…. And everything bad starts with a thought. I am fascinated with thinking. Ever since I started training as a coach, I learned so much about the power of our thoughts.

For the 3 years of the pandemic, I was what I called LOST. But I’ve come to realize that when we say that we are lost, or confused, or unsure, it really means that we haven’t thought deeply enough about this issue. The events paralyzed me in a way that I lacked motivation for almost anything – podcasting, writing, speaking – I stopped all my creative endeavors and I blamed the pandemic for that. My friends assured me that this was normal. But somehow I knew it wasn’t. Because most of them kept creating, evolving, changing. And yet, here I was: completely stuck, unmotivated, without a vision for my future.

Then I finally got off the coach and decided to become a coach. The drive to help others was still deep inside of me, and somehow, it made itself to the surface.  During the training, I learned that I don’t need to blame outside events for my behavior. Everything I do, good or bad, starts with my thoughts about what is happening. While I knew the truth of this concept through years of self-study, and also talked about it on my podcast many times, I didn’t clearly comprehend the power my thoughts had over me.

As a coach I learned to ask my clients empowering questions. And every time, I am amazed at what people come up with, the insights they suddenly pull out of (seemingly) nowhere. The same happens to me when I get coached. And this is really the secret sauce of coaching – coaches ask questions that clients don’t ask of themselves.

Now you may wonder – What is so magic about a question? I wondered the same. And I believe it boils down to the simple concept of thinking. Our brain has been given to us for a reason – to think. But I believe that our thinking has suffered from the same malady as our attention span – it has become shorter and more superficial. We have a question – we google it. We read a few of the results, we got what we think we needed, we move on. We don’t fully utilize the creative capacity we’ve been given. We rely on others to solve our problems, but what we are really doing is we are just recycling someone else’s idea.

The true power of my brain becomes clear only when I make time to think. And the best way to get thinking is, like a coach, ask myself an empowering question. Suddenly my brain becomes a search engine as I am asking it to solve a problem and come up with answers. I am fascinated by the power and creativity of my mind. It comes up with unique ideas, created from all the different inputs I have had throughout my life – my education,  my upbringing, my life experiences, and everything I ever Googled (and remembered).

When we put our brain to work (see my last post on this) it gets busy with imagination and creativity and it feeds us ideas. All it needs is some space to breathe and unfold itself.

You can try this for yourself. Take any problem you are currently facing and ask yourself one of these (or any other) powerful questions:

• How am I going to solve this problem?
• What are 5 ideas that would get me closer to resolving the issue?
• What would I do if I knew what to do?
• What would my future self, who has already solved the issue, advise me to do?
• What would I do without this problem? What would be different?

And then write down all of your ideas, even they crazy ones. This is your intellectual property. It may not be useful right this moment. You may not know what to do with it. But I believe that when asked to come up with answers, our brain is always working for us.  When we let it idle, unsupervised, wandering around, it gets lost, stuck, and often defaults to negative thoughts.

Throughout my coaching journey, I came to realize that most of my problems are thinking problems – wrong thinking, negative thinking, recycled thinking, listening to what are others thinking, etc. By spending time taking the (often useful) outside inputs and incorporating them with my own questions about what I want to discover, my thinking becomes positive, creative, original, and most importantly, in line with where I want to go.

Give it a try and let me know what solutions your brain is creating.