Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind

by Nancy Kline

no one even has time to think about what they are doing – they are too busy doing it. Urgency keeps people from thinking clearly.

Ease is a deceptively gentle catalyst. Ease creates. Urgency destroys.

if thinking clearly is the thing on which everything else depends, it is dangerous to keep doing the things that stop it.

Competition stifles encouragement and limits thinking. To be ‘better than’ is not necessarily to be good.

Competition between people ensures only one thing: that if you win, you will have done a better job at whatever it is than the other person did. That does not mean that you will have done a good job, just a better one. To compete does not ensure certain excellence. It just ensures comparative success. And the problem with that is that it distracts us from examining what good might actually be.

Until we can let go of having to compete, it will be nearly impossible to ask the question, ‘What would good be?’

When people are not competing with each other to be best, it is possible to think all the way to something good.

When people are trying to think for themselves, they just occasionally might cry or get angry or say they are frightened. Do not stop them. Be with them. Pay respectful attention to them.

Supply information only when you are sure that it will make a decisive difference in the direction, content or progress of the person’s thinking.

Thinking Environments are places that simply say back to the people, ‘You matter.’

Sexism, like regionalism, homophobia, racism, classism – every bedrock assumption and norm of superiority – stops people from thinking for themselves.

This training of men to be real men by denouncing much good human behaviour is based on the assumption that these human characteristics are somehow female.

What society needs is the whole human being, where gender matters only if you are trying to put together a baby and is irrelevant if you are trying to put together an effective organization.

we might benefit from official areas in our work places designated exclusively for quiet time alone to think – sanctuaries for the human mind.

Solitude is a human requirement.

It is the best Thinking Environment because it does not re-enforce the limiting assumptions that make us think we cannot think.

At the beginning: 1 Give everyone a turn to speak. 2 Ask everyone to say what is going well in their work, or in the group’s work.

Give attention without interruption during open and even fiery discussion.

When they anticipate interruption, on the other hand, they grasp for edges of ideas, they rush; and they elaborate. Interruption takes up more time than allowing people to sweep cleanly through to the end of an idea.

giving everyone time saves time.

Next time someone suggests you brainstorm something, suggest that everyone get a turn in sequence first to put forward an idea. Then open it to random contributions, but do not allow interruption.

They shine in the light of your attention for them. It is from that that they can see their own brilliance. They shine when you remind them that they matter.

In managing change, you have to listen better than ever. You have to understand that change means loss and loss requires grieving.

Part 1: Saying Everything

Part 2: Recognizing What You Want to Achieve from the Rest of the Session

Part 3: Finding the Limiting Assumption ‘What might you be assuming that is stopping you from figuring out a way to live differently?’

Part 4: Asking the Incisive Question

‘If you knew that you are the only one who does have control over your life, what would you do to live differently?’

Part 5: Writing It Down

Part 6: Appreciating Each Other

The real point of a Thinking Session is Part 1: to help people think for themselves without obstruction.

Part 1 is the open, free-flying time for the Thinker to explore a topic of their choice. Because they are not interrupted or steered by the Thinking Partner, they nearly always have new insights, they find answers to questions, they see order in disorder, they have brand-new ideas they did not suspect were in them and they face things they had not dared face.

What Does the Thinking Partner Do? Uninvaded time is what people need first in order to think for themselves. They need a turn of their own.

The first thing to do is not to assume that they are finished. It is very likely that they are just detained for the moment by a limiting assumption.

‘Is there anything more you think or feel or want to say?’

The Incisive Question does one thing and does it expertly. It removes the barrier that is stopping the person from thinking further. ‘If you knew …’ questions are the most common.

To construct an Incisive Question: 1 Hypothesize (‘If you knew ….’). 2 Follow with a freeing true assumption (‘… that you are blindingly stunning …’). 3 Attach that new assumption to the goal (‘… how would you feel around Sam?’).

If you knew + freeing assumption + goal = Incisive Question.

Ask your students what they think five times more often than you tell them what you think. Find the student interesting even if you are bored to death with their ideas. Do not interrupt them.

Begin the first class of the morning with a quick round of positive comments of some sort from everyone. Questions like: ‘What is going well for you?’

‘Criticize in a positive context. Do it in a Thinking Environment.’

ask about each other’s day and listen all the way through without giving advice or making comments. You will pay attention, eyes on the one speaking, until they have said everything. You might find a natural way to ask if there is more too.

‘The best thing you can do for your children is to listen to them.’

What people – of any age – learn from violence, including verbal violence, is to dominate in order to win, not to listen, not to think, not to negotiate or come to agreement with people. Physical punishment strips the components of listening, dignity, ease, equality, Incisive Questions and expression of feelings out of the environment and injects into it fear, shame, inferiority, urgency, interruption, denigration and misinformation.

Worry is almost always the product of an assumption, a parasite in our mind. If you ask yourself, ‘What am I assuming right now that is causing me to worry?’