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”

24 Dec 2008

How the Different Parts of the Brain Help Vision and Goal-Setting

I’m starting to explore a lot more of the neuroscience behind why vision and goal setting are such powerful tools.

Initial observations are fairly simplistic, but serve as a good build on previous posts (see tags to the right)

As a simple foundation it is helpful to see the left hemisphere of our brain as being the logical, detailed manager of time. It wants to know why, what, how and when. In a lot of detail.

The right hemisphere exists in the sensory moment. It revels in the here and now. It is intuitive, creative, has no sense of time and only relishes the details that improve the sensory experience.

Jill Taylor in My Stroke of Insight explains, ‘By its design our right mind is spontaneous, carefree and imaginative. It allows our artistic juices to flow free without inhibition or judgement’

Immediately an observation is that we are given the capacity; in fact we’re given half of whatever we define as ourselves or ‘self’ to fulfil our creative capacity. And yet how many of us would hand on heart be able to say that we spend much of our adult lives being spontaneous, carefree and creative?

So point one: we are given the capacity to imagine and create. For what purpose? One, arguably, is to imagine our goals and what we want to strive to achieve.

Associated to the above is the fact that ‘the present moment is a time when everything and everyone are connected together as one’

So, in imagining and planning for the future using the right hemisphere, does half of your brain starts to merge your imagined future with the realities of now?

The left hemisphere, in thriving in the detail and pulling together all of your experienced moments into a ‘past, present and future’, uses language to ‘break the big picture perception of the present moment into manageable and comparable bits of data they can talk about’

So, the other half of your brain can then kick in if the time is taken to describe your imagined future using all five of your senses. Your left hemisphere understands this way of describing the future. You can set the programme.

Add time, targets and milestones into the process of imagining the future then to all intents and purposes the next step towards your vision and goals just becomes an action.

Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity, Psychology, Successful Outcomes, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
12 Dec 2008

How Things Start to Change When you Attribute True Value to Your Sense of Self

So how does it feel? How does it feel to think that you understand things a bit better? To think that you are a bit more certain about how things work for you and what things mean?

Unsettling is a good way of starting the description. From NLP/ hypnosis/ habit removal experiences I’ve had, it’s a similar awareness of a void. The void is the non-existence of the previous habit.

In my current situation it’s the awareness of the absence of a programme of striving for understanding or meaning in certain areas.

I’m experiencing this change from different perspectives. My interest in the content of a number of previously subscribed blogs has virtually dissipated overnight. I’m not talking here about divine revelations. It’s just a shift in understanding in how the relationship between conscious and other than conscious works. This shift makes me currently feel like I understand more, and have more answers when I look at the subject matter of these other blogs.

My feelings towards other content also feels shifted. My sense of value added by the body of self-help literature is diminished in part because I feel they’re missing the common thread. So many questions postulated without going back to that common denominator of our brains.

We are that common element in all the challenges that we perceive we face in our lives. Yet we don’t start from that psychological perspective of the workings of our brains and the relationship with our construction of ourself.

Just getting stuck into an excellent book, ‘My Stroke of Insight’ by Jill Taylor. A neuroscientist who suffered a stroke and recovered to write about the experience. Excellent, clear explanation of the workings of the brain with a description of a right hemisphere-led view of the world that takes you out of your comfort zone and then mugs everything you previously thought to be true.

Already, what this is telling me is that our approach to many personal development matters are too left hemisphere-led (thinking, rationalizing and logical detail) and thereby doomed to fail when our feelings and emotions kick-in.

So how does it feel? Invigorating and slightly scary when I look at the absence of some of the previous striving. But ultimately? Bloody marvellous……

Posted in Change, Conscious and Unconscious, Happiness, Psychology and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
05 Dec 2008

How Things are Changing: Intuition as Another Evolutionary Step in Fact-based and Creative Decision Making

So what has changed? How are things differing in reality? How is the shift in thinking impacting things?

The last few months postings (since c. September) have started to circle faster around similar subjects. The core of Just Seven Things was and always will be the mission to find out how it all works; in particular, how the relationship between the conscious mind and other-than-consciousness can be managed to optimise happiness.

The shift is to a greater reliance on the other-than-conscious. I had always trusted my intuition before, but I had not had a relationship with it. Essentially, I hadn’t used it as a tool: it had just seemed to happen.

First I probably need to define terms that are only just forming for me personally (rather than being others’ words on a page. I’m using unconscious/ intelligent unconscious/ undermind (borrowed from Claxton)/ intuition interchangeably at the moment. Essentially: the assembling of information and decision-making without direct attention (thanks to Royce Bell of Accenture in an FT article entitled ‘Gut Instincts Give Business Intelligence a New Flavour’ which helped me with these words)

Now, on a daily (near hourly basis), I’m increasing my awareness of and then listening to my other-than-consciousness. Trusting it to help guide my attention. To seek what I need to replenish my energy levels or creativity.

My need to consciously interpret is reduced as I see the evidence in the form of quality and quantity of insight and output.

My belief in relaxing into, and doing all that I can to facilitate, my intuitive and intelligent unconscious is accelerated on a daily basis by my rapidly increasing levels of happiness: even in the face of more challenging external environments in which I am working

Posted in Change, Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity and tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

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