One Tool You Should Be Using...Thinking Out of the Box

One tool you should be using is "Thinking out of the Box".

When people say to you, "Think out of the box", what do they mean? They mean think in a way that you wouldn't normally think. Now, we human beings are creatures of habits. We love our comfort zones. It very often takes a crisis to push us out to try something new.

I have always found reading books to be a good way of encouraging myself to think out the box. Some years back, I read the book, Creating You & Co. by William Bridges. At the time I was reading this book, I had been an employee for about twelve years. In all that time I assumed that my employer owed me the obligation of providing me with a secure job once I fulfilled my own part by being a good employee. Everyone I knew, who had a job was looking forward to working till they attained the retirement age.  In this book, I was confronted with realities of the changing world of work. The buzz word then was re-engineering of businesses which very often resulted in down-sizing of the workforce. Bridges helped me to begin to think about my work in a different way. I began to think of myself as the CEO of Me and Co. and realised that I needed to take responsibility for the path that my career would take from then.

Roy H. Williams, the New York Times best-selling author of teh The Wizards of Ads Trilogy of books, published an article "Your Seat in the Stadium of Life". In this article, he said, 

"Your box is your perspective, your worldview, your schema - the sum of your life's experiences - your own personal set of assumptions. Like a seat in a stadium, your "box" determines the angle from which you view every game.

What people call "thinking outside the box" can be accomplished only by getting out of your seat and walking to an unfamiliar part of the stadium to borrow the seat of someone else.

Now you're seeing things from their view. You're still in a "box", but it's not your own. You've borrowed a new perspective so that you're seeing your problem through the eyes of another - according to their values and assumptions." Read more here...

A book that you choose to read, very often enables you to borrow someone else's seat in an unfamiliar part of the stadium of life and see life through their eyes. In the book, you have the opportunity of seeing how things will turn out if you choose paths of action that are different from what you are familiar with. The beautiful thing is that you see all this without having taken any step forward in any direction.

Since reading "You & Co.", I have read other books which have firther solidified my perception that my career in my business.

And now it's your turn. Which books have helped you to begin thinking out of the box?