If only you knew what you knew...

I think it was an ex-CEO who recently bemoaned, "If only we knew what we knew..."

He was talking about his sprawling, multinational organization with tens of thousands of people, thousands of projects ... and hundreds of wheels being reinvented on a daily basis.

But the lament rings just as true for you and me as it does for a big company. If only you (yes, you) and I (yes, me), when faced with one of our daily challenges, stopped for a moment to remember what we already know.

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First-idea-itis
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When does this amnesia show up? Pretty much each and every time we need to decide to do something, it happens.

We get infected by first-idea-itis
Here are the symptoms:
When a challenge comes up we immediately think of one, just one response and we run with it so long as...

-it's possible
-it's familiar
-it's not too challenging

So your idea is not awful. But it doesn't come close to tapping into what you know and what you are capable of doing.

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The pause button
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Luckily it doesn't take too much to hit the pause button and give yourself just a little more time and space to remember what you already know.

The shamanic saying is, "The wisdom enters through the wound," and we've all collected our share of scars along the way to ensure we have a healthy quotient of wisdom.

Slow down, hit the pause button and ask yourself a couple of questions to generate new possibilities and remember what you already know.

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Do these questions help?
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Next time you are facing a challenge, don't fall for the first idea-itis.
Give yourself a little time and space, and see what new possibilities get created with these five questions:

1. What do you need to remember about yourself? What do you know? What have you learned? At your best, what are you capable of doing?

2. What do you know to be true about this situation? About situations like this? About you in this situation?

3. What's the wise thing to do?

4. What does your intuition tell you to do?

5. If you remembered yourself at your most generous, most confident, most bold - what might you do?

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Michael Bungay Stanier is a professional keynote speaker, the author of the best selling coaching tool, Get Unstuck & Get Going ...on the stuff that matters and the creator of Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun and The 5.75 Questions You've Been Avoiding. A certified coach and Rhodes Scholar, he works with teams and organizations to help them do less Good Work and more Great Work.