My son Michael is in town for a visit, so gaming’s back in the conversation. When he’s riding the train in New York, he occasionally plays a game called Jewels. It starts with a screen full of colored shapes, like the one at left. When you match 3 or more, they disappear and new shapes drop down on the screen. He was consistently scoring 3000 to 4000 per game, and wanted to get better. Practice is the usual road to mastery, but Michael tried something else, with remarkable results.
He started paying attention to what his brain was doing. He realized he was looking for a specific match, like yellow. And the more he looked for yellow, the more stressed he’d get trying to match yellow shapes. It was taking him away from doing well. He also was aware that as the game clock ticked down, it added even more pressure.
To counter the stress, he decided to practice releasing control and just letting his mind go blank. “As soon as I realize I might be getting the highest score ever,” he said, “I freeze up and start worrying about getting that high score.”
When he was concentrating and trying to get better, his score consistently averaged 3-4000 score. When he let go, his scores leaped to 49,000, 56,000, 58,000!
“My brain sees way more than my eyes,” he said, “so I trained myself to stop thinking about what I should be doing and focus instead on what was there. I’m looking for yellow, and there’s a bunch of blue and pink staring me in the face.”
Michael knows that when we’re trying to master anything, our brain focuses on certain details and tunes out everything else. “Relentless practice makes you better over time,” he said, “but you get even better, faster when you learn how to shift contexts and see the bigger picture.” This is systems thinking, and it applies to any complex activity we’re trying to master, be it a game or an organizational transformation. When we can shift from discrete details to the grand scheme, we see things we didn’t notice before. New patterns appear. New possibilities come into view.
The irony here is that the harder we try to “win,” the more tense we become and the more it inhibits our power. To reconnect with that power, we have to let go of the need to win [or to do something perfectly or “right”] and start observing what’s actually unfolding. Take a few steps back. Soak in a bigger picture. Sometimes a different set of questions helps: How would someone else see this? What am I assuming? What am I NOT seeing? Sometimes it’s better to get out of your head completely. Take a few deep belly breaths, relax into the world beneath your chin, and see what bubbles up.