By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to strengthen your emotional intelligence. Reading time: 3:32

Ben Franklin did it in the nude. D.H. Lawrence did it under a tree. Gertrude Stein did it in a car. Robert Louis Stevenson did it in bed. Ernest Hemingway did it standing up. And Sir Walter Scott did it on horseback.

Ernest Hemingway at his stand up desk: typewriter perched atop book shelf.

Indeed, the process of writing is as diverse as those individual writers. So is the process of leading.

Yet the object is the same in both writing and leading: get into the mindset of your readers or followers and serve their interests.

How do you more efficiently adopt the mindset of another beyond basic research and survey tools?

Writers do it with a ritual that begins each writing session; a ritual that signals a conscious effort to change their behavior from the ordinary “me and we” to the extraordinary “them and theirs.”

It’s a ritual so arresting writers seemingly climb a ladder -step by step -to get away from everything familiar and then they take a proverbial plunge into something new, different, and exhilarating. Consider these various writing rituals to get into the hearts and minds of others:

Poet Friedrich Schiller would fill his desk with rotten apples. Composer Richard Wagner wore historical costumes. Author Samuel Johnson wrote most prolifically with a purring cat near him.

Author Marcel Proust lined his work room with sound-absorbing cork. Author Charles Dickens required his standing desk face north and Rudyard Kipling couldn’t work at all without black ink in his pen. And Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk would leave his house, walk around the block twice and then come back home to write.

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