Hi guys and welcome back to Brain-Friendly Thinking.
This video is about how you can take the ideas from your mind and put them into words, so
that you can continue to work with them.
It’s a crucial topic that not a lot of people address.
Having ideas itself is not enough.
You need to implement them in order for them to be valuable.
And that means you need to get them out of your head.
And for that you very often need to be able to communicate your ideas to other people.
Be it to ask for funding, to collaborate together or simply to work out a plan of action.
If you’re anything like me you will know the feeling, an idea makes perfect sense in
your mind, but the moment you want to put it into words nothing.
It is as if you’re trying to catch smoke with your hands.
Everything that comes out is a garbled mess that manages to miss all the important points
of what you want to say.
In the worst case your idea starts to fade like a dream 10 minutes after you wake up.
Even some of the greatest minds, like Einstein, after he had the idea that later let to his
special theory of relativity it took him two years to put the idea onto paper in such a
form that somebody else could understand it.
But it’s strange, even though it’s very common not a lot of people talk about this.
And I think the reason for this is, it’s very difficult to talk about this and it is
not very glamorous.
Coming up with ideas, yes, that’s glamorous.
And also giving the final touch to your draft, that is very easy.
But this period, this phase, where it feels like you’re wrangling with your ideas, where
you’re trying to tie it down.
This is actually a very crucial phase.
The thing is we don’t always realise that we’re going through that phase, because
for some ideas we can go straight from the idea to a very detailed draft.
These are usually ideas that are very close to ideas that we had in the past, so they’re
not very creative.
The more novel, the more creative ideas we want to have, the more often we will find
ourselves in this position.
So we should find a way to make it more successful.
Now I watched many videos on creativity and I read many books, most of them completely
ignore this phase, as I said, but there are some which sort of indirectly address the
problem.
And I collected a couple of tools from these sources, which I’ve been trying out for
the last couple of months.
What I’d like to share with you today is the tools which I’ve learned and that worked
for me.
So hopefully, they also work for you to make this process easier.
The first technique is journaling.
Journaling is used by many people as a tool for introspection and reflection, because
it is great to observe your thoughts.
And it is exactly this ability to observe your thoughts that we’re after.
So what we do in our case is we write our idea on top or a keyword related to our idea.
And then we set a timer for 5, 10, 20 minutes, for however long you like.
During this time, you either write or speak.
And you gonna write or speak whatever comes to your mind.
No censoring.
Every uh, um, I don’t know, and long-winded explanation.
Once you got that out of your mind, then you go back and read or listen to what you wrote
or said to understand what you’re thinking and you collect the nuggets of your thought.
And you can start to string them together to form the backbone of how you can express
your idea.
The next technique is called guided questions.
It’s a technique that is very close to journaling.
Again you write down or you speak out whatever comes to your mind without censoring.
But rather than just having the topic and then being able to go completely random, this
time you ask yourself questions.
Imagine you were to explain your idea to a friend.
And the friend asks clarifying and probing questions.
Except there is no friend, you’re asking the questions yourself.
So start with your idea or keyword again, set the timer and then start with the question
“What is the idea about?”
Answer that question.
With I-don’t-knows and ahms and all that belongs to that.
Look back at the answer and find another point which is not clear.
Then ask a question about that point.
And answer the question and so on and so forth until the time is up.
The next technique uses lists to clarify your ideas.
Sometimes it’s easier to come up with individual words rather than express your idea in
a complete sentence or in a complete text.
So for this exercise we start again with our idea or keyword on top, but then we create
an ABC-list.
Once you created the ABC-list, you go through all of the words you came up with and you
sort them.
Some of them are not very relevant, the other ones you sort them into logical categories
and then put these categories or the words into a logical sequence.
Afterwards you take the sequence as a guide to write or speak about your idea.
Each word serves as a stepping stone.
The fourth technique is brain dump.
Now brain dump means a lot of things to a lot of people, here is what it means to me.
Sometimes certain parts of your idea are already clear in your mind.
But you cannot put everything together.
That’s when you need a brain dump.
You start with your idea or keyword on top again as always, set your timer and then you
gonna list all the tasks, subs-ideas, questions, open points and so on, that you can think
of, underneath.
Afterwards you go back, you classify them and you either use them to talk about your
ideas, like before, or as a method to investigate your idea further before continuing to write
or to talk about it.
While all of the previous ideas you can do by yourself, for the last one, discussion
with a friend, you need somebody else.
In this case you gonna tell your idea to another person.
It’s a little bit like the guided questions, except that the guided questions come from
another person.
And that other person not only provides you with questions you might not have thought
about, but also with their own association, ideas or examples.
So that forces you to put your ideas into words, but you also immediately get feedback
from another person.
What is crucial about this technique is that you do it with somebody who is able to ask
you questions and give you feedback and not shoot down your idea at a stage when absolutely
no criticism is allowed yet.
So these are five techniques I’ve been trying over the past couple of months with very good
results.
If you try them, note that they’re note a checklist.
You don’t need to go through all of them.
What you’re really doing is you’re developing the ideas as you use the tools.
And it’s not so much that you’re just able to tie down the idea in the end,
the idea will have been transformed, to a certain extent.
And this is the light in which you should use and in which you should view those tools.
But if you do this you will find things are getting easier.
If you got problems of coming up with ideas in the first place, I made a complete video
about tools to create ideas and you can watch it right here.
Otherwise, if you got any topic you would like me to speak about, make sure to leave
it in the comment.
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And until next time: keep thinking.