Exploratory Writing: Everyday magic for life and work

When Professor Steve Peters, author of The Chimp Paradox, was working with the GB Olympic cycling team he had a rule: athletes could come and complain to him, but if they did, they had to complain for 15 minutes without stopping.

If you and I were sitting together and able to do this exercise in person – wouldn’t that be great? – I’d simply ask you to take a walk outside and bring me back three things. They could literally be three things you bring back into the room with you or they might just be something you see that you come back to tell me about. So you might bring me

Give it a go. Come up with a provocation for your own situation – or use one of those above if it feels useful. Set your timer for six minutes and come up with as many questions related to that provocation as you possibly can. Your questions might range from the profoundly philosophical (‘What does success mean, anyway?’) to the down-and-dirty tact

A famous 2011 study by Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky showed how metaphors can constrain people’s thinking about a problem without them realizing it.1 They ran an experiment in which they talked about urban crime using one of two framing metaphors in each of the research subject groups: to one group they described crime as a disease infecting t

Focusing on questions rather than answers is surprisingly freeing: when you’re ONLY allowed to come up with questions for which there is no obligation to suggest answers, the process feels playful and unpressured. As Gregerson puts it: ‘Brainstorming for questions rather than answers makes it easier to push past cognitive biases and venture into un

Reframing is a fundamental technique in modern CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) but its roots are older: as Marcus Aurelius put it, ‘Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears’.5

This is the foundation of learning: the willingness to entertain the possibility that you might be wrong, that there might be a better way to do things. Paradoxically it’s a sign of inner confidence: it’s the most insecure people who resist the idea of being wrong most strenuously. Being comfortable with being wrong is at the root of what psycholog

Draw the spine of a fish as above, but rather than making its head a problem that needs understanding and fixing, instead try putting a desired outcome there and then work backwards to see what might contribute to it. Imagine for example that in the diagram above, the text above the head of the fish had read: ‘timely delivery of project’. Then set

Agency = capacity for making things happen, for impacting the world. Intention = deliberately choosing what, out of the million different things you COULD make happen today, or in your lifetime, you are going to attempt. Attention = focusing your mind and energy on your chosen priority in a consistent and persistent way in order to make those inten

Think about something you need to produce that you’d usually look up online: a presentation, a report, a job description, a meal plan. Instead of reaching for the search box, pause a second. Grab a notepad and pen instead, and spend six minutes or so freewriting about what it is you want to achieve. Who is this for and what do they need? What’s the