Oh, to turn off your mind

A good trick is to think about what you are doing instead of the (negative) outcome.

If you run, thinking about your movements and where you're at in the sprint is good, thinking about what if you stumble, what if a fan throw a bottle at you, what if the guy behind me speed up, what if I lose and did everything for nothing...in this case, you've stopped to think about running, you're not focused, and so you're not doing a good run.

> No rethinking of the How and the Whether and the Are you sure? No second guessing. They decided to do it, so they’ll do it.

This first one is doubt. Realize that doing it is actually a fast way of casting out doubt--to yourself and to others when you show it. Answer by doing.

None of these other questions amount to anything. Maybe fueled by ego, social-media-self-consciousness, idk. Premature optimization is bad, and so is premature judgement of something you're still in the process of doing.

> Oh, this won’t be as quick as I thought it would be, should I really do this?

> If I do this, will I end up only ever doing things like this?

> What if it takes longer?

> Is this even fixable? What if this bug is just a symptom of a much larger issue, one that I’ll never be able to fix?

> Isn’t what I’m doing considered boring? Not cool? Huh.

> Do others think I’m doing a good job? Will they think I did a good job? Do they think they could do it better?

I get the feeling that people who have automatic thoughts in this theme are the same ones that will prolong a meeting hypothesizing and debating some technical aspect in a group for 10 minutes when one person could have actually gone to the system, entered some commands and found out in 5 minutes saving 10 min * (N-1) people's time. I can't stand discussing something that can be determined in fewer person-hours: assign and follow-up.

A different way I see this play out is when someone lists all the potential problems with a proposed solution, sometimes in great detail. I love it when this happens because I'll write it down as a roadmap/todo list. It's about having a 'growth mindset'--yes there will be obstacles, but I'll get past them because I (almost) always do.

Not "turn off you mind" but "ignore your doubts"