Writing as a way of thinking
When we started this blog, it was a way of getting our thoughts down on paper. We had been talking about training ideas and other matters over an after-training coffee for years, and enjoyed bouncing ideas back and forth. But all good things come to an end, and at one point Lennart moved to the countryside, and the daily after-training coffee talks had to happen via telephone.
This is where the idea of a coffee talk homepage was born. We had been tossing ideas around for years, but we never wrote them down or shared them with others. So, we started Coachingandcoffeetalks.com as a way of remembering our coffee talks—like post-hog documentation of previous talks. And this is what happened over the next couple of months. We started by studying the idea of a post-cardiac arrest/CrossFit existence, and slowly but surely, we wrote about training structure, intensity, and all the other training-related stuff we had been discussing for years.
But this is where the interesting part started to surface. We got better at writing because this was now a thing we practiced weekly, but our thinking started to improve and expand as well. Suddenly different topics and insights started to merge and interact.
We already knew that innovation and insights mostly arise when different ideas meet and interact--this we already experienced through our coffee talks—but this was more like coffee talks on steroids. New ideas were surfacing and developing on a daily/weekly basis. When we started this blog, we thought we would be out of topics after a couple of weeks, but after two years, we’re still going strong.
And this is where today’s topic comes into play. Writing is not only a way to document what’s in your head, but also a way of thinking and expanding on your thoughts. What we experienced is that writing does three additional things.
It makes it possible to have a dialog with yourself. When you’re writing your thoughts stay on the ‘paper.’ This allows you to play off and interact with your thoughts.
Writing works like scaffolding. It becomes a structure that ‘holds’ your thoughts in place, so you can focus on other things. In this way writing things down resembles a good habit—as in, it’s now a thing you don’t need to consciously think about—it’s now supported by your external scaffolding.
Your future coffee talks are now way more potent because your interlocular now has a nuanced perception of your thoughts. We have both studied, so we had a perception of the power of structuring your thoughts in writing, but we never applied this toolset to our day-to-day life.
We have a similar take on taking and structuring your notes, but we’ll save that for another blog.
We hope this is useful for some of you. Writing is a powerful way of gathering, structuring, and expanding your thoughts, and it doesn’t matter that much if only a few people read it. Write your thoughts down and share them with the world.
Until next time
Scott and Lennart