CHAPTER 2
The Insight State of Mind

Now that you have a good fix on what insights are, let’s move on to making ourselves receptive to their occurrence. Insights occur in a variety of circumstances. People report that insights are most likely to happen when they are walking or running, showering or meditating, playing with children, conversing with friends, watching a movie, listening to music, sleeping, golfing, or daydreaming. The list is perhaps as varied as the number of individuals.

While circumstances and settings for insights vary greatly, the one characteristic that they all share is a state of mind. All of us seem to recognize this easygoing “Insight State of Mind” in which our thinking is at its best. The mind is relaxed and not pressing in or fixating on a problem. Our attention is softly focused and may even be on something else entirely. Insights also occur when we are deep in logic and data analysis, but even then it’s generally when we are experiencing a bit of reverie. Like when you’re looking at a Magic Eye image, the picture appears one way until you relax your focus and allow a different image, the hidden and sought-after one that was there all along, to reveal itself.

Here is the second key to having more insights: insights, wisdom, and good judgment come from a clearheaded and calm state of mind. The way to have more insights is to spend more time in this receptive state. As you come to better recognize your Insight State of Mind, you will know when and how to look for it, and you will find yourself in this state more frequently, even in instances when you don’t need an insight.

Consider thought as operating on a continuum. At one end of the spectrum, your thinking is structured, deliberate, and personal. You work hard to push it, managing its direction. You feel as if there is no separation between you and your thoughts because, in that state, you are your thoughts. You are in your head and in control. At the opposite end, your thinking just happens with no urgency or impulse to act. Thoughts occur, but with most of these, you are just a passive observer, watching whatever shows up. Here, thoughts have their own trajectory and lives of their own, but to varying degrees you can guide them, like when you daydream or when your mind wanders just before sleep. In these moments, you are present, but it doesn’t feel as though you are entirely running the show. If you take one step further, you become lost in a dream, with no control over your thinking whatsoever. Presence is a good word to describe this end of the continuum; it is a state where very little active thinking takes place.

If you are like us, you aren’t truly aware in real time of where your thoughts stand along this insight/intentionality continuum. When we address business issues, we try to use two distinct modes that correspond roughly to each end of the continuum. In the first, the trick is to think hard, listing all the relevant material and mentally arranging the pieces. Next, we follow these relationships to logical conclusions and then keep track of which logical paths hold water and which don’t. Is this mode familiar to you? Like a sieve of logic, when it works, the best solution falls out. In the second mode, we drop all active thinking and, either figuratively or actually, gaze into the distance as we wait for whatever forms in our mind. We deliberately forestall any active connection making and see what springs forth on its own. Sometimes, as in a dream, the issue shifts of its own accord and offers a new perspective. Other times, it will feel as though we are groping in the unknown, a train of questions replacing a train of logic. This mode may sound familiar to you as well.

You will not be surprised to learn that insights often occur when you are not actively thinking about the problem at hand. Instead, insights arise when you are involved in something other than solving the problem, particularly something enjoyable or light on the mind. How often do you forget someone’s name only to have it pop back into your head after you change the subject or shift mental gears? Between the two extremes of this continuum are many other modes, none inherently better than another. Think of putting on a pair of ice skates and sliding into the most appropriate mode for each moment rather than getting stuck in any one particular place. Sliding effortlessly from mode to mode is what we do when we are at our mental best. We move into one self to prepare our tax forms and slide into a different self to love our families. We instinctively place attention on what matters most, depending on what is required in the moment. We can focus our intellect for a few minutes, back off to a daydream, dive into memory for a short while, and then return to being present again. We are most naturally effective, most comfortable, and most productive when we enjoy a resilient state of mind.

Tempo and Pause

As a general rule, the Insight State of Mind feels slower and less hurried than your normal pace of thinking. In our earliest understanding of the insight process, we advised our clients to slow their thinking down. We found this was not a good prescription, however, because we are all quite different thinkers. Some people have insights as life zooms along, in which case slowing down could interfere with their process. Other people need the mental space of slower-paced thinking. Whether thought rips along at the speed of light or creeps at the pace of a snail, insights more often than not come during moments of mental pause.

The art of insight asks that you let the pace of your thinking settle into what is right for the moment. This takes personal awareness and practice. Just as there is no strict rule or formula for how fast you should play a certain piece of music, there is no prescription for the right tempo of thought. What is critical for facilitating insight is thinking that is neither rushed nor pressured.

A friend recently returned to playing classical piano with a certain amount of discipline:

To my surprise, I discovered that with some effort and a little practice, I could play more than one of the preludes and fugues in Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. As most pianists can attest, Clavier is an amazing set of works, in part because many of the pieces we normally play quickly also sound beautiful when played more slowly. If I slowed down and practiced enough, I could play some of these magnificent studies, despite my limited abilities. Of course, I get into trouble and make plenty of mistakes when I try to play too quickly, but on the other hand, the pieces don’t sound right when I play too slowly. My challenge is to find the right tempo for my mood and my skill. When I find it, I make music. When I don’t, it’s something else. In the words of Goldilocks, “This one’s too hot, and this one’s too cold, but this one is just right.”

Our friend and colleague Steve uses a sports analogy for finding the Goldilocks sweet spot: “It is the championship game. Your team has the basketball with fifteen seconds left on the clock, and you are down by a point. Do you want to be wound up and tight or loose and confident?”

Great players always want the ball in these situations, and they are always loose and confident—present in the situation, open to whatever happens, and able to integrate many hours of practice into the immediate unfolding of the game. Lesser players get tight and try too hard to find the “right” action to take. Their breathing gets labored, and neither their brains nor their muscles move with the fluidity necessary to make the shot. They get so locked up that we use the term choke to characterize their efforts.

Bill Russell, star center for basketball’s legendary Boston Celtics, describes a quiet mind in a very fast setting:

Every so often, a Celtics game would heat up so that it became more than a physical, or even a mental, game and would be magical. That feeling is very difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter or more. Three or four plays were not enough to get it going. It would surround not only me and the other Celtics, but also the players on the other team, even the referees.

At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in a white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn’t feel competitive—which is a miracle in itself. I’d be putting out the maximum effort, straining, coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet I never felt the pain. The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut, and pass would be surprising—and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion.

During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball into bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I’d want to shout to my teammates, “It’s coming there!”—except that I knew everything would change if I did.

My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all of the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.

Sometimes the feeling would last all the way to the end of the game, and when that happened, I never cared who won. I can honestly say that those few times were the only ones when I did not care. I don’t mean that I was a good sport about it—that I’d played my best and had nothing to be ashamed of. On the five or ten occasions when the game ended at that special level, I literally did not care who won. If we lost, I’d still be free and high as a sky hawk.¹

Obviously, a quiet mind does not necessarily mean that you are quiet. You might be mentally quiet but also very physically active, like Bill Russell operating in the zone. You may have your best insights when you’re in the middle of a rapid discussion or friendly argument. We use the term friendly because insights rarely occur when the parties are feeling angry, afraid, or insulted.

The Space Where Fresh Thoughts
Appear

Think of your mind for a moment as a conveyor belt filled with cafeteria trays going to the cleanup station. Each tray is a different thought moving along at a comfortable pace. Thoughts come in and go out, each flowing easily into the next, without pressure or urgency. Between each tray is a sense of space, a breath, or a pause living between each thought. This empty space is where fresh thoughts and insights occur.

Trays run faster on some belts than on others, but there is usually a constant flow, at least until the trays get stuck and begin to pile up on each other. With real cafeteria trays, you get a heap of dishes and a sticky, gooey mess. With thought, you become bothered, anxious, or overfocused. Your thoughts are now a jumbled traffic jam, piling up on one another. The space between thoughts, the nothingness where fresh ideas have the potential to pop up, has been crowded out. Less space leaves less room for insight. If you feel pressured, anxious, concerned, or worried, an insight is probably not on the horizon.

When an answer doesn’t occur to us right away, we often get uncomfortable with this emptiness. We fill these gaps with thoughts from our memory bank, destroying the mental silence that could have brought us something fresh. As we shed this vexation and learn to be at ease with the unknown, we increase exponentially the likelihood of experiencing an insight.

One of our client teams was hammering away at a thorny problem without much success. Switching over their production line from one product to the next was taking too long. So, what could be done about it? Their mental cafeteria trays were pretty well piled up. We suggested that they begin looking for gaps, deliberately trying to relax their thinking and to practice not thinking about the problem—or about anything, for that matter. The room got pretty silent for a few minutes. Then one team member voiced a fresh thought that instantly crystallized into an understanding of how to adapt an existing component from a different line. With the addition of this component, they would be able to switch over in a matter of minutes instead of nearly an hour. Minding the gaps allowed this client team to create space in their thinking and see the problem differently.

Notice your own state of mind right now. Is your mind quiet and settled? Is there space between your thoughts, or are they crowding each other? Are you rushing through your reading, trying to get to the end as quickly as possible? Just noticing the quality of your thinking in this moment will help you recover an easygoing mental state. As soon as you stop thinking your way out of it, your natural equanimity will return.

Having read all this, you might think you have to do a lot to get your thinking into the right tempo, but you don’t. It’s much simpler than that. You just have to look for the good feeling of your Insight State of Mind, and as we will see in the next section, the pace of your thought will take care of itself.

The Feeling of the Insight State
of Mind

The most reliable way to recognize the Insight State of Mind is by the presence of its characteristically good feeling. There is a sense of calm, ease, and peace about it. There is a blue sky, a sense of spaciousness and that all is right with the world. While similar to the flow state that athletes like Bill Russell and performing artists speak of, the Insight State of Mind does not necessarily involve the peak experience often associated with being “in the zone.” The Insight State of Mind feels more akin to a gentle walk home along a familiar route: peaceful and unlabored. A related but different good feeling accompanies the arrival of an insight. It carries a sudden sense of energy and elation. Think about how great it feels when a problem you have stewed over dissolves in a flash of insight. Whenever an event in your experience matches a new cognitive structure in your mind, the physiological response is usually a smile.

The feeling of the Insight State of Mind is subtle. You may notice it before an insight hits, but usually it reveals itself in the satisfaction you experience after the immediate excitement has passed. You’ll observe it once the situation has settled down and your thinking feels more sharp and lucid. When you are both present in and appreciative of the moment, the feeling of an Insight State of Mind will be evident. Other types of good feelings, like that of completing a task or finishing a long run, while joyful, are not quite what we mean by the feeling associated with an Insight State of Mind.

The more familiar you become with this feeling, the more you will be drawn to finding it. As you find it more frequently, you will spend more time in the Insight State of Mind, and by spending more time in this state, you will become more insightful. Orienting yourself toward experiencing this good feeling is the most important touchstone in your insight practice. Like reading a barometer, reflecting on this feeling gives you a moment-by-moment report on the quality of your thinking. The presence of such a feeling signals a good state of mind. It means that you are connected to your inner wisdom and that you have positioned yourself well to have an insight. When this feeling is absent—when you feel cloudy, confused, pressured, or angry—having an insight is less likely. Cultivating your awareness of this feeling takes you simultaneously to the feeling and to the Insight State of Mind. It’s that simple. While you may not find it easy to do at first and the challenge may require some mindfulness, over time it will come naturally and more frequently.

The key is to have the sensor (the feeling) hooked up to the meter (your awareness) and to have the operator (you) paying attention to what the meter reads. Many of us, particularly men, may not spend much time in a mode where we notice our feelings. Instead, we retreat into our thoughts and find ourselves oriented toward figuring things out. In handling many matters, this may be the most useful mode of operation, but when an Insight State of Mind is required, we must remember to check in with our inner barometer.

It’s like sending an invitation to your friends to come over for dinner. Instead of going out and rounding each of them up to bring to your home, you know that if you put out the invitation, eventually your friends will arrive. You don’t need to spend any more energy than that. You do, however, need to stay alert for their arrival. Obviously, you don’t want to miss them when the doorbell rings.

A beautiful day, a sail on an open sea, the perfect ski run, the moment you wake up in the morning, the recovery after your morning jog, the peace after meditation or prayer: life abounds with examples of relative mental peace. We use many words to try to describe the condition, and while none quite capture the essence, they can point toward it. For any deep feeling, descriptions through words are only pieces of the truth, but remember what these moments are like and you’ll be heading in the right direction.

Losing and Recovering the Insight
State of Mind

It will come as no surprise that during a normal workday, most of us don’t spend much time in the Insight State of Mind. Circumstances like multitasking, meeting deadlines, and participating in conference calls all conspire against a good state of mind and lower the quality of our thinking. We are forever slipping unconsciously into worry, disappointment, fear, and other forms of insecure thinking. Since all these disruptions form ultimately from thought, you would think that we should be able to notice them and change our minds, but unfortunately, we get stuck and don’t notice the moods that we fall into because the quality of our thinking is so off. In these moments, our thinking becomes dense, and a bad feeling sweeps through us to boot.

Unfortunately, there are many ways to enter these under-productive states: overusing of the analytical mind, not getting enough sleep, facing a poor performance review, dealing with a lost sale, encountering an angry colleague, making changes in diet, or dealing with physical ailments. Since physical and emotional stressors all cause us to get derailed, each of us has multiple routes to disaster. What may trigger one of us may have no effect whatsoever on another. Even when not triggered, our latent thinking habits can kick in and make us worry or be overly critical, which can draw us out of good spirits and make matters far worse. Since we are generally unaware that these storms of thought are occurring, we usually just press on. More often than not, the more we press, the more our state of mind deteriorates. We end up less creative, more inclined to make mistakes, and less conscious of our mental state.

A good first step is to become better at recognizing when you are not in a good state of mind. When you’ve lost the good feeling, you probably will not know the best thing to do in the moment. With just a small pause, however, you can remember that, at the very least, you should not be making any important decisions. Instead, wait until your mood has recovered. Sometimes, your waiting period is quite short, but occasionally you may need a good night’s rest.

Still, noticing the absence of a good feeling and stopping whatever you were doing changes your experience only if it precipitates a change in thinking. Understanding the relationship between thought and experience makes weathering any bad mood easier. While it may not work 100 percent of the time, consciously looking for pleasant feelings can often interrupt the grip of a low mood and allow your mind to return to a calmer, quieter state.

Our colleague Robin realizes that anything he attempts in these situations, including trying to recover his mood, is likely to be flawed. Who among us hasn’t decided to stay at work an extra thirty minutes to clear our e-mail in-box? We often hate the decision as soon as we have made it, and the next day we may find that many of the reply messages we had sent are of questionable quality. In a case like this, our poor thinking may result in twice as much new work as was necessary in the first place. What’s going on here? The extra thirty minutes in themselves don’t cause the poor-quality work. Resentment degrades our judgment and carries a very negative feeling.

Now, Robin has become better at stopping everything the moment he discovers he’s not in a good state of mind. He simply waits until his mind settles. With a little practice and patience, he needs only a couple of minutes to recover enough common sense to know what to do next.

When we try to escape a bad mood, our strategies for doing so are the products of low-quality thinking and therefore are rarely successful. Many clever methods like replacing negative thoughts with positive thoughts or initiating distractions have been devised to change thinking. Unfortunately, trying to use the mind to outfox the mind is never-ending work. The good news is that all that effort is unnecessary. We come equipped at birth with a simple barometer for high-quality thought: the presence or absence of the good feeling.

You might think that recognizing a bad state of mind is some sort of panacea for improving your state of mind, but it isn’t necessarily. A low mood can be a stubborn thing. Recognition, however, is a crucial first step that will give you some composure and make it less likely that the lousy feeling will persist any longer than necessary.

As easy as it is to fall out of a natural good state of mind, what’s amazing is that, in principle, it’s just as easy to fall back in. Imagine a basketball in a swimming pool. The ball has natural buoyancy, which makes it constantly float to the surface. Holding the ball under the water takes effort, just like pressured thinking. If you stop holding the basketball down, it will float to the surface. Likewise, as your thinking relaxes, you will return to a natural state of equanimity. Recovering your state of mind isn’t as much about doing something to get somewhere new as it is about letting go so you can get back to where you started. Obviously, this is different from other areas of life—for example, exercise—where creating change requires us to do more, not less. To gain the feeling of the Insight State of Mind, you need only let your inherent righting mechanism do its natural work. Your mood, like an unhanded basketball, will float to the surface with no further help from you. Relax and let the quiet mind return. Look for the good feeling. Everything else will take care of itself.

Robin likes to describe his indicators as being like the “idiot lights” on the dashboard of his car. Lost the good feeling? Red light on! As with dashboard lights, this mechanism is not foolproof. You will get into trouble if you forget to look at them, as anyone who’s inadvertently run out of gas can attest. Over time, he has identified enough indicators to acquire a level of redundancy: if he misses one, he will probably notice another.

We all have different ways of letting go of the basketball. Young children are really good at it because they haven’t formed the habit of holding on to thoughts. If you are a child whose world is falling apart because someone took your toy but then you hear that chicken fingers are for dinner, your mental world becomes chicken fingers, and the upsetting thoughts are gone. As adults, we are disadvantaged as we spend most of our lives in systems that train us to hold on to the basketball. This capacity is essential for sound analytic thinking, but just like using thoughts from our memory bank, we create problems when we use it to excess.

It’s the Art of Insight, Not Just
Technique

We do all sorts of things to get into an Insight State of Mind. Some people like to go for a walk or a run, and some take a vacation, garden, or pray. Some of us lie quietly on the sofa, relax in long baths, or wail on a saxophone. When we find ourselves stuck in a bad state of mind at the office, simply standing and stretching or going to a window and watching the clouds can do the trick. One of our executive clients gets her best insights after going to the movies. By her own admission, she has a very busy mind. When she goes to the movies, she gets caught up in the visual experience. She gets distracted from her habitual thinking, and her basketball floats to the surface. Another client stands up and walks around when his thinking is blocked and he wants to get unstuck, while a third sits quietly by himself and writes in a notepad.

Any and all of these actions may work, but none work for everyone all the time, and if a single panacea existed, it would have been discovered by now. Certain methods may be useful, but they will be specific to you, and you should use them whenever it feels right rather than routinely or by prescription. It’s also important not to get attached to one particular method. For any technique you discover or mental rule you form, you may find the opposite works just as well at other times. Those of us who favor concrete techniques and prescriptions must be careful lest our preferences interfere with returning to an Insight State of Mind.

Reliable access to insight is gained more through an understanding of and a sensitivity to a set of overarching principles than through adherence to a set of techniques. The appropriate method to access an Insight State of Mind in this moment comes naturally and extemporaneously, as in sports or in the arts. It has much more to do with getting your thinking out of the way and getting yourself into the present moment. What are you experiencing right now? Great basketball players like Bill Russell have an intrinsic understanding of the principles, rules, strategies, and mechanics of their game, but their play is dictated by what is required in the moment, often without conscious thought on the part of the players. The Art of Insight is the same way.

For some of us, this shift of habit will occur quickly, while for others it will take more time. For Malcolm, becoming more conscious of his state of mind occurred over a number of years. During that time, he adopted faith in what he calls his inner wisdom. As this faith developed, Malcolm became more and more trusting that he would pick up on what was most important, confident that his inner wisdom would bring it to his attention when required. Others find that the shift requires attention, patience, and practice. Thankfully, the practice is not onerous. It feels good physically and psychologically and is accompanied by creative ideas, fewer mistakes, and sound judgment. Simply live your life and do your best to find your way to the good feeling.

Having an insight is the most natural occurrence in the world. Every day, when we discover things we don’t know, we are having minor insights and realizations. Generating more insights doesn’t require great effort; in fact, as we’ve explained, effort can be counterproductive. We need only recognize the state of mind in which insights are most likely to occur and find our way there more regularly. The Insight State of Mind doesn’t include a lot of internal monologues. It is not a state where you stop thinking, but it is a state where you are not working hard on your thinking. Techniques aren’t necessary to reach the Insight State of Mind. Again, you simply pay attention to the presence or absence of the feeling you associate with your best state of mind. Although your proficiency may have fallen due to neglect, none of this is new. You must simply reacquaint yourself with this natural, inborn capacity. If you step back and look for the good feeling, good thinking will follow. The change may not be instantaneous, but it will be reliable.