From the seed of thought to fruit of harvest: Ways to leverage the results of your thinking

“Behaviours without an inner map, plan or strategy to guide them, however, are like knee jerk reactions, habits or rituals”

Robert Dilts – NLP Expert

Introduction

The seed of thought is sown in the soil of the mind. Our thoughts are powerful forerunners to the things we want. Somewhere someone wrote that ‘thoughts are things’. This assertion is absolutely true because there are different categories of thought for different endeavours, which result in different outcomes. Thinking is a discipline. Probably, that’s why most people are not bothered to learn the skill. Investing our time to think is very important for us to achieve success and therefore make progress. In the realm of psychology this is called meta-cognition. This article will highlight some of the strategies that will help us to make our thinking more profitable and productive.

Vision

You need to have a clear vision of the outcome that you require. The idea about vision is that you have a clear picture of the imagery you want as an outcome to your thinking process. It is very important that you make your vision very clear using your different senses (sight, sound, taste, smell, touch) as evidence of what your outcome will look like. You need to envision the outcome you desire.

Belief systems

These are the driver of your behaviour- belief and value. These are internal in nature and they have impact on the external results. They do affect our attitude and completion drive and hence the pattern of behaviour. We need to be aware of them and understand how they influence our behaviour and hence the outcomes we desire to achieve.

Goal

Goal is the fore runner of solution to our problems. When you have a problem it means that there is an obstacle to you not being able to achieve what you want. Goal is an intention to develop solution to the problem. There are different strategies like setting SMART goals to achieve our goals.

Action

Action is the step you take toward accomplishing or completing your thought process. It is behaviour and requires movement on your part. Effective action requires a plan and a strategy. In taking action we need to closely watch our behaviour to make sure it is leading us to the results we want. We need to be aware that we are able to harness the resources and the skill set we need to accomplish the activities and tasks required to achieve the objectives we’ve set out to accomplish.

Outcome

We need to check the outcome based on what we’ve set out to achieve. This is very important since our vision informs the outcome we desire. Is it feasible in the environment we desire to use it?

Evaluation

We need to evaluate the outcome of result of our action, see what needs to be improved or changed. Evaluation provides us with the opportunity to be more reflective in our thinking which in itself a great means for improvement.

Conclusions

This article is basically an encouragement to highlight the fact that the basis for our thinking more productive requires both mental and physical mastery. For most case the mental is more than the physical, and therefore urges us to invest more on our thinking so as to leverage the results we get.

© 2009 Benjamin S C Ugoji