Free Your Mind, Huh?

January 8, 2016

It's such a clichéd statement, and when I hear people say "free your mind," I take it with a grain of salt. Most of the time, when people make that comment to you, they are trying to convince you to think in a particular direction. I once took a class called "Brainstorming" while I worked in the corporate world. In the '80s and '90s, taking extracurricular courses like this was encouraged, and budgets allowed employees to receive training. This was one of the few workshops I ever took at any level of schooling that I found helpful in the real world.

Brainstorming is the primary task of recording as many ideas as possible for a solution to a problem. The trick is getting past the low-hanging fruit of solutions and generating a whole tree of ideas. The way to gather a slew of possibilities is to create a group of unfiltered, unbiased, random associations along with words, phrases, thoughts, and similar answers and mind dump it. After you exhaust that exercise, you begin putting together ideas generated from the extensive list. When you start pulling items from the master list, that might create more food for thought. Sometimes you get to a place you had no idea would happen, and the most critical and cynical minds can be part of the process. I still use these techniques twenty years later and still own the course literature.

When it comes to sports, the teams that have the most considerable amount of success are the ones who try to break conventional thinking or do things others are not. They look for even the subtlest strategies which look different and give them the slightest advantages. The coaches and players who can think outside of the traditional box of ideas can often find success. For instance, there was a time in the NFL when the "Read Option" was the biggest headache for a defense to figure out. The Read Option is an offensive formation where the quarterback would hold the ball just long enough to either run, pass, or handoff based upon the defense's positioning. It took almost a whole football season before defensive strategies were invented to combat this alignment. This is only one example of the many ideas that come and go in sports strategy.

Thinking outside the box and using unconventional methods will bring plenty of judgment and sometimes make you second guess yourself. The absolute truth is a part of the criticism that is warranted and valuable, but nothing ever evolves without free-thinking and innovation. When your mind gets stuck in the rut of routine and boredom, perform a brainstorm. Look it up on the internet or take a class and learn how to generate new ideas and solutions. The path to solutions is a lot easier when you are choosing from a multitude of possibilities. As the R&B band En Vogue sang, "free your mind, and the rest will follow."