You’re Smarter Than Your Thinking - Grasshopper

You’re not as smart as you think; you’re smarter.

Thinking is a slow process and using it takes you a lot longer to learn something than it does when you learn to get thinking out of the way.

 

Rational thought is very useful in sorting facts and arriving at conclusions, but you most often get to what you need to know quicker without evaluating all the evidence, countless times.

 

I would be willing to wager that more scientific discoveries and solving of complicated police cases than we know of were precipitated by a hunch. The hunch led them to track down the supporting facts. They didn’t think their way to a discovery - they sensed it first.

 

We sense things first. It’s the way we are wired. That “hunch” is a feeling in our body that we can’t explain with words. It’s just an unmistakable, instantaneous sense that we too often dismiss and go into our preferred, turtle paced, thinking mode.

 

There is a raw intelligence with the body’s sensing mode. It’s unfiltered, yet comprehensive information. It just needs an opportunity to bubble up. That’s why it’s so useful to get thinking out of the way. The solutions will come quicker when we clear space in our mind.

 

If our mind is jammed with our thinking, our hunch stays as a hunch if we don’t have room in our mind for its information. Our mind is finite in the amount of information it can hold at any one point in time. If that finite space is cluttered with repetitive thinking, nothing new will come through. Your hunch keeps knocking on the door with an answer but you don’t answer.

 

Find a practice for getting your thinking out of the way. There are too many to cite but they’re all helpful in quieting the mind. Don’t confuse quieting with numbing the mind. That just freezes what’s there in place until the numbing wears off.

 

When you reduce the real estate for thought, you’ll allow your sensing properties through and build solutions much more quickly.

 

Don’t let your smarts hold you back, just put them on hiatus long enough so your feeling sense can seep through the crack.

 

You may be smarter than a 5^th grader but you’re nowhere close to being as smart as you are without your thinking.

 

All the best,

John