“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”  

Abraham Maslow

A few years ago on a meditation retreat, the teacher recounted a delightful story of their young son, whose grandparents had given him a toy truck, which he drove around everywhere, pressing the horn which blared ”GET OUT OF THE WAY!”

Have you ever had a momentary intuition that getting out of your own way would be really useful? That somehow, we contrive to find ways to take ourselves off track, away from what we know will best serve us, and the people around us? It’s not intentional of course, it just seems to happen. 

Being unaware that we are mostly lost in thought can be likened to ‘internal state capture’

Getting out of the way, and getting in the way are, of course very closely related. It has a lot to do with our state of mind. For many people, most of the time, the mind is lost in thoughts. It’s like an internal form of state capture. For those who live in or know of the political landscape in South Africa, state capture is a very evocative term. 

Internal state capture, where our state of mind is lost in thoughts, is equally consequential. In this mental process, we think without awareness that we are thinking. We become identified with ‘my’ thoughts, take them to be true, the mind then becoming an echo chamber of one (often further reinforced by social media algorithms).  

The upshot of internal state capture: we have limited access to a wider range of perspective, choices of behaviour and possibilities. This is crucial for all of us to understand, and most especially leaders, who are navigating so much and at such pace.

Knowing your mind so that you can begin to access more range in perspective is critical to navigating complexity and being more strategic. 

Most of our minds wander incessantly

The science of this state of affairs is interestingly, and unfortunately, rather robust: this tendency is the default position of our minds. We tend to wander incessantly, so often distracted from our present experience. This always has “me” as the central character in our mental drama. The neuroscientists call this “self-referential processing”.

Brain science can be really helpful to understand this process. This is especially valuable if we wish to understand how we land up getting in our own way, and how we can begin to counteract this tendency. One of the most interesting insights to have emerged out of neuroscience in the last two decades is that different brain regions activate together so that the information they encode is in formation, or coherent, like a flock of birds in flight. The brain and wider nervous system functions as a network rather than from discrete and independent areas. 

One of the networks within the wider neural net is called the default mode network. Researchers discovered this initially by chance, when they asked people to rest between mental tasks while sitting in a brain scanner (a functional MRI scanner to be precise). They noticed a pattern of activation of a network of midline brain structures that activated together when people were not actively doing anything in particular. This brain state correlated with the inner experience of mind wandering and self-referential processing (i.e. lost in thoughts with ‘me’ as the central character). 

This is not wrong or bad, and even has some utility. However, it is incredibly useful to know that when we get in our own way, it is this default network that is active.

Opening up a field of possibilities

It has also been demonstrated that the moment we notice that we are lost in thoughts, that is, with the introduction of mindfulness, the dominant network immediately shifts to a parallel network system correlated with more attentiveness, less self-obsession/absorption and a wider field of view.  

This ‘salience’ network is a collection of brain regions flying in formation, but more on the front and outside parts of the brain. As attention becomes unhooked from thoughts, the network acts like a torch, or a spotlight, the beams (of different sizes) both directed towards, and receiving from, a wider range of information, from both the external and internal environments.  

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Our minds and brains become available to engage and connect with what is here and now. This opens up a range of choices, sometimes referred to as response flexibility.

With this simple rotation from lost in thoughts to awareness of this distraction, we open up a field of possibilities, and slowly but surely we begin to learn how to get out of our own way by becoming aware in any given moment that we were in the way in the first place!  

This is an essential element of the slow, steady work of development as leaders: to get out of our own way by becoming aware with greater clarity and compassion to the mental mechanisms that keep us perennially stuck; stuck in an invisible cycle that degrades our well-being, the quality of relationships and our range.

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