Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Conscious and Unconscious”

11 Jul 2008

The Growing of the Conscious Mind in Children

To celebrate the birth of my third child yesterday, a brief (bottles/ baby and child #1 & 2 to focus on at this time…) couple of thoughts as the seed of something bigger.

What struck me was: is it any wonder that we have a constant challenge with concepts of ‘ourself’ or ‘me’. Why is it a surprise to us that we find it hard to ‘manage’ ourselves (if that is what we try and do)?

I sit and see a homosapien offspring aged 1 day. A beautiful bundle of potential; at this stage though just a bundle of nerve endings and other-than-conscious reactions. Initial genetic pre-set programmes around food and reaction (crying) to more extreme sensory inputs (noise/ light) – I’m sure there are a lot more listed by experts.

And then the conscious overlay begins. Thoughts and knowledge. Habits, beliefs, states and behaviours. Sets of reactions and responses based on our map of the territory.

I can’t shake an image of layers of ‘material’. Like strata in a rock; residues from the ‘time and tide’ of life compacted by the heat and pressure of the moment/ that moment.

And then initially apparently so hard to mine out those conditioned layers in order to change.

Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Control, Habits and Routines, Mindfulness and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
09 Jul 2008
3 Comments

Why Do We Feel Better if the Wording is Changed?

“There is no doubt that bringing elements of the US strategic arsenal close to Russian territory could be used to weaken our deterrent potential,” the Russian foreign ministry said. “…in such a situation the Russian side will take appropriate measures to compensate for potential created for threats to its national security”

Now I did a degree in Politics. Scary times, but not the point of this post.

A few minutes after reading the above in the FT, I opened up a letter about my subscription to the Times. They used to send ‘Timesaver’ tokens through with the vouchers. A perk of the subscription, it meant that I didn’t need to collect vouchers for anyspecial offers available. The letter said ‘You may notice that Timesaver Tokens are no longer included. We are continually working on new ways in which to deliver special promotions to you…..’

Yesterday I spent most of my time giving 360 degree feedback to my line reports at Madgex. We use a tool called My3Things which I based on a brilliant ‘rapid’ feedback tool from a guy called Matt Clarke from beyondnowhere UK. He worked with the finance team when I was at Sainsbury’s.

The feedback tool asks the person giving the feedback to give three things they’ve really noticed about the person they’re giving feedback to. And three things they’d love to see more of.

Now you may be asking yourself whether I’ve gone mad. What do these three things have in common?

Read more…

Posted in Communication, Conscious and Unconscious, Writing and tagged , , , ,
08 Jul 2008
4 Comments

Why does Relaxation lead to Creativity and Performance?

A whole heap of things have come together in my thoughts over the last 24hrs. They are primarily covered by the following:

  • Why does relaxing lead to more creative thinking?
  • Why does not thinking about an activity and sometimes just going with the gut or the flow often lead to better performance?

I started to think about these things because of the counter-intuitive way in which we sometimes work. In one of my line reports today I saw (what felt like) a classic case of ‘over-thinking’. I could virtually feel the heat coming from their brain….

Read more…

Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity, Mindfulness and tagged , , ,

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