27. TRAIN YOUR DEPTH MIND
* Making better use of your Depth Mind is an important skill for creative thinkers.
* Your Depth Mind is your sub-conscious. Once you have experienced an unconcealing – typically in a third place when you are quite relaxed and doing something else - then you can start to trust your Depth Mind to sort things out and generate solutions once you have ‘briefed’ it.
* But this doesn’t just happen automatically. You need to train your Depth Mind and you can do that in various ways:
1. Be constantly curious.
2. Practice serendipity (the more you think, the more it appears you are in ‘the right place at the right time’).
3. Become a Mental Magpie (collect stimuli often and from odd places).
4. Widen your span of relevance (many inventions were conceived by those working in other fields, and, as the saying goes, chance favours the prepared mind).
EXERCISE: Examine the brief and then do nothing about it. Meanwhile, draw up a plan to deliberately expose your mind to some unusual non-work stimuli over the next few days. Create a system for capturing your observations about these unusual things. At the end of your off-duty period, examine those thoughts in the context of the brief. There may even be an Unconcealing before your review. If necessary, get colleagues to do the same.