10 components to help people think for themselves.
‘The quality of everything human beings do depends on the quality of the thinking they do first.’
If that’s true, how do we help people improve the quality of their thinking?
When I read that question posed by Nancy Kline in the introduction to her book More Time to Think I got excited. She dedicated her entire career to creating a framework that emulates the natural breakthrough process of a human mind. Light-bulb moments on demand, she found the switch. An empirically proven way to improve everything that humans do. In this moment I knew that I was going to learn everything about her method and in this post I’ll summarise for you what I’ve learned.
The Thinking Environment
It turns out that one factor is more important for the quality of people’s thinking than their education, IQ, background or experience. It is… how they are treated by the people around them, while they are thinking. More specifically, if people around the thinker will behave in ten particular ways, this person will start to think for herself, often brilliantly.
Nancy Kline defined these ten behaviours that comprise the thinking environment as: Attention, Equality, Ease, Appreciation, Encouragement, Feelings, Information, Diversity, Incisive Questions and Place.
Each of them individually improves the quality of people’s thinking but, applied all together, they create an environment where human minds can thrive.
Let’s explore them in more detail…
1. Attention
How does it feel to be truly listened to? To know you will not be interrupted. Nancy Kline describes it as an experience closest to heaven we can have without dying. Scott Peck says that deep listening to your children is the best possible concrete evidence of your esteem you can give to them. And the more children feel valuable, the more they will begin to say things of value. They will rise to your expectation of them. It seems it doesn’t change later in life.
Attention is the first and key component of the thinking environment. Attention is powerful. It generates thinking. But I’m not talking about the kind of attention we are all used to in our day-to-day life filled with social media, email and phone notifications. I mean real attention.
Here are a few tips how to give the thinker the kind of attention that will generate the best thinking.
First of all, be fully present. No phone, no other distractions. Assume that there is nothing more important than the person in front of you.
Secondly, do not listen to reply. You have to be really curious about what the other person will say next and commit to not interrupting them under any circumstances. The thinker must know it and be able to count on it.
And finally, the attention has to be based on the positive philosophical choice. It means that before we even start listening we choose to believe in several assumptions about human beings in general, which of course include the person that is thinking and ourselves.
What are these assumptions?
We assume that we are inherently good, all of us, all the time.
We assume that we are intelligent,
that we have a choice,
that we are loving and lovable,
we assume that we want things to be right for everyone.
That our feelings are a part of thinking well,
that we have the right to happiness
and that we matter, equally.
You can argue if these statements are true or false; this debate has been open for centuries. Socrates believed they were true. But, if your goal is to help the person to think, holding these assumptions has proved to deliver the best results.
Attention that embodies all these qualities is in itself an act of creation. People are grateful for the gift of undivided, uninterrupted attention every time they receive it and they will show it by generating and expressing their best thinking, their most brilliant ideas.
Offering someone deep attention with the goal to help them think better is a form of love. And love makes attention catalytic.
2. Equality
Towards the end of a discovery session with a potential client, when I asked her if she had any more questions before deciding if she wanted to work with me she said: have you had any clients my age? I’m guessing I’m about twenty years older than you, won’t that be a problem?
Luckily, I was in the middle of reading Nancy Kline’s book so I answered: I believe that in a coaching session, which is a thinking environment, we are equal as thinkers, regardless of the gaps in age, knowledge and experience. She smiled when she heard that. In that moment I knew we would work together. And we did, very successfully.
Equality as thinkers is the second component of the thinking environment.
I know, the idea to value layman’s opinion as much as their own might make some professionals, including coaches, uncomfortable: why would a client pay to talk to you if you didn’t speak from a position of authority? But wouldn’t youwant a specialist to be curious about what you think before rushing to tell you what to do? I would. As coaches we have two roles to play in the session. Be the thinking environment for the client and offer them information, reflection, feedback and incisive questions, in a maximum of 20% of the session time. That will be enough. In the rest of the time we witness the clients shine and find the best solutions.
3. Ease
People want to be around ease. In the modern world we bought into the idea that there is not enough time. That we have to rush and be stressed, and keep up, all the time. Otherwise we will be left behind, and it would mean that we are not doing anything important.
When I think about ease what always comes to my mind is Caye Caulker, a small island in Belize in the Caribbean’s where I spent a few days. The island’s motto, written in visible places in big letters is “Go slow”. I remember walking along the beach, admiring the ocean, when a black man with dreadlocks stopped me and said with a creole accent “Eee, you are walking too fast. Go slow.”, smiled and walked away. That comment made my day.
Abraham Lincoln said If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe. Einstein would take 55 min of an hour to think about a problem before moving to tackling the solution. Studies show it empirically: taking the unrushed time to think before moving to action saves time.
So, in the thinking environment Go slow. Decide that the world can wait. The thinking that will be the result of it will ultimately save you time.
4. Appreciation
Humans need appreciation to think well. Biologically. It turns out that appreciative thoughts and feelings stabilize the heart, cause blood to flow to the brain and stimulate the cortex (which is an area of the brain where the thinking happens).
We all long for giving and receiving appreciation but it’s still so rarely present in a professional context. We are cultured to believe that it is cheesy and that focusing on what can be improved, so criticism, will bring better results as the good things already work so don’t need our attention.
Nancy Kline says that it’s the other way around. Using the 5:1 ratio of appreciation to criticism, so focusing on how good we already are first, creates the optimal conditions for the brain to generate the best ideas for how to improve things. She recognizes however, how hard it is for many people to give and receive appreciation and has some tips for us on how to give it. She calls it 3S: be succinct, sincere and specific. Succinct because people find it difficult to hear too much appreciation, sincere because they will look for a reason to disbelieve it and specific because the more specific you are the more the person can apply the appreciation generally to their life.
Ready to give it a try? I appreciate your curiosity and desire to learn more about how to improve your thinking.
5. Diversity
The human mind thinks best in the presence of reality, and reality is diverse. Hence, the more diverse the group identities in the thinking environment, the more diverse the ideas it can generate. But! There is a catch that sounds more or less like this:
Hi, we got over our prejudices and we now value diversity. We invite you to join us and want you to be yourself as long as you are just like us, look, dress, work, consume, and socialize like us. Welcome.
It is not enough to ensure the presence of different group identities, because as Nancy Kline says the assumption of superiority, like cockroaches, is the last one to die.
To create the thinking environment, we must make sure that we encourage the thinker to be different than us and think for herself. The message has to be: welcome and please be different, please be YOU.
6. Encouragement
Encouragement is about eliminating the competition between the thinkers. We are living in a world based on competition with a silent injunction “I must be better, smarter and faster than you”. So naturally we compare ourselves to others all the time and fear their judgement of us, also when we are trying to think.
When you are thinking about what others are thinking about you when you are thinking, you are not thinking. In the thinking environment, we have to reassure the thinker that we want to hear her most courageous and creative thoughts. The thinker must know that you are not competing with her but championing her.
7. Feelings
Positive emotions can make us smarter. After laughter thinking improves. But negative emotions have a strong effect too and can completely block the thinking. Allowing appropriate emotional release is essential in the thinking environment. Appropriate because it requires emotional intelligence to decide when showing emotions will help us think and, especially when it comes to negative emotions, it will block it further.
Here are some tips on how to deal with difficult emotional states.
Crying. Nancy Kline points out that most people get uncomfortable if someone, including themselves, starts to cry. Meanwhile, if we are feeling emotional, crying will help to release the tension and restore the thinking. Her suggestion is to keep in mind a simple observation: crying is natural and, when someone cries, everything is fine.
Anger and fear restrict people and block their thinking. Nancy Kline compares both emotions to fog that obstructs the vision of a pilot. And if that happens, every pilot would tell you what to do: trust the instruments, not your judgement. So, if you are sensing negative feelings like anger, hurt or fear arise, assume you are in the fog. Your instruments in this case will be the positive philosophical choice, let it guide your navigation in that moment. Remember that you, and all the people in the room are good, intelligent, loved and loving and want things to be right for everyone. And ask yourself: if I knew that to be true what would I think and say next?
8. Information
Information is not just about knowing the facts but also about accepting them. We should supply the relevant data to the thinker, but an equally important job in the thinking environment is to spot and dismantle the denial.
Denial is an assumption that what is not true is true and what is true is not true. We often deny both negative and positive things about ourselves and the world. An example could be “My jeans are too tight, they shrank” or “I got very positive feedback from my client, it was luck again”. Denial can be private and organizational, and it has three levels.
Stage one: what is happening is not happening.
Stage two: it happened but it was not bad.
Stage three: the bad was good.
In other words: ignore it, distort it, rewrite it.
Nancy Kline suggests four questions that might be particularly useful if we notice someone denying facts:
1. What are you not facing that is right in front of your face?
2. What are you assuming that lets you ignore this?
3. If you were to face it what positive outcomes might result?
4. If you knew you could handle it what steps would you take to live free of this denial?
9. Place
This component is about two things: the physical place where the conversation is held and your own body, so where YOU take place. The place where we do the thinking has to say back to us: you matter. The physical environment should affirm the importance of you and of the thinking process.
At the same time, you need a healthy body to think best. You have to respect it and take care of it and not be in denial of it.
The exact form and shape of either of these two do not matter, what matters is that you matter.
10. Incisive Questions
Incisive questions follow the mind’s natural breakthrough moments. They are called incisive because, a bit like a beliefs’ surgery, they cut through the untrue assumptions that are blocking the thinking and replace them with true, liberating ones.
Let’s say that reading this text you said to yourself “I’ll never remember all this information”. Let’s use the incisive questions to challenge that.
Q: What are you assuming that is making you think that you won’t remember this information?
A: Well, I’m assuming that it was a lot. That my memory isn’t good. I’m assuming that I have to remember it all after listening to it just once.
Q: Which of these assumptions is most making you think that?
A: Hmm… I think the assumption that I have to remember it all at once.
Q: And is that true?
A: No, of course not.
Q: What is true and liberating instead?
A: That I can take my time and watch this video as many times as I want!
Q: So if you knew, that you could take your time and watch this video as many times as you want, what would you do next?
A: I would watch it a few times over the next few days until I feel like I understand and remember the 10 components. Thanks!
It’s that simple. If you knew, [liberating assumption] what would you do next?
Summary
In coaching, we are experts by how we are with people, not by what we say. We are the catalysts of their thinking by providing Attention, Equality, Ease, Appreciation, Encouragement, Feelings, Information, Diversity, Incisive Questions and the right Place. In this way we matter profoundly because we don’t matter at all. We know that the mind that generated the question has the best answers.