Breaking Through to Thought Leadership | Get hold of YOUR best thoughts…it’s worth the effort (PG-13)

Seeking: A breakthrough to your best, most valuable, innovative thoughts

What if you could reliably have access to the best thoughts you have inside you, that maybe you don’t even know you’re capable of yet?  You know, the most inventive and most valuable to your market, the ones that make everyone around you go ‘Ooooh, how did you come up with that??’

And then starts a rash of ripoffs?

What if, like a woman’s eggs, we are born with the number of unique thoughts we’ll have available over a lifetime, and if not birthed in some shape or form, these unique-to-us treasures of DNA are lost?

What is the sound of an intellectual clock ticking, I wonder?

In my spare time, I’ve been thinking a lot about thought leadership for business owners who want to be of service as information marketers. If information is our offering, doesn’t it pay to think about the quality of it, and kaizen the process once in a while?

Things like how to ‘do’ thought leadership and be a leader to whom people turn for inspiration, for example. To take the place in your tribe as the ‘one’ who nourishes the minds of others, the thought-mother-ship, from which others derive their work?

What if you had access to the antidote, homeopathic of course, to the fate of the mass-produced expert who, clinging to the conviction that if you only read 20 books on a topic, it gives you the right to teach it. Have you watched these dinosaurs slowly but surely become irrelevant if left alone without fresh input?

Considering this, does it become important then, to learn how to nourish your mind as the performance machine it is, setting up your environment so your best thoughts flourish, and care, tenderly, for the ‘unbirthed eggs of your mind?’

I think you’d agree – the vast majority of people don’t have much clear thought. They confuse their thoughts with themselves, with no separation in between. Their emotions permanently short-circuit the masterpieces that would be their thoughts, if they weren’t umbilical-cord plugged into the television, etc.

There’s a giant chemical soup bowl of toxic, inbred thought in the room, and we aren’t talking much about it.

So what are some of the ingredients in the recipe for getting hold of YOUR best thoughts? It’s not exactly a well trodden road, but I’ve found it fascinating and worth the effort.

Here’s some of the thought-stream to start:

(1) Your best thoughts are sexy.

AKA “Creativity is a fundamentally sexual act.” — Deepak Chopra

Wow! Have you ever thought of what you do, creatively, as sexy? It’s still not common to speak plainly about sex in business circles (though Marie Forleo certainly breaks that taboo) but there is a definite, concrete correlation between the energy and chemistry of sex, and creativity…a fun avenue to explore, with sometimes surprising, and quick, results.

(2) Your best thoughts dislike certainty.

“Learning is what happens when you really (really) don’t know what to do.”

Knowing, or being certain, in my experience, suffocates the best thinking. Think about it— being absolutely, positively, incredibly sure about something is the giant full stop at the end of the creative sentence.

Instead of knowing all the time, or seeking the comfort and security of knowing, what if you sought the opposite?

Into the space of not knowing, I wonder if some of those thought-eggs would see fit to hatch?

(3) Your best thoughts need you to forget.

In my imagination, there is an illness in which the patience can’t forget anything. Everything that happens, they remember, and store, all the data. Feelings, thoughts, sensations, actions. Every day, they are prevented from leaving the confines of their prescribed familiar space, because to do otherwise would require them to remember more things.

So many of us spend energy attempting to stuff our brain with more facts, as if our brain, that lovely, lobed, moist thing, were a storage unit in a continent full of mini-storage complexes.

What if you could get where you want to get not by remembering more, but forgetting? What if it were essential?

Which brings us to the adventure of  ‘remembering to forget.’

Stay with me here, as there is a short but highly telling exercise in Feldenkrais, the revolutionary learning system that uses the body, that dramatically highlights remembering to forget:

“Stand up and go to touch your toes. Don’t force it, it’s not a gym class. Just make a movement that takes you closer to your toes.” In the class, various stages of reaching ones toes can be seen.

“Now, without pushing forward, without straining, make an adjustment in your body to release the muscles of your back.” One by one, some, not all the participants, but many, find themselves dropping closer to their toes.

In the parlance of Feldenkrais, this is all about excitation and inhibition, the two things that make up every waking movement. To move toward something, in this case your toes, you need to stop your back muscles from holding you up. Otherwise, you are fighting your back muscles by pushing on the muscles of your front, in a tug of war of effort to get somewhere.

In other words, to achieve the goal, stopping doing something is just as important as doing something. Breaking through to your best thoughts requires you to stop doing things, so the right things can start.

This one thing alone has been one of the most valuable lessons of the year for me, in terms of productivity, creativity and freedom.

And that, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, is all I got to say about that. At least for now. Perhaps we might we hear from you, next, if you remember…!

What about this idea of breaking through to YOUR best thoughts strums you? If we explore further, will it help make your work easier, the quality of your offerings shine? What do you think? What sticks?

Yours in thinking about thinking, I remain…

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