YouTube: Trusting the Thinker's Intelligence

Trusting the intelligence of the thinker is one of many favourite ideas that emerges in the theory and practice of generating a Thinking Environment for someone. In this video I explore the already-always deeply embedded habit of listening to correct that most of us have grown up with and learned by being at the receiving end of it. "Critical thinking" is often equated with thinking that finds the flaws or missing elements in someone else's ideas. At school our responses were frequently countered by correction. What we offered may have been acknowledged (if we were lucky) and nearly always followed with a "but........" that pointed out what we hadn't said or included in the thinking we gave to questions.

The practice of offering Generative Attention, as I have talked about in several of my videos, involves suspending some of the habitual needs we have ended up developing in the way we listen to others. The need to understand (and therefore to interfere with the thinker's flow with our need for clarifying questions). The need to correct. The need to add to what the thinker is saying and where they are going (which is perceived as already known by us). Surrendering these needs in favour of the assumption that the mind of the thinker, at work as I listen, has its own innate intelligence and ability to navigate its way towards the ideas, possible solutions, outcomes and sought-after clarity - means that I experience, time and again, the delight of the thinker arriving at perfectly "just-so" tailored ideas and solutions that, in all honesty, I could never have generated for the thinker myself.

The discipline of staying interested in where the thinker is going in their own thinking, by continuously moving beyond our habit of knowing on their behalf where we think they ought to be going, is empowered by this choice to trust their intelligence. The results, both for the thinker, and for us as listeners are always beyond worthwhile: they are beyond what we can anticipate, they are irreplaceable

Watch the full Youtube video below!