Great ideas seldom come when you are forced to come up with them, instead they are more likely to arise when you clear your thoughts and allow your mind to wander…

I have come to realise that there are certain times of the day or activities that are conducive to allowing me to escape from the busyness of the moment and to enable better clarity of thinking, that’s when those light bulbs moments happen. This revelation has only become apparent to me in recent months, because prior to that I was just too “busy” to appreciate that my ‘best thinking’ was being suffocated by my to do list! It wasn’t until I jumped off the relentless hamster wheel (that is my last big corporate job), that I realised that moments of clarity happen far more regularly when you give yourself the time and space to think, but how is that possible when you lead such a busy life I hear you say?

I have managed to work out and pin-point when those ‘moments of clarity happen’ for me, may be you can too?

Here’s my top 3:

• The Shower Moment: not sure why, but I have recently come up with some damn good ideas when having my morning shower; maybe it’s because the act of washing yourself can be done so unconsciously that you can therefore use the fifteen minutes to let your mind wander.
• In the Running Zone: when you get past that first ten minutes of any run when all you can think about is the actual running and how hard it is, you generally move into the ‘this is ok’ state, once you get past that you can then start to enter the thinking phase, at this point you can allow your thoughts to go beyond thinking about the exercise your doing and put some thoughts into perspective.
• The Mundane Train: my train route cuts through the countryside so my phone signal is pretty poor, I am kind of pleased about that because rather than just spending my journey seeing who is doing what on Facebook, I allow myself thinking time, pondering over things and coming up with new ideas.

Once you’ve worked out what your ‘Clarity Moments’ are, try to ensure you are having them often enough, it might surprise you that by being more in control of your thinking, you are generally more in control of everything- in the driving seat rather than being taken for a ride that you just can’t seem to get off. And that’s when you are more likely to feel like you are making progress….

• In: Blog