“When love and skill work together, expect a master piece.” ~ John Ruskin
My youngest daughter, a second-year university student, recently went to her sorority’s annual house dance. A week before the event she still didn’t have a date. Out of sheer desperation, she finally asked someone who she recently met while camping with friends. Little did she know that this young man was not just a nice guy, but also an excellent social ‘ballroom’ dancer. The problem was that my daughter cannot dance (or “sokkie” as we call this style of dancing in South Africa) and, strong-minded as she is, she was not interested in learning to do so soon. Dancing free style was more her thing. I was quite surprised, therefore, when I spoke to her the next morning and she told me how amazing the night was, because she learned to “sokkie”, and she loved it. Later that day, she posted a picture on Instagram of her and the young man with the following quote from Samuel Beckett to demonstrate how she was taught to dance: “Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order”.
At the LEAP Academy we help our clients reinvent their lives and find purpose and direction. Our approach is like the one the young man used when he taught my daughter to dance. We operate from the stance that all of us are fundamentally already perfectly us. The blueprint of our identity is a brilliant design that unlocks something only we can do. By removing the outer layers of our being we discover this perfectness which includes our innate ability to be creative (especially if creativity is understood as a problem-solving skill). We can all think for ourselves and think outside the “proverbial box”. Our creative potential is unlimited. It is like a blank page on which we can draw anything.
Unfortunately, many of us underutilise this creative ability. Creatives are often ostracised for being ‘weird’ or ‘different’ with no real understanding or appreciation of the contribution they make to society. Although talented and dedicated, their work, regrettably, only acquires ‘value’ after their departure from a company or upon leaving this world. Think of Vincent Van Gogh, Emily Dickinson, Claude Monet, Johan Sebastian Bach, and many others. However, with the rise in awareness that yesterday’s solutions increasingly fail to meet tomorrow’s challenges, the need to look at problem-solving differently becomes evident. With The LEAP Journey we support changing the status quo. We invite individuals who want to embark on a journey to change themselves and their destinations, to transform their problem-solving thinking process from one based on science (isolated datasets, facts, and observations), into a more artistically holistic approach that is fundamentally intuitive. Rather than trying to add A + B to come up with C, we promote stepping back and seeing patterns in the alphabet and reflecting on how such patterns can reveal one’s future.
You may argue that you already possess the awareness to detect and respond to changes in your environment. In reality, like so many other successful people, you are most probably taking in information by sensing rather than by intuition. The difference can best be explained with reference to the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) which is an introspective self-report questionnaire with the purpose of indicating differing psychological preferences in how we perceive the world around us and make decisions. Myers & Briggs distinguish between sensing and intuition. Sensing, they explain, is paying attention to information that comes in through your senses. You make decisions based on your experience of what is real and what exists in front of you. With intuition, however, you focus less on details and facts, and more on feelings and impressions, and you solve problems by pondering them rather than engaging in hands-on experience. At the LEAP Academy we’ve found that when individuals want to reinvent themselves, they benefit from shifting between a sensing methodology and an intuitive one.
Many people who apply a sensing approach, sometimes struggle to become effective. They focus on flaws and apply the “stick” approach (punish themselves for failure to meet their goals). Instead, they should learn to think “big picture”, see possibilities, and apply the “carrot”, which has enormous potential for enlivening creativity. Creative problem-solvers do not take a conservative linear approach to their decisions. They first weed out obviously underdeveloped ideas, and then focus on their vision and drive the idea with enthusiasm and commitment. Their capacity to connect the dots to see the big picture is more valuable than the ability of literal-minded analysts and controllers to weigh risks by applying past formulas to tomorrow’s world. To successfully reinvent yourself, you must allow yourself to be led by your vision and your intuition. A great example is the late Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs stumbled onto his intuition – an experience he later described as “priceless” – through deep soul searching when, in his early youth and before Apple Inc., he embarked on a 7-month spiritual quest to India. He later encouraged several Tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s CEO), Larry Page (Google’s CEO), Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay), and others to also visit India to contemplate the future of their companies. He was of the opinion that “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect”.
Transformational coaches often focus on teaching their clients tools and techniques to try and help them solve a specific problem. On The LEAP Journey, we advocate a creative problem-solving process that combines techniques as well as a fundamental change in how individuals make decisions for problem-solving. This process can be illustrated by how we take in information. In science we focus on past and present as well as the known and familiar. Scientists prefer to take in information that is real and tangible – that which is actually happening. They are observant about the details of what is going on around them and are especially attuned to practical realities. At the other end of the continuum is the artistic quality of intuition, a holistic approach that focuses on the future as well as on the new and different; this approach leads to a reliance on one’s inner voice. People with a preference for intuition like to take in information by seeing the big picture and by focusing on relationships and connections between facts. They want to grasp patterns and are especially attuned to seeing possibilities.
In the creative problem-solving process both intuition and sensing are used. When considering the two stages of idea generation and idea evaluation within this process, we can see that these two styles both come into play, but at different times in the process. During the idea generation stage, the problem-solver gains a starting idea by relying on a gut feeling about information which he/she had acquired (also through sensing) gradually over time. He/she then intuitively combines separate chunks of data about what could work and, by recognising patterns and making associations, boils them down to form a new coherent idea. Intuition doesn’t solve the entire problem but grants an idea which is purposefully selected. At the end of the idea evaluation stage the problem-solver then works analytically by applying his/her senses to judge whether the creative idea is suitable for addressing the problem and what further steps are needed.
Most people prefer either one or the other of these two styles to a greater or lesser extent. However, people can also learn to develop and effectively use their less dominant style. To reinvent yourself you must use your existing knowledge, but also develop your ability to utilise your intuition, regardless of your underlying preference.
But, how do you elicit your intuition and tap into this natural ability? Instead of focusing on your outside system when trying to solve problems, you should focus on the inner you. Like dancing, you should get out of your head (your thinking) and into your feelings. Thoughts and feelings are two sides of the same coin. Every thought has a feeling and every feeling a thought. You should focus on the feeling of your thinking, not on the outside world and on your experiences. During this intuitive process, you momentarily suspend any thoughts or ideas about reality and the outside world and focus on the thoughts inside that make you feel a certain way. Being present and in the moment when you must solve a problem, will set your intuition in motion and help you to find the original solution you seek.
When you feel caught up with everything happening in your life, or you feel stuck or lost, quiet the noise in your head. Don’t think too much about your problem, try to feel it. You will find that the solution seems to come from nowhere; that the dots just connect. If you think too much or plan too much it will become a barrier between you and your solution. What will come to you in the moment, is much more powerful. Once you understand this, you will be unstoppable, and just as George Bernard Shaw, you will be able to say: “Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’. I dream of things that never were and say ‘why not’”.
Unlike other coaching programs, The LEAP Journey offers opportunities to increase an individual’s awareness about the implications of using both science (sensing) and art (intuition) during the information-gathering steps of decision-making, within the problem-solving process. We enhance individuals’ ability to shift styles toward intuition where appropriate. This is uncharted territory. From our coaching experience, we learned that it is often frightening for people who have successfully used one style and are now confronted with the challenge of adopting a different style.
Promoting this kind of shift is difficult. What encourages us, is the many examples over our lifetime of underestimating opportunities as illustrated by quotes such as these: “The phonograph is not of any commercial value”, Thomas Edison; “Man will not fly for 50 years”, Wilbur Wright, 1903; and “I think there is a world market for about five computers”, Thomas Watson, founder of IBM. To be more accurate in their assessment, these individuals would have had to activate their intuitive processes and see into the future rather than constantly looking in the rear-view mirror.
It is time that we recognise that our world today requires dreamers, not gatekeepers. Currently, trainers and coaches often focus on developing tools, and miss the opportunity to explore the inner processes that lead to behavioural change in their clients. This is what we in our LEAP and The LEAP Journey do differently.
References:
- Briggs Myers, I. & Myers, P. B. (1995). Gifts differing: Understanding personality type.Mountain View, California: Davies-Black.
- Leaf, C. (2017). The Perfect You: A Blueprint for Identity. Grand Rapids: Baker Books.
- The Myers & Briggs Foundation. Available at: https://www.myersbriggs.org
- Neill, M. (2013). The Inside-Out Revolution: The Only Thing You Need to Know to Change Your Life Forever. London: Hay House.
- Pétervári, J., Osman, M. & Bhattacharya, J. (2016). The Role of Intuition in the Generation and Evaluation Stages of Creativity. Frontiers in Psychology. 7, pp. 1420. Published online on 20 September 2016. Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5028408/
