the things your furtive imagination invents. You are a pure learning-being, led by your curiosity and your fears, on your way to becoming a knowing-being as your learning moves to the hands of those charged with educating you.
Some people devote themselves to being lifelong learners, while others blissfully decry learning as something that ended along with their formal schooling. But like children, as adults, we continue to learn so that we grow, develop needed new skills, improve competencies and make meaning from our experience, often at the “school of hard knocks.” It is sometimes cynically noted that “experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” But in truth, every experience is an opportunity to learn something. You just have to choose to make it so. Leaders tend to make the most of their experience since most of what you have to learn, especially about how to think, cannot be found anywhere else.
You can try to inform your thinking through formal education and training. Still, these often only contribute to being a more practiced knowing-being and less often develop you as a learning-being.
Self-learners tend to turn to books and reading. The problem is that books don’t teach you how to think, they only give you what to think about. In The Art of Living, the stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote, “Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.” Learning to think better is the key. But how?
While books may be “the training weights of the mind,” rigorous debate and interrogating reality can strengthen your power to think.
When you exercise your opinions with a willingness to be proven wrong, you open your thinking to new beliefs. What you believe and the values that prioritize those beliefs only change when you learn something new. This is how personal growth is linked to your capacity to learn.
Filling your head with what you read can help you acquire information, some of which might be useful and some will not. Learning is not a function of acquiring information; it is developing the ability to apply what you must know to improve the things you must do.
Books offer you new ideas to evaluate, but you must do the thinking to learn from them.
But we all tend to experience a level of cognitive bias when exposed to new ideas. Most people are more comfortable confirming what we believe than accepting things that challenge our beliefs. This phenomenon is a function of the human ego. Holding onto beliefs not only provides comfort it also protects your sense of identity.
Do you get more out of a book when you agree with the writer or disagree? The chances are good that you will learn more from exploring why you disagree. Better still, you might find you come to agree with something that initially challenged how you think about something consequential. Yet, most people prefer to read what they find agreeable. It might help you pass the time with scholarly entertainment but will do little to inform your thinking.
With discipline and sufficient curiosity, it is possible to learn from reading books. Many great thinkers were self-educated. People like Benjamin Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Steve Jobs, and Maya Angelou all made their mark in the world without academic credentials. (You can find a long list of people who were self-educated and made a difference in the world at The Autodidact Hall of Fame – https://www.autodidactic.com/profiles/profiles.htm )
Leaders are effective not by constant learning alone but by learning what they need to know. Doing so requires the awareness that you don’t know what you need to know and the humility to admits so. What you “know” (or think you know) tends to galvanize your beliefs, and what you learn is what can change them. It is the critical difference between a “knowing-being” and a “learning-being.” To elevate your thinking, you must be a learning-being and learn to spend your time in learning mode.
A leaders’ curiosity tends to be infectious. You elevate others’ performance by helping cultivate their curiosity and being an exemplar of what a learning-being is. It is how leaders develop their followers, and more importantly, develop other leaders.
To be an exceptional leader, you must not only be a continuous, life-long learner, but you must also be a self-directed learner.
No one can teach leadership. You learn it through the experiences found in the challenges you face as a leader. Some theories may offer you clues, but the ability to make critical decisions in the presence of uncertainty and adversity requires that you trust your gut. You must balance whatever information you have at your disposal, whether in your head or your hands, against an internal filter that triggers your decisions. This is what we describe as being conscientious or driven by a duty to a sense of purpose. When you feel that what you are doing must serve something greater than your own needs or interests, you find the courage to defy logic, lean in towards your fears, and move beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone.
To exercise the kind of grit that is often required when aiming to accomplish things that truly matter, being conscientious is a function of elevating your level of thinking. You might feel that your decisions are on auto-pilot and that you are reacting to external forces that demand your attention, but your decisions are purely a function of your habits of thinking.
The power behind habits is that they are deeply bound in your thinking.
Even simple habits, like brushing your teeth or setting your alarm clock at night – may feel like mindless actions; routines you do without even thinking about them. Yet, it is thinking that triggers those actions. What makes something a habit is that the thinking has become hardwired. You don’t have to assemble the thoughts, but you still choose whether to amend your behaviors. You can always override a habit. You can also overwrite a habit and replace it with a new one.
When you were young, you needed to build habits from scratch. Your first routines were primarily instinctive. Things, like eating, sleeping, and eventually crawling and walking are all essential behaviors that are hardwired at birth. But you ultimately layered new habits on top of those instincts. You developed eating and sleeping habits, and eventually, a range of habits to normalize your life into a series of routines that defined your daily life.
By the time you were an adult, developing new habits mostly became a function of either modifying existing ones or eliminating unproductive ones and replacing them with new habits. This process of unlearning is hard enough, but it becomes practically impossible when you have failed to maintain the habit of learning. Learning was essential to your survival as an infant and vital to your development into an adult. Learning was likely a powerful habit most of your young life. So did the habit die?
Some habits can fade through neglect, but strong habits endure. The habit of learning doesn’t die; it devolves into the habit of knowing. You can either be in knowing mode or learning mode, but not in both at the same time. The focus on knowing is an unintended consequence of formal education. You are tested on your knowledge, not on your curiosity or your learning prowess.
It may seem that people who become reliable repositories of facts and processes are necessarily capable learners, but the evidence proves otherwise.
People who become skilled at memorizing information get rewarded more often than people who challenge the system. Education, by-in-large, rewards conformity and demands obedience. Great thinkers generally will have none of that. While a successful education is generally a tally of correct answers, learning is a function of better questions. It is safer to have the correct answers than to incessantly question things. The desire for safety causes people to replace the dangerous habit of learning (being insatiably curious) with the safer habit of being satiated by knowledge.
So, how do you reinstall the habits of learning to elevate your thinking? It’s clear that it isn’t easy, given the fact that few people do. But, if you are determined to become a better or an exceptional leader, you must. Coaches and mentors can help you understand what you need and can help you become inspired to learn. The problem is that the habit of operating in knowing-mode is especially powerful given the adulation offered to people who can demonstrate great mental prowess. People are easily impressed by what you know. A coach or mentor must be willing and able to push hard to keep you from clinging to your comfort zone for dear life.
Because these habits are so powerful, you would likely benefit from having a cohort of like-minded people and surrounding yourself with people who will help you elevate your thinking by challenging your assumptions and beliefs works because they are there for the same purpose. It is not about getting together for the purpose of acquiring knowledge; it is about learning to think differently so you can lead more effectively. Such cohorts are like learning laboratories, where you can experiment with your ideas, test your hypothesis and innovate new ways of thinking and new habits that drive better leadership performance.
You can always choose to settle for what you have.
Dr. Lee Thayer would provocatively suggest, “if you want to know what you deserve, just look at what you’ve got.” It follows, then, as Thayer also suggested, that most people prefer problems they cannot solve over solutions they do not like. But, can you learn to like something because you know that it is good for you? Are you willing to learn something new? Have you thinking challenged and perhaps change what you believe about yourself, about others, and the world?
If you feel you deserve more or that you can accomplish more, then stop settling. It’s up to you. You can choose to settle, or you can decide to elevate.
