The point is, 99% of what you do in life I classify as laundry. It’s stuff that has to be done, but you don’t do it better than anybody else, and it’s not worth that much. Once in a while, though, you do something that changes your life dramatically. You decide to get married, you have a baby – or, if you’re an investor, you buy a stock that goes up twentyfold. So these rare events tend to dominate things. (Ralph Wanger in an interview in Money Magazine; as quoted by Keith E. Stanovich in his latest book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought.)

This is an excellent point.

I would qualify it by adding a little distinction:

• - 99% of the decisions me make are laundry (in the sense explained above); 1% are the real deal – 20 or 30 decisions that shape our life
• - 80% or more (my arbitrary estimate) of what we do is “laundry” – stuff that we have to do, activities in which we are no better than the average; but 10% or more of what we do is based on our unique skills, it is something that we do better than average – we can make this 10% or more of our activities either deliberate practice that leads us to excel in what we do that is “us”, or actual doing that makes a difference in the world.

And this is where coaching comes into play.

A coaching conversation while facing one of those non-laundry moments in life can make all the difference:

- coaching can make the difference between a good decision, i.e., a rational decision based on our long-term interest and a bad decision, i.e., an impulsive, knee-jerk reaction based on automatic patterns of thinking. Automatic patterns of thinking are good for the laundry moments of life, they might be dangerous in the “non-laundry” scenario where our evolutionary-determined instincts might lead us astray

- coaching can make the difference between focusing our best efforts on that 10 to 20% of our activities that allow us to have a real impact on the world or squandering our unique skills, talents and dreams.

The whole point of Stanovich’s book is that while IQ tests measure our algorithmic mind, sort of like our “mental horsepower”, they do not measure the abilities of the reflective mind, sort of like the driver’s skills of our mind – so even people with high IQ can fail in making the rational choice IF they are not cued first (i.e., if they reflective mind is not engaged and brought online).

What better way of engaging the reflective mind than having a conversation with a professional coach? One session is often all my clients need to figure out where to go and how to get there!

Are you tired of doing laundry yet?

Tags: algorithmic mind, brief coaching, Decision Making, deliberate practice, my clients, reflective mind, Solution Focused