One of the ways to change how you think is to change the things that you do without thinking… the mundane everyday autopilot activities. If you change those, you’ll switch off your autopilot, wake up your brain and set yourself up to come up with great ideas.

Quite a few years ago I attended an American Training & Development Association conference where a couple of guys gave the audience some of these tips (and I’ve since added a couple of my own). But if you know of those guys please let me know so I can credit them appropriately.

Coming up every week or so will be one of seven simple ways to get your thinking out of the rut. Here’s the first…

1. Once or twice a week get out the other side of the bed. (If you sleep with a partner swap sides of the bed every so often or, if your bed is against a wall, turn around and sleep with your head at the other end of the bed occasionally.) Because you normally get out of the same side of the bed you begin every day the same way. You’re in a rut and right at the start of the day you are encouraging your brain to go onto autopilot. If you launch your day by getting out of bed on the other side you’ll be programming your brain differently and, as a result, you’ll change the colour of your day.

2. Once or twice a week clean your teeth holding the toothbrush in the other hand. Doing it the same way every day means you clean your teeth in a trance and you’re making your day predictable. Now you probably reckon that, when you start this exercise, you will get toothpaste all over the place and up your nostrils as well. You are dead right, you certainly will. But that’s the beauty of this gem. You’ll have to concentrate on cleaning your teeth and by so doing you switch off the autopilot and get it into the wide-awake, ready for anything mode. Tape a message on your mirror to remind yourself to change your toothbrush holding hand.

3. Open your wardrobe and throw out those clothes you don’t wear. You have a couple of metres of clothing hanging there but only use about half a meter of them because you’re waiting for the rest to either come back into fashion or back into size! Leaving clothes you can’t wear where they confront you every day is a big mistake because you are reminded of your shortcomings and pushed back into that rut. You are clinging onto spent dreams, focusing on your yesterdays rather than your tomorrows, thinking failure rather than success. Give those old non-wearable clothes away – get them out of the closet, yourself out of the rut and open up your mind to new ideas.

4. Every couple of months re-arrange the furniture in your bedroom. For the last umpteen years the first thing you have seen when you opened your eyes every morning has been the same scene. The same bedspread, furniture, pictures, lamps and so on all in the same darn position. What message does that send to your brain first thing in the morning? Everything is the same as it was yesterday so jump back into that good old warm comfortable rut. Change the scene occasionally and you change your results. So shift things around, even change the colour scheme, and do it pretty often. Notice the impact it has on your life (in spite of the short term tensions it may cause with your partner until they realise that the changes are creating a new you… and them).

5. Take that drawer of stuff you’re keeping “just in case” and dump it. This is a great suggestion. Somewhere in your house you’ve got a drawer where you put all of those things that you don’t need right now but you may need to use “some day.” You keep them as insurance against the remote possibility that you might need them. Look, do it now. Take that drawer, run (don’t walk) to the garbage can and heave the contents in. Say goodbye to the remnants of the past, say goodbye to the things in your life that you have been hanging on to that have been holding you back. Elbow your way out of that rut.

6. Take a different route to work occasionally. Most people, still bleary eyed and waiting for the caffeine belt to hit, climb into the car and drive to the office on autopilot. They are cocooned in their own hermetically sealed little world completely oblivious to anything and barely aware of other traffic, pedestrians, motorcyclists and even the scenery. Their brain is saying, “I’ve seen all this before.” The antidote? Once or twice a week drive to work a different way. See how the challenges of navigating a new route, unfamiliar driving conditions and changed surroundings really wake up your brain and give you a massive rut buster!

7. Change what you listen to in the car. Most people start their day listening to the radio with its news of madness, murder and mayhem. By the time you get to the office your brain is full of bad stuff, just like it was yesterday and the day before and the day before… Try listening to something different— classical music radio, a motivational CD, an audiobook or maybe, just maybe, the sounds of silence when the brain can go into freewheel and think its own stuff. Tuning in a different sound makes sure that you are not lured back into that dreadful rut.

There they are. Some great ideas that can change the way you think and, as a consequence, the results you will achieve. Now you’ll come up with great ideas too.