The Art of Not Thinking

 

How I Discovered the Art of Not Thinking

 

What is it that holds people back from reaching their true success and achieving that next level in their careers and/or personal lives?  What is that one thing—that lack of confidence—that causes us to give in, quit and stop at the moment where we could instead reach that next level of success?

 

That thing, that event, is called the Confidence Anchor.  There are probably events that have happened throughout your life where you have pushed through that barrier and you didn’t even realize it.  For me, the best example of this occurred during a wrestling match my junior year of high school.

 

 

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The Art of Not Thinking: When Should You Be Thinking?

When should you be thinking?

The Art of Not Thinking

There are 3 times that are optimal for thinking.

1. The best time for thinking is during a scheduled time that you have set aside to plan out your day, week, month, or year.
One of my Sales Management Performance Coaches (Chris Samuels) gave me a valuable piece of advice. He told me “Dustin, successful people always make sure to set a time at the end of each day to prepare for the next day”. He said that during this time look over your schedule and ask yourself “what do i need to do to prepare for the conversations, meetings, and task that I will be doing”.

This skill set is called “Mastering the Art of Preparation”.

When a Southwestern Consulting Sales Coach trains a client on Mastering the Art of Preparation, they teach them how to not think at the wrong time. The number one “time-waster” is over-thinking. The reason mid-level producers don’t reach the next level is that they over analyze. They get analysis paralysis. The goal is to be so prepared before we’re on the battlefield that we have already won the fight for the day before the day even begins.

Stay tuned for more ideas on “The Art of Not Thinking”…

The Art of Not Thinking

The Art of Not Thinking is my new book that will be coming out in 2012.

the art of not thinking

Here is a sample of what The Art of Not Thinking is about:

Chapter 1- Why Do Smart People Not Think?

Calvin Coolidge says “The world is full of intellectual giants and emotional midgets”. The world is consumed with the notion that we need to think our way into success. People turn to books and seminars trying to learn “the secret”. Parents all want their kids to get straight A’s, go to college, get a good job, and be a “normal” member of society.
I am 29 years old as I write this and I recently found out my wife and I are having a baby girl! At a social gathering a friend and I were discussing how I don’t want my girl to be “normal”; normal is boring, normal is forgettable, normal is average, the normal people secretly wish they were like the abnormal people. We all want to be the best and we want the best for our families… However it is fascinating how hung up we are with being the best at the wrong things. For example grades… I work at the 155 year old Southwestern Company, we interview over 10,000 people per year for various jobs. The number one thing we look for in a candidate is previous successful work habits, the last thing we look for is someones GPA. I think Michael Thompson said it best “The truth is that many indifferent students do extremely well in business because the set of skills required to be a good student does not match the set of skills to be a success in the world,” says Michael Thompson, a University of Chicago-trained psychologist and co-author of the bestseller, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. He likes to quote the old line: “School is a place where former A students teach mostly B students to work for C students.” It may be an over generalization, but it has “more truth than educators are comfortable with,” he says.

Thinking is a good thing to do at the right time. The problem is that most people don’t think when they should be, and they are thinking when they shouldn’t be.

Stay tuned for more of The Art of Not Thinking…