Are You ThoughtFULL?

Intro Music:
Welcome to An Owner’s Guide for Your Life, the podcast that combines psychology, coaching, common sense and fun. I’m Tracey Browning, an entrepreneur, life coach and lover of people. Now let’s talk about how to live, love, make money, and change the world.

Tracey:
Hey, I’m glad you’re here. I’m going to talk today about the importance of being thoughtful. It’s probably not the kind of thoughtful you’re thinking like, “Oh, isn’t that so kind of you” or the Southern hospitality kind of thoughtful. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about being thoughtFULL. Full of thoughts.

Now here’s how I got started on this yesterday. I’ve got a really interesting LinkedIn feed. I’ve got some great connections, people who are thoughtful, filled with thoughts about creativity and business and being curious and adventurous and courageous and doing business well. So it’s very interesting to read various posts and comment and engage with other people talking about this.

We got started on this idea of, are you creative? Do you consider yourself creative? And somebody mentioned the book The Dip by Seth Godin. I haven’t read it. I’ve read some excerpts from it. So I was really thinking about The Dip and what Seth Gordon says the dip is. It’s like when you start something, let me find it. It’s the long slog between starting and mastery. The long slog. But it’s actually a shortcut because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path. And basically what he’s saying is that you’re going to start out and you’re like, your trajectory is going to be, you’re going to be going up, you’re learning, here you go. You’re headed up, and then you hit the dip where, I don’t know, you’re tired, you’re frustrated. Things aren’t happening the way you think you expected them to. So there’s an actual dip. And then if you can make it through the dip, then you power through. And he talks about some different things.

I’m not going to get into it, really. Because what happened is, as I was considering this concept of the dip, I was having a good conversation with my husband about it.

Now I want to tell you something about my husband. He is a thoughtFULL person. He’s one of these fellows who, he’s got great formal education, but lots of informal education. He is a master at reading or hearing something and sitting with it to figure out how to apply it to his individual situation. He’s done it for years in manufacturing environments. He’s done it with our own businesses. So being full of thoughts, not taking information at face value to just go, oh, okay. Well, yeah, because some perceived authority said it, it must be true. Todd does not do that. Todd thinks through things. So we had a little bit of a conversation and he came back later and he said, “I just don’t think the dip applies for most of what I see in my life.” Oh, well, Dang. Okay, wait a minute. Maybe it really doesn’t.

The lesson here for me is that I’m so glad that I surround myself with people who believe in the importance of being thoughtful, who believe how important it is to, yes, always be learning, but not just learning, applying it in a considered way to life and to business.

One of the conversations I was having on LinkedIn, one of the guys was saying, you know, we’re so lazy in our thinking and we are so many of us are lazy. Part of it is laziness, and I’m using the air quotes, part of it is being lazy. But part of it is our brain just wants to function efficiently. And for our brain to function efficiently, we fall into habits, we have stereotypes, we have patterns of thinking because it’s faster and easier and it’s more energy efficient to follow those patterns.

It can be easier to let somebody else do your thinking for you. Because sometimes, yes, it’s hard to figure stuff out. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It just means it takes some effort. It takes some thinking.

So we were having a whole different conversation about lazy thinking and how it’s good to just kind of challenge yourself. But as I was thinking about what I wanted to really talk about today, I went through this whole circle of the importance of being creative. And being creative does not just mean artwork or music.

Be creative in how you live. Be creative in how you think. Be creative in how you relate to people. Creativity is everywhere. It’s easy for us to pigeonhole ourselves and go, oh, I’m not creative. I’m an accountant. Maybe being a creative accountant might not be the best thing. I don’t know. People might really look for the creative accountants. So being creative, being curious.

Here’s the whole pathway of thoughts I had about creativity and curiosity and thinking for yourself, how important it is to think for yourself.

Now, where that also led me to is when you think for yourself, you want to trust yourself.
And to trust yourself, you have to believe that you have value, that you’re worth the trust, that you are worthy to be trusted. Because are you going to trust somebody you think is worthless? No. So you have to believe that you have value, that your thoughts have value.

So I’m circling back around to the importance of being a thinking, thought filled, thoughtFULL person who learns, who applies, who’s capable of evaluating and considering complexities and nuances and intricate ideas. Someone who’s curious and creative, confident and courageous to not just think, not be filled with thoughts and only thoughts, but to take those thoughts and apply them.

How do you become that kind of person if you don’t consider yourself to be that kind of person?
You start with some small steps.

Okay, I’m going to bring a game into this. Wordle. Have you played Wordle yet? W-O-R-D-L-E Wordle is a word game that you try to guess, you have six tries to guess the five letter word. It is so good for not just somebody who likes word games but for word and logic skills and it helps you you have to be careful about making assumptions like if there’s an o and an a it doesn’t mean that the o and the a is going to appear together in the word like in ‘broad’ B-O-R-A-D haha, I didn’t spell it right B-R-O-A-D with the o and the a together. It could be that the word is Borax B-O-R-A-X so you start challenging assumptions and logic and things like that. Anyway, play wordle, play a game that helps you stop and think and TELL yourself, “Oh look at me I’m a thought filled person. I’m someone who’s capable of thinking and applying thoughtful skills.”

It’s a small step yeah, it’s a game but it’s a small step in helping you become a person who takes time to think. If word games aren’t your thing, read something, listen to something and when you hear somebody say something don’t just go, “Oh yeah, that’s right.”

Stop and think about, wait a minute, how does this apply to me and force yourself to come up with three different ways this applies or three different ways you can use the idea. Consider the situation from different angles. It’s really all about stopping and considering things instead of just going, “Oh yeah, somebody said it so it must be true.”

You just start taking small steps to become a thoughtful person and when you’ve built a history of taking the small steps and believing that you are a thoughtful person who takes thoughts and turns them into action- that’s when the bigger steps, the bigger impact happens.

I love that I have a life filled with thoughtFULL people and I encourage you to become a thoughtful person.

So thoughtFULL person, let’s go live, love, make some money and change the world.

For a transcript of this episode or for more information about life and mindset coaching, visit my website https://www.tbrowning.com/.