Superthinking

Give your own mind time to create answers instead of only collecting everyone else’s.

Before you ask someone else a question, have you asked your own brain?

I require my students and team members to bring an answer when they bring me a question. Not because I never want to help, but because I want them to practice accessing their own wisdom.

If I answer every question, I spend my day making everyone else's decisions. They keep practicing the belief that the answer is outside them.

Superthinking is a way to change that. It means giving your mind space to think beyond the surface, ask better questions, and create ideas.

Start with mental hygiene

Before I do superthinking, I clean out my mind.

I call this mental hygiene. It is a daily practice of watching myself think and managing the thoughts I am practicing.

Think of having an amazing computer and leaving it in its box with the default settings. You never customize it or discover what it can do.

That is how many of us use our brains. We live from childhood and social programming instead of choosing deliberately how we want to think.

Self-coaching lets us use the tool we have been given.

Download your thoughts

Put what is in your brain on paper. Write it all down so you can look at it instead of trying to manage it from inside the same thinking.

This is the skill of watching yourself think.

Recognize what you want to change

Look at the thoughts and their effects. Use the Model. What feeling does this sentence create? What action follows? What result does it produce?

Decide which thoughts you want to keep believing and which you want to stop practicing.

Create new thoughts deliberately

Choose the beliefs that serve the life you want. Practice thinking, believing, feeling, and living from them.

This is not a one-time cleanup. It is a discipline you return to, just as you return to other forms of care.

Create time when you only think

Once your mind is cleaned out, give it thinking time.

During this time, you are not reading a book, listening to a podcast, or working on the computer. You are thinking on purpose.

Start with ten minutes if that is where you are. You can build toward an hour.

I take notes while I think. I listen to my ideas and write them down. We are used to taking notes about what is happening in a teacher's brain. I want us to pay attention to what is happening in our own.

If you tell me you disagree with an idea because another person said something different, I want to know what you think. What has your brain come up with?

You can train it to do more than collect and repeat other people's answers.

Balance input with output

Education gives us a foundation of ideas. That can be valuable. But there is a next step beyond studying and regurgitating.

I like to balance input with output. If I spend an hour reading a book, I want time to think about my own ideas too.

Consider the input you are choosing. Does it help you think about the area where you want to create? Does it spark questions you want to explore?

After reading, ask a question. Instead of immediately contacting the author or another teacher, give yourself time to develop an answer.

At first, some of your ideas may be repetitions of what you have learned. That does not mean you are bad at this. It means you have a foundation and are beginning to practice a different skill.

If your mind is constantly occupied with other people's opinions, shows, feeds, and work, you leave little space for your own thinking.

Ask questions that lead somewhere useful

You can come to a superthinking session with a problem you want to solve or an idea you want to create.

Then ask your brain for answers and write. Let the ideas flow without requiring the first one to be perfect.

Here are questions I use:

• When this problem is solved, what is different?
• What would I do if I knew what to do?
• What does my future self, who is already successful, advise me to do?
• How is this issue for me instead of against me?
• What are ten ideas for my company, my clients, or my life?
• What would I do if it were not currently impossible?

That last question is one I learned from The Last Word on Power. I have used it repeatedly with my $100 million goal.

You can also ask what your current belief system is and what you want it to be. Compare the Model you are living now with the one aligned with the result you want.

But do not only borrow my questions. Ask your mind what question would be most useful for you.

Require yourself to answer

When your brain says it does not know, ask what it would say if it did know. That is a question I learned from Tony Robbins.

Do not stop the session at confusion. Practice generating an answer.

If the question is factual, you can look up the fact. Superthinking is for the ideas and solutions a search engine cannot create for your particular life.

Make your questions useful. Asking why you are terrible or why you cannot do something directs your mind toward an answer that reinforces the problem.

Ask how you can do it, what you need to learn, or what value you can offer.

Write down the ideas, even the ones that seem crazy. Give your mind a place for its work.

Notice the ideas you are already creating

Coaches often develop their own ways of communicating and using tools with their clients without realizing it.

They have adapted what they learned to their niche and their own way of thinking. That is worth noticing and writing down.

Your experiences, education, and unique mind can combine into something new. If you never give yourself time to access it, we keep recycling everyone else's ideas.

I spend time alone, walking and filling journals. I think about my clients, my employees, my business, and my family. I ask why something is happening so I can understand it and create a solution.

When I disagree with something, I can ask how I would do it instead. Trying to answer that question can also make me more compassionate about the work others are doing.

Your mind is capable of independent and creative thought. Treat it as worth listening to.

Clean it out. Give it space. Ask a question. Then take notes on what your own brain has to say.