By Kathrin Köster

How to escape the what-if trap

Do you know situations like this? One of your biggest customers has cancelled a meeting in your calendar without any comment. As this move comes totally unexpected and you don’t have any explanation for it, your mind starts rattling. What has happened? What if you had annoyed him somehow without noticing? Should you call with a pretence and find out? But what if he does not want to talk to you and you make things worse? What if he had switched sources without telling you? What if, what if….You are stuck in a loop of ‘what-ifs’ that keep you busy and distract you from the task you wanted to focus on. You are stuck in thoughts you don’t want to think. You are stuck in ‘mental waste’ you don’t want to produce.

How to get rid of these thoughts? How to change this mental habit? As with any change, we have to go for it in a determined and sincere way. We have to take ourselves seriously. It all starts with a “YES, I want to change my mental habits.” In this case: “I reduce the what-ifs.”

As thoughts are evasive and we are not used to track them, we need to introduce a kind of marker to make our thoughts visible to our inner eye. We need to get aware of them in order to be able to stop them. Hence, we identify so-called ‘heads up – words’

that help us to get aware of the thought pattern we want to reduce. In this case it is easy: It is sentences starting with ‘what-if’ and the following thought loops. It does not make a difference whether we think silently or whether we speak out. The technique with the markers or the heads-up words works in the same way.

At the end of each day, we take 5-10 minutes to write down the what-if-scenarios we were producing during the day. We use either a paper or an electronic journal for monitoring our thought patterns. After taking notes of the what-ifs, we reflect on the context that triggered them in order to find out more about ourselves and about our particular worries or concerns. This leads us to the root-causes of the thought loop.

After 2-3 days, we gain a picture of our thought patterns related to the what-ifs. This is when we enter the next phase intervening into the thought process itself. As soon as the marker comes to our mind, we react with ‘stop’, immediately putting an end to this thought. The ‘stop’-command is combined with a deep conscious breath to interrupt all ongoing processes and reset the mental system. Fully focus on taking the breath. During this mental reboot, you only think of breathing.

To summarize, there are 6 steps to change the what-if mental habit. We call it the ‘marker-technique’:

1. Decide clearly for yourself that you want to change. This is the commitment to yourself
2. Identify the marker for monitoring the relevant thought pattern. In our case: “What if…”
3. Identify the what-if-loops as soon as the thought pattern emerges and become aware of it
4. Take 5-10 minutes in the evening to track all what-if-thoughts using a journal (electronic or paper)
5. Get to know the context that triggered the what-if-loops to explore the root cause of the loop. Add your insights to your notes
6. Say “stop” to the ‘what-if’ as soon as you detect it and take a deep conscious breath

With the marker-technique we eliminate thought patterns that are fruitless and have the power to take energy from us and reduce our efficiency. Stopping negative mental habits can be viewed as an inner detoxification process. Without the mental waste functioning like a blockage, other thoughts come with greater ease and clarity. Some of you will notice that new thoughts emerge you would not have had before. You may get more creative and/or just more focused and resilient.

And what if it doesn’t work? What if it is not as easy as described above? You see, these patterns are pretty deep J. Needless to say that we have to practice this marker-technique for a while until we get rid of our patterns. Persistence and self-discipline are required.

And yes, there is more we can do. To make the mental waste reduction more effective and sustainable, we have to look at emotional aspects as well. The root-cause analysis for the what-ifs can help us to find out more about our worries and concerns underlying the ‘what-ifs’. But first things first: Let’s tackle the ‘mental waste’ and create space for something new J

In one of the next posts I will talk about emotional patterns….

By Kathrin Köster

Mental cleanup?!

The last decades have been dominated by the concept of efficiency: Save time, save money. Endless change campaigns were initiated to increase efficiency – mainly in the area of production and processes. All organizations have to be lean – promoted in the concepts of lean production and lean management. With this hype the Japanese approach of ‘muda’ (waste) went global and waste is eliminated wherever detected.

Interestingly, a wide area of potential efficiency increases has not been addressed yet: The change of mental habits. Given the shift towards a knowledge-based industry with a high percentage of people adding value with their well-trained brains, this is a promising field.

While we are sitting at our work places, we are ‘producing thoughts’. This is the basis of many jobs in so-called white-collar functions. The challenge with thoughts is: They are evasive. We usually are not aware of them. There are estimates saying that we produce more than 40,000 thoughts per day without being able to state what exactly we are thinking. Are these all relevant and ‘necessary’ thoughts related to the tasks at hand? Are they to the point? Or are they just distracting us from doing what we want to do? Think about what you have been thinking during the last hour. Probably about many issues not really related to your tasks, including some worries, some concerns…

I would like to invite you to shift perspectives now: Following the traditional paradigm, efficiency typically is seen as a way to save scarce resources, to minimize input in order to be able to maximize profits. This view is constraint-based

and usually increases pressure in the organizations we work for. It’s about doing more in less time. This is exhausting and we tend to feel pressure.

But efficiency can be seen differently: Potential-based. It is a concept to gain more freedom by being able to track your thoughts and manage them actively. From this view, efficiency campaigns are an impulse for self-experimentation and self-development enabling us to drive our thought processes and modify thought patterns.

This kind of efficiency leads towards self-empowerment as we emancipate ourselves from thoughts we do not want to think at that very moment for a variety of reasons. This kind of efficiency campaign can be seen as a collective inner clean-up to create free space. Reducing “mental waste” (seishinteki muda) creates ‘free space’ and strengthens creativity. We gain time and mental freedom that we can invest otherwise, for instance in new ideas. Free ‘brain capacity’ helps us to come up with fresh approaches that are especially needed in times of uncertainty and complexity.

Stay tuned to my next post to get to know how to reduce mental waste in practice.