In my one to one work with clients, I work with very intelligent people. People who are very good at thinking about things.
And if they were only good at thinking, they probably would not do much with their lives.
But the people I am talking about also do, not just think. In other words, they think well and they have a high capacity for implementation. They make the things in their heads happen in reality.
And even so, sometimes they get stuck. If you look at their lives, personal or professional, and put them on a graph, you will see a progress curve that starts low and, as time passes, goes further and further up. Until, at some point, it plateaus.
As if they have hit a glass ceiling they cannot rise above.
Why do these very smart, very capable people plateau?
My hypothesis, supported by thousands of hours of change strategy with people exactly like them, is that many plateau precisely because they are so good at thinking that they forget to live.
They spend so much time inside their heads that they have no time to actually be outside their heads. Which is to say, in the real world.
You feel trapped because you live inside your head.
That is exactly the problem with people who are too intelligent.
The temptation to solve everything using your mind is so strong that you stop even considering the option of not using it.
It is an old trick, and it has got worse over the last few decades. We were taught that the mind is a useful instrument. That it can help us do things, get things. So naturally we wanted to use it better and better. “If we know how to think, things will keep getting better, right?”
Except that little by little we became dependent on the only instrument we ever learned to use. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail.
The problem with the mind and with thinking is not that they are not incredible instruments. They are.
The problem is that we use them so much that we have come to believe they solve everything.
If you ask an analytical person, someone good at thinking, to draw the relationship between themselves and their mind, they will draw the mind somewhere at the top and themselves somewhere subordinate to it. As if the mind dictates what they should do.
Which, if you think about it for a second, is rather messed up.
I am not judging, just saying. If the mind is a tool, even the most powerful tool you have, should it not be subordinate to you? Rather than the other way round?
Does the hammer tell you which nails to hit? Or do you use it, when you feel like it, to solve some problems?
That raises two questions.
- What other tools do I have available, besides my mind?
- Where could you be in life if you had not one instrument but two or three, and could use each of them when needed?
A hint for the first one. Think of a moment in your past when you genuinely felt that you were ALIVE. A moment full of life. A moment when you would have wanted to stop time and live only in that present, because it felt that good.
I bet that in that moment you were not thinking about the past and you were not thinking about the future. You were in the present. Analysis and thinking had nothing to do with it.
You were simply living what was happening to you through your five senses. Not thinking, not planning the future, not analysing the past.
So I want to remind you that this ability to stop the overthinking and be present can be learned, and hypnosis is one of the faster routes to it. It is like installing a button you can press when your mind starts getting in your way.
So that you can be genuinely present for the people and the good moments in your life, without hundreds of thoughts running in the background.
In other words, so that you actually live, instead of permanently living locked inside your own mind.
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.