I’m not saying knowledge is a bad thing, of course it’s not. It’s just that it often just sits there, clogging up our brains and not getting used.
Insights change the way we see things. Insights change behaviour. Insights change results.
Here are a few examples:
I had lot’s of knowledge about the harmful effects of smoking, but carried on. Then one day I had an insight about how smoking did not make any sense and so I stopped. Easily.
A client of mine – a senior manager in the technology industry, had an insight that the source of his stress was not the amount of work he had to do, but how he felt about it. And in that moment his stress disappeared and is still absent several years later, though his career has taken off.
After years of repeating the mantra ‘people buy from people’, a salesperson had an insight that ‘people buy from people’!!! Their sales behaviour changed dramatically and so did their results (for the better!)
A leader had an insight that ‘we are all different’ and from that moment on, stopped trying to make everyone be like him
Insights drive change. They take knowledge and make it relevant. Real. Meaningful.
The obvious question then:
How do we get more insights?
Or maybe:
How do we help others get more insights?
The bad news unfortunately, is that we can’t ‘force’ insights.
The good news though, is that we don’t have to. They are an innate ability of all humans.
The trouble is that we’ve been conditioned all our lives to believe that if we want something to happen you have to make it happen. We have to take massive action.
And that just doesn’t work with insights. In fact, the more we try to force ourselves to have insights, the less likely we will be to have them.
It’s a bit like trying to force yourself to go to sleep. It’s not going to happen. You need to just allow yourself to fall asleep. Sleeping is natural when the body is tired.
In the same way, we need to allow yourself to have insights. How do we do that?
Hmmm……….. We’ve just agreed we can’t do anything to allow. We just allow. It’s a non-doing thing.
But it can help if we stop doing things that don’t allow!!! Like:
Continuously filling our heads with more knowledge in a hamster wheel attempt to find the answer
Spending every waking moment doing something, instead of allowing our mind to wander a bit e.g. sit on the train and stare out the window for a few minutes (or maybe the whole journey) instead of immediately opening our laptop/tablet/phone/Sony Walkman cassette player. If we are too busy to do this, then we should realise that insights may not come our way very often and little will change.
As a coach, I accept that many of my clients want to get to the action plan as quick as they can. However, an action plan without an insight is often just hard work. It’s reliant on sheer willpower. When I tried to give up smoking without the insight, it was hard work. And I gave up giving up several times. It was too hard. And after the insight. Pretty much effortless.
My job is more about helping them create space for insights, rather than creating an action plan that could well be doomed to failure.
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