Overthinking: the art of creating problems that aren't even there.

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‘Where do you believe your experience is coming from?’

I was in a hurry. I was due to collect my car from the mechanics at 5:30pm and take my daughters for dinner and a movie, but when I got to the garage, the car wasn't ready. ‘It’ll be ready in five minutes, mate – we're just running some final checks'. I knew better than to argue, and took a seat in the waiting room, but my head was swirling with urgency and reproach. Why didn't I arrange to pick the car up earlier? How were we going to get to the movie on time? Why did I try to squeeze so much in today? I peered into the garage to see my vehicle elevated six feet in the air on a car lift, with two mechanics attending to it with a hammer and a blowtorch. What kind of ‘final check’ was this? I instantly saw this was no five-minute job. My heart sank even further and my head went into overdrive. What's wrong with my car? Why am I such a bad father? Why does everything always have to be so difficult? Why do I always do this? I started pacing around the garage to try and dispel some of the tension and anxiety. Suddenly, a quiet voice spoke from the depths of my being…

‘Where do you believe your experience is coming from?’

I stopped in my tracks. ‘Did you believe your feelings were letting you know about the car, or the mechanics, or the movie, or your daughters? Did you believe your feelings were letting you know about your past, or your future, or what you’re like as a person?'

In a heartbeat, I fell out of my contaminated thinking and back into the moment. I called my ex-wife and explained I'd be late, and asked her to feed the girls; that I'd be picking them up shortly and taking them to the movie.

The solution to my predicament was obvious once I fell out of contaminated thinking. We're built for reality. Our intelligence and wisdom is always there, ready to guide us the moment we wake up to reality. The only thing that gets in the way is contaminated thinking, arising from the outside-in misunderstanding. We all have areas in our lives where things flow effortlessly, and other areas where we struggle. There's a way in which all my clients have the same two challenges when I first meet them. You're about to realize the only two challenges that ever stop people making progress, and the unexpected key this realization holds for creating results.

Challenge one: Preoccupation

When I first meet a potential client, they're typically preoccupied with something. This preoccupation can take many forms, but one thing's usually clear; they've been thinking about it. A lot! Brooding, ruminating, trying to figure it out. They've given it a lot of thought, and that's usually made matters worse. Here are some examples of the kinds of things people have been thinking far too much about:

• I want to get slim, fit and healthy, but I keep falling back into bad habits.
• I'm desperate to improve my money situation, but nothing seems to change.
• I'm trying to find the right relationship (or fix my current one).
• I'm trying to find my purpose in life, my true calling.
• I need to get more clients.
• I want to raise morale in my company, and get people more engaged.
• I've been thinking about starting my own business.
• I'm trying to change my limiting beliefs.
• I'm trying to figure out what our competitors are planning to do that could knock us out of the game.
• I want to play a bigger game but I don't know what it is.
• I want to spend less time at the office and more time with my family.
• We need to disrupt our industry before someone else does.
• I want to change our company culture but nothing seems to work.

By the time they get to me, they've usually chewed it over, written checklists and ordered multiple books from Amazon about it. Sometimes they've made progress in all kinds of other areas, but there's this one thing that they just don't feel they're progressing with (or at least, not in the way they want to).

Challenge two: Underestimation

Similarly, when I first meet my clients, they tend to radically underestimate their talents, abilities and innate capacities. And do you know where they tend to overlook their talents and abilities the most? You guessed it – in the area where they're preoccupied. Typically, they have a number of aspects of their life where they do really well. If we go through their personal histories, we find numerous examples of stellar qualities, including…

• Natural leadership (sometimes in ‘crunch’ situations where many people would crumble).
• Creativity and innovation, finding elegant solutions to problems.
• Wisdom, intuition and gut-feel, bringing them clarity of direction in times of uncertainty.
• Resilience and resourcefulness (often in the face of extremely challenging circumstances).
• High performance (often at tasks that would have others trembling with trepidation).
• Love, connection, kindness and compassion.
• An innate capacity for realization and insight that shows up exactly when they need it.

I've never met a person who didn't have examples of these kinds of qualities. It sometimes takes a little time and curiosity to find them, but they're always there. Yet when it comes to the area of their lives where they've been perceiving themselves as ‘stuck’ or ‘struggling’, people tend to overlook the fact that they're connected to these powerful resources.

The unexpected solution

We've been conditioned to seek additive approaches, so when I explain the two challenges, the next question is usually, ‘So how do I fix that?’. But there's a more useful question to ask first:

‘Why do people get stuck in these two challenges in the first place?’

The answer to this is simple: contaminated thinking arising from the outside-in misunderstanding. This profoundly deceptive ‘trick of the mind’ is responsible for challenges one and two, and is the cause of the majority of problems we face as individuals, organizations and societies. The solution is a deeper embodied understanding of the principles behind clarity; an intuitive feel for the inside-out nature of how your mind and perception already works.

Implication-based Learning

So how do you deepen your embodied understanding? Let me introduce you to what I call Implication-Based Learning (IBL). You've already been doing IBL your whole life, but you may not have had a distinction for it until now. IBL is the learning that takes place automatically when you're exposed to sensory data (like a human version of the machine-learning algorithms that are increasingly shaping our digital environment). Obvious examples include how you learned to walk and talk, even though no-one ‘taught’ you how to do them. Let's look more closely at this:

The principles behind clarity

Like gravity, the principles behind clarity are a pre-existing fact of life. You're born into them. But unlike gravity, the principles are non-obvious; they're invisible (like germs, only more so – you won't see the principles of MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS and THOUGHT using a microscope, because they're what's creating your experience of what you see when you use a microscope). The purpose of this book (and of all my work) is to make these principles ‘visible’ to you so that an automatic IBL curve is initiated, and you start benefiting from a deep embodied understanding of these principles. That way, application becomes automatic. As your embodied understanding of the principles behind clarity deepens, you get to benefit from that understanding throughout your day without even thinking about it. This is the source of the kind of clarity that leads to meaningful results.

Domain	Pre-existing fact of life?	Obvious?	IBL curve
Gravity	✓	✓	Initiated automatically via implication-based learning
Germs and bacteria	✓	✗	Need to make it ‘visible’ first, then it progresses automatically via IBL
Inside-out nature of life/the principles behind clarity	✓	✗	Need to make it ‘visible’ first, then it progresses automatically via IBL

There are aspects of life where you already perform brilliantly; where you trust yourself to respond intuitively in the moment. For one person it might be cooking, project management or graphic design. For someone else it might be parenting, driving or public speaking. The difference between the areas where you struggle and the areas where you thrive is simple:

In the areas where you've been struggling until now, there's been a big gap between your embodied understanding and reality.

In the areas where you thrive, there's very little gap between your embodied understanding and reality.

Let's take public speaking as an example. An enormous percentage of the population are afraid of public speaking. If you ask them why, they'll give you a long list of reasons (‘What if I don't remember what to say? I’m nervous in case I look stupid. I'm worried about what people are thinking about me'). When they see someone for whom public speaking is effortless, the nervous speaker assumes that the confident speaker is finding answers to all those questions and concerns, but that's not the case. Ask a confident speaker what they're thinking about when they're in front of an audience, and they'll usually say ‘Nothing’. They're typically in an open, responsive state of mind with their attention on the audience and how their message is landing. Remember: when true causes are not understood, spurious causes and solutions proliferate.

Your mind is a self-correcting system

We all have places in our life where we have a good embodied understanding of the self-correcting nature of our minds. Have you ever said something like one of the following?

• ‘I’ll sleep on it and see how the situation looks in the morning'.
• ‘I’m not thinking clearly; I'll call them when I'm not feeling so annoyed'.
• ‘Don't worry; it’ll all look different in a few days'.
• ‘I’m not getting anywhere. I'm going to take a break and come back to it with fresh eyes'.

These kinds of statements represent your intuitive understanding of the self-correcting nature of the mind. It's just that until now, you may not have realized just how reliably your state of mind can return to clarity. As you continue deepening your understanding of these principles, you're going to benefit from this innate capacity more and more.

So what's this got to do with impact?

Grounding is the foundational piece that allows you to have a profound, transformational impact on another person (whether as a leader, parent, coach or colleague). When you listen to people who are extremely successful in a given field, you'll hear them pointing to an intuitive understanding of these principles (their grounding) without even realizing it…

‘You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over’ (Richard Branson)

‘You miss 100% of the shots you don't take’ (Wayne Gretsky)

‘Follow your instincts. That's where true wisdom manifests itself’ (Oprah Winfrey)

‘Be yourself; everyone else is already taken’ (Oscar Wilde)

‘And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition’ (Steve Jobs)

‘There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way’ (Nelson Mandela)

‘You have to do what you dream of doing even while you’re afraid' (Arianna Huffington)

‘There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing’ (Aristotle)

‘We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are’ (Anaïs Nin)

Like gravity, the principles behind clarity aren't something you ‘do’ or ‘apply’; they're already there; something you realize for yourself. These principles are already playing out in your work, your relationships, and in every other aspect of life.

You're already swimming in the intelligence and
wisdom of  life. We're living in these
principles like fish are living in water.

Your grounding is what governs the impact you're able to have, and how you're able to leverage it. I often speak to aspiring transformation professionals who are passionate about making a difference to others. They know what they'd love to do, but say they don't know how to make a living from it. What initially looks like a commercial problem (e.g. ‘How do I get clients?’) usually turns out to be a grounding issue. As your grounding deepens, you find it much easier to resolve the commercial challenges.

Your innate capacity for realization deepens your grounding by bringing you more closely into alignment with reality. The more aligned with reality you are, the easier it is to make progress and create results. So once you're making progress, what do you do on those occasions when you get knocked off-track?