… and the force of distraction.
The tale
Once upon a time there was a brave knigth with one clear goal: He wanted to rescue his princess for she was imprisoned in a dark tower with huge stonewalls. He saw his only chance in climbing those walls. So he practiced klimbing: Every year, every day, ever minute of his time.
During his exercising he thought about practicing with his sword or just swimming like the other brave knights, but he did not allow himself to be unfocused. Although, with only focussing this one topic, he did not have any discussion with other kinghts about their topics, like lock picking. Then the day came when he felt ready for the rescue but when he arrived at the dark tower he found it surrounded by a moat. Without the ability to swim his journey ended at those muddy waters.
The idea
Sometimes our brains don’t work as we want them to: We try to focus on a topic but our brain starts beeing distratcted, chasing a new idea. The brain starts to be creative without permission!
It’s not just that our brain does not need our permission to do what it wants – it determines our whole life so it has its own permission. It’s the way our brain works, as it did for thousands of years and made us successfull, so we can’t just ignore or re-program it. Even better: We can use that!
Space for creativity
When we focus on one topic for a long period of time (“long” may vary from person to person) we get bored. Thats really important because it forces us to be constantly curious. We can, and sholud, not suppress that curiosity but we can use it.
For not beeing surprised by the unconcious we can conciously create space for creativity by taking a break.
For not staiing focused on our initital topic during the break we can conciously distract ourselves by changing the place, so that we see new things, hear new things, smell new things (when we take a walk outside or just visit the coffee machine).
And sometimes it’s just an unfocused look out of the window that fulfills our brains need for unfocused creativity to get back the focus on our topic.
Keep distractable!
Feedback
If you have any comments, ideas, suggestions or other feedback about this article, feel free to send me an email at Feedback[at]scrummastersmind.com.