Mind Gym (27 page)

The games we play in our relationships—at work and at home—are perhaps the hardest behavioral patterns to change. They often sit outside our conscious awareness, and we only become aware that we’ve just played a game after it’s over and we are feeling upset. By spotting the games and making an effort to not get hooked into them, your relationships will feel more positive and more fulfilling.

Give Your Mind a Workout

1. Identify a game you play in your life—it could be with a partner, a friend, a work colleague. Look for something you play regularly.

2. Identify the hook.

3. Identify the positions both you and your game-playing partner start in. Where do you end up?

1. Think about a relationship game you regularly find yourself in. Analyze the triggers that start the game. There will likely be a trigger in you, the environment, or the situation, and in the other person.

2. Analyze what it is about these triggers that hooks you. Ask yourself a series of “why” questions to get at the root of this trigger.

3. Visualize yourself reacting to the trigger like you typically do. Now change the visualization. Imagine yourself reacting differently, in a way that subverts the game. What does this look like? Repeat this visualization a few times, and then commit to yourself to put it into action the next time the trigger occurs.

4. Start a dialogue with the other person about the game dynamic and what you can both do to prevent it in the future. Be sure to first explain to them the concepts detailed in this chapter so your dialogue doesn’t feel like an attack.

I
MAGINE YOUR alarm clock buzzing. Instead of getting out of bed, you wonder,
What else could an alarm clock do? What if it could answer my emails? What if it could alert me that I’ll have a stressful day? What if it could wake me up by telling me how much money is in my bank account, what my blood pressure is, and how today’s humidity will affect my hair? What if I could create something that eliminates bad hair days altogether?

While this stream of ideas may seem appealing, you’d quickly get overwhelmed by the noise of it. So, to survive in this world, you have trained your brain to make practical shortcuts. And as you progress through life, you learn more mental shortcuts that help you do the regular things faster. Once you know how to make a cup of coffee, you don’t rethink the whole process each time you fill the pot. You have better things to do.

Nevertheless, there are many situations in life in which the shortcuts you’ve created become harmful, in which the lack of creative thinking could be a detriment. Maybe you’re tasked with a new project at work. Do you approach it the same way you have approached all your previous projects? What if you want to plan a special birthday party for your significant other? Do you want to plan it so it’s just like last year’s party?

As our world becomes more systematized, hyper fast, and process driven, the ability to think creatively becomes a premium skill—a valuable asset in the workplace and in your personal life—because for all the benefits of big data and the latest technology, the ability to engage in higher-order imagination is still unique to humans.

It pays to be creative when you want to

   
•   solve a problem;

   
•   spot (or discover) an opportunity;

   
•   find a better, quicker, or easier way of doing something;

   
•   be imaginative (write a story, decorate a cake, design your kitchen);

   
•   add a little sparkle, humor, or romance; or

•   make life more interesting.

This part of the book is for those of you who want to expand your creative potential. It will also help you improve your work, impress the world, and spice up your relationships and life.

In the following chapters, you’ll discover ways to spot those mental shortcuts—or “filters”—that have become second nature, and remove them. You’ll learn techniques to help you generate original ideas—techniques that actively encourage logical and free-thinking creativity. Plus, you’ll learn how to tap into your unconscious mind so you can think the unthinkable.

Take your time with this section. Dive in. And let your creative juices flow.

A
man is driving a black car on a blackened road. There are no streetlights and no headlights on his car. A black cat crosses the road in front of his car and still he is able to apply the brakes to save the cat. How come? In this chapter, you’ll discover the answer to this intriguing brainteaser and, more important, the way to solve it: how to think about things creatively.

There’s an old saying that people looking at the past nostalgically are looking through rose-colored glasses. Similarly, the patterns in understanding future decisions and situations are often filtered by something we like to call a “filter bubble.” Basically, your mind works much like an Internet search engine, only reporting back to you the information you expect to find based on the words you type into the search bar. Although you may not realize you are filtering, a “filter bubble” is a useful (but distorted) view of reality. The trick to thinking creatively is to remove all the filters and perceive the world with a fresh set of eyes and a fresh set of unexpected data.

Would you want to remove these filters permanently? Definitely not. Just like a pair of eyeglasses, these filters help you see the world in a way that is useful, recognizable, and clear. However, when you want to be creative, you want to remove your glasses and see all the fuzzy edges, the different shapes, the mass of interlocking colors that breaks down your assumptions and makes you think differently about the world around you and the challenges you face.

This chapter explores the different kinds of reality filters and how you can take them off to get more creative. Let’s start by shedding some light on why that black cat wasn’t run over.

Obviously we all see the world from different perspectives. Different life experiences create different filters that allow us to quickly relate situations to other situations. Maybe you’ve worked with a boss who was abusive. You leave the job, find a new one, and the moment your new boss says something that reminds you of your former employer, you assume you’ve once again entered a toxic environment. You use filters to get through life. They can allow you to quickly assess situations that may be dangerous or heighten your awareness to a situation that may be similar to one you’ve dealt with before. But they can also limit your ability to be creative.

Here are five filters through which we all see the world:

A donkey is tied to a rope that is six feet long and there is a bale of hay eight feet away. How can the donkey get to the hay if he does not bite through or undo the rope?

Can you figure out the answer? It has nothing to do with using his hind legs or gusts of wind blowing the hay in his direction. If you can’t figure out the answer, then try to work out what assumptions you have made about this situation. The brainteaser has been deliberately worded to encourage you to think in a certain way, but it is the wrong way to think if you want to solve the problem.

What are the assumptions you have made about the donkey? That a donkey has four legs, perhaps. And what about the rope? You know it is tied to the donkey, but what is it tied to at the other end? Aha! It doesn’t say, and therein lies the answer to the question. The rope is not tied to anything, so the donkey has no problem getting to the bale of hay.

As frustrating as this brainteaser might be, it highlights a common filter that hinders creativity: knowing the problem. We often make assumptions about a problem before we try to solve it. Doing this automatically reduces the range of possible answers. If your assumptions are correct, they may help you get to an answer faster. But if they are wrong, they prevent you from ever getting an answer.

Sometimes there is a conscious effort to mislead. Let’s go back to the black car and the black cat at the beginning of the chapter. Can you spot the assumption that most people make when defining this problem? Because the word “black” occurs so often and because there is a mention of streetlights and headlights, most of us assume that it is nighttime. However, it doesn’t say the scene takes place at night. Once you realize that it could be daytime, you can solve the puzzle immediately.

Except in brainteasers, the narrow definition of a problem isn’t usually deliberate. The narrowness occurs because you haven’t challenged the way a problem has been expressed or what lies behind the expression.

The idea of introducing ATMs came out of some rather tired market research. Bank customers had said for years that they wished their branches were open longer and on weekends. But when the banks calculated the cost of extending business hours, they decided it wasn’t worth it. It was only when someone spotted that the customers didn’t necessarily want the branches to be open but wanted to be able to withdraw cash outside normal banking hours that the idea of the ATM took off.

Were you told at school to make sure that you read the question on the exam properly before answering? With our busy lives there is often a similar rush to answer, and we assume we know what the question is without checking. The consequence is the same: the wrong answer.

Look at the two following lines. Which do you think is longer, A or B?

Now measure them. Go ahead. Use the edge of your mobile phone, a pen, the spine of another book, or any other straight edge, and find out for sure which line is longer.

Were you surprised? Most people think the lines are the same length because they have seen a puzzle that looks like this before where the lines were the same length. But this is not the same puzzle. And these lines are not the same length.

The
I know the solution
filter comes into play when you assume that either you know how to solve a problem or you already know what the solution is. While you might use this filter at the same time as the
I know the problem
filter, they are quite distinct.

Consider the story of Jake, a software engineer who was unhappy with his job because, even though he was earning good money and liked the company, he hated his boss. Eventually, Jake decided to consult with an executive recruiter, who assured him that he would have no problem finding a new job given the shortage of people with his skills and experience. That night, Jake reexamined the assumptions he was making about how to solve his problem. After thinking through his options carefully, he went back to the recruiter the next day, and while discussing potential job opportunities, he gave the recruiter his boss’s name and praised him highly. A few days later, his boss was surprised when he was called about a new job opening, and he accepted a position with another company.

Jake was able to facilitate this happy solution for everyone concerned—he is now happy at his job and his boss is happy at a new company—because he thought differently about how to approach a familiar problem.

When Einstein developed his theory of relativity, he did it in such a way that he left reality behind. He pictured himself chasing after a beam of light and imagined the journey he was going to take. Your thinking is often influenced by the “reality” you inhabit. Consider an exercise in which a group of people is asked to generate ideas for a new tourist attraction. First, they are asked to come up with alternative hours of operation. The group groans. What could be more boring than coming up with times that a tourist attraction might be open? With their reality filter firmly on, they list all the possible variations they can imagine. An abridged version of their brainstorm looks something like this: