The Rewards for Being Crazy

Be crazy …

Crazy world, crazy times. But there are rewards for being crazy. Too often the focus is on following a standard process but sometimes, to succeed, you have to take a leap.

Take Martin (not his real name) who is about to move down under with his girlfriend and begin life all over. He has been looking for ways to bolster his chances. He wants a good job and to make a success of the move. He’d followed all the usual routines – looking at job boards, getting his CV into shape and trying to find which boxes best ticked his personality and skills.

Enter some Right-Brain thinking:

For those not familiar with the concept, this is a way of getting in touch with the (large) portion of your brain that does not process using language. We are generally not aware of it. However it is the bit that sometimes pops ideas into our head in response to concerns we have been subconsciously processing. But how to make this happen on demand? And, for Martin, how to get an answer to a complex question of how to approach the pending move?

Crazy on the draw

Plain paper and pencil are all that are needed to get started.  Thinking hard about the problem and letting the hand doodle all the while. Just one simple rule: No words or pictures of everyday objects – the whole should be abstract. The richer the doodle the better it works.

Martin did just that and spun the result at his coach for enlightenment. He listened while the coach read back insights from the drawing (without knowing what the underlying problem was). And that’s the craziness. Because the feedback was putting into words what the drawing did not. Connect the feedback to the problem and ignore the actual picture and there is objective insight that was not based on a verbal description in the first instance. It uses a lot of metaphor but that’s no bad thing.

So what? Well it meant that Martin was able to understand better how to approach his move in ways that would never have surfaced otherwise. He revisited what he had already done in preparation and made some changes. He is better able to descibe what he wants and why. More to the point he also realised precisely where his strengths lie and can now pitch using those, rather than relying on a CV based on job skills alone. One very happy young man with a bright future ahead.

At Executive 20:20 Coaching we take craziness seriously. We’d be mad not to!

What about you?