What do you do with the thoughts running round in your head?
It’s a common theme in product thinking that we should expose our ideas early and often. The first principle of the Agile Manifesto is to “satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”. We’re getting at the same essential thought when we build a ‘Minimum Viable Product’ to test our idea.
In the same way, there is always a risk that your thoughts – worries, judgments, arguments – don’t match up to reality. We often protect the outer world from our inner dialogue, but in doing so we allow our own perception to harden.
Tentative assumptions become obvious truths. Our worries, far from simmering down, grow louder and ever more convincing. And, as we repeat arguments over and over in our heads, we lose grip of the possibility for other perspectives. We take shelter in our own imagined reality.
So try extending those principles of product thinking to your inner world: iterate on your perception, by exposing your thinking early and often.
We needn’t look for complicated, fancy frameworks to do this. The minimum viable reality check comes in two simple forms that you already know how to do. The first is writing it down. The second is saying it out loud. Writing and speaking helps you see the gaps and conflicts hidden in your thinking. It can also relieve the pressure cooker of feeling, giving you new perspective, and sometimes even closure.
Last year, I spent several months planning for a specific direction for my coaching business. But when I told my plans to close friends, I noticed that my words felt hollow and inauthentic. It wasn’t what I wanted. Speaking revealed my inner truth, and steered me towards a completely different path.
Exposing your thinking through writing or speaking is often uncomfortable. That, in fact, is precisely the point! Discomfort is a valuable signal: it highlights when there is something you’ve not yet fully reckoned with. To overcome that, you most likely need to expose your thinking more, not less.
What are the thoughts going round in your head this week?
What can you do to expose your thinking?
– Shaun
This article first appeared in my quarterly newsletter: Subscribe • Read past issues