Each week I intend to dispatch my pent-up creativity by creating a new version of something I call a “quotius”. (Learn about the genesis of it here.)
Circular Thinking: Works on fear – Makes you gutless
Reciprocal Thinking: Works on guts – Makes you fearless
This quotius is not actually a quote like most of the others I do here. That’s because it’s not a quote from somebody else. This time it’s my own idea which I made up in an attempt to vividly illustrate the striking differences between two distinct types of thinking: circular and reciprocal.
If you’ve seen more than one of my Quotius videos you may have noticed that I have little regard for the circular type of thinking pattern. I personally believe that thinking that has a pattern like this has been the sole cause of the stuckiness that many people experience in their own lives.
I don’t like it in myself and I don’t like it in others.
That’s why in each one of these little productions I end up destroying the circular band that represents circular thinking. This often happens in a rather extreme way. It’s intentionally violent and final. Like a deadly virus I don’t want it ever coming back.
Circular thinking causes you to make decisions that are hard to reach. They are long coming (if they get made at all) and they are usually the result of over-analyzing things. They are what I refer to as head-based decision making. All you do is go around and around and around burning up time and energy to finally reaching a flimsy compromised path.
If you tend toward this type of thinking it’s probably because it seems like the safe thing to do. But it’s not. It’s just time-wasting. Real opportunities aren’t often found in the safe area of life. They are found in the deep end of the pool and it takes some guts to swim out there to claim them for yourself.
Reciprocal thinking, on the other hand, is thinking that works in partnership with the two sets of independent brain systems found in all humans. The head brain and the gut brain.
You’re no doubt aware of the head brain and what it does. But for some the knowing about the gut brain is still be a bit of a mystery. So let me give you a brief rundown of what I think was one of the top biological discoveries of the last fifty years.
The gut brain, known technically as the “enteric nervous system”, was a discovery that was first made public in North America in an article in the New York Times in 1996. The subject of the article was an announcement by cell biologist Dr. Michael Gershon. His area of interest had been the digestive system and that is how he literally tripped over the evidence of this (abdominal) brain.
He conducted tests and found some startling facts such as:
• The gut brain can, and does, act alone without instructions from topside
• The area of the gut brain is rich in “feel good” chemicals
• The gut brain is very sensitive to touch employing the same neurons found in the head
The brain in the gut was not entirely unknown however. A British doctor by the name of Langley had written about it about 100 years prior to Dr. Gershon’s work, but it had been overshadowed by the discovery of neuro-transmitters (chemicals said to help transmit nerve signals between each neuron).
Now that we know we have two distinct brains in the body why not use both of them in concert when considering critical choices? You can have the thought considerations from the head brain while being made more aware of invaluable signals about good or bad from the gut brain. Base your finial decision on that.
It is said that two brains are better than one. But what’s even better is when both reside in the same body and can agree on the same direction to go in.
More power to you.
Music Credit:
The Annual New England Xylophone Symposium by DoKashiteru is licensed under a Attribution Noncommercial (3.0)