A friend asked me over coffee, “How do you help people see their broken thinking? You can’t see thinking.”
The question stayed with me for a while, and came up again as I was reading yet another book on decision-making.
How do you see your own mind? How do you spot the cognitive blind spots that quietly keep you looping the same habits and wondering why unwanted things keep reappearing in our life?
With clients, it's easier, you are not in their head, you see where their thinking works against their goals.
But what about your own head?
There’s a simple tool that shows up again and again in research, in leadership, and in good coaching: self-distancing.
It sounds almost too simple. But it works across domains - emotions, strategy, decision-making, personal growth.
In Dealing with Feeling, Marc Brackett shares, based on his deep research, that one of the most effective ways to navigate emotionally charged situations is to ask,
“What would I advise a friend if they were in my exact spot?”
The moment you step out of the emotional swirl, you rise above your own head, your thinking sharpens and clears.
Jim Collins found the same pattern in Great by Choice. Some of the most resilient CEOs in companies that stood the test of time routinely ask,
“If someone new stepped into my role today, what would they do to grow this business?”
Fresh eyes reveal what familiarity hides.
And Annie Duke, in How to Decide, develops it further: before writing your own inside view of a decision, you write an Outside View, a more distant, factual list of base rates, constraints, and environmental factors, taken from the perspective of someone else. And then you marry the two. That’s how you escape the gravity of your own biases.
So today I decided to put this to test.
I asked myself: If a highly competent friend suddenly took over my business for a week, what would they do that I’m not doing?
The answer was pretty clear: my weak spot isn’t ideas or skill. It’s the network. And in my field, trust is built through personal referral. Referrals come from relationships.
Relationships come from proven value.
And so the obvious strategy emerged, one that felt uncomfortable but right: give away some of my work to the right people for free. Not randomly. Intentionally. To the people who can actually see the value, use it, and refer the right others.
Painful to the ego. Wise for the business. And, aligned with what Alex Hormozi keeps preaching as one of the best ways to attract business - reciprocity, give away great stuff for free to the right people.
The bigger lesson:
Our thinking is biased. All of it. Even when we think it’s not. We will never be perfectly objective, but we can become better decision-makers with the right practices. Like self-distancing that has been proven to work across all domains.
Over to you dear reader,
Where would stepping outside your own head, just for a moment, help you see the move that’s been obvious all along?
