Mostly, thinking is like breathing. Thoughts enter and leave my mind without much effort. But when I’m feeling excited, anxious, or fearful, my mind races, accelerating my thinking to the point of becoming overwhelmed. Other times, my thinking becomes labored as I struggle to find ideas, solutions, or the right words to say. But thinking is not breathing. You draw breaths from the world around you while thinking draws from the world within you.
What you think about is often informed by what you experience around you, but how you think about those experiences is shaped by the meaning you make of them and your beliefs. What you believe is always a choice, but those choices are limited if you don’t develop your mind. Many people simply choose to believe what others tell them to. Expanding your capacity to form your own beliefs and then prioritize them into your system of values gives you agency and allows you to lead your own life and leave your mark on the world.
You can expand your lung capacity through exercise and training. You can improve your stamina or increase the time you can hold your breath underwater. You can learn to slow your breathing down to the point of being barely detectable. Breathing helps you seize control of your thinking when your mind begins to race and take control of your muscles during things like childbirth, steeling yourself to move heavy objects and improves eye-hand coordination.
Expanding your capacity to think isn’t quite the same. Your self-identity amounts to how you think about things and how your thinking informs your beliefs about yourself, especially your strengths, capacities, and limitations. Your thinking defines who you are. Changing how you think amounts to changing yourself. That means giving up parts of who you are to become the person you want to be. The problem is that much of your thinking is a function of habits you have formed. You cannot simply eliminate unproductive or harmful thinking by stopping those thoughts; you must replace them with different ones.
Just as you cannot survive without breathing, stopping your mind from thinking is impossible. Medically speaking, death occurs when a person is determined to be brain dead, even if the heart continues to beat. Being alive is to think. The quality of your thinking will determine the quality of your life. More specifically, your life’s purpose, meaning, and accomplishments come down to the quality of your thoughts and decisions.
Through my years of coaching, I have learned that the best way to guide people to become more effective leaders is to help them improve their thinking. None of the tools, exercises, or books I can offer will help unless you elevate your level of thinking to make them useful. Acquiring the knowledge and developing the skills you need to be more effective requires you to cultivate the curiosity that drives learning.
.
