Just like the way you would treat a human being who claims "I know everything about this" OR "I am the right person to do this job".

Handling a person who vehemently claims "I know everything about this" is a tricky situation. The more you try to resist this claim and try to convince that person otherwise, the more he or she would lurk around and assert the position more and more.

Every idea that comes to you as a line of thought while solving a problem is making a similar claim - "I am the right idea to solve this problem". The more you try to push this idea away, dismissing it as a bad or inappropriate idea, the more it will lurk around. Everytime you try to come up with another new idea, the ideas that you are resisting or pushing away will surface again and again, in some form or the other. It will not be very surprising to find that each new idea that you get is some variant of the idea you are trying to push away.

So, what is the best way to handle a person who endlessly keeps claiming - "I am the right person to do this job" OR "I know everything about this" ? Just ask the person to explan how would he go about doing the job, OR to tell you everything that he knows. Either he answers everything correctly, in which case he was right about being right. Or else, he would shut up. His ability, in either case, would be self-evident.

You can treat each idea likewise. Ask the "idea" to show its credentials. Work upon that idea and see for yourself where it leads you. Work it to the end till you can go no further. Either it leads you to the right solution, OR else, you can clearly see that this idea will not work. The idea will stop lurking around. It will vanish. As a bonus, you would know precisely why this idea was wrong. Which means you would have painted some map of the right idea.

Ideas, like human beings, need attention. They need existence. The more you try to deny attention or existence to an idea, the more aggressively will it try to assert back, hang around, and appear in some form or the other in everything that you think. It will colour all your perception, and anything that you will think will be some variant of all the unhandled ideas.

Knowing that an idea will not work at the level of "I" will not be of any benefit. Knowing at the level of "AIM" is what will move the thought process forward. And the only way to know something at the level of AIM is to go through the entire process of working through the idea, and see for yourself whether an idea works or not !!!

Don't ask any idea to shut up, however trivial. Ask it to "show off" instead. In either case of whether the idea is the right one or a silly one, you would have gone very far in arriving at the solution.