Great Leaders Have Mental Clarity
Great leaders are people who naturally have mental clarity, and mental clarity comes from not having a lot on your mind. I have found the quickest way to not have mental clarity is to view your psychological life scientifically.
Psychology, according to New Oxford’s American Dictionary, is “the scientific study of the human mind.” But until relatively recently the field of psychology was missing scientific principles to explain psychological functioning. Consequently, psychology has been built on personal theories rather than on science.
The result is that in America and many other parts of the world, people try to understand their psychological functioning through their personal minds. It’s a closed system – analysis of our personal minds by our personal minds. This process doesn’t allow in anything new, anything that will create real change. It also results in an overactive mind, which obscures our mental clarity.
Understanding that psychology is a science relieves our minds of enormous amounts of excess thinking. It means that there’s only one place to look for the source of our feelings, and that’s our thinking in the moment. When you think that your feelings can come from someplace other than your thinking in the moment, you have a million possible places to look, and this leads to lots of excess thinking, which clouds our mental clarity.
Understanding the science of how your psychology works not only clears your mind; it calms you down, because you’re in touch with the truth of how your mind works. We have an innate sense of truth, and when we’re in touch with it we feel more secure in life.
When your mind is calm and clear you have mental clarity, and room for insights to arrive. Insights don’t come from our personal thinking; they come from a higher order of thought. They’re what allow you to really change, to drop mental habits that may have plagued you for years. And they bring leaders the kinds of breakthrough ideas we need to make a real and lasting impact on our world.
