Time to Think by Nancy Kline

I recently gave another presentation on "Listening—The Hidden Motivator" (one of my favorites) and was reminded again of an excellent resource I have used again and again over the years. It's Nancy Kline’s book, Time to Think, and her detailed explanation of the components of a Thinking Environment. One of the most important is our capacity for listening. Consider the following:

“Until we are free to think for ourselves, our dreams are not free to unfold.”

The best conditions for thinking, if you really stop and notice, are not tense. They are gentle. They are quiet. They are unrushed. Giving good attention to people makes them more intelligent. Poor attention makes them stumble over their words and seem stupid. Your attention, your listening is that important. We think we listen, but we don’t. We interrupt, finish others’ sentences, insist of telling our own stories, and give advice, and give more advice!

This is because an assumption raised itself from the land of creaking social indoctrination and told you what to do. It said, “Helping people always means giving them your ideas.” You assumed that the caller’s brain, the one that contained their problem, did not also contain the solution. You assumed, because you had been taught this almost since you could breathe, that helping people means thinking for them. The thing you would do, therefore, would be to listen only as long as it took your brain to think of an idea for them. But your ideas were not their ideas. Because your ideas were not theirs, they were less likely to act on them than they would have been if the ideas had been their own.

Real help, professionally or personally, consists of listening to people, of paying respectful attention to people so that they can access their own ideas first. Usually the brain that contains the problem also contains the solution – often the best one. This is not to say that advice is never a good thing or that your ideas are never needed. Sometimes your suggestions are exactly what the person wants and needs. But don’t rush into it. To help people think for themselves, first listen. And listen. And just when they say they can’t think of anything else, you can ask them the question, “What else do you think about this? What else comes to mind that you want to say?”

The important thing is what happens for them because you let them do it themselves. To be interrupted is not good. To get lucky and not be interrupted is better. But to know you are not going to be interrupted—that is categorically different. That is bliss.

More Brainstorming Questions

Following are a few questions from my book, Transformational Thinking, that can jump start the pursuit of your dreams. Use them for brainstorming or first-thought writing. Try to come up with 2-3 ideas for each question. Brainstorming quickly without judgment stops the inner critic from sabotaging your efforts before you've begun. When you've finished brainstorming, pick the top three ideas and create an action plan—a detailed list of things to do, then decide a date to accomplish the first thing on your list. We move our dreams forward when we identify the smallest step to take each week. Imagine - Detail - Set a timetable. Michael Gerber suggests, "Great people create their lives actively while everyone else is created by their lives passively, waiting to see where live takes them next."

• What makes me happy? Curious?

• What makes me sit up and pay attention?

• What gets me outside of myself?

• What do I want more of in life? What do I want less of?

• What habits, energy-drainers, or fears are holding me back?

• What encourages possibility for me?

• What dreams are sitting on the sidelines?

• What would I like to learn spiritually, financially, intellectually, or technically?

• How much money will I need to do the things I want to do? By when will I need it?

• What would have to change in my current working environment for me to be happier?

• What would I like to be doing two years from now? 10 years from now? 20 years?

• How will I live intentionally and with joy?

• What legacy do I want to leave?

Learning a new piecing pattern

I'm often intrigued with a new quilt pattern, as long as it doesn't contain triangles. I recently found this pattern and learned an easy way to make triangles by putting two contrasting squares right sides together, sewing two lines diagonally down the center, and cutting them apart. I ended up with a black & white square, or in the case of this quilt, a red & white square. (And as usual enough left-over fabric to make another one someday.) The pattern is from Turning Twenty, book 1 and I changed it from a queen to a lap-quilt size—quite a math project!

A Whole New Mind (Why Right Brainers Will Rule the World)

This book by Daniel H. Pink explains why right-brainers will rule the world. One of the trademarks of the new era our country is entering—Conceptual Age—is the outsourcing of traditional white-collar jobs such as law, accounting, computer programming, and engineering to less-expensive overseas workers, particularly in Asia. In many professions, what used to matter most were abilities associated with the left side of the brain: linear, sequential, spreadsheet kind of faculties. These still matter, but they're not enough. What's important now are the characteristics of the brain's right hemisphere: artistry, empathy, creativity, inventiveness, and big-picture thinking. This book is easy to digest and contains lots of great exercises, tools, and extra reading at the end of the chapters. A must-read for anyone in business or thinking about getting an MBA.

The Four Laws of Debt-free Prosperity

This book is a story about a man whose financial situation is a disaster and how following these four laws transformed his life. As I’ve been reading the first couple of short chapters in this book, I’m reminded again how easy it to become mindless about spending. It’s not that we don’t budget for certain monthly expenses and manage those. It’s that if anything else comes up, we get in the habit of spending or charging without considering the consequences, or without thinking about saving for it if we don’t have the money in hand. Saving for what you want is called delayed gratification. We practiced that with with our children, who were frustrated sometimes when we said, we needed to wait until we had saved money for what you want.

I like the sprinkling of quotes that are part of each chapter. I haven’t had any financial goals for a while and it’s showing. I really believe that when I don’t know where I’m going, I’ll end up in a place I don’t expect—the result of default planning. So it’s good to be tracking our expenses and see where we can trim things up for the next few months. I really like 1) the idea related to kids—“that if they can only account for half of what you give them, when allowance time rolls around again, you will only give them half as much, and 2) that running up overdrawn check charges was like using $20 bills to test paper shredders.

In the chapter, “The First Law,” there's a story about Lee Nelson about making tracking into a game and I’m thinking I’d like to plan some kind of incentive if I track and am able to save money over the next five months. Not sure what that will be yet. p. 26, “Progress in our financial lives is directly related to the ability to measure.” p. 28 “Smart people find the exact places their cash flew when they thought it was going to flow. They backtrack along the pipeline looking for leaks, knowing that if they can find the leaks, they can fix them. You’ve got to measure it before you can manage it.”

Generations of Faith

“Look forward. Turn what has been done into a better path.

Think about the impact of your decision on seven generations into the future.”

—Wilma Mankiller, Chief of the Cherokee

This quote has stayed with me ever since I heard it at a workshop in Rapid City, South Dakota in 1996. I had not considered the legacy I would leave for generations to come. This Native American concept emphasizes the interconnectedness of all life, respect for previous generations, and nurturance of future ones. These generations—our great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and our own generation—were considered in every decision made. The concern for the well being of generations reflects itself in a better world for all.

In the past several years, I've been impressed to identify the women seven generations back from my daughters and their cousins. By bringing these stories together in one volume, our children can familiarize themselves with the names and experiences of thirty female ancestors identified from the lineage of my mother’s mother and father: Jennie Eldora Barlow and Clarence Duffin, and my father’s mother and father: Alice Cloe Larsen and Thomas Ross Wilson.

My daughters and their cousins stand on the shoulders of these generations of women who came before them, primarily from England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, and Denmark. My purpose is to portray the richness of our heritage by giving these women’s lives visibility. As I have researched these generations of women, pieced together and in some cases invented their stories, characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have happened, they have come alive.

We stand at a pivotal point—as each generation does—a place where we can look backward and forward. We can view our own contribution as insignificant and justify our reasons for not illuminating it, or we can truthfully acknowledge that we were born into this earth-life experience at a critical time that allows us to have a lasting influence on generations to come. We have received a legacy of goodness, integrity, and perseverance that has been passed down and those who have gone before remain vitally interested in our spiritual and temporal well being.

More about the energy of our feelings

I read this story recently in a book by Catherine Thomas entitled, Light in the Wilderness. It impressed me because again, it illustrates the impact of the expression of our emotions. Jacques Lusseyran, a blind Frenchman, tells his story which begins just before the Second World War in France, when seven years into a happy childhood, he suffered an accident at school in which he was totally and permanently blinded. In his autobiography he writes:

“Barely ten days after the accident that blinded me, I made the basic discovery. I am still entranced by it. The only way I can describe that experience is in clear and direct words. I had completely lost the sight of my eyes; I could not see the light of the world any more. Yet the light was still there. . . . All the world around me was convinced that I had lost it forever. But I found it again in another place. I found it in myself and what a miracle—it was intact. . . .

“I felt it [the light] gushing forth every moment and brimming over; I felt how it wanted to spread out over the world. I had only to receive it. It was unavoidably there. It was all there, and I found again its movements and shades, that is, its colors, which I had loved so passionately a few weeks before. Yet I had to make the effort to find my way between doors, walls, human beings, and trees. As happens to all blind persons, I hurt myself often. But I quickly learned that I knocked against things only when I forgot the light. When I paid constant attention to the light, I ran a much smaller risk. The second great discovery came almost immediately afterwards. There was only one way to see the inner light, and that was to love.

“The light I was able to perceive changed with my own inner emotional state. When I was sad or afraid, everything became indistinct. But when I was joyous and attentive, the light would return. Anger, remorse plunged everything into darkness. But a magnanimous resolution, a courageous decision, radiated a beam of light. By and by I learned to understand that love meant seeing and that hate was night. . . . Sadness, hate, or fear not only darkened my universe, but also made it smaller. . . . Outwardly I could not avoid running against doors and furniture. I was punished very thoroughly and very quickly. I found that impatience seemed to surround things by some sort of smoke or fog, but that joy clarified everything. When I was content, I had eyes all around my head, and then, truly, I was no longer blind. . . . And it was all because I was content.

“Because of my blindness, I had developed a new faculty. Strictly speaking, all men have it, but almost all forget to use it. That faculty is attention. In order to live without eyes it is necessary to be very attentive, to remain hour after hour in a state of wakefulness, of receptiveness and activity. Indeed, attention is a state of being. In its truest sense it is the listening post of the universe.”