Who Would You Like to Think Like?

Archive note: this reflection and its training postscript were published in March 2025. Event references and personal or political commentary are retained as the author’s historical text.

Even though no one specifically taught you to think, you have learned to think in very specific ways. At first you simply copied the thinking of parents, teachers, and peers. Later you learned to think according to the jobs you took, the courses you took, and the books you read. You learned to think by the movies you watched, the games you played, and the hobbies you engaged in. Yet in all of this, you probably never thought, “Now who do I want to think like?” “Whose way of thinking attracts me so much that I want to learn to think like him or her.”

On the surface, thinking seems so natural, so inevitable, so unstudied that the idea of studying hw to think, or how to think like another person never struck your consciousness. So you just think without considering who you are thinking like. But now let’s raise that question. If you were to look around and consider the different way that people think— Who would you like to think like?

After all, when it comes to modeling excellence, isn’t that what we most essentially do? It seems simple— if you want to be a millionaire, you need to think like a millionaire. If you want to be an entrepreneur—you have to learn to think like an entrepreneur. If you want to excel in area area or profession, you have to think like the best minds in that area. And if you decide to do that, the next question is, “How exactly does millionaires think or how do entrepreneurs think?” In fact, there are books written to those very ends. In each case, it’s the thinking that makes the difference more than what they do.

So pick your poison. Once you have a career or adventure in mind, your next step is to learn how to think like those who are best in that career or adventure— who is the best thinker as a business person, a musician, a lawyer, doctor, I.T. specialist, etc.? A few years ago I got books from Bobby Fisher on playing chess, I wanted to know how he thought about chess. In the first month of President Trump, people on both sides of the political aisle were repeatedly astonished by the out-of-the-box ideas he came up with. And no wonder, he does not think as a politician. Instead he thinks as an entrepreneur, a real estate investor, and as an entertainer. No wonder why they can’t figure him out, and no wonder they take him literally and miss his humor— he thinks and speaks in very different terms from political.

After I learned NLP I focused my attention Bateson, Korzybski, and later on Maslow. I wanted to know what they thought; then I went back to re-read regarding how they thought. In fact, I wanted to learn how to think as they thought so I could carry on what they had started. This actually is the deepest modeling as it goes beyond what someone does—their expert level of performance— to how they think that got them there in the first place.

After several decades of doing that, I realized this about the founders of NLP. Bandler modeled Perls and at the beginning began to think like Perls as he began mimicking the tone and tempo of how Perls spoke. But given that Perls described himself in his biography as “a dirty old man,” that tells you a lot about Bandler. He would have been so much better off if he had learn to think like Virginia Satir instead! Grinder’s thinking followed Marx (he taught Marxist economics!) and Chomsky (who gave up linguistics to become a socialist left winger politically. Pucelik was the founder who thought like a therapist and ended up opening drug and alcoholic clinics in the USA, Russia, and Ukraine thereby helping thousands of people.

Who do you want to think like? Most of us do not answer that question at all. Instead we end up thinking with bits and pieces mixed together from mom and dad, a favorite teacher or author, a spiritual leader, etc. For most of us, our thinking is a mishmash of thoughts and ways-of-thinking from many sources. If you have a career, that career probably plays a big influence on your thinking. If you focus on and care more about family, or your best buds, or membership in a special community—then that highly valued group probably influences your way of thinking.

Who would you like to learn to think like? Would you like to think like a change agent, a first responder, like Elon Musk, like a character in a movie, like Neo in The Matrix, like a famous trainer or coach? It’s your choice ... and “as you think, so you are.” So you will become.

PS. By the way we have just completed the training, Thinking Like Humans here in Mexico ... next time we do that training will be in Brazil in June. Interested? Let me know.