No Thought Will Help You - For Change Leaders Too

An Ode to the Non-Thinking

We all have an escape hatch. When things get overwhelming, stressful, or frightening, we reach for it almost reflexively. For many of us—especially those of us who pride ourselves on being thoughtful, analytical, smart people—that escape hatch is thinking.

It can feel like freedom. The dependable source that just keeps on giving. But you might also agree it has the ability to drive you up the wall—a wall made of the same endless thinking.

What I learned, sparked by a single lightning-bolt moment and deepened through years of practice, is how much by escaping into thought, we ironically miss out on the "solutions" we are craving.

And in these times—when uncertainty seems to be our constant companion, not just regular uncertainty, but that existential dread, the feeling of being completely out of control—it becomes more urgent than ever to connect to what is actually certain. What is actually here.

If there was ever a time to question the benefits of escaping into thinking, it's now.

The Lightning Flash

Many years ago, I was going through something difficult. There was so much self-torture happening, and I was completely stuck. My mind was churning—replaying, analysing, strategising, catastrophising around a personal relationship—doing everything it could to think its way out of pain. Then my partner at the time, someone with profound wisdom, stopped me dead in my tracks. He said:

"No thought will help you."

It was like being caught in a dark storm when suddenly there's a lightning flash. The sky cracks open and all you can see is blue. That moment pierced through the illusion that thinking would solve my problems. I just knew—before the next thought was able to form—that it was true.

That that thinking, was indeed not helping. There fell my fort.

Two Minds, One Life

To simplify, there's a difference between what you might call the functional mind and the thinking mind.

The functional mind serves our daily actions—decisions around food, shelter, safety, logistics, planning. It's practical. It gets things done. The thinking mind analyses. It’s also the one that loops. Replays conversations. Builds elaborate scenarios of what might go wrong or what should have gone differently.

Both are evolutionary products of our need to survive, but we've gone terribly overboard with the thinking mind. Some of us escape more into emotions ("I feel, therefore I am"), while others dive deeper into thoughts ("I think, therefore I am"). But modern life has made nearly all of us dependent on analysis and rational thinking to the point where when we're stuck, our only strategy is to try to solve it with more thoughts.

And that's precisely where we get trapped.

How to Catch Yourself

This isn't an exact science. It's something to notice and experiment with in yourself. But here's what I'd invite you to try.

Next time things get difficult—you've had a tough conversation at work, you've been doomscrolling like there's no tomorrow, or you're trying to figure out the next step in your purpose-driven career and feeling stuck—just pause.

There's nothing wrong with reflecting. (Impact Sweet Spot is all about reflection!). But notice the moment when reflecting tips over into something else. When the thinking is no longer leading anywhere. When it starts to want to solve, pulling you further from resolution rather than closer to it.

(And for us raucous ruminators: know that in the moment, it might actually feel deliciously comfortable. And yet it will not help you.)

You're not actually problem-solving anymore. You're avoiding the feeling underneath. The grief of letting go of something. The fear of not knowing what comes next.

You want to move forward, but you're not ready, and instead of sitting with that, you think… and think… and think.

You can notice where your energy is. Is most of it up in your head? And maybe all you feel in your body is a knot—in your stomach, your chest, your throat?

That knot is where your attention actually needs to go.

The knot will not be solved by more thinking. It will be met by your attention. Your willingness to be with it and discover what is underneath or inside of it. That's an embodied process—perhaps supported by some reflection and questioning, sure—but not the kind of looping analysis most of us default to.

Trusting Emergence

This is where it gets both simple and radical. Trusting what's here means trusting that whatever comes next will be something you can respond to—because you are naturally built to do so. I talked about this with a client recently, their natural talent for trusting in emergence got rediscovered.

And emergence is only here. It's not somewhere in the future. You can't trust emergence tomorrow.

There is only here.

If that feels terrifying and freeing at once—that's probably a sign you've got it. If it feels purely terrifying, that's also a sign. If it feels purely freeing, same. And if you're thinking "what on earth is she on about?" (but you're kind of intrigued), you know where to find me.

Why This Matters for Change Leaders

If you work in the space of societal change—whether you lead transformation in organisations, work in social impact, advocacy, policy, or simply care deeply about making the world better—this is especially relevant. And here's why.

The challenges facing change leaders today are not primarily intellectual puzzles. They are complex, adaptive, and deeply human. The climate crisis, systemic inequality, polarisation, institutional decay—none of these will be "solved" by more analysis alone.

Yet the default response in most organisations and movements when faced with overwhelming complexity is to think harder. More strategy sessions. More frameworks. More plans.

Maybe there is still a place for all of that. But when thinking becomes the avoidance—when the meeting about the meeting becomes a way of not feeling the grief of what's being lost, that you might have to change yourself (not just the world), or the fear that we might not be enough—then we are stuck in exactly the same loop. It’s just at a collective scale.

I'm hardly the first to suggest we need to go back to basics. Back to our intuition. Not just learning to be with the not-knowing, but actually the unknowable.

It's arguably the hardest and most courageous thing you can do as a changemaker: to stop reaching for impact (solutions) out there, and start practising presence.

Just Be a Dog

If all of the above feels too cumbersome right now, try this instead: be a dog.

That's Finn (pictured above, deep in contemplation). He looks like he's pondering the nature of existence. But most likely, whatever is happening behind those gorgeous brown eyes is probably very simple. Maybe no 'thoughts' at all. And if there are, they're something like: leaves are moving. Bit hungry. Body good after a long walk.

Finn is just here. Being with what is. Like a newborn baby, grabbing its feet for the first time, having no idea they are 'its own'. Just watching, noticing, knowing innocently something we can easily forget: what's actually happening right now.

We could learn a lot from that.

A Hack for Getting Unstuck

The moment you discover when and where you escape into the thinking mind, you gain a choice you didn't have before. You can turn back and go the other way.

And rather than seeking answers, open to what comes.

If nothing happens straight away? Wait. The penny will drop when it’s ripe and ready. I believe you will get an insight, a knowing, a feeling that leads to a direction. The trick is to recognise it. Because as you have not controlled it, or prepared it in your head first, it might not be evident. Or it might not be what you want it to be.

But it might be exactly what you need.