If your thinking stinks, your life will follow suit. “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” —Proverbs 23:7. Stinking thinking often leads to stinking living.
In today’s disrupting, ever-changing, and accelerating 21st Century world, being smart is not enough. Being adaptive is the new smart. It is the ability to keep abreast with the changes, rise above the noise, and view the bigger picture to help us stay agile, relevant, and move productively.
One of the best ways to be adaptive is to adopt POSSIBILITY THINKING to overcome the pitfalls of being too narrow-minded and rigid. In other words, possibility thinkers can accomplish tasks that seem impossible because they believe in solutions.
Your brain is both your best friend and your worst enemy.
In her research, author and professor, Anna Craft, of the University of Exeter and The Open University defined possibility thinking as a means by which intelligence, self-creation, self-expression, and know-how are bought together and expressed. It finds a way around a problem by posing questions and finding solutions through it. She further expounds, “I have long argued that ‘possibility thinking’ is at the heart of all creativity in young children, whether they are working alone, in parallel, or in collaboration with others. Possibilities are generated by children (and adults) in all areas of learning, whether imaginative play, musical exploration, and composition, cooking, mark-making or writing, outdoor physical play, mathematical development, or early scientific inquiry. Possibility thinking is how questions are posed or puzzles surfaced–through multiple ways of generating the question ‘what if?'”
Whenever we face a challenge that is a significant stretch, our brain automatically and unconsciously runs a background check and analyzes whether overcoming it is likely or not. The problem is that the brain makes this analysis based on what we have achieved in the past—what was possible then. It is a rear-view or looking-back perspective that lowers the bar on what is possible now. When we are going for breakthrough results, the whole idea is not to be swallowed by the challenge but to raise the bar; to expand the concept of what is possible.
Your brain is both your best friend and your worst enemy. Use it wisely, and don’t let it rot to stink your life. It is time to crank it up, refresh it and live with possibilities and hope.
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.” ― Henry Ford
Fred Tokè aka Dr. Tokèmon
