Thinking is not effective
Perfection is like an unwritten number, something that can never be achieved, but it is still something that helps to find the meaning of life: the search and finding perfection in everything — no matter what — will reveal the mystery and meaning of life. Richard Bach writes about the Seagull, which wanted not only to eat, but also to fly, in flight honing skills and achieving perfection. Finding it is one of the methods and even ways of coaching.
“The crisis of meaning occurs when our accumulation of knowledge exceeds the moderate influence of our values. With the onset of the crisis, we lose the false sense of security created by the illusion of power and certainty that great knowledge gives us. Wisdom is higher than knowledge and much deeper than it. It provides foresight, is often paradoxical, and offers different kind of security to the person emerging from crisis,” writes John Whitmore, one of the “fathers” of modern coaching in his bestseller “high performance Coaching.” He states that coaching leads to wisdom: the view that you have on things, being unusual — a view from different sides — leads to the fact that you begin to understand things in their entirety. You begin to form, to create not your own opinion on things, but you begin to understand the real essence of things.
And when you understand this, you find that this understanding is not yours: it does not belong to you. It’s like the look of someone better than you who understands things differently from your usual understanding. It’s like an insight and an astonishing question after it: “What is it? I do not know and could not know this before!” This is actually the touch to perfection.
It is so simple, but it fills with such motivation that you do not want to stop, because perfection is unattainable: there is always something more perfect than you have achieved. And when you feel his breath next to you, it inspires so much that everything else does not matter.
Where to start? It would be good to start with the understanding that you know nothing. And if it seems that you know for sure that you do not understand anything, then you can ask yourself: do I really understand it deeply? Is it possible to understand it more deeply? Maybe to start suffering from it? To cry from powerlessness and feeling borders? The first and most important thing is always to understand that before you begin to push the boundaries of your nature and thinking, first you need to find these boundaries. And what helps to understand the limits of thinking? It’s possible by studying philosophy, trying to understand what great people understood, facing the limitations of understanding.
And when you begin to learn and understand — preferably together with friends, like-minded people or with a mentor who helps you, who shows you very different things and from a different angle — then this is the first step towards understanding your boundaries. You understand that it’s possible to push the boundaries. You will see the way how to move them. And this extension of boundaries is similar to what has just happened to you. Once you are convinced that they can be moved; then you break through them and see, and on the tenth attempt you begin to understand the technology.
This means that you have learned to learn. And now no one will forbid you to learn. Moreover, understanding the unusual in the usual knowledge, you will be delighted with it every time, surprised by this. And each time it will motivate you more and more. We know that all processes in the world are exponential. First comes the accumulation of quantity, then — the rise of quality and the transition to a new stage. Therefore, when you learn how to study, the learning process will be very different from that the regular one.
It will look approximately like this: you look at the field of knowledge, think about it for five minutes and then you express something beyond possible capabilities. Why? Because you can spend the minimum time at maximum efficiency. The best programs for training top managers are based on knowledge of the exponential development of thinking: to create those who do not spend much time on thinking.
Thinking is not effective. Much more efficient is to “put an on shelf” of thinking, wait five-ten minutes and obtain the answer, which you recognized. The answer is correct and indisputable, it is also the most effective of all existing.
So thinking looks like a fiery process: you threw the wood of knowledge into the furnace, and get the fire of solutions. But you don’t burn the fire “manually”: it ignites by itself. As you know, this is a very different type of thinking than we are all used to. It’s much more effective. To come to this type of thinking is to become a perfect disciple, that is, to learn from everyone and everything. And at the same time to develop exponentially, when you improve during a year more than other people do during the whole life.
In the West, people with such thinking are called coaches. What is the secret of the coach, or how to reveal the inner potential of a person? In one company I was asked: — When a conflict situation occurs — how to resolve it? I say, “ Very simply. Tell people directly what the problem is, and people will listen. — They said they didn’t listen. — Oh! So, it is necessary to become the one who is listened to. The root of effectiveness is in the personality of the manager.
There was a great Russian teacher Makarenko. He wrote a book about his work. This book is known to all teachers, but no one can repeat his feat. Why? Because it’s all about the personality of the teacher, his look. It’s important how the teacher looks at children. One child changes for the better, and the other — for the worse or does not change. And it is not because of having competencies and knowledge of the teacher: even the smartest ones demonstrate the worst performance.
So, look at children, the personality of the teacher — what it broadcasts in addition to the school subject — that’s what changes children or does not change them. And, indeed, the best coaches in the world have already realized that the secret of the development is concluded… in the personality of the coach.
Human development is the goal of coaching, and therefore the whole armada of coaches is constantly puzzling over how to make the development process more effective. How a coach develops people? I’ll tell you the secret. You will probably nowhere find this solution: it is necessary to see the future development in the other people. We must try not to imagine it, not to draw, not to visualize, but, looking into the essence of man, to find his more perfect essence — as miners find emeralds in the mines. And when a coach finds, sees these emeralds, he will be surprised: his look initiates development in people!
