The other day, I plucked a book called Range from my bookshelf and started reading.

Very interesting it was too.

The book is a former Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. It's all about how generalists can triumph in a world full of specialists.

One chapter focusses on interventional cardiologists.

These are the men and women who specialise in treating chest pain by using stents (i.e. small metal tubes) to prise open blood vessels. So when a patient arrives in hospital with chest pain and a scan reveals a narrowed artery, they’ll pop in a stent to open up the artery and stop a heart attack.

The only problem?

Clinical trials have shown that for patients with stable chest pain, stents don’t actually prevent heart attacks at all.

The book goes on to say:

A 2015 study showed that patients with heart failure or cardiac arrest were less likely to die if they were admitted to hospital during a national cardiology conference when thousands of the top cardiologists were away.

Despite the evidence, cardiologists who specialise in using that tool reported they simply cannot believe that stenting doesn’t work, even when their compensation was tied to not performing the procedure.

It doesn’t take a brain scientist (or a stent-wielding cardiologist?) to figure out that treating a symptom isn't the way to cure an underlying problem.

And what this study shows is that the “see a problem, fix the symptom” mentality is live & well and hasn’t really gone anywhere since the days of smearing mammoth dung into cracks in a cave wall.

It’s not just hospitals where silencing a symptom gets muddled up with solving a problem.

Take an overactive monkey mind at work as another example. 

I’ve wrestled with thoughts like "how will I get through all this work?", "how can I stop thinking about work when I’m not at work?" and "should I quit my job?" more times than I’ve had hot dinners.

The normal remedy for this sort of mental merry-go-round is setting strict work hours, being ruthless with boundaries, distracting oneself with hobbies, downloading the latest meditation app or sweating the thoughts out in the gym.

I tried all these.

Some of them worked for a week, a month or even longer.

But their usefulness always ran out at some point. And none of them stopped me lying awake in bed at 3.30am, mind racing, wondering why I couldn’t get to sleep and dreading my 6am alarm.

What I see now is that these “pills” were all ways to silence my symptoms. Not ways to solve the source of the issue.

That source?

No, it wasn't my job. 

It was my mind.

It seems to me that if you spend some time getting clear on how the mind works, where thoughts come from, the purpose of thinking and the nature of thought, you can’t help but find more peace and quiet between your ears.

Best of all?

Because this shift is rooted in understanding rather than tactics, it doesn’t wear off after a few weeks. 

Instead, it sticks around. And the more you get eyes for what's going on, the more and more settled your mind becomes.

The shift from tactics and pills to understanding is what changed things for me. 

It's also the direction I take when I work with my clients.

If you’d like to get started:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com