If you want to position yourself as a high-status individual with the capacity to lead, consider this: Power comes from abstraction, not from facts.
According to research in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, abstract thinkers feel less constrained by details and prefer higher-power roles.
Abstract thinking broadens options, while thinking concretely is more likely to make people discouraged.
So, if you want to take a step up the pay scale, envision advancing the company’s wider game plan, and leave the bean counting to others.
The key to making big moves, according to lead researcher Pamela K. Smith, is thinking in terms of why rather than how.
“When you’re going through your to-do list, think about the higher-level goals each action serves,” she suggests.
In my own experience as a trainer and coach, I often find myself reluctant to give my clients concrete advice, because I feel it could be limiting, and less powerful than the advice they give themselves. Better to ask them questions to see if they can come up with their own effective answer before I start feeding them mine.
And as we begin our presentations, it’s often a good idea for a speaker to describe the big picture the audience is in and why they should listen before he or she jumps into the facts and figures.
The greatest American speech of all time begins with a wide angle shot, then zooms in for the close up, then zooms out to mid-range. Take a look:
The big picture: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Zooming in on the present: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Zooming in on the space: “We are met on a great battlefield of that war.”
Zooming in even tighter: “We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”
And then the wide-angle again: “But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.”
In a way, the mind is like a camera. It can zoom in and look at detail, or it can zoom out and see the big picture. The really powerful lenses (and minds) can do both.