Busy Minds

One of the most important things I learned over the past ten years is gaining a new understanding of how the mind works — and how it doesn't.

This understanding may have impacted my thinking, creativity, and growth more than any other single factor over that period.

Gaining this understanding came through several books and people I interviewed at Forward Thinking Workplaces.

One of those influential persons was Sandra Krot, Human Dimension Consultant and co-author of Invisible Power.

Today, I'm happy to share an excerpt from my interview with Sandra, published in The Future of the Workplace.

I hope you will find Sandra's message intriguing and worthy of further study.

To your forward-thinking life & great success!

— Bill

What does it take to get an employee's full attention and best performance?

When I walk around the corporations I work with, what strikes me is how busy people’s minds are. It is very difficult to get people’s full attention. What is needed is for all of us to realize how the human mind actually works.

When I saw that my experience can only come from thought in the moment, this realization took so much thinking off my mind.

I stopped fretting about things. I stopped thinking about whose fault it was. I stopped having these long dialogues in my head about why this was unfair and who was to blame and what I needed to do to feel good about myself. There’s so much extra thinking that people do. It keeps them preoccupied.

One of the results we hear from our clients when they realize how their minds actually work is they say to us, “Wow, I can’t believe how much more present I am!” They discover that when they become present, a whole set of capacities and abilities shows up. They feel more insightful. They feel more creative. They feel that they can see the bigger picture, so they get perspective. It’s not like they’re not already doing this, it’s that these capacities show up more often when their minds are free of unnecessary and unproductive thought.

You can tell people, “You just need to quiet your mind or clear your head or be mindful.” But that’s like telling people you just need to lose weight or stop smoking.

It’s great information, but to be able to pull it off, you have to see in the moment what actually is filling your head up. It was a surprise to me how much extra thinking I was doing that served no purpose other than to perpetuate an outside-in illusion. To get people’s full attention and best performance, we need to teach them and help them see for themselves how their minds actually work.

It’s interesting when you see how your mind works because at the same time you see how it doesn’t work. That’s the nature of seeing something as a paradigm. When you see something as a paradigm, it’s like putting a box around it. It’s definitive. It’s black and white. When I realized my experience was coming from thought in the moment and no place else, it eliminated all other possibilities. That realization rendered so much thinking useless.

My mind quieted down, my mind cleared and I could pay attention. I see this happening with the companies that we work with. It’s making a big difference.

Note: This is an excerpt taken from The Future of the Workplace. Sandra shares a lot more on how the minds works along with other experts on how the mind works in The Future of the Workplace.