The SOT Experience

There’s a strange side effect to learning how to think better.

People start writing emails that sound like they’ve joined a secret society.

Not a cult. Not a productivity hack. Something rarer: a system that changes how they experience reality itself.

“You’ve given me something to look forward to every day,” one member writes. “Like a bonus in my life.”

Another says the lessons are “dangerously clever.”

A third compares the experience to “a very bright light switching on in my mind.”

This is the world of the School of Thinking — or SOT — a decades-old cognitive training movement founded by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson. Long before Silicon Valley became obsessed with “mental models,” “cognitive stacks,” and AI copilots, SOT was building something stranger: software for the human brain.

Not metaphorically.

Operationally.

The premise is both simple and deeply unsettling: most people are not actually trained thinkers. They are reactive pattern repeaters running biological default settings. Intelligence helps. Education helps. Experience helps. But none of these automatically produce better thinking.

In SOT language, this default state is called the CVS: the Current View of the Situation.

And according to the organisation’s central law of thinking, the CVS can never equal the BVS — the Better View of the Situation.

That gap changes everything.

Because if your current view is never the best possible view, then certainty becomes suspect. Defensiveness becomes inefficient. Argument becomes primitive. The mission shifts from being right to becoming better.

It sounds philosophical until you watch what happens to people who actually practise it.

One member describes the effect like this:

“Your training has given me a new view on life, a constant reflection on what’s going on. Have always been fairly positive and focused but this has heightened or reawakened this passion.”

Another writes:

“I don’t get stuck in my CVS nearly as often as I used to. I have been transforming my CVS to a BVS with effectiveness.”

This is not self-help language. It reads more like users describing an operating system upgrade.

Which is fitting, because the SOT ecosystem increasingly resembles cognitive infrastructure rather than traditional education.

Its concepts sound like commands inside a neural interface:

CVSTOBVS.

X10.

GBB.

CPV.

The terminology can initially feel cryptic, almost cybernetic. But underneath the acronyms is a surprisingly practical architecture for changing behaviour.

Take “10X thinking.” In most business circles, the phrase has been diluted into startup motivational wallpaper. At SOT, it means something more mechanical: deliberately multiplying options, contacts, actions, attempts, or possibilities beyond the brain’s natural stopping point.

Humans typically stop after three or four ideas. SOT treats that as a neurological limitation, not a strategic decision.

So members train to push further.

Far further.

One participant applied it to sales outreach:

“Instead of just limiting the number to about 20 — I will x10 and endeavour to get about 200.”

Another changed the sequence of an entire workday:

“I changed the way I start my day at work and work back to front, by changing the order of the work.”

Tiny shift. Massive implication.

Because the real target of the system is not motivation. It is cognitive rigidity.

And this is where the SOT experience starts to diverge sharply from conventional corporate training.

Most training programs attempt to transfer information. SOT attempts to alter perception.

Members repeatedly describe becoming less argumentative, more exploratory, more experimentally minded.

One participant reports:

“I am more accepting of other people’s opinions. I allow others to have opinions that differ from my own. I am much less argumentative.”

That’s a fascinating outcome in an internet age engineered around outrage optimisation.

The modern digital economy rewards certainty, tribalism, and instant judgment. Algorithms love emotional conviction. Nuance performs badly. Curiosity is inefficient.

SOT effectively trains against all of that.

Not by making people passive, but by making them cognitively mobile.

The result is a kind of mental elasticity that many users describe as emotionally energising.

“The speed is going up and so is my feeling about life in general.”

“The beauty of its practicality.”

“A sensational journey.”

“It has had a huge impact on my thought patterns.”

There’s something almost paradoxical happening here. The members aren’t describing intellectual strain. They’re describing cognitive exhilaration.

As if better thinking creates psychological oxygen.

And perhaps that’s the hidden story beneath the current AI revolution.

Because while the world obsesses over artificial intelligence, systems like SOT are asking a more uncomfortable question: what if the real bottleneck was never computational power?

What if the bottleneck was human thinking quality?

AI makes answers faster.

But faster answers are not necessarily better views.

In fact, they may reinforce the CVS problem at planetary scale.

A badly trained thinker with AI becomes an amplifier.

A better-trained thinker becomes something else entirely.

This is why the SOT framework increasingly feels less like a coaching methodology and more like a prototype cognitive operating system for the AI age.

One member captures this shift perfectly:

“Whatever level I am at (CVS), I can always move toward a BVS.”

That sentence contains an entire worldview.

No fixed endpoint.

No final mastery.

Just perpetual cognitive upgradeability.

And that may explain why the testimonials feel unusually emotional for what is essentially structured thinking training.

People aren’t just learning techniques.

They’re experiencing the psychological effect of escaping mental confinement.

For decades, intelligence was treated as the ultimate cognitive advantage. But neuroscience has increasingly complicated that story. Intelligent people are often exceptionally good at defending existing views. Rationalising them. Protecting them.

SOT attacks that tendency directly.

One member even compares the experience to acquiring a superpower:

“The businesses I work for are most surprised with my increased thinking power. Not to mention my personal life which has developed radical new insights and possibilities.”

Thinking power.

Not knowledge.

Not information.

Not credentials.

Power.

That distinction matters.

Because in the emerging economy, raw information is becoming abundant and nearly free. AI systems can already generate competent summaries, presentations, strategies, and analysis in seconds.

What becomes scarce is not information.

It is cognitive advantage.

The ability to escape first answers.

To generate alternatives.

To reframe problems.

To move from CVS to BVS faster than competitors.

In that sense, the School of Thinking may have spent decades quietly building a system designed for a world that only now exists.

A world flooded with intelligence but starving for better thinking.

And perhaps that’s why the testimonials feel oddly futuristic despite many being written years ago.

They don’t read like students reviewing a course.

They read like early users describing what it felt like to install a new cognitive layer onto the human mind.