CHAPTER 4
Thinking into and out of an Insight-State of Mind

As newcomers consider the modes and methods we have described, they relate them to their personal experience and realize that this is the way that they already operate. They become curious as to how they can adjust the way they live to get into an Insight State of Mind with greater regularity.

Here is where things get interesting. It turns out that trying to get into an Insight State of Mind is a bit of a fool’s errand. This insight state is actually our natural, default state. In an Insight State of Mind, our brains are not being overworked. Rather, they are relaxed, and nothing is more natural than finding your way to a state of relaxation. It is where most of us find ourselves right before we fall asleep each night, and it is where we find ourselves when we wake up each morning. Either a conscious or an unconscious effort is needed to move us out of our natural state. However, working hard at achieving an Insight State of Mind will not yield positive results.

In the 1980s, noted physician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton described the following six behavioral states of the newborn: quiet sleep, active sleep, drowsiness, quiet alert, active awake, and crying. In the quiet alert state, the baby’s eyes are wide open, bright, and shiny. There are few to no body movements, and the baby’s energy is directed into seeing and hearing. Normal newborns spend two-thirds of the first hour of their lives in the quiet alert state, 30 percent in the crying state, and the rest in the other states. Many experts have concluded that the period between thirty and sixty minutes after birth is when the newborn is in the state of highest awareness and has the highest capacity for learning.¹

The babies studied weren’t meditating or deliberately entering some type of deeper consciousness. They were just being present. Not until we become active, educated thinkers are we so easily diverted from what would otherwise be our natural, present, insightful state. This is important. Anytime you are not in an Insight State of Mind, it is because you have done some type of mental work (most likely unrecognizable by your conscious mind) to drive yourself out of it.

Remember the analogy of the basketball in the pool from chapter 2? You will never have to push the basketball to the surface, just as you will never have to think your way into an Insight State of Mind. Your mind will return to this state naturally and with little effort—as soon as you stop thinking your way out of it.

Since we can’t stop thinking entirely, the answer is to relax and accept. Relax your thinking so that too many cafeteria trays don’t pile up to the point that you can’t see what’s in front of your nose, and accept that thinking is constantly going on in the background and that eventually, when space allows, an insight will occur.

Thought Governs One’s State
of Mind

A couple we know shared a story with us about a trip they took to California to visit some friends. The family they were visiting had very small children, and when the couple got to their friends’ house on the first morning, the situation was a bit chaotic. Our friend describes the experience:

Our hosts had decided we would eat out that evening and asked us what time we would like to have dinner. We said that since we were on East Coast time, and have a difficult time digesting late at night, six would be great. They said sure. The chaos with the kids continued for a bit, but around eleven o’clock, we went to visit a local museum and finally sat down for lunch at around three. I remember thinking, “Geez, if I eat now, I am not going to want to eat again at six.” I had a small snack to keep me until dinner. Our hosts had a full meal, and the whole time I was wondering how they would be hungry again in just a couple of hours. I dropped that thought and tried to relax. At this point, there was no question that my state of mind was deteriorating, but I had noticed this sort of thing before, so I made note of it and just tried to go with the flow.

When we finally did return to our friends’ house, it was six thirty, and no one was getting ready to go to eat. Over an hour later, we left for dinner, but then we had to drop off the kids at a babysitter on the way. At this point, my expectations for a relaxing evening were completely blown and my mood sunk even lower than before. I was operating in damage control with all my shields up, ready to react to anything that might aggravate me. I realized that I was in a bad way, so I started to look (unsuccessfully) for ways to improve my state. For the rest of the evening this searching was the best that I could do. There wasn’t anything I could do to improve my experience because the quality of my thinking was just too poor.

The following morning, I woke up to a beautiful sunny day, happy to be alive, with no concern for the previous evening.

When you discover, or even suspect, that you are in a low mood, the first point to remember is that while you often can’t make your mood better, you can generally keep it from getting worse. How? Well, when you are emotionally agitated, the urge is to do something about it. The problem with this is that whatever action you take will be born of low-quality thought and is therefore unlikely to work. In fact, it may even make matters worse. In this situation, the better strategy is, as Dwight Eisenhower reportedly ordered, “Don’t just do something; stand there,” at least psychologically. Acknowledge that you’ve momentarily lost your bearings, and don’t take any bait that carries a bad feeling or that might set you into a downward spiral. Patiently let your mind settle before doing anything or making any big decisions. Hopefully you can avoid taking action, but in the relatively few cases where you can’t, try to do whatever carries the best feeling and then learn from the result.

Sleep is vastly underappreciated as a reset button for the brain. Sometimes your only option is to get a good night’s sleep and to wait for the world to look better. When we are in a low state of mind, we may feel as though we will be stuck there forever, but our head will eventually clear itself without any work on our part.

At the time, our friend couldn’t figure out how to snap himself out of his crummy state. He was, however, aware of the effect a low mood has on how he experiences and interacts with the world and was able in the interim to have a nice time with his friends.

A few days after returning from our trip, I was on one of my morning walks, where I often get a lot of insights. It was a breezy New England day, and I suddenly realized that when our friends had asked us what time we wanted to have dinner, they didn’t have any real intention of honoring that time. It was just a social nicety to express concern for our needs.

I had a whole series of experiences that evening that were based on a reality that didn’t exist. I was operating as though they had broken a promise to me. My thoughts had bounced all over the place that afternoon, from wondering why my friends were so inconsiderate to being amazed that they could live such haphazard lives. In truth, they were perfectly courteous hosts. From their point of view, everything was fine, since they always like to go to dinner at seven thirty or eight. To them, the conversation about dinnertime had been an exchange of social pleasantries without any serious commitment.

In a low-quality state of mind, we take things far more personally than we would otherwise. Since our psychological experience is a consequence of how we are thinking, the bad moods that we find ourselves in are of our own creation, even if triggered by external circumstances. These circumstances, our families, our friends, and their antics, actually have nothing to do with how we feel. The perception that the world has conspired to ruin our experience is entirely in our heads. This sort of thing occurs all the time to varying degrees. We have a set of experiences and expectations from which we create a story around our present reality. Depending on the quality of our state of mind, that story can lead to drastically different conclusions. How the story plays out is entirely up to us.

It is impossible to live your entire life in a good mood. None of these concepts will keep you from ever having a bad day or slipping into a poor state of mind, but they will help build your resilience. We hope that when your state of mind starts to slip, instead of getting a full-blown cold, you’ll only get a few sniffles.

Discovering the Importance
of Thought

Shortly after graduating from college, Charlie was in a relationship with a woman that wasn’t on the right track. Below he gives an account of the profound insight that was the genesis of his work at Innovation Associates and a long career pursuing high-quality thinking.

One evening, my fiancée and I went to the house of a couple we were friends with to have a bottle of wine. When we arrived, she started right in on me with a series of what I heard as really disparaging comments. I had a lot of self-control in moments like this, so I calmly asked her to stop. When she continued with the belittling remarks, I became increasingly upset, and this continued for the rest of our visit. On the ride home, our quarrel boiled into a series of loud accusations. She even denied saying anything derogatory. Now, not only was she being irrational, but she was being dishonest as well. I was furious. She was wrong, and I could prove it.

At home later, I was standing in the doorway to my home office when she sat down at my desk and started to cry. The seeming injustice overwhelmed me. After all the awful things she had said, she had the audacity to feel sorry for herself!

And then the entire world fell away, and I was left staring into empty space. I saw that my fiancée was not causing me to feel angry. I knew that there was no physical way she could be responsible. When she had spoken, sound waves traveled from her mouth to my ears, but there was no way that sound waves could make me feel. It was my thinking! I realized that my thoughts were the entire source for my anger.

I understood science and structure and equations of the natural world and the physical reality of things, but in this moment, I saw in a very profound way that my personal experience of the world was and is only a function of my own thinking. It wasn’t an intellectual understanding but a deeply personal insight—well beyond any understanding I had ever experienced before.

After this insight, I had an utterly new appreciation for the power of thought. I recognized that with thought playing such an essential role, it was crucial to improve my thinking and that of my clients. This marked the start of a lifelong pursuit of high-quality thinking.

Over the years, we have learned that as effective as being vigilant about your thinking can be, it isn’t as important as seeing how your thinking forms your psychological experience. Once this occurs, you will come to possess both a conscious and an unconscious awareness about how your thoughts affect your reality. Your mind will settle more easily, you will have insights more regularly, and when you do get stuck in a poor state of mind, it will be for a shorter period of time. In a phrase, you will become more psychologically resilient.

When we are disturbed, we lose our bearings, and our perception of reality gets cloudy. When you shake a snow globe, the snow swirls about for a while, but eventually it settles. Moods are similar. There is no question that your globe is going to be shaken from time to time. The more you understand that your thinking determines your psychological experience, the more quickly your snow will settle.

Practice Versus Technique

You may have, or want to have, a favorite technique to fix your head, but when you’re caught in a bad mood, such techniques tend to be unreliable at best. An important distinction exists between a technique that you use to make something different in a specific situation and a practice that you try to employ on a regular basis.

Josh likes to swim. If he hits the pool in the morning, it sets up an entirely different day for him than when he does not. He comes out of that swim feeling great physically and in a terrific state of mind that often carries four or more hours into the day. Meetings run smoothly, business conversations are efficient, and participants enjoy great rapport. You may have your own version of Josh’s swim, like running, yoga, cycling, or meditation. If so, you probably know the kind of feeling we are referring to.

Usually, during the course of those thirty minutes of rhythmic motion in the pool, Josh’s mind settles. But what happens when he gets in a lousy mood and tries to swim to improve it? Well, let’s tell you about Diane.

Diane is a senior editor of a business magazine. From time to time, she is given the opportunity to write an essay of her own. One time the deadline loomed and she had no idea for her essay. She packed her laptop, left the office, and went home to take a bath, because she always gets her insights in the bathtub.

She emerged from the tub and sat down at her computer, but no ideas showed up for the essay. She sat for a while, waiting for something to come along, but nothing happened. Diane headed back to the bathtub. Emerging with wrinkly fingers from the bath, she dried off and sat down at her desk, but after some time, no ideas for her essay had surfaced. Back into the tub she went. Then back to her desk. No ideas. Back to the tub again.

Luckily for her skin, Diane had an idea hit during her sixth bath.

A technique is something that you do in the hopes of changing your situation—in this case your state of mind. A practice is something that you do because you like the thing itself and, in our case, because it brings with it mental benefits. A practice doesn’t carry the expectation that it will necessarily change a specific situation. Instead, the function of a practice is to remind you of what is available to you all the time. You know that the Insight State of Mind is possible because you experience it during or after your practice. Because you know that it is possible, you know that your loss is only temporary. And you know what you need to look for to find your way back.

Here’s a friend describing how prayer works in his life:

I’m a little embarrassed to say that often my daily prayers kind of look like a list of things that I really hope God will give me. It’s like little old me giving God a list of things that he should do. But that all changes when I get to “Thy will be done.” Then it is no longer little old me. I am one with God. That feeling, of course, is inexpressible in words. But I am so lucky in that I can carry it into the rest of my day.

If you have a practice that brings you the kind of peace of mind that we associate with an Insight State of Mind, by all means keep it up. If you don’t have one, you might think about starting one. But think of the state of mind that accompanies your practice as your normal state, not the one you just visit temporarily or as a consequence of disciplined work.

Many of us can draw a fairly sharp distinction between what we might call our work state of mind and our vacation state of mind, which we visit typically just on vacation. Since our vacation state of mind is infrequent and conditioned by the occurrence of a vacation, we think of it as an unusual state and our work state of mind as the regular state. It is true that for many of us, the work state of mind is the most common one, but it is not the most natural one.

The Role of Thought

Your psychological experience is governed by thought. Your states of mind (insight or otherwise) and mood are not caused by circumstances, although they generally appear to be. For example, two people are walking down a dark street at night. One is convinced that danger is lurking in every shadow. He is sweating, his heart rate is elevated, his adrenaline levels are abnormally high. The other sees and feels no danger at all. She is relaxed and in an entirely different psychological and physical state, even though the external circumstances are precisely the same.

It’s useful to remember that what you are thinking is often not as important as how you are thinking. Forced, clenched thinking lowers your mood, even if you’re thinking “good thoughts.” It is the how of your thinking that causes your psychological experience. Pressured thought, for example, takes you away from your Insight State of Mind.

Any time you find yourself with a nice feeling or in a great state of mind, notice it. It will remind you of what’s natural, and that will support the natural process of returning you to that state. Also, find something to be grateful for. Have you ever thought about how grateful you are for something and then found yourself in a bad mood? It doesn’t happen. Gratitude is a mood elevator. When one very successful company president notices that his mood is shot, he walks out of his office and down the hall to find somebody to sincerely thank. He says that he finds such people very easily now. Their mood is lifted, and so is his.

During one of Malcolm’s workshops, a participant who had only just been introduced to the Insight State of Mind shared that for years he had noticed a shift in the quality of his thinking immediately after going for a run. He often had great insights into his business and even began to carry a notepad and miniature pen on his morning jogs, but before this conversation he never had the vocabulary to describe the phenomenon or the recognition that his state of mind was facilitating the insights.

Focusing hard on thinking better may work on occasion, but by and large, trying to out-think your thinking is a pretty weak strategy. Techniques can sometimes be helpful, but they will generally get you only so far. And remember, techniques aren’t ultimately required. Nothing is. You don’t have to do anything to alter your state of mind. It doesn’t work that way. Changes of mood can accompany action, but they are not caused by action.

Losing awareness of your state of mind is a natural and common occurrence. Think of it as a parallel to the formation of chronic muscular stress. First you tense the muscles. Then you keep the tension. Then a habit of tension is formed. Your brain knows the presence of that muscle only through sensation, so without movement, the sensation extinguishes over time and the brain “loses track” that the now permanently stressed muscle is in fact stressed. After that, nothing changes. The stress is “forgotten.” Certain forms of physical therapy and exercise are based simply in restoring movement to tight muscles, thus restoring sensation. With sensation and awareness, the proper mind-body connection is reestablished.

Analogously, what you are looking for is simply awareness and understanding: awareness of your psychological experience moment by moment and deeper and deeper understanding of how your thinking forms your psychological reality—nothing more. You need only have insights into the nature of your thinking and how your thought creates the world you live in.

Eventually, you will realize that in any moment you are just one thought away from an insight, one thought away from psychological freedom under any circumstance. This doesn’t mean that you can order up that thought on demand. In fact, you probably can’t. It means that you know how through your own insights (and this is important), any psychological state is impermanent and not a direct consequence of the situation you are in. Anyone can tell you this. But you must see so for yourself. Your truth is in your own insights into how your thoughts bring about your reality. When you come to see how this relationship works for yourself, you will be forever free from the chronic grip of insecurity or the encumbrance of other low-quality psychological states.

Bad states of mind will become much like storms. Yes, the rain may be coming down quite heavily now, but you know the storm will blow through. You may not be able to do anything to accelerate that process, but you know this simple, powerful truth: it will ultimately pass. This truth allows you to endure the rain with relative equanimity. You permit the natural restorative mental processes to work. The basketball floats. The snow settles. And you don’t interfere with these processes by getting bothered or worried or otherwise stressing yourself to get to some place where you would otherwise be if you simply stopped thinking your way out of it.

For a rare few of us, this awareness happens in an éclat of a transformative epiphany. For the rest, it arrives through insights over time—some small and others big. Your understanding will change and deepen. What you know today is different from what you knew about this five years ago, and it will likely be materially different five years from now. Undoubtedly, perhaps even ironically, we may well be thinking and saying different things about insight five years hence.

Whether in the form of minor insights or major epiphanies, your understanding of how we all see the world through the lens of thought will deepen over time. As your appreciation and awareness grow, so will your capacity for insight. Your usual mental hang-ups will shorten, and your ability to rebound from poor thinking will expand. In short, you will operate as a more intuitive, imaginative, and effective thinker.

Remember,

• Only your thinking can take you out of an Insight State of Mind. The outside world is never the culprit.

• Focusing hard on thinking better may work on occasion, but by and large, trying to outthink your mind is not a good idea.

• A genuine awareness of the connection between thought and the reality we perceive will allow a distressed mind to recover quickly and inhabit an Insight State of Mind with greater regularity.