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Train Your Brain to Generate Ideas When You Need Them!

August 30, 2011 by Liz

Stop Stopping the Ideas from Coming

Walking, pacing, staring at a blank page, tearing at your hair, and wishing you could be just about anywhere that isn’t this place … the place where you need an idea and your mind is a blank.

The adrenalin is pumping. Mental sweat is dripping. You hear the sound of your own breathing and the irritating tick, tick, ticking of a clock — though every timepiece you own is digital.

Your mind is working overtime to find irrelevant attractions and less than useful distractions keep interrupting any chance of a reasonable thought that appears. One unanswered question — How will I ever get this done? — is from every direction neutralizing any chance of a new thought.

It’s not that you’re out of ideas.

It’s that you need to stop stopping them.

The RAS — Our Brain’s Stimulus Management System

Ever noticed that the best ideas come when youâre least trying to have them? Great ideas show up when we’re falling asleep, taking a walk or a shower, unpacking boxes and boxes, or sitting outside watching people and clouds go by.

Times like those, ideas seem to be everywhere.
But when we need one, we can seem to see one anywhere.

The problem isn’t that we don’t have anything to stimulate ideas! The problem is that we have too many things! Really.

Everyone has plenty of what they need to get ideas growing. The key is knowing how to work mindfully rather than on adrenalin.

The stimuli that get ideas growing are continuously and constantly bombarding our brains, specifically our subconscious. They come at such a rate that, if our brains let them all in, we wouldnât be able to pay attention to anything — we’d be distracted by blinking, how it feels to be walking. the sound of our breathing, or the feedback of the chair where we’re sitting.

To keep our brains efficient, we come equipped â- at no extra charge â- with a stimulus management unit called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS is a valve-like screening device at the base of our brains that filters out most of the unwanted stimuli. Think of it as closed door gateway that allows only useful information into our conscious brains.

Unfortunately that same RAS gateway can close access to the great ideas that we’ve been reaching for. The more adrenalin we have flowing the more it’s likely to be closing.

The good news is that the RAS can be trained.

Train Your Brain to Generate Ideas When You Need Them!

Anyone can increase the number of useful ideas they have. The art is in training our minds to see the ideas and pull them in before our thoughts edit, deflect, or vaporize them.

The best way to stop stopping the ideas from coming is to teach yourself how to keep the RAS open. Here’s how to how to practice using the filter the way you want.

Still yourself — mentally and physically. Spend a few minutes a day in stillness. Practice stillness so that you get good at it. Use that still time to develop these three process models. These ways of thinking keep the filter focused on finding the opportunity in a problem or a new idea from an old one.

Change points of vision. View the question from the inside out, vertically, laterally, at the detail level, and the aerial view.
Change your value system. Imagine the suggestions that you might get from a designer, a composer, a writer, a mathematician, a coder, a dancer, a chef, and understanding friend. Then do it again from the view of an employee, a vendor, a partner, a stockholder, a CEO, and a competitor.
Change your scope and sequence. Tinker with ideas and viewpoints to stretch them, bend them, reconstruct them into solutions that fit and work perfectly in specific situations. Make it bigger, smaller. Make last shorter and longer. Take out crucial steps and put them in a different order. Add something that doesn’t belong.

If you get in the practice of thinking during stillness, youâll find that when you need ideas in a hurry, you can stop, be still and get them.

And

None of your decisions will be reactions to a crisis.

Have you ever tried anything like this?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Catching Ideas Coming In and Going Out

October 4, 2006 by Liz

Everyone Has Endless Ideas

Ideas.

Can’t write without one. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work.

If you’re reading this, you probably know that. So let’s move around that dead, old horse.

What’s an idea anyway? A thought, a stimuli, a catalyst.

Everyone has endless ideas in our brains every minute that we’re alive.

We can get to them two ways — from the inside or from the out.

[Read more…]

The Secret to Why Dennis Miller Can Rant in Public and the Rest of Us Really Can’t

September 19, 2006 by Liz

Rant Is a Four-Letter Word

Something has happened. It wasn’t nice. It happened once too often. It happened to someone you care about. It needs to be addressed. You’re about to write something someone is going to read.

Before you write, check your emotions. They’re running high, aren’t they? Here’s what you need to do before you write.

Go to the local store. Buy 100 ballooons. Blow them up and pop them each one individually — one at a time — slowly savoring the noise. Or do something else that will open a steam valve: go running,

Whatever you do, please don’t write and rant. Rant is a four-letter word. You’ve read ’em. They’re deadly.

So, how come Dennis Miller can rant in public?

[Read more…]

Net Neutrality 7-26-2006

July 26, 2006 by Liz

Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

No, it’s “In the Beginning…”

. . . The Net, as Bob Frankston puts it, is the real infrastructure. It’s the superset, not the subset. It’s the ultimate context. TV, phone, radio, publishing, commerce and everything else will eventually come to you over the Net, if it doesn’t already.
The problem is, the Net is really nothing more than the shortest data path between two devices. You want fast and free Internet for the same reason you want a fast and free connection between your computer and your keyboard and your screen.
Think of the Net as a giant three dimensional zero. Everything across it is zero distance from everything else. The cost of using it isn’t zero, but once it’s built, that’s what it rounds to. (As I explained here a few days ago.)
How do we build that out, and who do we trust to do it, without screwing it up? There is plenty of business in building it out, as there is in all forms of construction. But maintenance shouldn’t look like the cable TV or phone businesses, any more than highway maintenance should look like a theme park.
More to the point, why trust building the “first mile” of the Net to people who never wanted it in the first place, who have always felt threatened by it, who can imagine their customers as nothing other than “consumers” of one-way “content”, and who want to create scarcities and insert billing valves everywhere they can? Because they’re the only ones in a position to do it? That’s not a good enough reason. It’s also not true. . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Critical Skill 3: Fluency: with Ideas

April 9, 2006 by Liz

Stop Not Having Ideas

The first part of fluency with ideas is having them–LOTS of them. There she goes again. What is she talking about? She might have lots. Right now I’d be happy with one.

The trick is get to learn how to stop not having lots of ideas.

That’s not a typo. You can stop not having ideas.

Open the Valve

Ideas are being stimulated constantly in your subconscious so often and at such a rate that, if you let them all in, you wouldn’t be able to pay attention to anything else. You would literally be aware of stimuli that you have no need for, such as the feel of your shoes on your feet or the chair that you’re sitting on. That’s why we come equipped–at no extra charge–with a filtering unit, a valve-like screening device at the base of our brains–the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS allows us to filter out most of that unwanted stimuli. It serves as a closed door allowing only life-skill information into our consciouness. Unfortunately with the door closed we don’t have access to some great ideas.

The good news is that the RAS can be trained. Firemen can make it let through the sound of the fire alarm. You can can use it to access things you forget that are still in your brain– great ideas when you put them together again. Ron Daugherty offers some ways to expand and explore your ability to open the RAS in his article, Understanding the Mind: 5 Keys to a Writer’s Creativity.

With Access Comes Fluency

With a little practice you’ll be able to access more and more ideas. Seriously, believe that they’ll come. Relax and make room for them, and they will. Getting them is just the first step toward fluency with ideas. To follow a language metaphor, the ideas are just your vocabulary. Now you have to be able to use them–pull ideas to match three basic scenarios. Here are ways you can practice to build up your fluency.

Brainstorming wild lists. When you have a few minutes waiting in traffic, pick an everyday object such as a plate. See whether you can come up with 25 things you might do with that object, silly or otherwise. As blogger, you should be pretty good at this. After all bloggers know a thing or two about making lists. Don’t edit. Be as wild and creative as you can. When you reach 25, try for another 10.
Freewriting. When you’ve got a few minutes and some paper and pencil, write without stopping about a simple pleasure, such as drinking coffee or running. Explain all of the impacts and outcomes it’s had on your life. Try to write 15 minutes without stopping.
Problem solving. The next time you or your child has a problem don’t begin to address it until you’ve identified at least five solutions. Not every solution needs to be doable or practical, but all of them need to fix some aspect of the problem, using facts that you know. Allow for an outrageous solution or two. Outrageous solutions often lead to extremely solid ones, once the outrageous solutions have been talked about. Think through what the impact of trying every solution would be and name all of the possible outcomes that could occur if you tried each one.

If you want to be truly future skilled, you’ll do each of these things verbally and in writing too.

Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking the Language of Ideas

The more you practice with your vocabulary of ideas. The more fluent in the language of ideas you will be. That means you’ll not only be good at speaking and writing your own ideas. You’ll also be good listening and reading other folks’ ideas too. You’ll get really quick at telling a great idea from a loser when someone else offers one.

Imagine the time and money a business might save when they know you can tell a solid idea from pipe dream that just sounds really good. AND that you can explain in writing how you know. Now there’s a concept on which you could promote your business and yourself. That would be an added value idea plus.

–ME “Liz” Strauss