Improve Your Thinking Through Writing

In the past week, I had three distinct conversations—with my son, a colleague, and a coachee—all revolving around a single theme: writing down your thoughts.

My son wanted to pursue a business idea, and after an hour of discussing its pros and cons, I advised him to put it on paper, detailing his concept comprehensively.

The conversation with my colleague centered around a business pitch he was planning for a prospective client. He was eager to talk to me about the proposal, and I suggested that he capture the flow of his idea on paper and lay out the proposal in full detail.

The third conversation was with a coachee who was anxious about an internal evaluation for a promotion. She needed to present her credentials and achievements to a promotion committee. As I did with the others, I told her to write down a summary of what she had accomplished over the last three years.

Writing is the spotlight that forces poor thinking to come out into the open. When you put your invisible thoughts into words, you are forced to confront them as they are, not as you wish them to be. You can’t just take a few minutes here and there to grasp the essence of a problem and expect clear thinking and unique insights to emerge. Good thinking demands patience and a commitment to sift through your thoughts by writing them down. Writing and thinking are symbiotic. Initially, your writing may be unclear because your thoughts are still forming. As you review your writing, your mind identifies ways to refine the idea, which you then capture in the text. This process continues until you’ve distilled your best thinking into a well-crafted piece of writing. Writing is a tool that helps your thinking improve.