CHAPTER 7
Life in an Insight State

So far, we have focused on creating more insights. But you almost certainly have realized by now that the applications and benefits of The Art of Insight reach into every part of our lives.

Based on what we have heard from others, we are confident that as you regain your familiarity with insight and experience a greater number of insights, you will discover positive changes in other areas of your life as well. Thought is at the root of our understanding and our actions. Improved thought leads to improved situations in life more directly than any technique we have come across. If you are relaxed and focused, you make smarter decisions more quickly and with greater confidence than if you are anxious and distracted. You demonstrate better judgment and therefore make fewer mistakes. Your interactions with colleagues improve, and moments of interpersonal conflict disappear. To the calm mind, the world is well paced. Almost miraculously, your personal schedule will relax. You will find plenty of time to live and work with ease. For workplace teams, the effects are multiplied with shorter meetings that flow more efficiently. Better decisions are made, mistakes and errors diminish, and solutions emerge that are easily implemented.

Here is a brief summary of other phenomena that have been consistently reported—benefits for you to look forward to:

You will have lots of little insights and fewer big ones. We believe this is because as you become mindful of small insights, you solve problems earlier—before they grow into bigger issues. Since insights occur all the time, you remain on track, and the need for major epiphanies becomes less frequent.

Life will become easygoing, with fewer problems. Ideas seem to come along just when they’re needed. In many cases, these ideas don’t register as insights. After a few months, people offer, “I just don’t have anything I’d call a real problem.”

Your problems will become less emotional and less personal and seem to disappear quickly. You will still get angry or frustrated, but far less frequently and you’ll be far more resilient. Issues won’t grip you the same way they did before, and you will rid yourself of the bad feeling in a matter of minutes or seconds instead of hours or days.

You will have fewer decisions to make, with less microman-aging. Managers who used to involve themselves in every decision now, curiously, find that team members willingly offer input and recommendations that in most cases are very sound. One client put it well: “The people around me seem to be getting smarter.” When controversy arises, managers find themselves leading a discussion and asking questions until there is convergence, as opposed to making tie-breaking decisions.

You will have time for everything. Nearly everyone describes how life feels less pressured and stressed. Fascinating examples include finding less traffic in the morning on the way to work and, most commonly, finding more time. Things don’t pile up the way they used to. Meetings end early. Moments of quiet show up throughout the day.

Your communication and relationships will improve. Interpersonal problems diminish. People who have had difficult histories with each other start to get along.

You will gracefully move across all types of thinking. Life is not just about insights. You will routinely move from fresh thinking to memory thinking and from intellect to intuition and enjoy a natural state of flow where you no longer need to consciously decide what type of thinking would work best.

You will have a heightened confidence and a strong sense of peace. Concern, anxiety, and worry become rare. When problems occur, they are just problems, with no ancillary emotionality.

You will find a job you actually love. Usually, this is because people rediscover the ability to enjoy the jobs they have, but in other cases, the perfect job opportunity comes along, and they are alert enough to notice.

You will have more energy. Another client put it nicely, “For the first time in as long as I can remember, I’m bringing all my energy to my life, both at work and at home. I’ve always felt I had to continually work hard to overcome resistance. Now, it seems like nothing is in my way.”

Each person’s results are different, of course, and problems will stick. We will still get angry and frustrated when we are in low moods. Everyone loses control once in a while. No one has yet reported any sort of perpetual high, which we think is a good thing. Looking for such a permanent state would probably interfere with finding moments of awe and profound joy. If you notice even a few of the conditions listed above showing up in your life, consider them further evidence of the success of your insight experiment.

Don’t Overthink Insight

People who use these methods enjoy a new groove in their lives. Most don’t pay a lot of attention to why this is happening or show much interest in being introspective about insight. They say to themselves, “Just be happy and go with the flow.” Some of us become more curious about insight and how it occurs, but this isn’t necessary and can even carry some risk. It’s easy to overthink matters, and studying the Insight State of Mind is no exception. If you become busy-minded about the Insight State of Mind, your experience of that state will almost undoubtedly diminish.

Our client Pete, whom you met before, started learning about insight with a whole raft of problems on his plate. Like many of the people we work with, after a couple of months, all the problems seemed to go away. He still had problems of course, but they weren’t major issues. The decisions of his subordinates moved in his favor, often without his conscious attention, and his workplace situation now couldn’t look better. Pete doesn’t seem to have any particular interest in why this has occurred. He is happy to be, in his words, “hot right now.” While he had what must have been an important realization—something about his thinking he didn’t understand before—it wasn’t of a conceptual nature, and he may never need to articulate it to himself or anybody else. He doesn’t even want to. After all, he’s “hot”!

An important difference exists between understanding these concepts and having an insight into how you personally think. You want to look for insight into your own thinking process, not just an intellectual understanding of the concept of insight. Once you understand insight as an available tool, once you understand in your own terms that insight arrives best from your being in a specific state of mind, and once you understand that this state of mind has a lot to do with the way you think, and not so much what you think, your life will change. One of the most consistently interesting and important findings of our studies is the value of seeing something for oneself. In the area of Insight Thinking, the benefits come not from having a conceptual understanding but from having an insight into how your own mind works. If you only attain an intellectual mastery of these ideas, you won’t have more insights.

At some point, most drivers have experienced a skid starting while making a turn. Your tendency is to steer back onto your course. However, by turning into the skid, the car straightens itself, and you stay on the road. In that instant, you may not understand the physics or mechanics of what is happening, but you somehow know what is effective. If you act on that knowing, you will have fewer car wrecks as a result. In the same way, your personal understanding of your capacity for insight can have a profound effect on everything in your life.

Look for That Good Feeling

That’s the bottom line. You don’t need a conscious change in understanding. The proverbial pennies will drop for you along the way. Perhaps only a few will be in the form of conceptual understandings. All of us walk our own paths to reclaiming our ability for insight. Yours might be a completely nonverbal, even subliminal, experience. You don’t need to attach words to it so that you can describe it to yourself, your friends, your families, and colleagues. In fact, your progress in Insight Thinking may be very subtle after a first burst of awareness. Smaller insights may occur with greater frequency, but you may also experience an increase in insights that don’t seem to be relevant to anything in the moment. You might be walking to work in the morning and feel hit by an insight of some sort. You know you now understand something you didn’t understand before because you have “that” feeling, but your insight doesn’t connect to anything you’re thinking about at this moment in your life. Only later do a number of these small realizations link together to address something more relevant to you. In some cases, your realizations never link up in a coherent, verbal way. Nevertheless, you wake up one day on a significantly different track in life—a track you know is more authentic for you, one that you have reached with a certain psychological ease.

Reacquainting ourselves with the capacity for insight is something unique, something to be treasured, and that may be the end of it for some of us. If we are asked by others about our process, we might respond that we don’t know, but it is common for our friends, families, and coworkers to comment on the changes that they are noticing. Because the experience is not easy to articulate, many of us are content to simply move forward, excited and happy to have a new way of experiencing the world.

Whether or not you have more interest in insight, if you find yourself having more of these experiences and enjoying some of the positive benefits we’ve discussed, something about insight works for you. It should only get better. We wish you the best in your ongoing explorations.