What makes our LEAP unlike any other? Part 5: We develop LEAP Thinkers not Leap Takers

Your mindset is the collection of thoughts and beliefs that shape your mental attitude and thought habits and determine how you interpret and respond to events, circumstances and situations. Your mindset, therefore, affects how you make sense of the world, and how you make sense of yourself. Building the right thoughts into your mindset is very powerful as it is an important source of creativity and imagination; which is critical in the process of self-innovation and leaping.

We are all naturally wired to have an opportunity mindset, e.g. to believe that we can have purpose and be self-fulfilled. We have the power in us to thrive instead of strive. However, life has groomed us to adopt a negative mindset that keeps us feeling stuck, frustrated and playing small. If we want to leap authentically from where we are now to where we want to be, we need to reset our mindsets back to its natural positive and opportunistic state. We do this by transforming the way we think, feel, and choose. Research by neuroscientists, such as William Klemm in his book Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate, indicates that we can cause structural changes in our brains if this transformation is deep enough. This means that you can redesign your brain with your mindset by choosing to be more optimistic and adopting healthy thinking practices such as the mental self-care techniques you will learn on The LEAP Journey. The process of realigning your mindset back to your natural authentic design is integral to a fulfilled life. It is about deliberately and intentionally paying attention to what you think, feel and do in a self-reflective and self-regulatory way. And it all depends on what you choose to think about.

On The LEAP Journey, you are encouraged to think about your thinking, i.e. to learn and change your behaviour through deep conscious thinking or the application of meaningful cognitive skills. We are not interested in the learning that is associated with short-term memory. Our learning experiences develop the kind of intelligence that will help you intellectualise, reason, solve problems and make wise choices. As mentioned in a previous blog post you will specifically develop four key meta-competencies on The LEAP Journey, namely existential intelligence (to be life-smart), intrapersonal intelligence (to be self-smart), interpersonal intelligence (to be people-smart), and professional intelligence (to be work-smart). We are not designed to remember everything. We are designed to remember what we need to succeed. This requires comprehension and deep, focused understanding.

In order to leap, we do not only need to learn the right things, but also in the right way. In her book Think, Learn, Succeed: Understanding and using your mind to thrive at school, the workplace, and life, Dr Caroline Leaf explains that we each have a unique way of thinking; also called our customised thinking. Our thinking is different from the way everybody else thinks and enables us to create our own realities. If we understand how we think, we can use it to our advantage, and function on a higher level to create meaningful realities filled with purpose. As mentioned before, the way we think is so powerful that it changes our genetic expression; constantly restructuring our brains. We have control over our thinking, feeling and consequently the way we act. To use your customised thinking is to be authentically you. If we go against this way of thinking, we are working against who we truly are. This can lead to frustration, losing our sense of inner peace, and poor performance. On The LEAP Journey, we guide you, using Dr Leaf’s approach, to move back into your customised thinking to repair your brain and body through your thoughts – all possible because of the neuroplastic nature of our brains. On The LEAP Journey, we teach you about the different modules of thinking, and your unique thought cycle and how to use it. This will allow you to be ‘you’ and to work out strategies that maximise your ability to think, learn, and succeed in your unique way.

People tend to separate thoughts and feelings into different compartments of mental experience and even prioritise the one over the other. We are all familiar with the saying “I think, therefore I am” by the philosopher René Descartes to explain that the act of thinking guarantees the existence of the self. Milan Kundera, the well-known author of books such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in the last of the trilogy, Immortality, offers another parody to this line when he says: “I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid”. When Carl Jung studied human behaviour, he noticed that people have the capability to make decisions based on two very different sets of criteria: thinking and feeling. When someone makes a decision that is based on logic and reason, they are operating in thinking mode. When someone makes a decision that is based on their value system, or what they believe to be right, they are operating in feeling mode. We all use both modes for making decisions, but we put more trust into one mode or the other. Incidentally, one of brain science’s most important discoveries is the critical role of emotions in ensuring our survival and allowing us to think. Feeling, it turns out, is not the enemy of reason, but an indispensable accomplice.

What role do our emotions play in decision-making? Some might say it’s a fairly contentious question. But, understanding the role emotions play and why we act impulsively when we do, might help with better decision-making. By now, this debate is well documented. Psychologists have written thousands of papers on the subject. The neuroscientist António Damásio, for example, in his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, posits that rationality requires emotional input. He argues that René Descartes’ “error” was the dualist separation of mind and body, rationality and emotion. Probably the most famous person who has advocated the view that emotions are key to learning or behaviour is Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics. Kahneman’s studies showed that there’s a rapid, irrational, shoot-from-the-hip way to make decisions, which is important in the behavioural side of economics. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow Kahneman provides a brain model that shows that feeling, is a form of thinking. Both thinking and feeling are ways we process information, but feeling is faster. Kahneman uses the term “system” to explain his thinking. He claims that the brain has two systems that determine our behaviour. System 1 is fast, automatic and intuitive. System 2 is the slower, analytical mode, where reason dominates. Both these systems help the brain to operate efficiently and manifest itself in different ways in our behaviour. Our mind is lazy and tends to go for the least effort, i.e. we tend to go for quick System 1 choices as System 2 consumes more energy. This often leads to error as we lack enough information to make rational decisions. Then also, intuitive information processing has typically been considered irrational, but System 1’s fast thinking is often logical and useful. Conversely, despite being conscious and deliberate, System 2 can produce poor (sometimes irrational) results. Additionally, we cannot trust our memories, as our minds don’t remember experience in a straightforward way. Instead, we tend to remember our feelings more than the actual event as a whole. By understanding how our mind works, we can adjust our focus and dramatically change our thoughts and consequently our behaviour. Using System 1 mode of thinking, makes us more creative and relaxed. System 2 thinking makes us better in rational thinking and decision-making.

The work of Kahneman and others are consistent with the idea – as explained in one of our previous blog posts – of a dance that should take place between art and science on The LEAP Journey. Not only should we think about thinking, but also at times feel our thinking. Like dancing, we should sometimes get out of our head (our thinking) and into our feelings. In The LEAP Journey’s Triple Diamond Redesign for Self-Innovation we illustrate this dual behavioural practice by distinguishing between divergent and convergent thinking in the process of redesigning yourself. Divergent thinking is about generating new ideas but also about triggering conflicts between opposing ideas, between old and new ideas. Someone who thinks this way, works through leaps; not through “small steps”. They operate not only with relevant elements, but also with the irrelevant ones (counter-intuitive behaviour is after all typical of creativity). Divergent thinking also means to allow the spontaneous elements of thought to influence a systematic way of thinking or vice versa. In the convergent thinking process, choice is deliberate and conscious. Criteria are purposefully applied as we screen, select, evaluate, and refine the options, all the while knowing that raw ideas still need development. Additionally, research shows that carrying out a task that requires creative thinking affects people’s mood. Moreover, divergent and convergent thinking impact one’s mood in opposite ways: divergent thinking improves one’s mood while convergent thinking lowers it.

We have the distinct advantage over other animals of having both instinct and reason at our disposal. So, we don’t actually have to reject either morality or instinct; rather, we have the capacity to honour and call upon both. We don’t have to reject scientific logic to benefit from instinct. We can honour and call upon all of these tools, and we can seek balance. And by seeking this balance we will finally bring all the resources of our brain into action. Until about a hundred years ago, science wasn’t even aware of the role of our unconscious mind, but studies now show that an enormous portion of cognitive activity is non-conscious. William Klemm suggests that perhaps a more useful term for these kinds of thoughts is “subconscious”; a term popularised by Freud (one of his ideas that has not been discredited). According to Emanual Donchin, a psychologist from the University of Illinois, up to 95 percent of our thoughts are subconscious. In his book Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will, Klemm suggests that we consciously think about something only after it has registered subconsciously. The conscious is an expert at logic and will use it relentlessly. Conversely, the subconscious mind searches through the past, present, and future and connects with hunches and feelings in a nonlinear way. Its process is cryptic to the logical mind, as it defies the conventional laws of time and space.

In an article that appeared in the MIT Sloan Management Review only a few days ago, Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony, suggest that despite leaders’ tendency to make strategic decisions intuitively, a more structured approach is needed. They propose that each major decision be divided into subcomponents and be evaluated independently. This contrasts with the intuitive way strategic decisions are usually made. It doesn’t mean that intuition or gut-level thinking should be taken out of the decision-making process entirely. But, that independent qualities in any decision be identified and evaluated separately and explicitly, before trying to make an overall decision. At the LEAP Academy, we agree with the approach of Kahneman and his colleagues to encourage conscious thinking and to balance it with intuitive thinking. To guide our clients as self-leaders to do just this, we use a LEAP Thinker Journey Map (refer to the diagram below). This map guides and tracks their behaviour as they progress through their learning experience. The map reflects real-time data on their real-life experiences and connects them to the hard metrics we care about on The LEAP Journey. It serves as a visual illustration of a client’s learning experience. The journey map guides our clients, as Kahneman and his colleagues suggest, to follow a disciplined approach to decision-making, while also providing for and capturing their emotions during each step of the journey. An evaluation of experiences during each phase of The LEAP Journey is required.