Cultivating the Ambidextrous Mind part Eleven: by Dr. Eric Zabiegalski

It’s a cold February morning on the Mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. While finishing my last article Complexity, Chaos, and Contentment, I had a watershed moment, perhaps a watershed week. In that short span of time I perfectly coalesced the thoughts of my previous article , I discovered a Seminole book written in 1975 which succinctly defined my views concerning the link between organizational complexity and quantum theory, and I escaped to a movie with my wife which quite unexpectedly illustrated my current writing so poignantly It caused me to laugh out loud in the theatre , shaking the feeling it was a personal message meant just for me. True to the definition, the turning-point events of that week created a mental dividing line, a watershed, which seemed to “synchronize” the events of my life.  

 “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant, we have created a society that has honored the servant but forgotten the gift” – Albert Einstein

            Cultivating the ambidextrous mind and giving allegiance to both the servant and the gift as Einstein said is not just a societal nicety, not doing so would be downright blasphemy. We are intuitively and rationally built to think equally in explorative and exploitive ways. The problem comes as we are encouraged and trained in our professional and social lives from an early age to only behave in one of these ways, woefully neglecting or even denying the other. This creates an imbalance which torments our organizations and personal lives needlessly. Late mindfulness guru and self-help author Wayne Dyer who said “when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change” learned to master this balance and navigate between these two realms effortlessly. Dyer also spoke about watershed events and synchronicity in his life in which he would be searching for a passage to cite for a forthcoming project when a book would fall from a shelf at his feet with the very idea he was searching for, someone would engage him in random conversation and it would answer the current question on his mind, or he would unexpectedly walk into an experience which would bring him the answer he was searching for. 

           In my humble opinion if were doing it right, moving through the world in the right way we will experience these synchronous moments in which things appear serendipitous and fall into place like tumblers aligning to open a lock, revealing a clearer picture. Call it flow, luck, or the perfect day, it occasionally happens to all of us, but what if it could happen much more than occasionally? As Dyer suggests, do we intentionally create this doorway and walk into synchronous flow or do we discover it and walk through? Either way, he seems to suggest the best way to meet change starts with you, from within. What is this right way to move through our personal and professional world and how can we organize the dual aspect of our mind to do so with efficiency, productivity, and contentment? That’s what these next articles will focus on. 

           Last month I discussed complexity, adaptation, getting comfortable with chaos, and focusing on one another with support and courage. In these next articles I will continue to use quantum mechanics as a template and shift the focus from the “outer” space of organizational activities to the “inner” space of the individual mind navigating the outer organization space. This article is, in part, the beginning of an argument in defense of the intuitive (explorative) mind as an active important co-author in the rational (exploitive) mind, an argument long made by many classical and contemporary scientists. It’s also an appeal to get your “mental house” in order, stave-off judgement, and to prepare you to think in new (more considerate) ways. You cannot truly master the rational side of your mind without also addressing the intuitive. I have a humble goal; by the end of these articles you will think ambidextrously, shift easily from exploitive to explorative mindsets, dwell in either place with concentration and comfort, and be in better command of your inner mind as you bring it to bare upon the outer world. As intuitive thinker Bob Proctor noted, “most of us have it dead wrong, we let the outside world control the inside when really it should be the other way around.”

 Structures in the mind

 When I was a kid my neighborhood park had a geodesic dome made of steel triangles. Like a giant skeletal igloo, it was the perfect structure for climbing, walking on, weaving in and out of and hanging from. Its frame bounded me within a defined space and at the same time gave me the freedom to experience, explore, and express myself, I spent many afternoons playing on it until it was time to come in for dinner. By contrast, mental and conceptual structures can be funny things, we rebel against them yet we need them, sometimes wanting them desperately in our lives. But too much structure and we fall into a pit of helplessness, hopelessness and paralysis, too little and our feedback loops become akin to stepping off the curb into city traffic. 

Why do we live in a world which either seems completely chaotic and out of control or increasingly imposes more structure and tighter constraint? And why do we routinely take steps to constrain achievement in ourselves and others, pulling others toward tightly structured means? The answer in part is because these are unconscious activities of the rational and intuitive mind. Our realities are driven by these and they’re hopelessly (and wonderfully) knotted together. The good news is we needn’t concern ourselves with trying to untie these knots or control them. Instead we need to know more about the various on-ramps, off-ramps and cloverleafs of thought they create, which direction they would take us, who we want in the driver’s seat of our mind at any given moment and what corresponding behavior is warranted. Once these considerations have been assessed we simply need to choose our next highway and take the exit. 

Up to now you may have considered things like synchronous events as random chance or simple tricks of the mind, pure subjectivity with no link to the real, and completely out of our control. But it would be more accurate to think of them as indicators of the rational and intuitive (exploitive and explorative) sides of the mind working in synch and this reality is created by you.

We could look at constructs like rational-exploitive and intuitive-explorative thought, human reality, and synchronous moments, in terms of quantum mechanics or some yet defined science. We could think of them as a simple function of hyper awareness or acute noticing, and if so, reference back to the argument it’s a simple trick, but my advice would be to think of them both ways. The point is there is something significant going on here and it does involve awareness, noticing, balance and a kind of “physics of the mind”, and, it is significant enough to warrant reflection as it is a part of our constructed reality; socially, professionally, and personally. Next month we will dive deeper down the rabbit hole and delve into the rational and intuitive exploitive and explorative parts of the mind and how they create and inform the world we ultimately create.   

Dr. Zabiegalski is available to talk to your organization or venue about this ground-breaking research or speak informatively and eloquently about organizational culture, leadership, strategy, learning, complexity, neuroscience in business, creativity, mindfulness, talent management, personal success, emotional intelligence, and Action Learning. Contact Eric Today.