The Professional Thinker

ReInventing the Art of Thinking for the New Age Professional

"I have been running since I was 3. Running is intrinsic to being human. Why should I have to 'learn' how to run ?"- Navin blurted out at his friend angrily for advising him to join a conditioning camp for fine-tuning his running skills. "I don't need somebody to tell me how to run. All I need to do is to keep practicing and trying hard ..."

The Amateur Athlete

Navin's fury knew no bounds. He felt as if he was being told on his face that he wasn't good enough a runner. An innocent remark - "Why don't you join the conditioning camp like others have done ?" sounded to him like an insinuation that he didn't know how to run. "Next time, tell me to take a lesson in breathing. I am all ears ..." - yelled Navin at his friend fading out in the distance, still recovering from this reaction he had just experienced.

Ever since he was a child, Navin had nurtured the dream of being an international sprinter. He had always been quick ever since his primary school. He was his school's hero, darling of his friends and teachers, and had been dazzling everyone with his sprint, winning countless trophies for his school for very many years. It was only in the last few years that a lot of his competitors started attending an athletics academy, and shot their way ahead of him. He felt nothing short of having been "betrayed" by these academies - which according to him - were minting money by pulling the wool over the eyes of these unsuspecting youngsters. "I am too smart to be fooled into the gimmicks of these athletic academies".

Secretly, he also felt betrayed by his friends who had taken this short-cut to learn "how to run" from somebody else.

He practiced his heart out. He never missed an opportunity to compete. He was there for every tournament in his vicinity.

It was just that he wasn't winning anymore. At the beginning of each race, he would reiterate his burning desire to emerge victorious. He would clench his fists, tighten his arms, summon as much fire in his belly as he could, look at his competitors with fiery eyes. With his adrenaline peaking, he would shoot ahead at the gunshot... He felt great while he ran. He could feel how quicker he was getting by the day. Sadly, on reaching the finishing tape, he would realize that quite a few of them had already been there. He could never figure out when and how would others surge past his blizzard speed.

Navin's biggest fear was - he knew that with the passage of time, the thought would start sinking into him that he probably isn't cut out for running, and would be forced to let go of this dream. That - sent shivers down his spine.

He, however, prides himself in the fact that he has reached wherever he is by his own natural ability, hard work and iron will. Running, according to Navin, should be natural, spontaneous, and should come out of one's own innate ability. "It's a shame that people go to an academy to learn how to run" was the philosophy he lived by.

What Navin had clearly failed to realize was that an individual who depends solely on his intrinsic abilities to perform his tasks, could at best be labelled as an "amateur".

The Science of Gold

Navin's story might sound too far-fetched. Every athlete knows that while running is a natural ability inbuilt in humans - running at peak speeds requires much more than throwing the two feet forwards one at a time. Awareness of the bio-mechanics of the body reveals to the runner how to focus his entire strength and stamina towards achieving the peak performance.

No nation would field an athlete, howsoever much of a prodigy, in Olympics, without ensuring that the athlete is aligned to these skills. A raw talent, howsoever exceptional, should be streamlined before it can deliver international standard performance.

And yet, we spend a large part of our professional lives insisting on carrying out complex mental tasks without giving much thought to the psycho-dynamics of the mind.

Learning to run is not about learning how to move the feet forward alternately. Learning to run involves developing an awareness of the bio-mechanics of the body.

This is what the strategy of a program for conditioning an athlete's sprint would look like :

If we deconstruct the process of sprinting, there are broadly 3 parameters that influence the speed of running :

(a) lowering the number of strides, by taking larger strides

(b) reducing the interval between two strides

(c) cutting through the air-resistance. Air-resistance increases with the increase in speed.

Suppose an enthusiastic beginner athlete finds out that in order to sprint faster, one needs to take longer strides. With just that information - "I need to take longer strides" - an unsupervised enthusiast could try applying this "learning" by taking it at its face value. In the process, he would end up trying to increase his stride by over-extending his strides, resulting in a hop-like motion. This "over-extending of strides" could result in loss of balance, require a lot of effort to make that larger hop, increase the time-interval between two strides, eventually ending up slowing down the sprint speed, and creating innumerous injuries.

"Increasing the stride length" is the eventual goal of the athlete, and it cannot be achieved directly by "trying to take longer strides". The athlete needs to learn to take longer strides while maintaining the proper form and the proper motor patterns. In order to be able to take longer strides, the athlete needs to go through a certain process, the outcome of which would be increased stride lengths.

A professional coach would deconstruct the goal of "taking longer strides" into a series of subgoals -

(a) generating more power plyometrically - by applying short powerful backward thrust

(b) pressing the ground at the right angle

(c) raising the legs knee-high to ensure the right "flight" of steps

(d) avoiding dissipation of energy through unnecessary movement by keeping the torso and the hips locked

(e) maintaining the right angle of the arms to provide that forward swing of the body

All these need to be supported by stronger lower body and flexible legs.

The process of increasing one's stride length requires working on all these items independently through short drills. The drills could include hopping uphill, taking strides continuously on one foot, running on toes, and a thousand other exercises, which develop one or the other aspect mentioned above. The athlete practices these drills and over a period of time, discovers that his stride length increases naturally.

A conscious effort to increase one's stride length by over-extending only results in awkward, inefficient hops.

Navin didn't need to learn "how to run". He needed to explore the "mechanism of running" and the bio-mechanics of the body involved in the process.

What he needed to explore was the fascinating world of how the muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments of all parts of the body orchestrate to create the symphony of a running experience.

The fascinating world of "thoughts"

Just like running is much more than "the act of throwing one's feet forward alternatively", thinking is much more than juggling with a pool of thoughts fervently. Just "keep thinking" or "thinking harder" doesn't lead us to creative ideas and solutions. Just as an increased awareness of one's bio-mechanics leads to better utilization and coordination between muscles of different parts to generate power and speed, an increased awareness of one's psycho-dynamics leads to better utilization and coordination between different thinking muscles. This is the access to better learning, creativity and problem-solving.

Generally, we classify everything that passes through our mind-space as "thoughts". Often this includes memories, feelings, emotions, sensations as well. If we really think of it, "thoughts" isn't really a homogeneous entity. If we could see "thoughts", we would probably see a replica of the whole living kingdom, with hundreds of species of thoughts inhabiting our mind-space. From protozoans to complex dinosaurs, we have thoughts of all complexities.

To give an idea of how varied our thoughts are, consider a simple experience of "being lost in an unpleasant memory". The sequence of events being remembered, our angry responses to specific events, regrets over what we did or didn't say, resolutions to never forget this event, decisions about how to respond to such events in the future, a realization that this is now becoming too draining, deciding to skip thinking about this for now, frustration at not being able to put these thoughts away - each of these is a thought of a totally different species. Our thought streams is a complex mix of "data", "meta-data", "control-data", and a whole lot of stuff.

The realization that each thought-type is different and needs different handling is the starting point for transforming our relationships with thoughts.

Consider another example of a familiar thinking process - "trying to find an answer to a situation at hand". This is a small list of all the thought-types involved in the process :

• the perception of the need of a solution, which could include perception of a threat
• the desperation to seek an answer
• fetching all the relevant details from memory
• fetching relevant details by searching and sifting through various sources
• feeling of indecisiveness present throughout this process
• the process of analyzing all the relevant data
• trying to reach a decision
• evaluating each decision that arises in the process
• feeling bugged and insecure at the inability to reach a quick decision
• memories of incidents from the past of similar situations
• worry about what could go wrong if you do not take the right decision quickly
• ... a complex jambooree of thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, sensations ...

How much of the processing bandwidth of our mind-space is actually available for creating ideas and answers ?

Our minds function like processors with nearly 100% CPU utilization without running any app of our choice. The viruses have it all ...

The thinking world is replete with over-trivializations and cliches. The advises thrown all around us all the time - "forget your past and move ahead", "concentrate better", "think out of the box", "think hard", "be creative" do not mean anything, and do not result in anything.

Mental processes ain't that trivial to be regulated at will. We can neither command an unwanted thought to leave nor demand a much-needed thought to appear. Not to our thoughts. Not to others' thoughts.

When we seek a solution to a complex problem, we need to operate our thinking mechanism skillfully to get to the right answer. We need to steer the momentum of our thought streams to the desired destination.

When we communicate an idea with another person, we need to operate their thinking mechanism skillfully to get our ideas into their system. We need to steer the momentum of their thought streams to the desired destination.

Thoughts have very powerful momentums of their own. We can neither deliberately stop the thoughts we do not want nor deliberately generate the thoughts we need. The art of thinking requires us to be able to steer the momentum of these wild thought-streams within us to the desired destinations.

The notion of a "mechanism"

As long as a sprinter identifies himself with the process of running, a resolve of "I want to run faster" often translates to trying to run fast by putting in very hard effort. The identification of "I" wanting to "run faster" only results in clenched fists, tightened muscles, and a feverish throwing of arms and legs. "I need to take longer strides" naturally results in "I" trying to hop longer and over-extend his legs. This identification of "I" with the process is the hindrance to smooth execution.

The emergence of a trained athlete begins with letting go of this identification. When the athlete starts to look at his body as a mechanism that operates according to its own laws, the athlete would be able to study how this mechanism operates. By creating this distance between himself and his body, the athlete begins to observe objectively all the factors that influence running. This enables him to work out on all those factors independently. During the actual process of sprinting, all these improvements converge, resulting in a faster sprint.

Likewise, identification with the thinking process leads to huge blind spots in the process of thinking. When we are overwhelmed by a problem, we do not even realize what's going on in our mind-space. We just go through the motions - as a complete victim of the momentum of thought streams. Eventually, we land up wherever these thought streams lap us onto.

The first step of becoming an effective thinker is to let go of this identification with the thinking process. We need to step back and create a distance from the thinking mechanism.

When we observe our thinking mechanism in action, we move over from being a victim of our thought streams to the controller of the thought streams. We learn for ourselves what factors influence our thinking process, and how we could fine-tune all those factors, resulting in improved efficiency and effectiveness of thinking.

The thinking mechanism is a very real mechanism - just like the human body. It operates in a very precise way. This mechanism needs to be skillfully operated and steered to take it to the desired destinations. Just like the body cannot be commanded to run faster, the thinking mechanism cannot be commanded to produce the desired answer or a creative idea. Just as we need to change the way we operate our bodies to make it run faster, we need to change the way we operate our thinking mechanism for it to produce better results.

The Trained Thinking Professional

A "trained thinking professional", just like a trained athlete, performs at a whole new level. A trained thinking professional is beyond all cliched limitations prevalent in the professional world. A trained thinking professional could solve in minutes what others take hours to get started with. Handling of complex projects, creation of intricate design and architecture, programming and fixing bugs, invention of new algorithms, scientific research, academics, communication, marketing strategies - they all take a new dimension when approached with a trained thinking mind-set. A trained thinking professional who understands how to operate his thinking machinery is more efficient than dozens of professionals groping in the dark put together. The effectiveness of a trained thinking professional is not just limited to the efficiency, but in his ability to handle complexity. This, often, is the decisive factor in whether a job gets done or not.

The sheer number of projects overshooting time and budget deadlines, the number of startups winding up prematurely, the increased noise and indecisiveness in all discussions, the increasing stress and deteriorating health of professionals world-wide embed an implicit reach-out cry for the need of a more trained, professional approach to thinking.

Software projects getting stymied due to poor design, programmers struggling to implement complex tasks, failure of the "cutting-edge-but-ineffective" programming methodologies and management techniques are striking evidence that relying solely on the individual's innate thinking ability, or a "one-size-fits-all-processes" are not sufficient for the new-age professional demands from individuals or the corporate.

A trained thinking professional experiences a new world of cognitive abilities. Learning, teaching, problem-solving, programming, communicating, brainstorming, strategizing, managing people and resources - every "intellectual" skill gets completely transformed by bringing in a streamlined, trained, thinking process.

It all starts with a simple realization - "we are not thinking dummies". We need not be victims of the random, murky, whirlpool of our thoughts. We carry a powerful thinking mechanism within us. We have just not realized its full potential, nor gained access to its instruction manual. When we learn to step back, observe and operate this thinking mechanism, we become capable of pull off intellectual miracles at will - in our personal as well as professional lives.

How could we create a distance with the thinking mechanism and learn to observe and operate the mechanism skillfully ?

Other articles :

The Science of Deep Thinking

Taking Problems Head-On

Diving Into Deep Thinking

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