Thinking Clearly
How the Circle of Impact in Practice Creates Self-Understanding and Situational Awareness
Screengrab from The Big Short
There is a skill that many people with whom I have worked over the years never acquired. It is the skill of thinking clearly.
The question that I bring to this pattern of behavior is:
Why do people not want to think clearly?
It is not hard to think clearly. It is a similar discipline to balancing your checkbook or growing a garden. It is a discipline like most disciplines. We give ourselves to the task of developing our capacity to reason and discern.
I find that thinking clearly reveals perspectives and information about people that they do not want others to see. It may well be that people actually do think clearly, but do not want others to see that they do.
So, in my opinion, thinking clearly is not essentially an intellectual problem. Instead, it is a moral question.
To think clearly requires us to have a moral perspective as the foundation of thought and action. This is not the kind of thinking that Daniel Kahneman describes in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. These two ways of thought, fast and slow, are described as Systems 1 and Systems 2 thinking.
“* System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
* System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.”
This is the difference, I suggest, between instinct and intuition. Or, the difference as Harry Frankfurt and Charles Taylor describe as the two orders of desire. In the first type of desire, the person knows that they are hungry, and desire something to eat. With the second type of desire, the person knows that they are hungry for a shake and burger. In both cases, the person is clear about what they are thinking. They may not know every aspect of their decision-making process. But they are clear about the outcome. Any lack of clarity at this point is rooted more deeply in questions of intention and order. These are moral questions.
(Harry Frankfort as quoted in Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Pages 1.)
Taylor continues,
When we make choices, are we making rational decisions, or is something else going on? If I am hungry, and I go down the street to my favorite local restaurant, is my choice between brisket, chicken, or trout a rational choice? Or is it something else?
I believe that our decision-making process is not purely rational, even if we are using a rational comparison of price, health, and taste. It is for this reason that even if we desire to think clearly, it is not simply a process of thinking. When we think clearly to make decisions, we are making moral choices about how I am engaging with people and the world.
Michael Polanyi says that “We know more than we can tell.” This is because knowing is not simply a mental act of perception. He calls this personal knowledge. “Personal participation is the universal principle of knowing.”
“Our body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical. In all our waking moments we are relying on our awareness of contacts of our body with things outside for attending to these things. Our own body is the only thing in the world which we normally never experience as an object, but experience always in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body. It is by making this intelligent use of our body that we feel it to be our body, and not a thing outside.”
He speaks of knowledge that is embodied and indwelling. Iain McGlichrist, in his book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World writes similarly.
“… Heraclitus … ‘Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.’
The Greek word syllapses - here translated ‘graspings’ - seems … to suggest several ideas: something ‘grasped’ (perhaps suggesting sudden comprehension); something that brings elements together; and fertility (Aristotle uses the word to mean the sexual generation of life). It is hard to overestimate the richness of this fragment. It says many things at once: that a deep understanding of the nature of reality comes in glimpses, or grasping - moments of insight; that, in that insight, all is neither simply not whole, neither simply like nor simply unlike, each thing working with, and by the same token working against, the others; that the One and the Many bring one another forth into being, together generating the reality that has this structure at its core; and that despite (or, in light of all this, perhaps because of?) the nature of this multiplicity, all is held together in a syllapsis: the only word here not to be paired with an antithesis. And the whole saying is in itself a syllapsis - a gathering which, in its fertility, births a syllapsis - a moment of dawning insight in us.”
Blend all these perspectives together, and we realize that engagement with people and the physical reality of the world is how we learn to think clearly. In other words, Personal Knowledge, as Polanyi describes, is a relationship with reality. To think clearly is to establish genuine self-awareness, which is a product of an embodied awareness of the world. Through the tacit knowledge of self-awareness, we can establish situational awareness that enables us to think clearly in every aspect of our lives
We can learn what we need to know by asking questions. Here’s how.
We Learn By Asking Questions of Our Life Experience
Ask this:
Why are you in the career that you have found yourself in?
Did the job fall into your lap?
You are pretty good at your job. It pays well. You have had some opportunities that came from the relationships that you formed on the job.
Yet, as you are sitting in your car at the stoplight, you begin to ask,
Have I wasted the last 20 years of my life? How could these years have been different?
We rarely share these deep questions of life with the people we love.
These are kind of random questions that pop into our minds.
Let’s be intentional. I recommend the Five Questions that Everyone Must Ask.
Ask these questions at least once a week.
What has Changed? How am I in Transition?
What is my Impact?
Who am I Impacting?
What Opportunities do I have?
What Problems have I created? What Obstacles do I face?
Now, ask these questions with your family, your team, and in particular, your spouse. Ask without judging. Ask to become aware. Ask to learn what you know that you don’t know how you know. Trust your intuition.
Circle of Impact in Practice Project
The idea of clarifying questions is not just for us personally, but also for the people in our lives. This is part of the work that I’m calling people to join me in as The Circle of Impact in Practice Project. To become a part of this project, become a paid subscriber. Your participation and contributions of thoughts will help us know what the follow-up book to Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change is. Learn more about the project here.
We are going to learn together. The knowledge and skills will be transferable to many areas of your life. And I will give time for us to make it work in your situation.
We will use the tools.
The Circle of Impact model
The Five Questions That Everyone Must Ask
The Five Guiding Principles
And, The Impact Day discernment program.
Subscribe by May 1. Stick with me to end. Your contribution will be noted in the book.
These posts that focus on Circle of Impact will go behind a paywall after May 1.
I look forward to our journey together.
Thank you.
Awesome knowledge Ed.
Already applying it at the enterprise where I work now ...
Best Regards,
Carlos
Excellent!