“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see” wrote Henry David Thoreau.
What is that little voice in your head saying now? Is that constant tsunami of thoughts really you? Or can you just for a moment, be mindful and create some space, treating that flood of judgements as a third party speaker?
Business is a game - defined by rules, jam-packed with playful moves, aiming for a targeted outcome. To play the game, it helps to step back see the big picture. And most importantly, to ‘think about thinking’ – to be curious, on how one sees.
Despite recent advances in artificial intelligence, the world’s most sophisticated computer is sitting on your shoulders.
Make distinctions
The ability to create distinctions is one step on the path to Solomon-like wisdom. When we think of our mind, how we think it helps to create the distinction: brain, mind and consciousness.
Our “brain is a complex organ that controls thought, memory, emotion, touch, motor skills, vision, breathing, temperature, hunger and every process that regulates our body,” according to physicians at John Hopkins. Our mind is the source of awareness, and human consciousness remains a mystery.
Create some space
As a manager, it helps to be able to detach, pull back and imagine you are able to see yourself from across the room. Trapped in a ‘stimulus – response’ loop, one has all the sophistication of a single-celled amoeba.
Feeling > emotion > reaction is the 'default' decision-making process for most managers. When you are making decisions, for example, trying to come up with a plan or a higher level strategy with a distinctive approach, and your buttons are being pushed by fickle emotions, this is what author Robert Greene calls 'tactical hell'. One can pretty much predict the 'autopilot' response, there is no choice.
Who is talking?
Are you that little voice in our head? Or, is it best to ‘disengage’, and consider perhaps that the voice is like a third party, that at times, just generates noise?
Mo Gawdat, the former chief business officer of the Google moon shot innovation division, explains that we may need to reconsider, reframe how we think about that inner voice, if it is a biological product of our brain.
The biological function of your kidneys is to extract toxins and waste matter out of your system and remove them from your body in the form of urine. None of us thinks that we are the biological products of our kidneys.
And while on a bad day, guilt can make some of us feel like we’re a piece of … number two, nobody believes that poop is the essence of who they are. ‘I breathe, therefore I am’ is not true either. You are not the carbon dioxide that you exhale. Why then do we believe that we are the biological product of our brain?
If thinking is a biological function, then a thought is analogous to urine and carbon dioxide. It is just a biological product.
This idea has a lot to support it. Your brain, fundamentally, is a three-pound lump of meat, just another biological organ concerned with your survival. The product it produces to aid with that altruistic purpose is thought.
Although humans have managed to push our brains to the point where they have created iPhones and built civilisation as we know it, the original function those brains were designed for is entirely focused on keeping us alive.
To do that, our brains analyse the world around us, turn our complex environment into simple concepts that we can grasp and then turn those concepts into words (the only building block of knowledge we can comprehend).
With this knowledge, we can make the all-important decisions needed to survive, and then implement those in the form of orders given to the different parts of our bodies so we can remain safe.
“That’s it, really. Your brain is your inner voice. It’s the one telling you what’s going on and suggesting how things should be. It is the one making all the noise” writes Gawdat, in his 2022 book That Little Voice in Your Head.
