“Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Just Do It” is not only Nike’s slogan but also a motivational call to action frequently used to move people into action. This was also the message of a TED Talk I recently watched. The highly energetic (and clearly action-oriented speaker) urged the audience to get outside their comfort zones and just do it. Just like the athletes that appear in Nike’s ads, her advice was to be forceful, direct and competitive. “Get outside your head and screw your feelings… You will never ‘feel’ the need to act”, she said. “You have to force yourself”. If you do not marry your urge to act with an action in five seconds you will pull the ‘emergency break’ in your brain, she continued to say. On the surface, one cannot fault her message as it is definitely effective in getting people to move into action, but is it really that simple to achieve success? At the LEAP Academy, we know it is not. Especially In the new world of work, you will not be successful if you quiet your mind and your heart and only focus on action.
What makes some people today more successful in life and career than others? It is not the good fortune to come from a wealthy family, or a good education either, as plenty of underemployed, but highly educated people can attest. It is not in having a rags-to-riches story, nor is it in being in the right place at the right time. The answer to life and career success and satisfaction is to become an authentic self-leader. Self-leadership, according to Andrew Bryant and Ana Kazan, is “having a developed sense of who you are, what you can do, were you are going; coupled with the ability to influence your communication, emotions and behaviours on the way to getting there”. When you are an authentic self-leader, you are the author of your own life; this means you know what’s important to you and what you want to achieve, and you make choices accordingly. Hence, when you are the captain of the ship, you get to decide which way to sail and how you will get there. And like any good captain, you will need to plan your journey properly. For this, you need to use your brain…
At the LEAP Academy we argue that thinking plays an important role in skilfully handling practical situations in the process of reinventing yourself. For this reason, we call those on The LEAP Journey ‘LEAP Thinkers’. To understand why LEAP Thinkers, and people in general, are successful, we need to see them not as racehorses, but as intellectual human beings. To understand LEAP Thinkers as successful self-leaders, we need to understand how they think and take skilled action.
The philosopher Barbara Gail Montero at the City University of New York calls the view that thought is the enemy of skill, the “just-do-it” view. According to the just-do-it view, skilled action at its best is associated with ‘flow’ experiences that leave no space for thought. When we start thinking about what we are doing, skill breaks down in distinctive ways. It is easy to think ourselves into the just-do-it view. So often, athletes, artists and musicians are fluid in their field of practice but inarticulate in explaining how they achieve success. In essence, they have mastered something that led to habitual behaviour that does not require thinking. Cognitive scientists Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr call this phenomenon ‘expertise-induced amnesia’. There is experimental evidence that certain kinds of thinking can undermine performance, e.g. a study by Linda Schücker and Lucy Parrington in 2018, found that asking runners on a treadmill to focus on their form or breathing, led them to burn more oxygen, and be less efficient. According to the just-do-it view, skilful action can be described as an immediate response to what a situation requires. It does not flow from deliberate intention. It seems effortless.
What then, is the alternative to the just-do-it theory? The English philosopher Gilbert Ryle in the ‘Concept of Mind” is not a proponent of the just-do-it view. Unlike the just-do-it view, he believes that thought is central to skill. Ryle also opposes the Cartesian view of the mind, which he calls ‘intellectualism’. Intellectualism tries to explain the intelligence of skilful actions in terms of inner acts of contemplation. According to this view, “when a middle-distance runner kicks at the right time in order to out-sprint her competitors, it must be because she considered relevant facts about the right time to kick before kicking”. Ryle does not agree with the intellectualist’s picture of what either skill or thought is. In his view, thought cannot be understood as inner speech or contemplation, but is rather a distinctive learning-oriented engagement with the world.
Ryle believes that in skilful action, individuals are both doing and teaching themselves how to do something at the same time, i.e. they are “thinking on their feet”. For Ryle, thinking is something that we do during our actions. Each action is an experiment, with the results closely monitored and feeding into future actions. The skilful person tries out different ways to negotiate his environment and exercises his judgment; all the time being aware of his movements. His actions are both deliberate and deliberative. Thus, skilful action is intelligent not because it involves putting knowledge into action, but because it is a distinctive kind of learning in action. In later works, Ryle calls this activity ‘self-teaching’, and gives it a central role in his account of skill. He makes two distinctive claims: that self-teaching is a general feature of skill, and that self-teaching is a kind of thinking. More specifically Ryle thinks of self-teaching as a kind of creative problem-solving, involving the application of problem-solving techniques.
At the LEAP Academy we support Ryle’s view of a middle way between the just-do-it view and intellectualism. We agree with the just-do-it view that conscious thought is not a requirement of skill, but support the alternative view of thinking as creative problem-solving, claiming that this kind of thought is a requirement of the skilled action of self-leaders, which is essential in the new world of work.
Navigating your own transformation in a complex world requires some novelty, and in order to succeed we need to take these contingencies into account. We need to vary our behaviour, working out how to deal with each situation as it unfolds before us. It is like building a picture puzzle. With simple puzzles, it will be possible to just ‘see’ the solution, but with more complicated puzzles, getting there requires some creativity: applying general puzzle-solving techniques, breaking down the puzzle into chunks, and working out simpler versions of the puzzle. With the puzzle example, it is easy to think about the solver as self-teaching by thinking her way through the process. On The LEAP Journey, LEAP Thinkers follow a similar process. We use Design Thinking. Design Thinking is a mindful approach to problem-solving that builds on successes, but also learns from past mistakes. It incorporates trial-and-error experiments, which in Design Thinking is called ‘prototyping’.
LEAP Thinkers as Design Thinkers have a certain disposition. They possess a mind-set that doesn’t get flustered by ambiguity; in fact, they are inspired by it. They’re obsessed with imagining what might be possible – driven to challenge the status quo. Design Thinkers take a holistic approach to understanding the problem from multiple angles and from stakeholder perspectives. They believe that in exploring the shadows, you’ll uncover the underserved need, the unique opportunity. Combining the capabilities to ‘think like a designer’ with the methodologies to ‘work like a designer’ any individual will be able to adapt to turbulent times and not be paralysed by it.
The challenges we address on The LEAP Journey are usually big and complex, such as what your next career move should be. It requires novel solutions as it is the only way you can truly reinvent or innovate yourself. If, for example, you seek and are willing to take any job opportunity that comes your way, you do not need to be on The LEAP Journey. Authentic self-leaders seek solutions to their problems that are true to who they are and that will give them the edge and put them forward more quickly.
At the LEAP Academy we believe that there is a good case to be made for the idea that thinking during the process of leaping involves self-teaching as a form of self-leadership. LEAP Thinkers commit to a process of continuous improvement, which spans both practice and performance. Self-leadership is a process; it’s something we do every day, and over time it becomes a natural habit. The process of deliberate practice is essential to both practice and performance.
Deliberate practice is intensely thoughtful: it involves not just repeating movements, but intensely focusing on one aspect of performance to perfect it. Think of a dancer attending to a hand movement, a climber focusing on the position of her hips, a musician mastering the fingering in a difficult passage. Montero argues that this intense focus is not confined to the practice room: skilled performance also relies on deliberate movement. This means that, when we think and do on The LEAP Journey, we are self-teaching; trying to make fundamental shifts at the essence of our being (not just shifts in the circumstances of our lives) that, once achieved, can result in a far more effective flow in life; while challenging circumstances become an opportunity for development and growth. On The LEAP Journey we are called into the space of continuous learning and of creating lasting, positive change for ourselves.
In fact, there is scientific proof that, because of ‘neuroplasticity’, the experiences, thoughts, feelings and trial-and-error experiments we do on The LEAP Journey, can rewire our brains. When we repeat experiences such as with experimentation, the brain learns to trigger the same neurons each time. The more these neurons are triggered the stronger the neural network becomes. We have trillions of possible neural connections in our brains. Some of them have wired strongly into habits and behaviours that are effective, and some have wired into limiting beliefs and strategies that are not. And many exist simply as pure potential. Because the default in our brain is to go with the networks that are most developed, it is difficult to change without focused, supported, intentional effort. On The LEAP Journey we help you bring this sort of focus, literally helping you to rewire your brain for greater effectiveness and a more fulfilling life.
Don’t just do it, think about it too. This philosophy will help you to successfully reinvent yourself. You must remain the CEO of your own life and career. Take control and start running your life and career as a business. A LEAP Thinker both walks and teaches himself how to walk at the same time. Thinking becomes something we do in action. On The LEAP Journey we do not leap by blind habit; we think about what we are doing and we experiment; in short we walk with a degree of skill and judgement. If we make a mistake, we are inclined not to repeat it, and if we find a new effective way, we are inclined to continue to use it and to improve upon it. The ‘results’ of our actions are therefore feeding into our future actions. LEAP Thinkers concomitantly walk and teach themselves how to walk and their actions are both deliberate and deliberative, meaning that they are not ‘just doing it’ but are ‘thinking on their feet’.
References:
- Bryant, A. & Kazan, A. (2012). Self-Leadership: How to Become a More Successful, Efficient, and Effective Leader from the Inside Out. New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Beilock, S.L. & Carr, T.H. (2005). When High-Powered People Fail: Working Memory and “Choking Under Pressure” in Math. Psychological Science, Volume 16, Issue 2, Pages 101-105.
- Montero, B.G. (2016). Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Ryle, G. (1949). Concept of Mind. Chicago: University Chicago Press.
- Schücker L. & Parrington L. (2019). Thinking about your running movement makes you less efficient: attentional focus effects on running economy and kinematics. Journal of Sports Science. Volume 37, Issue 6, Pages 638-646.
