The Power of Thinking

As John Maxwell reminds us in “No Limits”, success has as much to do with thinking as it does with acting. We are all given opportunities and challenges. We all face difficult choices or moments when we aren’t sure what to do next.

That’s why we need to develop our thinking capacity. It’s not enough to come up with ideas, we need to deepen those ideas. We need to become what John Maxwell calls an “idea digger”. It doesn’t happen with one shovel full of dirt. We need to keep going deeper into the ground. This kind of thinking takes real muscle and it’s worth every bit of the effort.

For over 18 months, the UpCloseTeam has been working in Fort McMurray, helping local businesses revitalize. As much as doing, this has involved a lot of thinking. We’ve put John Maxwell’s ideas on how to become an idea digger to the full test. The results have been good for the whole community.

Five Steps for Deepening Your Thinking

Sometimes we look at people who have game-changing ideas and we think they must be made of different stuff than we are. But becoming an idea digger is a learned skill. We can all do it.

Here are five key steps, taken from John Maxwell’s book, to help you deepen your thinking:

1. Clarify your thinking. In Fort McMurray, we were offering workshops on cash flow management and marketing. We sensed there was more we could do, particularly related to leadership. But until we decided to draw from the “21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” by John Maxwell, all we had was a notion.
   
   
2. Share your thinking. We wanted to encourage local businesses to think about their leadership capacity, but we knew they had limited time. After thinking it over as a team, we decided to offer lunch-and-learn sessions. We’d give a presentation and follow that with open discussion. 
   
   
3. Put it to the test. This first session was small and helped us see the true potential. The discussions were the most powerful part of the experience. This reinforced the idea that a mastermind format was best suited to our goal. One of the best ways to grow leadership is to share it.
   
   
4. Expand your thinking. We soon began to see that the lunch-and-learn format was a way for local businesses to understand their leadership capacity and commit to helping it grow. A number of the participants found the introduction so useful, they signed up for a full course in the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.
   
   
5. Implement your thinking. We continued to deliver lunch-and-learns on leadership. We remain open to expanding our thinking on what it takes to help people assess and develop their leadership capacity. Here is what one of the participants said, “This one-hour session was full of good information. It makes you ask yourself some very important questions to keep evolving as a leader.”

One Good Idea Leads to Another

What started as a vague sense that more leadership training might be helpful turned into a specific series of lunch-and-learns. This launched many businesses on a path of growth. You could say it started them on an idea digging project of their own. That’s the power of thinking.

The next time you have a vague sense of an opportunity that has not yet been pursued. Stop and think. Use these idea digging steps and see what happens when you take your thinking to a deeper level. Clarify, share, test, expand, and implement. Let us know it goes.

As Steve Jobs said, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

The best is yet to come. It starts with you.

Your friends,
The UpCloseTeam