There are thoughts cruising around. Constantly. It’s one thing after another. The mind doesn’t take vacations. It doesn’t take any breaks.

They say we have an estimated 6000 thoughts per day. Who? Good question. All I know is that is a lot of thoughts. They don’t really stop, do they?

These pesky thoughts just keep noodling, one after another. The keep coming and coming and coming. Sure, yeah, it’s cool. It’s interesting, but holy smokes sometimes brain, it’d be cooler if you could take a chill pill every once in awhile.

Against our will. Whether we like it our not. The thoughts just keep on coming. By the time we’ve pondered whether our not the thoughts are useful, the thought has already come.

If we want to change our thoughts, it takes a shitload of time and effort because we have to retroactively change our thinking. After we’ve already made the wrong decision we can sit and ponder what the right one was.

Each time we can dissect what the correct course of action should have been, we get better and better at identifying the correct action. Over time the ‘correct’ thought starts to come earlier and earlier until eventually we make it real time.

We can train ourselves to be wittier, more confident, cleverer (a word?), funnier and better at decision making with the same technique.

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”

John Dewey

Thinking about thoughts: it’s what makes the human mind so goddamn powerful. We can rethink our way into better actions and a better way of doing life.

“Humans are the only animal that allow nature to observe itself”

Ricky Gervais

Jonathan Haidt describes the mind as an elephant and a rider. The elephant is our mammalian brain – It does what it wants to. It wants food, water, shelter and sex. It wants to keep us alive.

The rider is our prefrontal cortex, the newer part of the brain that evolved on top.

Trying to will the brain to what we want is like trying to yank the reigns of an elephant. Idk if you’ve ever yanked an elephant, but I imagine they’re pretty heavy. Over time though, we can slowly coax it to do what we want and think what we want it to.

“The quality of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts”

Marcus Aurelius

Once I started to observe my own thoughts and pay attention to the way I was thinking, I was finally able to change the way I was thinking. I was finally able to realize the way I was treating myself… it wasn’t super nice. I was an asshole… to myself.

For the longest time I was on autopilot. This wasn’t autopilot in that I was coasting through life. It was autopilot on the thoughts I was having.

They weren’t mine. They were thoughts that had been instilled in my by others over time.

Slowly, I started paying closer attention and realized the relationship I was having with my own mind. I paid better attention to my internal monologue and started to realize that I treated myself like a dog and punished myself for irrelevant actions or things outside my control. I was never good enough and I dislike being myself.

Once I became conscious of the thoughts, slowly I was able to change it.

We have an unbelievable amount of thoughts each day. Snippets of conversation, ideas, and to-dos are all floating around. They all crisscross and mingle with each other. We don’t know what goes where and it all gets all sorts of jumbled.

Day to day interactions fill the mind. We process process process and our brain continues to fill. Research shows there is not really a max capacity, so we get to just keep on filling our brain up and up and up, never cementing the previous ideas.

Unfortunately, this is celebrated in society. Do more. Create bigger. Go further. Keep going and don’t look back. We stack ideas on top of ideas without understanding the basis.

Double unfortunately, we are hardly taught to take the time to process these ideas. They just keep stacking. Time out to pause and orient our thoughts is not a sparkly process. It comes across as ‘wasting time’. We are not doing anything, afterall.

Bullshit.

But because performance reports come from ‘observation’ of us by others, we are encouraged to always be buys, always be doing something. Doing takes precedence over thinking.

To think?
To reflect?
Yeah, right. Kick rocks. Quit wasting time.

‘The single biggest deficiency in military leadership is the lack of time to reflect’

Jim Mattis, Marine 4 star General, former Secretary of Defense

Jim’s words not mine.

If this happens in military leadership, why would this same trouble not exist in commercial leadership? Why would this not be the same problem permeated through every level of leadership in other global organizations?

Isn’t this the same exact trouble you and I find ourselves in on a daily basis?

Especially in the West, we do not put enough attention on the understanding of our thoughts. We have a thought after thought and next thing you know, boom! 2 more thoughts. It’s an endless conveyer belt of ideas without the time to fully process any of them.

Without the time to process it become one giant mangled mess.
We need time to process or we’re operating at 100% going in the wrong direction.

“Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through the lips and fingertips”

Dawson Trotman

Walking and writing have been undeniably valuable tools to understand what in the ungodly hell my brain is on about. Perhaps a bit too hippy-dippy for some (as was me initially), meditation has since provided substantial relief. The practice of observing thoughts has given some distance between me and my thoughts.

It’s allowed me to understand what is actually going on in my mind choose the direction I want to go. It’s allowed me to be more intentional with my life.

“My best thoughts have come from when my body was in motion”

Source: Unknown

However it is done, reflection provides the control over our lives rather than running on autopilot.

The alternative is a messy jumble of junk, vomiting out idea after subpar idea. Our brains are far to useful to cause us this much stress and be this underutilized.