The way you think either inhibits or liberates your inborn creativity. Your particular thinking style is learned, starting in early childhood, usually as the result of imitating one or both parents. You learn how to think the way your parents think when you are too young to be aware of what is happening.
Different styles of thinking are usually survival or coping mechanisms. They are developed unconsciously and unthinkingly as a response to the uncertainties and unpredictability of the world around you. The good news is that because these thinking styles have been learned, they can be unlearned as well. You can, with continual practice, actually override or cancel out an unhelpful way of thinking with a positive and more dynamic way of thinking.
If you take the various thinking styles and arrange them across a spectrum, you will have mechanical thinking at one extreme and adaptive thinking at the other.
Mechanical thinkers are rigid, inflexible, and quite fixed in their ideas and opinions. They rely on what is often described as “rote thinking” or automatic thinking; they are unbending in their ideas and interpretations of the world and are not open to any ideas or opinions that deviate from what they have already decided to think.
Mechanical thinking is also a form of “normative thinking,” where the individual sees everything as one extreme or the other, black or white, wrong or right, with few distinctions in between.
WHY IT WON’T WORK
Mechanical thinkers tend to be pessimistic and to look for reasons why anything new or different won’t work or can’t work. In NLP they call this “sorting by differences.” This type of person continually seeks out how anything that you say or suggest is different from what has happened in the past or what the person currently believes. Once the person sees a difference or a conflict, your idea is immediately downgraded and discarded.
Mechanical thinking is noncreative. The favorite word of a mechanical thinker is the word no. These people have what is called psychosclerosis, or a “hardening of the attitudes.”
How do you deal with mechanical thinkers? You put them into jobs or positions where no creative thinking is necessary. Most governments are staffed with these people from top to bottom, which is why it is so hard to get a government official to be open to a better or different way of doing something.
Mechanical thinkers make good accountants, engineers, and data programmers. They score high in the personality tests on “compliance” and “stability.” They are most comfortable in situations that are totally predictable and where no variation or turbulence is to be expected. They are not particularly creative, and they are quite happy that way. In fact, mechanical thinkers are largely convinced that other people, those who are more flexible and open to new ideas, are less stable and less capable than they are.
Adaptive Thinking
Adaptive thinking is characterized by a high degree of flexibility in approaching any project, problem, or goal. As we mentioned previously, this way of thinking is characteristic of geniuses and highly creative people. This is the kind of thinking that you want to practice on a regular basis.
As it happens, some people are mechanical in some areas of thinking and adaptive in others. Some people are very rigid with regard to their political or religious convictions, but very relaxed and casual with their opinions in other areas. The ideal is for you to become an adaptive thinker in as many areas as possible.
KEEP YOUR MIND OPEN
Adaptive thinkers have an open mind. They avoid falling in love with their own ideas. They practice detachment and can stand back from an idea, as if someone else had come up with it and they had been asked to evaluate it objectively.
Adaptive thinkers are more flexible and willing to look at many different sides of a question. They are optimistic in that they believe that problems can be solved, and they are constantly looking for innovative or positive solutions to the most difficult challenges.
Adaptive thinkers are creative, imaginative, and ask many open-ended questions: Why? When? Where? How? Who? and Which?
The key to becoming an adaptive, highly creative thinker is for you to suspend judgment on as many things as possible, especially at the beginning. The very act of refraining from judging, and instead keeping an open mind, makes you naturally more flexible in your thinking.
Finally, if you do make a decision and you get new information that invalidates your decision, be willing to change your mind. Refuse to become locked into a particular idea or conviction, especially when the evidence is against you.
ACTION EXERCISES
1. Challenge your self-limiting beliefs about yourself, especially about your talents, abilities, and potential. What if none of them were true? What if you had unlimited potential and all you had to do was to learn how to release it?
2. Think of a situation that is causing you a good deal of frustration or anger today. Imagine that you are completely wrong in the position that you are taking, and the other person is completely right, or that there is a way of dealing with this situation effectively that is completely different from anything you have thought of up till now.