Brian Gubernick explains thinking time, a practice of setting aside uninterrupted periods to ask powerful questions that uncover deeper problems. He shares four prompting questions, like what shortcuts you're taking or what decisions a new leader would make, and recommends scheduling a 15-30 minute session with a whiteboard to gain insight into your business and life.
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Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Let's get into today's topic. Today's topic happens to be one of my favorites, a topic, or a concept I should say, that's made a massive difference in my business and personal worlds over the past few years, especially when I started practicing this concept on a fairly regular basis. And the concept we're talking about today is known as thinking time. Thinking time. And this concept came, at least for me, came from a very successful businessman, a very successful individual, a guy named Keith Cunningham, who wrote one of my favorite books known as The Road Less Stupid. If you haven't read that book, I encourage you to pick it up because there is so much wisdom in that book. And this concept of thinking time was probably one of the one or two or three most impactful things that I was able to take from that book. So what is thinking time? Okay, it's not a lot different than you probably think it is. Okay, it is literally creating space, creating time for you to lock yourself away, isolate yourself, and ask a powerful question or two or three to come up with a positive solution, a possible positive response. Okay, so when you're talking about thinking time, what Keith teaches is, number one, we've got to find the unasked question? What is this unasked question? What, what haven't you contemplated at a deep enough level, or maybe ever at all? And could you ask yourself and come up with a different vantage point or a different solution, or maybe a new tactic or a new strategy? What's the unasked question, and what insights around the actual problem might you figure that you have to address? In doing so, in asking this unasked question, what you start to do is separate the problem from what quite possibly is really just a symptom. What do I mean when I say that? See, too often we default to thinking something's a problem, and the reality is it's just a symptom of a much deeper or bigger problem. Okay, so an example of that would be someone saying, you know what, my business is not going the direction I want it to go. It's not going the right— it's not, it's not trending upwards. Instead, maybe it's flatlining or even going backwards. Well, guess what? The fact that your business may not be going the right direction is likely a symptom, not a problem. It's a symptom of something else going on. Maybe you're not converting at a certain level. Maybe you're not marketing to attract the right people. Maybe you're not blocking time to lead generate. Hey, maybe you're not even maintaining a calendar, honoring a calendar. Maybe that's the real problem. So where am I going with this? When you ask yourself ask yourself these unasked questions, when you give yourself time and space and permission to dig a little deeper, you start to solve things at a much, much deeper level, right? It's like, you know, I think too often we're wandering through the trees and we don't see the actual forest. So thinking time, at least for me, I know puts me at that 30,000-foot level and allows me to more or less assess what's going on in my world and come up with a much different approach than maybe the one I'm currently taking. Thinking time also allows you to check your assumptions. See, it gives the opportunity really to test the validity of all the assumptions you're making. None of us see the assumptions we make about the problems we have, right? Like, we're moving so quickly, we're progressing forward, we're trying to push all the time And we make a lot of assumptions that frankly may not be accurate. Maybe they're false. And when we slow down, we have this thinking time, which again is more or less locking yourself in a room with a whiteboard and a marker or a pen and a notepad and asking yourself a deep question or two and just thinking around it and jotting down your thoughts and digging a little deeper. When you do things like that, it allows you to check assumptions. Just the slowing down. Prompts you to question almost black hat some of the things that you're doing. And you may again discover a different path to take. So here's what I want to do. I want to give you a couple questions that I'm currently thinking around, things that I ask myself regularly that may apply to you. Maybe these questions make sense for you and your business today, or maybe they don't, but it prompts you to think around some different questions you should be asking yourself. And I want to challenge you to set aside some time today or this week to do nothing more than ask yourself a powerful question or two like I'm about to go through and just see what you come up with. Don't get distracted. Put your phone out of the room, even if it's only for 15 or 20 or 30 minutes, and just see what happens, right? So here's some questions for you. Number 1, something I'm asking myself: what do I need to imprac— what do I need to practice to improve my game and deserve the success I desire? What do I need to practice right now? What do I have to start practicing to improve my game and deserve the success that I desire? Another question for you, something I'm asking myself: what shortcuts am I attempting to take right now that are not really shortcuts but really a possible result of my laziness or my procrastination or my impatience. Man, that's kind of a deep one. That's kind of a tough one. Maybe a tough realization looking in the mirror and saying, what shortcuts am I attempting to take right now that are not really shortcuts, but are really mirages of laziness or greed or impatience or procrastination? What are those shortcuts? Sit there, be honest with yourself, give yourself 15, 30 minutes, ask that question. What might you come up with? Another question for you. What would my life look like if I had every customer that I'd ever served? What would I need to have done to keep all of those customers? For those in the sales business out there, this is a great one for you. What would your life look like if every client you've ever worked with ended up being a repeat over and over and over again client? And what would you have to do, or what should you have done, or what could you do moving forward that would allow you to keep them indefinitely? Last question, something I think about quite regularly: if I were fired and a new leader came into my business today, what decision would he or she make immediately? Man, that's— some of you should really be giving this one some thought, right? If you were fired today and a new CEO came in, what decision would he or she immediately make? Now, all those questions I just gave you, again, they're perfect for me, but maybe they're not questions for you. But what kind of question could you ask yourself today? And that's the challenge for today. That's the focusing question, I should say, for today. What could you ask yourself today or this week if you block some time, sat in a room, nothing more than a whiteboard, sat in your favorite chair with maybe a pen and a notepad? What kind of question could you ask yourself that would prompt you to deeply contemplate the direction of your life, of your business? What answers might you find? Now keep in mind, I just kind of implied, right, this very much applies to things outside of your business world as well. What kind of question could you ask yourself in your personal world? And if you sat and just thought without distraction, with nothing more than a pen and a notepad, and you just allowed your mind to wander, and you used models like we've recently been discussing, like the 5 Whys— if you haven't heard that, go back to the podcast and dug deeper and deeper and kept sorting through the symptoms to get to the problem, where might you land? I think it's a really powerful exercise, one I really want to encourage everybody to take action on. That's all I have for you today. The No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
