Holistic Thinking - a base mindset idea.

We all have a guiding way of thinking that dictates how we handle different situations. I've given a fair bit of thought to how to say this lately - it's hard. It's different from a world view or an attitude in that this guide isn't caught up in how one feels about something. It's more like a tool box of things that you use to deal with a given set of parameters to produce an outcome you want. Your attitude might dictate the outcome you want, or how you approach the situation, but that's not what causes the change itself. The toolbox of your awareness and your different skills does that.

The purpose of this post is to describe the toolbox of what I call 'holistic thinking'. Until very recently I thought of it as 'design thinking' but realized that this concept is far more nuanced than what I apply in my life. Eventually I'd like to have enough of a working knowledge of design thinking to call that my approach in life, but this is going to take a lot more research and application of knowledge. For now it's holistic thinking, and I feel that this is a useful way for those lacking a broad support network and easy points of reference to think. As an attitude, I feel that the phrase that best sums up my current one is 'everything in moderation - even moderation'.

The main idea with holistic thinking is that it keeps the mind open to all aspects and factors in a given situation, and is centred around what you need and want. It is also very much about being mindful of what a situation and the variables within that situation are not - this not only keeps unneeded concerns out of the picture, but it keeps one aware of things that could 'come into play'. This concept of being mindful of the entire field of possibilities and using only those which will benefit the situation was born from the concept of minimalism, which is also close to my heart. Keeping this awareness is especially useful for the aforementioned sort of person, who may find themselves dealing with a lot of different situations due to their independent nature. I've heard this sort of thing referred to as 'wearing lots of different hats'. This is just one aspect of the loners' life that can be improved by keeping a holistic mindset.

There are a few ways that this mindset helps the person who has it, particularly if this person is the sort of person I hope ends up reading this blog regularly. I've listed the advantages below. I tried writing them all out but this post was (is?) turning into a novel.

• Good for avoiding stagnation and ignorance in a situation - good for preparation
• Helps avoid stress, the 'root of all evil' in a loners' life
• Helps evaluate what's really important and makes other things secondary - here's that minimalism again
• Helpful in establishing routine, a set of behaviors that can again reduce stress and prepare for almost anything.
• Good for establishing points of reference about what's acceptable behavior and things like that - no 'crazy hobo syndrome'.
• Nurtures active reactivity - a state of readiness but not anxiety about what's going to happen in the future. You can deal with almost anything because you're aware of what may or may not happen. Helps avoid stress no matter what's going to happen.
• Nurtures hypervigilance - a high degree of awareness of all factors in play, especially environmentally.
• Keeps you interested, gets you off your arse and out the door - there's always things to find out and creche into your knowledge base.

Of course, this holistic mindset isn't perfect - there can be some downsides to it. It can be mentally exhausting, for starters. It's also never bulletproof. No matter how much thought you give to something, you're never completely prepared for anything that might happen - all you can really do is try to mitigate stress when something unexpected crops up. The last thing I've found is that in a new situation, it can be easy to misread a situation and gain a lot of misinformation from personal bias and things like that. This ends up in a lot of effort being expended learning about something that can be completely wrong. For this reason, leaning on other people to give you other perspectives or practical reasoning as to why something is so can be crucial.

This has become a bit of a monster post, so I'm going to leave off here. Next post I think I'll talk about the role of hypervigilance in an independent persons' life. I hope this is useful to someone – it’s certainly helped me. Please let me know if you enjoy these posts, and what you'd like more on. I probably have some more stories I'll post up before long too - I handwrite all of them and then have to transcribe them, which can be a pain.

Peace.