Sometimes, when your thoughts get way too complicated, you yearn for only the important stuff. And one simple way to identify and remember what’s important is with a
HIGHLIGHTER
You tech-savvy computer users out there might be more familiar with the highlighting button than our good old-fashioned marker friends, but the idea is the same. You’re confronted with a huge (or maybe just tedious) body of text. There’s a lot of info there; you start to feel overwhelmed and your palms start to sweat. So you reach for that little [insert favorite color—mine’s orange] highlighter and suddenly you feel empowered. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the highlighter is mightier than the pen. Your eyes start scanning, and you lash out with your strokes of color and rapidly make sense of your document.
Highlighters are great because they have a clear function: to simplify. Whether you are identifying only important things, or things to change, or things that don’t make sense, you are narrowing a LOT of information down to a more manageable amount. And unlike summarizing, where you cut out all but the most important information, all the other information is still there! You can access it immediately, but your eye and the eyes of future readers are drawn to the colorful highlights.
This isn’t meant to send you rushing excitedly to the nearest office superstore in search of a stock of highlighters (although you are more than welcome to go once you’re done reading). Highlighters, like many seemingly mundane items in our lives, have a lesson to teach us.
How often do your thoughts feel like a 120-page document filled with 8-pt text and no pictures? Probably more often than you’d like, between work, family, friends, goals, fun, bills…. there’s a lot going on! People tell you to organize your thoughts: use lists, charts, calendars, reminders, etc. YES, By all means do that! It’s vitally important to your busy life if you want to keep everything from crashing down around your ears.
But sometimes you’ve got a decision to make, and WAAAY too much information with which to make it. You can organize and summarize everything you know: long lists of pros and cons, dos and don’ts, he said, she said, etc. But those lists can severely limit the information you’re working with, and not necessarily in a good way. A lot of times what you really need is to highlight aspects of the information in the context of everything else. How? Conversation.
THE TAKE-AWAY
It occurred to me recently why talking something out with someone is so powerful in making decisions and honing goals. When you have something weighing on your mind, say a big career move or a relationship issue, there are thousands of thoughts flitting around. Things people said, previous conversations, something you read, past experience, emotional responses: all of these are fighting for your attention. It would probably take you a year to write it all out and organize it in a way that encompasses everything. But why would you? You already have everything in one place: your mind. And your mind is working feverishly trying to organize it for you. At that point, you can think and think and think and wait until your mind comes to a conclusion. But ask yourself, do you really need ALL the available information at once, equally, to make a decision? Chances are, you can get away with just highlighting the important points, but allowing your mind to take them in the context of everything around them.
When we talk to someone, especially when we explain a dilemma, we can really only give them a very finite amount of information. Even if you’re the type of person who spills everything and tends to drone, there are only so many hours in the day. So if you are contemplating a major decision and you want someone’s advice, you aren’t going to burden them with every single point about that decision. You can only give them the most important information, and you have to give the information in a way that they can understand and respond to. And you really only have a split second to do this. After all, you can come to a conversation with a list of things you want to cover, but conversations are impossible to completely plan out. Based on the other person’s response, you have to decide what to dole out next.
If done mindfully, this process of explaining a complex situation to another person serves the same purpose as highlighting a document. It accentuates and clarifies the key information you want to convey. And in the course of the conversation, you can draw from the surrounding “documenting” thoughts to back it up or provide more information. This is useful to whoever you’re talking to, but it’s invaluable to you. Why? Because when you go back and review that conversation in your mind, you have certain thoughts that you know you emphasized. And you also have notes or additional “highlights” that the other person may have provided.
Conversing mindfully and decisively about a complex problem or decision can help highlight what is most important to you while allowing you to solicit insight about key thoughts or points.
With enough of these conversations, you have yourself a mental “document” which you can scan through quickly and decisively to gain the most relevant information. You can cut the worrying and stop mulling over things in circles because everything you need to know stands out. With that kind of clarity, it will be much easier to make a decision.
WHAT’S IT TO YOU?
Think of a major issue or pending decision in your life. Do you feel like you’re spinning your wheels and going over the same points with yourself again and again? Try talking it out and see what comes to mind when you try to explain the problem to someone else. If you feel like you’ve tried this and it hasn’t worked, try talking to someone else (maybe someone farther removed from the issue, an objective third party). Or, try talking to the same people again but be mindful of the points you are bringing up, the lines of conversation that seem to come up most, or the aspects that you are most passionate or clear about. You might find that the answer has been written there all along, it just needed to stand out a little more. Happy highlighting!
wittytruth 