Mindset Monday - Power Thinking

This is episode 157 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast, where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, vitality and peak performance coach, Kari Schneider.

Welcome. Welcome to Mind Mindset Monday. We are onto such a cool topic, and it's wrapping up the topic that we've been going on about for the last few Mindset Mondays. It's power thinking. That's the topic for today. And we've gone through overthinking, we've gone through effective thinking, and we've gone through lazy thinking. So we've gone through this concept with the other specific topics, and now we're getting into power thinking. This is the holy grail of mastering your mind. Most people do not ever get into power thinking. This is kind of a big deal. So I'm going to lay this out for you so that you can tap into what it really looks like to get into power thinking. Hey, Melinda. So this one is. So if we look at the definition of power, there's a couple ways to look at it. There's the noun looking at power as the ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a quality or a faculty. And that's part of what we want to look at with power thinking. The other part is my scientific brain. I love to think of it in terms of the definition of power. When it comes to science. Power is simply what work or force. Force is part of work, but it's work over time. It's the rate of work. So in this, it's the rate of thinking. It's the ability to think the way you want to. So not only is it magnifying effective thinking, it's also the rate of being able to think the way you want to. That's what I'm defining power thinking as being. So if we go into this, what does it really look like? It's effective thinking over time. So if we take our definition of effective thinking that we went over earlier on a previous Mindset Monday, it's effective thinking over time. So let's really look at this. It's not. Sounds like, okay, what does that mean exactly? So let's go over effective thinking. What was effective thinking that we looked at? This is effective thinking equals our thoughts plus our intention. So what are we intending to aim at or plan for? Our thoughts plus our intention times awareness. Our thoughts plus our intention times awareness. So what that looks like an intention is an aim or a plan, and we have these thoughts. So we're creating an actual aim or a plan with the thoughts that we have. And awareness is that state of being conscious of whatever's going on around us might be within ourselves, might be within somebody else, might be the environment around us, might be the difficulty of the intention, whatever it is, the awareness, taking our thoughts plus the intentional thoughts, so directing those thoughts towards what we want to see happen and multiplying that by our awareness. Okay, that might, you might be going, oh, mind blown. Why do we turn thinking into math? But we can make this really, really clear in what it looks like in life. So what does it look like? If I'm going to give you an example? Because now we know that power thinking equals effective thinking over time or the rate of effective thinking or the magnitude of effective thinking, we're adding power to it. So the example, first example I want to run by you is that the situation was that I was heading into a coaching session, so I was coaching a client. And this is how I do this over and over and over again. This is how I head into a coaching session. It looks something like this that my thought is somewhere along the lines of I will coach to my best ability. Why is that the thought? The thought is because the question before that thought was how can I deliver a really amazing coaching session for my client? Well then the thought, the answer to that question was I will coach to my best ability. The intention of the coaching session was holding space for my client. So I've got a pretty high quality thought. I've got an intention of holding space for the client and my awareness is around their situation, around my energy, also around the thoughts that might be coming up for myself. I'm aware of the thoughts that I'm having, but setting them aside, so I'm holding my attention on the client and I'm listening. So that's where the awareness is. So if I look at that, I'm having this incredible outcome because I'm able to hold space for the client, I'm able to continue to coach with my best ability. And on we go. And that is a framework for power thinking. That's the example, actually a real life example of power thinking. Now let me give you a different example where it doesn't turn into power thinking. It because of what else is going on. And this happened very recently, just a few days ago because I've just spent 20 hours driving back from spending four months way up north working on a project. So in the 20 hours preceding the 20 hours driving back, there was a lot of packing and preparing to do in order to leave very early in the morning, have all the things ready to go and still get a decent night's sleep. And before having to drive many hours on the first day, about 14 hours. So in that example, that was the situation is I'm packing to leave in the morning, but the thought was that I'm exhausted and there's still so much to do. And that thought was preceded by a crappy question, which something along the lines of, how am I going to do all this? The intention was to clean, to pack, to get on the road by 6am and the awareness was very little of my husband, who was also in the same boat I was, but very little awareness to him. Very little awareness of how my thinking was affecting my own energy, my own outcome, the things that were doing, very little awareness on myself and very little awareness on my spouse. So you can imagine that whole scenario in terms of the outcomes weren't that great because the thinking wasn't effective thinking. And it wasn't because it's not effective thinking. There's no way it's going to be able to get into power thinking. So that's how that would play out overall. So why is the first one power thinking, the first example, power thinking, and the second example not even close to power thinking? Well, we know it's not because it's not even getting into effective thinking. There's little to no awareness and the overall thought is really poor. So when we get into and when I say a poor thought, it's just not going in the direction or the intention where we want it to go. So the first one ends up being power thinking. I'm going to give you some back backstory here, is that that is easy for me to power think. And the reason is, is that I've had so many years of going into day after day, session after session, multiple times a day of that similar thought pattern. That thought pattern of, okay, I'm heading in to coach someone. Whether it's mentally, life coaching or physically in the gym for years, I'm heading in to coach someone. The thought might be, we're working on explosive power today and the intention might be to get through some Olympic lifts and start that or warm that up with a little bit of agility first after the warmup. And the awareness is of what they've done in previous training, how they slept, what their consumption is like, where their headspace is at. So there's very high levels of awareness towards them and then also towards me. What am I going to do to set this up, how is this going to look for the other athletes coming in with this athlete or the client coming in? There's a lot of awareness going on, a lot of intention going on, and high quality thoughts that go towards the intention, the plan or the aim. So it's easy for me to have power thinking in that scenario, in working with a client, because I've practiced that type of thinking so many thousands of times prior to going into say, a life coaching session or a business coaching session with a client. And that's one of the reasons why it turns into power thinking is because there's been so much practice at effective thinking. In order for me to make it power thinking, I transition it into power thinking so easily because now it's a matter of just tweaking the thoughts, tweaking the attention and expanding the consciousness or awareness. Whereas the second example, although I've had lots of practice traveling, I hadn't traveled nearly as much in the last couple years. The time frame of being in that space was four months. So it was a different type of packing than just packing for a one week or couple day trip. And there was also this extra time pressure as well and lack of practice in that scenario. So it wasn't able to even be in or I wasn't in effective thinking. Therefore I couldn't transition it into power thinking. So. So the first one was power thinking because it had a high quality thought and answers that answers a high quality question. That's what I like to call intelligent curiosity. High quality questions. High quality thoughts coming from high quality questions, intelligent curiosity. So that's the first part that makes the first one into the power thinking realm. And the second part was that it looked for common ground not only with another person or a desired intention. So if the intention was to pack and get on the road, or the intention was to be with another person, the common ground, the awareness looks for that common ground on all aspects, what could be going on there. So it had that element to it. And lastly, the thing that comes into power thinking that makes it really, really important and being able to be powerful in that thinking is the added tension. The tension comes from time or the demand from another person or someone depends on you. Those three things are usually the factors that create the tension in being able to produce at that pressure or that tension scenario. That's when you know you can really power think is you can still produce effective think when there is a time pressure or demand on you or someone depends on you, if that tension scenario holds true and you can still Effective think, you know you're into that power thinking realm. That's what was holding true for the first example I gave on working with a client. There was the time pressure, it was happening right away. There was also someone else depending on me and potentially demanding from me if that scenario came up in the coaching call. And the same was with the second scenario. There was a time pressure. There was only so much time to get everything done before having to get out the door. And there was a high level of demand on what needed to get done. But the effective thinking wasn't there. So it never went into the realm of power thinking. Now I know this is an advanced concept, this is advanced work right here. But I'm bringing it to you because we've done some of the concepts and the work on overthinking, on effective thinking, on lazy thinking, and this is the next level. If you can tackle those other three, overthinking, effective thinking and lazy thinking, you know that you're ready for power thinking. So why practice this? And that's truly what it is. It is a practice. This is not an overnight endeavor, this is a lifetime practice. But why would we want to do that is because it is so worth it, because we end up going towards the outcome we really want. If I could have gotten into effective thinking, which eventually I did with the packing scenario, then I would have had the ability to get into power thinking and truly have it be an enjoyable experience or even if it wasn't that enjoyable, a really well connected experience with another person. So that's really what we want in our overall experience of life is to be able to have those connected and fulfilling experiences, even if they're not great scenarios, even if they're ones we don't exactly like so much. So why practice power thinking? Because it's going to get you the outcomes you really, really want in life. And number two, when you can power think, then you know that you've got effective thinking. Maybe not mastered, but it's really something that's practice, it's something that's becoming routine. And if you've got effective thinking more routine then when the demand from others or there's time pressure on or someone depends on you, then you know you are going to be able to power think. You are going to be able to do more of what you really want to do. So I hope this topic really serves you and allows you to try on a whole new realm of a way of thinking that can make a big difference for the quality of your life. So, so much love to you. Have a beautiful, beautiful rest of your week. Have Happy Monday. Go get it. Try on some effective thinking, master it, and get right into that power thinking.

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