Thinking becomes smarter when you step outside yourself — whether through imagined interlocutors, prayer, or deliberate perspective-shifting.
My friend Roger Overall started a chat on LinkedIn about talking to yourself. Do you do it? Is it helpful?
Roger mentions a ‘Simple Truths’ card deck that provides sentences designed to help you untangle a thorny question or problem.
I like the idea. Intelligence exists in dialog. If you get too caught up in your own thoughts, you can go down an ugly spiral. Getting a new perspective can be incredibly helpful. It reminds me of three things I use all the time: my inner interlocutors, prayer, and a very different deck of cards.
My Chorus
In terms of “talking to yourself,” I have a chorus of voices in my head that I chat with frequently. The chorus includes my parents, Ben Franklin, Sherlock Holmes, childhood friends, and avatars of different philosophical, political, or cultural perspectives.
These chats can be very useful in looking at an idea from different perspectives. But there’s a limit to internal advisors. You can lie to Ben Franklin. You can even lie to Sherlock. But you can’t lie to God.
Well … you can, of course — most people do when they sing hymns — but if you have anything like a conscience, if you try to lie to God in the privacy of your own mind, where you can’t shift the blame to Charles Wesley, it will immediately attack you.
How Prayer is Different
When you pray, you’re putting all your thoughts, ambitions, desires, hopes, fears, and worries before someone who knows everything, wants the best for you, and wants the best for everybody else too. (That last point is important.)
Here’s the thing. It doesn’t even matter if God exists.
Actually it does matter, but it doesn’t matter for purposes of this mental exercise.
One of the benefits of talking to God is that it puts you in a particular frame of mind — in which every thought, motive, and desire is scrutinized by the unflinching gaze of somebody you can’t fool. It helps you put things in perspective.
Prayer forces a kind of ruthless self-honesty. You’re speaking to someone who can’t be manipulated, flattered, distracted, or deceived — even if you’re only imagining Him.
And Now For Something Completely Different
Let’s turn that concept completely on its head.
Roger has his cards. I have mine. They’re called the Creative Thinking Cards Deck. Each card has an interesting exercise to spur creativity, such as the mind map, first principles, 10 ideas in 10 minutes, reverse brainstorming, and so on. They’re fun, and I recommend you get a pack.
My favorite is “Think like the devil.”
The goal of this exercise is not to do wicked things, but to eliminate mental constraints and see where it takes you. I.e., if there was nothing to hold you back, if you had no fear of fines, or jail, and no moral scruples, what could you do?
“Thinking like the devil” isn’t about wickedness. It’s about temporarily lifting every moral, legal, or social barrier to see what ideas emerge. Most of those ideas will be unusable — but the exercise often reveals the adjacent possible, the thing you can do because you allowed yourself to imagine what you can’t.
Conclusion
If you’re in a rut, get out of your own head. Talk to somebody else. Preferably a real person, but if not, talk to Sherlock. Talk to God. Imagine you’re the devil. Imagine you’re the president. (Am I repeating myself?) Find new ways to frame the problem and new angles from which to explore.
