If you had to come up with a list of ways to completely shut down a person’s creative best, what would you put on the list? This is the central question behind one of my all-time favorite slideshows, by Harvard Business School innovation and strategy professor Youngme Moon, called An Anti-Creativity Checklist: 11 Ways to Stifle Imagination, Innovation, and Out-of-the-Box Thinking (Guaranteed Results).40 I like it for several reasons, not the least of which are that she used both humor as well as the “Opposite World” method (see Chapter 2) make her points. Here are my favorite five:
What Moon is referring to here is the self-censoring voice in our head that whispers things such as “Why would you go out on a limb to put your idea out there, what if people think it’s stupid?” Listening to such nonsense will most certainly stunt your creative output.
This is that same self-censoring voice telling you quite clearly that you’re not creative, not an innovator. It’s putting you in a very confining, very false box.
Moon is referring, again, to that overprotective voice that wants to squelch an idea even before it gets fully formed, warning your SLOW thinking not to bother getting engaged, and that you’re better off going with what’s worked in the past. It’s far easier, safer, and more comfortable. Why waste valuable mental resources?
Go ahead and play ostrich, implies Moon. All this change and disruption happening around us—new knowledge and new technology and ways of working—isn’t going to last. They are just distractions and passing fads, so don’t lean in, don’t invest the mental energy to learn. In other words, stay right where you are. Your way of looking at the world is the only way. Sound familiar? It should, it’s Fixation 101.
Don’t play, don’t explore, don’t ask why, don’t rock the boat, just do your job, because there’s real work that needs to be done.
All five are variations on a theme, which is the subject of the seventh and final fatal flaw: Self-Censoring.
Not long after I began using the kinds of thought challenges I used with the LAPD bomb techs, I became aware that the elegant solution was present in the room during these types of sessions far more often than it was presented as the solution. In debriefing the exercise, I began asking how many people had thought of or discussed simply removing the shampoo bottle tops, or simply allowing videotapes to be rented unwound, even if they were not chosen as final ideas. Responses were of two varieties.
In the first, the solution, or one very close to the solution, was indeed suggested to the group, but did not make it to the top of the list—it was defeated by one of the other thinking flaws, in much the same way the solution to the Survival on the Moon exercise was: NIH.
In the second, an individual had thought of the solution, but did not raise it with the group. The first time this came to my attention, though, was not because someone raised their hand to say they had thought of the answer, but rather because an individual came up to me during a session break to tell me, rather sheepishly, that the solution had immediately popped into her head. I was keen to know why.
“Well,” she began, “it just seemed easy and obvious, but I’m not very good at these kinds of things, so I figured my idea was too simple, and couldn’t possibly be right.”
This is classic Self-Censoring, which is the act of rejecting, denying, stifling, squelching, striking, silencing, and otherwise putting ideas of our own to death. She had censored her thoughts before they ever saw the light of day. I find this tragic. It’s a crime of the mind. Ideacide.
Self-Censoring is perhaps the deadliest of the fatal flaws, because any voluntary shutdown of the imagination is an act of mindlessness, the long-term effects of which eventually kill off our natural curiosity and creativity. Like NIH, it is a special form of Fixation that borders on mental masochism: we field or create a great idea, we recognize it as such, but deny or kill it anyway. Unlike NIH, there is no real or perceived border or boundary to cross, other than our own brain-mind barrier: the scrimmage line of the brain game.
As I mentioned in the Introduction, Self-Censoring is rooted in a kind of personal fear that can not only silence whatever creative instincts we may have, but also render us mindless: exaggerating, catastrophizing, doomsdaying. Welsh novelist Sarah Waters sums it up quite eloquently: “Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends’ embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . .”
There is no dearth of literature on Self-Censoring. It goes by many names. A century ago, Carl Jung wrote that, “There are, indeed, not a few people who are well aware that they possess a sort of inner critic or judge who immediately comments on everything they say or do.”
My first formal introduction to this flaw came from Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers in their 1986 classic book, Creativity in Business, based on a popular course they co-taught at Stanford University Graduate Business School. In it, they introduce the Voice of Judgment, which their students fondly nicknamed VOJ:
If you have trouble taking risks, or knowing when to take a risk, you are probably afraid of stumbling over the blocks thrown up by your own mind. If you lack the confidence to create, you are undoubtedly tuned in to the Voice of Judgment that all of us have within. You might think that the inhibiting pronouncements come from your associates, or the mores of your business environment, or society as a whole, but if you allow them to stop you, it’s your own internal broadcast you’re listening to.41
Ray and Myers acknowledge that judgment is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” and in general is a good thing that mostly keeps us on the right track, but that as we become more social animals and our desire to fit in and be accepted grows, “we submit ourselves to the kind of judgment that has conformity as its goal. This judgment condemns, criticizes, attaches blame, makes fun of, puts down, assigns guilt, passes sentence on, punishes, and buries anything that’s the least bit unlike a mythical norm.”
Novelist and screenwriter Steven Pressfield introduces us to the archenemy of creativity, which he names Resistance, writing in his 2002 book The War of Art that Resistance “is the most toxic force on the planet . . . the root of more unhappiness than poverty. . . . [Resistance] deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’s shadow is Resistance.” In his 2011 follow-up Do The Work, Pressfield goes further, calling Resistance a “monster,” an enemy in the form of “fear, self-doubt, procrastination, addiction, distraction, timidity, ego and narcissism, self-loathing, perfectionism, etc.” He spends several pages giving Resistance a persona of its own: “Resistance will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man. . . . Resistance is not out to get you personally. It doesn’t know who you are and doesn’t care. Resistance is a force of nature. It acts objectively. Though it feels malevolent, Resistance in fact operates with the indifference of rain and transits the heavens by the same laws as stars. When we marshal our forces to combat Resistance, we must remember this. . . . Resistance is always lying and full of [expletive].”42
Jeffrey Schwartz, whom you met in Chapter 2, takes a less dramatic yet more cerebral approach, categorizing Self-Censoring thoughts among various “deceptive brain messages,” which he defines as false, inaccurate, and unhelpful. Schwartz believes these thoughts take you away from what you truly want to achieve, and trigger what he calls our “Uh-oh” center, which sends out false alarms that something is wrong. Interestingly, the opening story of Schwartz’s You Are Not Your Brain is quite literally dramatic, centering on Ed, a talented Broadway performer suffering from “intense stage fright and fear of rejection.” Ed’s brain was sending him messages telling him he was no good and undeserving of acclaim and success. “What’s worse,” writes Schwartz, “those deceptive brain messages about Ed were dead wrong.” To the rest of the world, Ed (who sounds a lot like Henry Fonda, who threw up before he took the stage) was a beloved performer, a master of the stage, and could hold a crowd spellbound in their seats, often moving them to tears. But all Ed could think about was how terrible he was. “Rather than believing in his inherently wonderful qualities and impressive skills, Ed’s brain was programmed to ignore his positive attributes and instead focus on what he might have done wrong or how people might perceive his mistakes—in essence, to home in on his minute flaws and imperfections.”43
By any name—inner critic, VOJ, Resistance, deceptive brain messaging—Self-Censoring can snuff out our best thinking in a dash. If we let it, that is.
The causes of Self-Censoring are both biological and social, share the same origins and invoke the same brain functions as Fixation, and look a lot like NIH. So I will not dwell on them. There is a nuanced difference, though, and it is wrapped in the wisdom of the old idiom “once burned, twice shy.” One touch of a red-hot stove is usually all we need to avoid that kind of discomfort in the future. The same is true as we experience the emotional sensation of stress from our first instances of social rejection or ridicule. We quickly learn to fear and thus automatically avoid potentially stressful situations of all kinds.
In the context of thinking and solving problems, the challenge is that our response to stress becomes so ingrained and so reflexive, so mindless, that our avoidance tactics automatically prevent new experiences that have potentially rewarding payoffs. When we self-censor, we don’t even give these experiences a chance.
Perhaps, then, it is this kind of mindlessness that is at the root of Self-Censoring. Mindlessness is not synonymous with stupidity or ignorance, nor is it in any way an indication of brain damage. As Mindfulness author Ellen Langer defined it for me: “When you’re mindless, the past is over-determining the present. You’re trapped in categories created in the past. You’re trapped in a rigid perspective, oblivious to alternative perspectives. When you’re mindless, you confuse the stability of your mindset with the stability of the underlying phenomenon. You think you know, then you find out you don’t, because everything changes, everything looks different from different perspectives.”47
I asked for a personal example. “I was at this horse event,” she began, “and this man came up to me and asked me to watch his horse while he went to get a hot dog. He came back with the hot dog and gave it to the horse. And the horse ate it. And I said, OH MY GOD, what does it mean, ‘horses don’t eat meat’? And then I recognized that all information changes according to context, it changes over time, so every time you think you know, you’re wrong.
“It turns out that we can find evidence for whatever hypothesis we entertain,” she continued. “So if you ask about your thoughts . . . what’s wrong with them, how bad they are, yours, mine, anyone’s . . . you can easily find evidence. You can just as easily though find evidence for the opposite. And if you were more mindful, you’d probably do both. You have to recognize that events don’t cause us stress. Stress is a function of outcomes, which are simply our interpretation of events, not of events themselves. When you’re faced with something that seems stressful, you assume two things: first, that something is going to happen, and second, when it happens it’s going to be dreadful.” Both of which could be entirely false.
I interpreted what Ellen Langer told me to mean that since Self-Censoring is firmly rooted in the past, not the present, the messages arising from it can indeed be deceptive. And if what our censoring self thinks it knows may not be true, then automatically accepting it as some sort of inert truth is indeed mindless and self-defeating. Langer agrees: “When you think ‘I know’ and ‘it is’ you have the illusion of knowing, the illusion of certainty, and then you’re mindless.”
Allow me to share a personal example. In searching for new insights on the notion of mindlessness, I wanted to talk to Ellen Langer. Both her classic Mindfulness and deeply personal follow-up, On Becoming An Artist, are among my all-time favorite books. I didn’t want to simply trade interview questions over e-mail, I wanted to talk to her about mindlessness as it relates specifically to Self-Censoring. The problem was, my own Self-Censoring was holding me back, triggered by the uncertainty of acceptance. It said, “Ellen Langer doesn’t know me from Adam. She’s a rock star, a heavyweight. She won’t have time for me, and probably wouldn’t talk to me even if she did. It won’t happen.” How did I know Ellen Langer had never heard of me? I really didn’t. How did I know she wouldn’t have time? I really didn’t. How did I know she wouldn’t talk to me? I really didn’t. Had I mindlessly accepted these false Self-Censoring messages as gospel, I would have never had the pleasure of spending time with her.
Langer argues that we must learn to look at the world in a more conditional way, versus an absolute way, which was exactly the way the mindless me was approaching things at first. Understanding that the way we are looking at things is merely one among many different ways of looking at them requires us to embrace uncertainty. “Mindfulness follows from uncertainty. When you’re uncertain, everything becomes interesting again,” Langer told me.
That immediately brought to mind one of my fondest memories, involving my daughter when she was just a toddler of one: taking her with me on the short walk to check the mail. I live in a small enclave of homes in which all the mailboxes are together in a central location, less than a minute’s walk from my front door—when I walk alone, that is. When I would take my daughter with me it was easily 20 minutes. Everything along the way, to and from, fascinated her: every pebble, ant, stick, leaf, blade of grass, and crack in the sidewalk was something to be picked up, looked at, tasted, smelled, and shaken. Everything was interesting to her. She knew nothing. I knew everything. She was mindful. I was mindless.
The trick to fixing Self-Censoring is making everything interesting again.
The opposite of mindlessness is of course mindfulness, of which there are two views, Eastern and Western. The Eastern view positions a specific method—meditation—as an essential component to achieving a mindful state. The Eastern view is more about quieting the mind, and suspending thought. This philosophy is almost the complete opposite of the Western view of mindfulness which centers on active thinking, not suspended thinking, as captured in Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness. Although a megatrend of Eastern mindfulness meditation is a rapidly growing one—a bright shiny new object in our Western business culture—it is not the view I wish to employ here in the context of solving difficult challenges that require us to actively think differently.
David Rock, in his book Your Brain At Work, defines mindfulness as “living in the present, being aware of experience as it occurs in real time, and accepting what you see.”48 Daniel Siegel of UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center agrees, defining mindfulness as “our ability to pause before we react,” which in turn “gives us the space of mind in which we can consider various options and then choose the appropriate one.”49
And as Ellen Langer tells us, “When we’re mindful, noticing more things, it’s literally and figuratively enlivening. You cultivate the ability to notice things around you. Noticing new things, in general, puts you in the present. Most important, it shows you that you didn’t know that thing you thought you knew, which makes everything new to you again.”50
It is this version of mindfulness—a higher-order attention, noticing moment-to-moment changes around you—on which the Self-Censoring fix rests. I call it Self-Distancing, which is apropos for several reasons.
First, the kind of heightened in-the-moment noticing at the core of mindfulness as we are defining brings to mind a classic concept well over a century and half old—The Impartial Spectator—first introduced by Scottish philosopher Adam Smith as a central figure in his 1759 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the precursor to his more well-known The Wealth of Nations. Smith wrote that we all have access to “the person within” by invoking “the impartial and well-informed spectator,” which he defined as the ability to observe our behavior as an objective onlooker does, while remaining fully aware of our thoughts, emotions, and circumstances.
Jeffrey Schwartz uses the concept of the Impartial Spectator as an integral part of his therapy with OCD patients, teaching them to call on their “Wise Advocate” to assist them in reattributing their obsessions and compulsions as nothing more or less than deceptive brain messages. Schwartz and coauthor Rebecca Gladding describe the Wise Advocate as “The aspect of your attentive mind that can see the bigger picture, including your inherent worth, capabilities, and accomplishments. The Wise Advocate knows what you are thinking, can see the deceptive brain messages for what they are and where they came from.”51 Patients learn with great success to use the concept of Wise Advocate to view themselves as unbiased spectators and outside observers would.
Second, the modern term psychologists use for Smith’s Impartial Spectator is in fact self-distancing, coined by researchers Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk. What spurred Ethan Kross to investigate the concept in the first place was an act of mindlessness: he accidently ran a red light. He scolded himself by saying out loud, “Ethan, you idiot!” Then he heard NBA superstar Lebron James in a 2010 ESPN interview following what many thought was an unthinkable and cold-hearted decision to leave his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat. James literally came under fire: fans were burning effigies of his jersey. Watching the videos during the interview, Lebron said, “One thing I didn’t want to do was make an emotional decision. I wanted to do what’s best for LeBron James and to do what makes LeBron James happy.” The shift from first-person “I” to third-person “James” reminded Kross of his own switch after passing through the red light, and made him wonder if there might be something more to this quirk of speech, and if it might represent a method for changing one’s perspective.
The short answer is yes, based on a series of studies by Kross and his team at the University of Michigan Self-Control and Emotion Laboratory.52 In one study, they invoked stress and anxiety in one of the most powerful ways known to turn a challenge into a threat: public speaking in front of judges without sufficient time to prepare. In this case, college students had only five minutes to prepare and could not use notes. One group was told to use first-person pronouns to work through their stress; for example, “I shouldn’t be so nervous,” and “I will be fine.” The other group was told to use their name or a third-person pronoun; for example, “Matt, don’t be nervous,” or “You’ll do great.” Not only did the judges find the latter group’s performances to be more confident and persuasive, but the participants themselves reported far less shame and rumination than the first-person group. According to Kross, when you think of yourself as another person, it allows you to give yourself more objective, helpful feedback.
As Pamela Weintraub writes in the May 2015 issue of Psychology Today: “By toggling the way we address the self—first person or third—we flip a switch in the cerebral cortex, the center of thought, and another in the amygdala, the seat of fear, moving closer to or further from our sense of self and all its emotional intensity. Gaining psychological distance enables self-control, allowing us to think clearly, perform competently. The language switch also minimizes rumination, a handmaiden of anxiety and depression after we complete a task. Released from negative thoughts, we gain perspective, focus deeply, and plan for the future.”53
Experiencing Self-Distancing is not unlike the feeling you might get when you travel to a distant and unfamiliar place. As visitors we are de facto spectators: naturally mindful, fully present, noticing details the locals now take for granted. We are very much the outsiders, watching ourselves as we stumble and fumble local customs, chuckling at our folly rather than stressing over how stupid we are, as we surely would as natives to the land. And all the while we stay fully aware and alert to everything happening around us. We are in it, but not of it, so we are able to view ourselves in a more detached, rational, and objective way.
When I asked Ellen Langer if she had a favorite tool or technique for managing mindlessness, her response involved a form of Self-Distancing. She reiterated that when you’re facing something that’s causing you stress, be aware that you’ve made two unwarranted assumptions: that something will happen, and when it does it will devastate you. Listen to her use of “you” and “yourself”:
So first say to yourself, give yourself three reasons, five reasons why this thing might not happen. It immediately becomes less stressful, because you just went from “it’s going to happen” to “maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t.” Then ask yourself for three, five reasons why if it actually happens, it will be a good thing. Those reasons are easy to find once you ask the question. Now you’ve gone from “there’s this terrible thing that’s going to happen” to “there’s this thing that may or may not happen, but if it does, it will have good things and bad things.” That leads us to become less reactive to the world; you stay responsive, just not reactive.
As she relayed this simple method to me, I reflected back a few days to when I was immersed in my own Self-Censoring, which was causing me stress and rendering me mindless when it came to contemplating how I might possibly get to speak with Ellen Langer. I realized that I had worked through my dilemma in just this way, distancing myself from my Self-Censoring voice: “Wait a minute dude, you talked about mindfulness and mindlessness with your friend and mentor Roger Martin not long ago, and Ellen Langer’s name came up. You should ask Roger if he knows her and might have spoken to her recently. And you should ask Karen Christensen too.”
Karen Christensen is the editor in chief of Rotman Management, the journal of the University of Toronto’s business school, of which Roger Martin is dean emeritus and faculty member, and to which I regularly contribute. It turns out I batted .500: Roger Martin didn’t know her, but editor Karen Christensen did, and had in fact interviewed Ellen Langer in 2008 for the magazine. Not only did Karen e-mail me a copy of the interview, but she made the inquiry and introduction on my behalf. Ellen Langer responded within minutes to Karen, agreeing to chat with me, and two days later I was speaking to her, probing her thoughts on mindlessness, having just defeated my own. Had I not, you would be reading a decidedly different chapter on Self-Censoring.
Ellen Langer’s final words to me may just hold the entire key to winning the brain game, so they will be mine to you: “As soon as you realize the issue looks different from a different perspective, take that perspective.”