Our innate resource: Rational Thinking

The context for these videos

Each post in this short series is from Alec’s weekly livestream to the Facebook group Finding the Balance with Anxiety Freedom Cards. Each week I focus upon one of our innate resources or needs as depicted in the Anxiety Freedom Cards. And the reason I’m doing this is to show you how you too can live a life free from anxiety and stress.

Please let me know what you think by scrolling to the bottom and commenting below!

Below is a direct transcript from the video shown above.

Well, good afternoon and welcome to this Tuesday Two o’clock Topic. My name is Alec. I’m from in8 and I’m here to talk this week about one of our most powerful innate resources. It’s our ability to think rationally, our rational thinking ability.

And this is an interesting topic to talk about. It’s a slightly challenging one for me, and you’ll understand why as I go through, I share a little bit of my own personal story later on. But first of all, let me welcome you. If you’re watching this live, if you are then please drop a comment in the box below so that I can see that you’re with me. And if you’re watching this on replay, then please drop a commentary in as well. So that I know that you’re interacting with me. And if you have any questions at all about rational thinking or about the Anxiety Freedom Cards in general, or any aspect of the work that Bindi and I do here at in8 then please ask a question. This is an informal, open-ended chat. I tend to share a bit of knowledge, just a bit about my experience, but I also ramble a bit and I usually share a story.

So thank you for joining me. Good afternoon to somebody who’s a Facebook user. I can’t see your name at the moment, but I shall try and find out during the course of this broadcast. And thank you for commenting. So rational thinking, what can we say about this? Well, let me read a little bit from the extract, from the book that goes with the cards. When we think of the brain, we tend to think of it in terms of, we often use a computer analogy. You know, we have the cogs turning here, the idea that things are being processed, calculated, thought through. If you look at the style of the image, it’s ordered, it’s rational, there’s measuring, there’s calculating, there’s writing, there’s language. Everything’s neat and tidy. The head is on the left-hand side because that’s perhaps a nod to the idea that this is predominantly a left brain function. So whether you go with that left brain, right brain analogy or not, I still think it’s worth considering it to be one part of our thinking process. And in the book, it says, it relates to rationality to logic, to intelligence, to planning, exams, academic learning, prioritising, sorting, listing, categorising, targets, science, maths, problem solving, but I’d like to keep things real wherever possible.

And I think it’s worth asking ourselves question, how do we use this in everyday life? What does it mean to be using this one of our innate resources and perhaps a good example would be to suggest that maybe if you know you’re going to go shopping, what do you do? Well, if you’re anything like me, you make a list. And I, the reason I make a list is that I’m quite likely to forget important things. So I have a look in the fridge and I see if we have any milk. And I see if we have any food in the fridge and I’ll make a rough list. It doesn’t mean I’m only going to buy what’s on the list, but it helps to jog my memory and to focus me and I then don’t have to carry it in my brain. I’ve got the list. I can take the list with me. So making a list of any sort is a rational thinking type of exercise, making plans. And now that we’re coming out of lockdown, many people will be planning a holiday.

How do you plan a holiday? Well, you probably get your diary out and you see what commitments you already have, and you look for a gap and you look for where you want to go, and maybe you get on the web and you do a bit of Googling and some research. Basically you do a whole lot of rational thinking type of work in order to make any kind of plan. Setting priorities. What’s urgent in your life today? What’s important in your life today? What’s important and urgent? Because those are the things that you really should be focusing on.

And as I said, researching things, getting on Google, finding stuff out, getting information is all part of our rational thinking. Working stuff out logic, you know, the, the simple logic idea that if A implies B whatever, A and B are, let’s leave them open-ended. But if there’s something that you know, which is we’ll call that A, and it tells you that B is true, and that if B implies C, then it’s logical to say that A implies C. You don’t have to invoke the middle stage. That’s an example of a rational thought example, but then anything to do with classifying, labeling, sorting. Our rational mind tends to like to draw distinctions between things it likes to classify. It likes to label stuff. You will have maybe heard me talk in the past about the idea that there are many trees in the world, and we have a word for tree, and yet no two trees are the same. Why is that? Because we make a distinction. When we say this thing is this living organism is tree-like. Sorry about the noises in the background. I shall just try and make those noises silent so we don’t get that constant dinging because it annoys me. What I want to say about rational thinking. And this is why it’s perhaps a slightly double-edged sword for me is that I think it’s really important to notice that it’s only one aspect of our ability to think.

There are many ways that we can think. And rationality, I think is sometimes overrated. Now I’m a fan of rationality. Don’t get me wrong. I think sometimes there isn’t enough rational thinking in the world. Rational thinking means to evaluate and to verify things, to, to check them and to check what you perceive against your prior knowledge about against your understanding. So I’m certainly not putting it down, but I do think it’s quite interesting that when you look at the difference between, let’s say rational thinking and imaginative thinking – these two cards, which are both really crucial to have a balanced life, it’s only the imagination that is essentially creative. I’m not saying you can’t do creative things with rational thinking. You can, but coming up with a new idea or a new connection between things or a new insight is much more likely to involve your imagination and your creative side than your purely rational side.

Rationality works with what it’s got and it draws inferences and deductions from what’s in front of it. It’s not very good at producing new ideas or bringing in new insights. That’s really the role of other aspects of our brain. So I would say that essentially, it’s not a particularly creative part, even though it’s a really important part of our thinking style and we can get seduced by it. We are, we tend to think that more information is good, that the more information we have, the better we are informed to make decisions. And that is generally true, but it’s kind of seductive. And I have seen people get really, I’ve done it myself, get really tangled up in thinking that information is the way to proceed. Just this week I’ve, I’ve heard two stories.

One was people explaining to young children who were upset about what was going on. And I know because I understand the effects of emotional arousal, that when children are really upset, for whatever reason, maybe they’ve dropped their ice cream on the floor or something relatively trivial, they really can’t process information. None of us can. And when we’re emotionally aroused, our rational thinking tends to go out of the window and we rely more on instinctive prior patterns that have been laid down. We tend to react more than respond. And so explaining to an upset child is usually a waste of time. And yet I’m seeing it more and more. In the park, somebody angry with a child who was very upset and going through a really labored explanation of what was going on when all that was really needed was to hug the child and make them feel safe.

I, I heard a story this week of someone who was really struggling to their baby to sleep. And this is a baby that’s only a few months old and they had read all the books and they had done all of the research and they had all of the information, but what were they, where were they going wrong? They’d forgotten to trust their own human instinct about what the child might need or what might be right or wrong. And we’re almost getting educated out of this, trusting our instincts. Now you’ll know that because we call our company in8, I’m a firm believer that we have innate wisdom. We have innate skills, innate knowledge, and quite often the answer to the challenges that we face can be found by looking within, by looking to our bodies. You know, if we’re not sure what we should eat, ask your body. Is it happy with what you’re eating? And if it’s not then go with its instinct because it’s wise. We have great wisdom within us, which we often completely ignore in favor of what we read on the web.

So I think it’s very important to point out the limitations of purely rational thinking. The left brain way of looking at things tends to be associated with language, sequences in time, cause and effect. Whereas our right brain mechanisms tend to see connections between things, tend to see the big picture, tend to involve a more emotional and more creative side. And we need both in balance is the real answer.

So I’m going to share a little bit of my own story because rational thinking, I say it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. I was good at exams at school. Now I don’t think it was because I was particularly clever. I think I just had a lot of self-discipline and I was brought up by my parents to value self discipline. Homework must be done before you play. Work before play. And they were quite keen on academic success for all of their three children. And I was compliant. I thought it was the only way that’s, that’s the way that kids work. You know, whatever you see around you, you think is normal at the time. And I was very diligent at doing my homework, so I got good grades. And in fact, I remember I used to get bullied a bit because one year I think I came top of the class in six different subjects and people would groan and Oh, there’s Stansfield again, you know, showing off or whatever. I was just doing what I thought you have to do, which is work hard and do your best. Always do your best was my mum’s, one of my mum’s favorite mottos.

And so I was pushed hard to excel academically, and I did maths, physics and chemistry. And I was put in a fast stream and we skipped a year for doing our ‘O’ levels. And then I did maths, physics and chemistry at ‘A’ level. And I was very lucky, in a way, to get a government sponsorship, to go and study electronic engineering with a salary. So I didn’t need a grant. I didn’t need a loan. I was completely financially independent as soon as I left home. And that as a, a kind of a daydreamer teenager, I had no idea how, how lucky I had been to land that amazing deal. You know, to get paid a salary, to be a student was really a pretty rare thing. And I must’ve done really well in the tests for, to get on the programme in the first place. So it was a government sponsored engineering degree. It was my father’s idea. He was a chartered mechanical engineer and education for him had been away out of the mills in Yorkshire. And he had, he was the first in his, he was the first generation in his family to have a university education. And my parents valued that above almost everything else. But to me, having a creative side and being a bit of a daydreamer and a bit of a, I guess, a bit of an old hippie at heart, in a way in those days, you know, I was what 12 in 1968, when all the good music was coming out, I was influenced by the sixties, even though it was a bit too young to really enjoy certain aspects of it.

So I worked hard, but I was always aware that I was being pushed one way. It wasn’t balanced. There was no emphasis. There was no balancing emphasis on creativity. And I wanted to do woodwork and metal work and music. And I had to fight hard to let them do, to get, to be allowed, to do a music ‘O’ level while I was doing my math, physics and chemistry ‘A’ level. Now I’m not telling you this to show off. What I’m really trying to tell you is that I understand about rational thinking. I, I developed that skill. I was good at it. And I used it in my work in lots of different ways, but I was always aware of limitations. And that was never very happy with this idea of, Oh, he’s a bright kid. I still get upset when I hear people say that because to say someone is bright implies there is a single scale for measuring intelligence, but you’re either up here or you’re down there. And if you’re not bright, you’re obviously a bit dimmer. And you know, we have IQ tests and IQ is a real thing. It’s it measures an ability to solve problems.

But my point is that we all have to shine our own light. We all have to sing our own song. We have to share our own personal story and we can learn from everything and everybody. And as soon as we start labeling people into bright and not bright we’re kind of missing the point, is how I feel because everybody has something unique and brilliant to share with the world. That’s my perspective. That’s my belief. And that is actually my experience. So I’d never been very happy with this kind of categorising people into bright or otherwise. I’m, I’m convinced that every person has a unique gifts to share with the world. I am. I’m a fan of critical thinking. And I like the quote by, I think it’s by Idries Shah that says: “Study the assumptions behind your actions and then study the assumptions behind your assumptions.”

It was some years ago that I had a, an ongoing relationship with an elderly man who we used to have weekly conversations, which we both enjoyed. And he wanted a structure for our conversations. He was quite a formal person. He’s dead now, I’m sorry to say, but he was a big influence on me. And so when we thought about, well, what do we really want to talk about? I decided that what I would really like to focus on was how do you develop your intuition? Now, this is not rational thinking, this is more magical thinking if you like, but I’m convinced that sometimes we do have a real sense of intuition. Sometimes we just know stuff without really even knowing how. And we had these interesting discussions about intuition, and that led me to a whole new way of looking at life. And it put rational thinking into a particular context for me.

And I’m going to go off on a little bit of a tangent because I’m allowed to, because this is my show. I, you may have heard me talk in the past about dividing time into three portions. Let’s say we have the past, we have the present and we have the future. Simple idea, past, present, and future. When you think about that middle bit, the present it’s infinitesimally small, it’s already gone. You know, that moment’s gone. This is a new moment now. The present is fleeting. It’s tiny. And yet it’s the only point at which we have any control. Any effect on the world is act in the present. We can’t change the past and we can’t change the future, not in the simplistic terms anyway.

So the present almost has no duration, but it’s the only bit that gives us any power. It’s the only thing that we can ever influence. So now let’s look at those other two bits, the past and the future. And one of the things, insights that I think is, is really interesting about pattern-matching, another card, which we’ll talk about at another date, is that everything that you think you know about the past, you know in the form of narrative. Because it’s not here now. It’s the stories that you tell yourself or that you’ve heard, or that you’ve learned from, or that you’ve watched on TV or on YouTube or whatever. It’s the narratives that you have accepted and digested that give you a sense of the past. And it’s also the only way that you can experience the future. All of your expectations are based on narrative. It’s not here in front of your nose. So it can only be through the ability to create narratives in our head, which is a combination of imagination and rational thinking. The rational thinking gives us the language part. And without the language, we have no sense of time. And we’re more like basic, you know, like my pet Hendrix, my cat, who doesn’t seem to have any sense of time, or much sense either. So I just kind of think it’s interesting when we look at these assumptions, because the narratives that we have accepted become the truths that we live, in a sense. And when we are really mindful and really present in the moment, those things become a lot less important. And I just wanted to share that particular perspective because it’s, it’s something that bugs me and it just goes on all the time in the background.

Let’s ask the question now, how do we develop our rational thinking? Actually, before I do that I just going to check. Cause I’ve got a couple of comments here. The spontaneous, let me show this. The spontaneous light bulb and creative moments that seem to come out of nowhere when in the shower or ironing, et cetera. Absolutely. Yes, those are real that, and then not arrived at, by sitting down and thinking hard that there’s this wonderful book. I don’t know if you know this one by Daniel Kahneman: Thinking fast and slow. And in this book, he gives a very plausible description, that’s based upon science, of the difference between those fast knowings, those intuitions and the more laborious, slow, working it out, rational thinking approach. And there are two very definitely, def, excuse me, there are two very different mechanisms in our mind. And we have two ways of processing information, a the fast way and a slow way. And the rational thinking is actually one of the slow ways, but sorry, let, that was one of the comments. So thank you for that. Whoever shared that. And also I got this one, which is they can often be, life-transforming far more than a rational decision. Absolutely. In fact, that’s a good comment. I want, I want to add to that as well.

Think about the major decisions that you’ve made in your life. Things like maybe a career or a job that you got, that you really wanted, or a partner that you met or married, or traveling to a place that you, that you decided to travel where you learned something or gained some valuable new perspective on life, those decisions when you track back to how they happened.

I’m just thinking back to where I met Bindi, my soulmate and my life partner and business partner. It was because I was overloaded and stressed, working too hard. I hadn’t had a holiday in a long time. And my homeopath said, you must take a break. She was quite dogmatic. She’s German. And she has a way of putting things that you didn’t really, you wouldn’t challenge her. And she said, you have to take a break. Look, there’s this holiday in Spain next week, it’s a drum and dance workshop. You should book on it. You should do it. Just commit and say yes and do it now. I thought, Oh my goodness, really? That’s way out of my comfort zone. So I booked this holiday in Spain, in a kind of a retreat center: Cortijo Romero, if anyone knows it. And that’s where I met Bindi. And that was the most random thing that could have ever occurred. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t work it out rationally. Like this comment says it was a lifetime, life transforming decision and it wasn’t rational and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world and those jobs that we get or those people that we meet, very often it’s a random, chance occasion where we just act on gut instinct, Oh, I’m going to talk to this stranger. Oh, we seem to be getting on well, and then it turns into a lifelong relationship.

And I wish I could see who was posting the comments. I’m just going to see if I can find out by looking at the Facebook group. So please bear with me. So we’ve got Caroline with us. Good afternoon, Caroline. Nice to see your comment there. Thank you for that. And I can’t see the other comments, so I know that they’re there, but let’s press on.

Let’s ask the question: How can we develop our rational thinking ability? Because it is a great skill to use and it is in, sometimes it’s the tool that we really need to be applying to solve a problem. And I think the answer comes out really by using it. It’s like a muscle. The more you use it, the more you exercise, you know, if you’re trying to build muscle strength, you lift weights, you, you exercise. And I think rational thinking is exactly the same. So anything that challenges you rationally is a good, good way to, to, to build up rational thinking ability. So puzzles, word searches, doing Sudoku, you know, anything that, that exercises your mind and makes you think hard is probably a good way to develop it. I learned how to do Rubik’s cube a few years ago. It looks like a clever party trick. The reality is it’s actually, all you need to do is to be pedantic. There are some moves that you can memorise. There are about eight of them. They involve, I dunno, half a dozen different kinds of rotations. And if you work through methodically from whatever pattern you start with, you can always get back to a proper cube. Now I’m not one of those teenagers who can do it in 30 seconds flat. I’ve never learned the really fast ways of doing it. And probably don’t have the brain power at the age of 64 to take that on. But, and it still, I still find it quite satisfying that I can solve a Rubik’s cube because the first time I ever tried to do it, it seemed way impossible, way beyond my abilities. And it turns out that actually there’s a, you can just learn a few patterns, learn how to do, to do them in the right sequence, in the right order. And you can solve any Rubik cube.

So those are the kinds of things that will help you develop rational thinking. I’m also reminded to think of my daughter, who is the illustrator who illustrated these cards, who drew these images. Now she is a typical, creative individual. She’s, I believe she’s very talented. She’s an illustrator, that’s her job. She has a strong imagination. She has strong rapport, but she’s always struggled with numbers. And she’s always struggled with the more kind of logical, rational side of life. She is a true creative. I love to be with her because you can be walking down the street and she’ll suddenly burst out laughing. And you think, what, what, what did I miss? What’s happened? And she’s seen a funny shape on a lamppost that looks like a face. You know, it was two little dots and a, and a mouth, and it makes her laugh because her life is lived out in cartoon in a sense. And it’s not the way my mind works at all.

But what I think is really interesting about her story is that she’s in her young thirties now and married, and she copes really well with life, with the challenges that life throws at us. And she’s been through some quite big things in the last few years, and I’m really impressed with how well she’s coped. And when I think about how did she learn to develop her rational thinking, because it was not her strongest point when she was at school. She was diligent. She worked hard. She was, she was, you know, relatively well behaved. She certainly challenged us in her own ways, but essentially she was a creative person. But what’s interesting is that she, I got a job in a restaurant, a family run restaurant, as a waitress, and what she had to do is that she had to remember menu options, she had to remember orders, table locations. She had to remember people’s orders, the wine list, the wines that were available. She had to handle bills. She had to be able to cope with splitting a bill at the end of the evening and handling all that stuff.

And I remember when she first started, she found it really, really difficult. She was, she was almost despairing at times that she wouldn’t be able to do it because she didn’t have the kind of memory that could sort of just take a whole load of orders from the table and maybe half a dozen people and write it down accurately and get it to the kitchen and get the orders fulfilled. But she stuck at it and she stayed with it and she stretched herself and she developed that skill and she doesn’t do that work anymore now, but, and I’m sure that it paid huge dividends in, in the sense of exercising that muscle, getting her used to using the rational side of her abilities, her innate abilities, because that’s one of the important things to remember about all of these resources is that we all have them. How well we, they work for us, depends on how much we’ve developed them and how often we use them and how much effort and energy we put into developing those individual skills. So, yeah, rational thinking is, is a, is a big one.

Now, I think that’s all I have to say about rational thinking itself, but I always like to share a story.

So I have a story today and it’s a story taken from this rather remarkable book by Kaleb Seth Pearl, which I’ve only come across recently. It’s a story that I’ve seen before, in the work of Idris Shah, and it’s called: The Scholar and the Boatman.

So are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. A certain, well-known academic scholar was taking a long needed vacation amongst the tranquil islands of the golden sun, where trees grew tall and fruits were bigger than the hand. On one particular morning, he had hired a local boat man and his boat to take him to one of the islands, for he wished to make a curious visit. The scholar stepped into the wooden boat and sat down as the local boatman, unshaven and somewhat scruffy, pulled away from the moorings. The scholar himself, a man of keen observation, eyed this local fellow with interest. After a short time, he called over to him.

“Tell me my good fellow, have you always been a boatman?”

“No I aint,” replied the local man. “I’d gone done other things before I did this.”

“Excuse me,” replied the scholar with a low chuckle. “I aint? I gone done? What sort of grammar is this? Did they not teach you correct grammar when you were at school?”

“I ain’t never been to school,” replied the boatman.

“You have never been to school? Dear me!” said the scholar, “I would say, that half your life has been wasted.”

The boatman said nothing but kept on steering the wooden boat. The scholar sat back and watched the ripples of water spread across the surface of the lake. However, within a short time, he noticed the ripples were becoming stronger and changing into small waves and then larger waves. A storm had suddenly risen up from the belly of nature herself, and suddenly began to pound the waters of the lake. The scholar held on tightly as he saw the boatman struggle against the strengthening storm. Several more minutes passed. And eventually the boatman called over to the scholar.

“Hey scholar, as you ever learned to swim?”

“No!”, replied the scholar, with apprehension.

“In that case,” shouted back the boatman, “I reckon all your life has been wasted. We’re sinking!”

And I will read what Kaleb Seth Pearl says about this story. I don’t, I don’t like to over-analyse them, but I think what he says is interesting. It can be said that this joke stroke tale represents the futility of a certain type of knowledge experience within a particular context.

Like the scholar, the general person is trained or programmed with external skills and capacities suitable for certain jobs in the world. Yet the art of swimming is a fundamental life skill for living in a world where there is water. In this world or reality there is much water. Yet few have been trained how to swim. Swimming here is the capacity for interior awareness and developed perceptions. The art of swimming is now a survival requisite, not a mere pastime.

So I hope to enjoy, I hope you enjoyed the story today. I think that’s all I’ve got for you. I’ll be back next week where we’ll have week two of rational thinking. And the reason I do it two weeks at a time like this is so that I have an opportunity to answer any questions that come up from you or, and also to reflect on the topic myself and see if I have any other insights that I want to share with you or any other angles, or perceptions, perspectives rather, looking at this topic. We also will be working through the worksheet next time. So there will be a worksheet which you’re free to download and to replicate, to use with your clients or with your own workshops or in any way that you like.

And in the meantime, I say, if you have any questions, please let me know. They’ve got, Oh, CG’s managed to join us, just in time to sit comfortably. So she got the story. Great. Well, you can watch the rest of them on the replay. I know that you had other things coming up and thanks for letting me know. And there are some lovely icons here as well. So we have a scholar, we have a sun, we have a boatman. We have waves, we have some applause and a thank you. That’s really brilliant CG. Thank you for that. So hope you have a good week. I think the weather’s going to be getting quite cold, but we’ve had a good weekend. I hope you have as well. Good Easter weekend.

I look forward to joining you again next Tuesday at two o’clock for another Alec’s, Tuesday Two o’clock Topics. In the meantime, whatever else you’re doing, don’t forget to keep breathing.

Please let me know what you think by commenting below!
Thanks, Alec