A few years ago one of my clients came to the coaching session flustered and angry. A situation had arisen in the office shortly before our meeting which had upset her, and as we started the coaching conversation she launched right into venting her anger about her colleagues.
After letting her go on for a couple of minutes I asked her to rate the importance of this situation on a scale of one to ten, one being that the situation was really not important and ten meaning that the situation was exceptionally threatening.
With only a moment’s hesitation she replied: “Oh, it’s about a three I guess.”
As she heard herself say that, she stopped, smiled, relaxed and said: “I didn’t think of it like that. It really isn’t important enough to waste this much energy.”
What had happened was that she had allowed the situation to occupy centre stage in her thinking, and so it had grown larger than life, taken over her life and become an obsession. When she was encouraged to put the situation in context, in other words to think about her thinking, the situation found its proper place among the priorities she had to deal with.
We are distinguished among the animal kingdom by our sophisticated ability to reflect on our actions and to think about our thinking. Without that ability we would operate by instinct, responding to the same set of circumstance in the same way every time. And as I write that last sentence it does sound terribly familiar. Despite our ability to choose to think differently, to monitor our thoughts and adjust our behaviour to more appropriate responses, we still fall into default mode and run on instinct. We neglect our more sophisticated abilities and drop into responding to certain circumstances in the same way every time. Perhaps it is laziness, or perhaps it is that we are stressed and have neither the time nor the energy to monitor our thinking, but as a species gifted with superior intellect we are so often woefully inadequate in using it.
If we allow our thinking to go unchecked, in other words if we do not realize that we are thinking and are not conscious of the train of thought, it will lead us into situations such as the one my client found herself in. She had allowed her thinking to run from one thought to the next, from the cause of the anger through to full blown anger and a virtual mental hijack, simply because she hadn’t stopped to monitor whether her thinking was correct. She had allowed her thoughts to carry her to a place where she was simply unable to think. A question helped her to place the situation in its proper context, which in turn corrected her thinking. Instead of obsessing over a relatively unimportant situation, she was able to clear her mind and attend to issues that were really important.
The most effective way to monitor our thinking and to keep it at its most effective is to constantly ask questions of it. Just as my client’s thinking was brought back into line with a question, so any thought process can be assisted in the same way. Ask questions such as: How important is this? What would be the result of me doing this? What will happen if I don’t do this? When and why did I start thinking like this? Who is controlling my thinking, feelings, actions and emotions?
Thoughts and actions which are allowed to flow without being considered lead us to instinctual behaviour where we repeat the same actions, and often the same mistakes, as the past. To overcome that cycle we can challenge our thinking by asking it the when, where, what, how, why questions.
THINKING ABOUT THINKING - To learn more about this author, visit Jonathan Payne's Website.
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Jonathan Payne
(Visit Jonathan's Website)
Jonathan Payne has spent years studying
and working with human behaviour and has
facilitated numerous seminars in personal
effectiveness. He is a management and
executive coach, a professional speaker, a
facilitator of workshops and seminars for
businesses in effective performance, a
personality profiling practitioner and a
regular columnist in the local press.
Jonathan holds memberships of the National
Speakers Association of Southern Africa,
Coaches and Mentors of South Africa and
the Association of Psychological Type
International.You can contact him at jo
nathan@livingways.co.za
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