5 Basic Steps To Thinking Outside The Box And Grow!

Knowing to deal with change means knowing how thinking outside the box is important, especially in these changing times where our reality is changing to something we’ve never known before!

If personal development is important to you and you are moving on, you must have recognized that you are controlled by a repetitive level of thinking that often controls your feelings, emotions and, consequently, the level of your decision-making.

You also must have noticed that it isn’t so easy to change the aspect of reverting back to same-old, same-old ways of thinking, emotions, and habits.

Change begins with thinking, more specifically, with thinking outside the box!

What Does Thinking Outside The Box mean?

It simply means thinking for yourself rather than influenced by outside influence. Thinking differently even if it seems “out there”, entertaining new ideas and being free to think.

Sounds obvious and simple but the reality for the majority is light-years away. Not that they can’t but rather they won’t.

I am sure that you have noticed that most people, although very different from one another, tend to think the same, and perhaps like me, you wondered why?

Why is Thinking Outside the Box Rare? Key questions to ask…

The term “thinking outside the box” suggests the image of a box without much space, limited from all sides, without much air inside, with many people crowding that space, all seemingly thinking the same.

• Is there some grand thinking plan, a conspiracy to make sure that lack of creativity, & lack of thinking flare, prevail?
• Is being monotonous, saying what others expect you to say, adopting the views of politicians, and whole other “mental jail” symptoms, the only way to be?
• Does it make sense that the uniqueness of the person gets traded for acceptable generalism?
• What about the tendency to quote and align with the news, books, and unverified references without having researched the subjects, while identifying with views and concepts one knows very little about?
• Can we so easily give up the passion that belongs to the natural curiosity and the fire of discovery?

To understand what thinking outside the box means it’s important to know what that box looks like feels like, acts like.

You’ve got to know it, see it, accept it in order to escape it…if you want!

Clearly, this is a challenging issue for many of us, as we seem, unbeknownst to us, to fall into the traps that prevent us from thinking outside the box, which makes us feel not free, tied down and unable to change.

 

 

Personal Development Plan Template

Thinking outside the box is not a quick fix.

Unfortunately, thinking “in the box” has become a way of life for the majority of people.

Therefore, it’s not a short-term solution, it’s a long-term life strategy that requires Personal Development Plan Template, belief and repetitive attempts to switch on that creative switch inside the head that we all had when we were young.

What this is saying is that you don’t need to learn thinking outside the box, you have it naturally, it is a matter of taking a leap of faith and doing it.

The personal development plan template is about creating a discipline that will make you challenge old patterns, comfort zones, and mediocrity, regularly.

Mediocrity is a hiding place, a dark cave, where personal excellence and the light of the future cannot reach.

What Is The Box?

Firstly, it’s all in our head. We fashioned a box that looks like many other boxes, all coming from a “Mother box”.

The “Mother Box” is the thinking that everyone is the same, it’s much better to rely on books and what other people say than to learn to think for yourself, which is a synonymous term to thinking outside the box.

The term “conformity thinking” can also help to explain the nature of the box.

We think and exhibit the same attitudes in the way that everyone expects of us, or is typical to our age group, or gender, or life status, (because these can all be boxes of conformity & commonality).

To think in the box is to think in a way that the masses agree. A typical statement that you often hear when the box is “everyone knows that that’s how it is”.

Beware of such statements, they lock you up!

In my job as The Life Coach, I meet many professionals worldwide and have the opportunity to experience the way of thinking in different and various cultures.

Every culture has its boxed up way of thinking.

Here are some example, there are many more:

• The box of ego superiority(arrogance).
• The box of inferiority (“I am not good enough”)
• The box of “don’t rise too high or you get chopped down”.
• The box of class distinction
• The box of “don’t show too many emotions because that is a low class”
• The box of Democrats & the box of Republicans, if you are in the US
• The box of being a victim

These are boxes because they shape how people think!

How Does A Box Form Up?

If we thought something in the same way for a long time and haven’t challenged it, we start to believe that that’s how it is. It becomes second nature, automatic.

Let’s take a simple example, if you live in the U. S you are probably asked 20 times a day (at least), “How are you?” And you probably always say, “Fine, thank you, how are you?” (Even if you don’t feel well and you couldn’t care less how the other person feels).

“What’s the big deal?” you might ask.

Well, it’s not a big deal, but it’s a box of meaningless statements, where a “Small Deal” that goes unchallenged, after a while becomes a “Big Deal” of many meaningless statements that shape your mind.

It’s a box of having an automatic response, unconscious to the moment, a box of shallow exchanges, which is called being nice. What so nice about becoming meaningless?

Ok, still not a big deal – but what about the attitude that sneaks up on you and that is the attitude of not meaning what you say, which leads to not being true to yourself, and that further escalates to not standing behind what you say, to lack of self-respect, discounting yourself and others, talking behind other people’s backs and on and on, because these boxes are all related.

Realization

What you know got you so far.

It is what you don’t know that hides your next success, the next step you need to take.…and what you don’t know is for you Thinking Outside The Box.

This is where Einstein’s definition of insanity comes in “To do the same things and expect a different result is insane”.

Understand that if a person has not trained their mind to think creatively, to think differently, to listen…with respect, (listening politely is a box) to allow their mind to exploring new options, to release themselves from rigid past views, to not expect their experience of the past to solely determine their future…without training, it won’t be there.

Thinking Outside The Box…Where Change Begins

To change you need to learn to think differently. Thinking is the closest thing to us humans. It happens all the time in our head but mostly we don’t decide what goes on there.

Deciding to think deliberately is the most important thinking outside the box feature there is.

Automatic thinking is not thinking, it’s just electrical impressions (as science calls it) that we experience all the time. It is mostly linking.

Thinking is conscious, at the moment, deliberate where we use this tremendous gift we call thinking to figure out, analyze, add up, conjecture, reason or whatever to discover what’s next.

That’s where change begins and new ideas show up.

The 5 Steps To Thinking Outside Of The Box

#1 – It starts with acquiring new knowledge about everything, not discounting anything, even if it is not your forte. Develop a hunger and curiosity for new knowledge wherever you can find it. Read, research and, most importantly, become a good listener.

#2 – Learn to reason things out, thoroughly and not just reasons you are used to. Find the reasons for everything you want to do, and not just one, as many as you can find, “from the sublime to the ridiculous”

#3 – Developing consciousness about the long-term & short-term consequences of your decisions, in at least 3 levels in each.

#4 – Embrace the power of positivity as a way of life, while learning to see the good in everything. Become an agency of warmth and encouragement. The Thinking Outside The Box challenge is to make others better than you! (Negativism is a huge destructive box that is extremely crowded with millions of people who all think that They Are Right…and who see very little of the big picture…that’s one of the main reasons why there are so many conflicts in the world…)

#5 – Embrace The Power Of Now by developing “conscious uncertainty!” thinking outside the box is deliberately doubting what you think and thereby allowing other views to be considered (this bears a direct relation to leadership…It is a wise leader that surrounds themselves with people who can and will say no to him/her)

Finally

Thinking outside the box is an ongoing quest that requires courage and willingness to dare to be different, as an attitude, and to rediscover that special sense of being truly free inside, as a child is.

Getting out of mental prison has many untold advantages. There is a whole world waiting for you if you decide to make thinking outside the box a way of life.

The beautiful thing about it is that it’s exciting, natural and full of new opportunities that you don’t see at the moment.

If a person wants to change they first need to change the way they think about them, about other people, about life, about life issues and our fleeting existence on planet earth.

They need to put aside everything they think they know and take a breath of fresh air of thinking outside the box without restrictions, limitations or preconceived ideas of what they should or shouldn’t think.

Let me show you!

Eli Harari

The Life Coach for Professionals™