Control | Just Seven Things

Archive for the category “Control”

21 Mar 2009

Brain Training When We Only Have a Neanderthal Syllabus

Brainy People by Sanja Gjenero

The difficult balance we have to manage as human animals with a brain of two hemispheres is contrasted well in Will’s comment. Independent but obviously joined and synergistic. It’s how well we know about how the different personalities of our brain work together that is one of the roots of our personal effectiveness and success.

The planned, logical and rigorous administrator on the left wants to analyse, intepret and categorise. It gives a script to our experience of the world and our interactions within it.

The creative, artistic lateral thinker on the right wants to muse, develop, connect and expand. It experiences our world and our interactions within it, and is the source of apparently independent creative thoughts, ideas and constructions.

The administrator and the artist live together very happily for the purposes of you being born, living a life and dieing. Whether you have optimised either your happiness or potential greatness over this lifespan (assuming a positive desire to do this) is a matter of better understanding:

– how the artist and administrator work together best as a team. Their preferences, strengths and weaknesses: how they can organise themselves better to bring out the best of each other

– how they conflict. Their allowable weaknesses (in Belbin’s terms) are best handled when transparent, articulated and understood (without emotion or frustration)

– how your conscious handling of their other-than-conscious behaviours can also help improve their relationship and productivity as a unit – or not

Each of these three bullets is at least a shelf of potential books in your local bookstore. Add in the extra dimensions of personal preferences/ personality type/ psychometrics and energy levels/ chemical mood impacts, and you end up with a smörgåsbord of levers/ techniques/ aspects to manage. Throw in the fact that this analysis is framed by only a conscious assessment of the tip of the neuroscience iceberg. That we have both the rest of the visible (current consciously understood) iceberg to explore, as well as the vast depths underwater.

It may mean it is a long time before we are capable of consciously understanding how to optimise our happiness or potential greatness.

Further thought: Interesting research ‘The human brain is on the edge of chaos’

Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Control, Focus, Happiness, Mindfulness, Neuroscience, Psychology and tagged Brain, Conscious and Unconscious, Focus, Neuroscience | Leave a comment

22 Nov 2008

An Important Jigsaw Piece in My View of Life

Padlock by Victures

The only advantage of being sick over the last weeks has been my continuing revelations from Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. I’m nearly at the end and confident that I’ll be starting it again. Seminal.

So my reading really slowed down when I got to the chapter on ‘The Point of Consciousness’:

‘the intriguing possibility that areas of the brain might be getting on with their business at an unconscious level, without bothering to wait for consciousness to develop. A pool of neural activation may split into two, one part resonating with the self, and thus subserving the emergence of conscious awareness, while the other carries on with further processing such as planning a response’

‘These results indicate clearly that it is the conscious brain which decides what to do, and when; and that what we experience as intention is merely a post hoc confirmation of what has already been set in motion. Consciousness receives a kind of corollary ‘despatch note’, and then presents this as if it were the original order’

Had me in familiar territory already. Part of the reason for this blog’s existence was to understand a bit better what the other-than-conscious did. Not to necessarily ascribe meaning to it. As I noted in my first post in May, I firmly believe: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more’ (Waiting for Godot, Beckett)

Why Do Urgent But Less Important Tasks Drown Out The Really Important?

One of the things that continually amazes me is the split personality that exists within my brain (apologies for the mixed definitions here).

I can have a day like yesterday when I had fantastic conversations with clients and fellow industry CEOs which genuinely moved some of my thinking on. Our corporate strategy will develop positively as a result. I worked on some financial modelling that I’d long planned to. It gave me insights that have informed a whole other set of thoughts that will further impact strategy.

I then did some further reading that extended my thoughts on some issues and opened up whole realms of other thoughts.

Now, this post isn’t to wax lyrically about how effective I’ve been. The first point is that the time investment to achieve the above was probably 3-4 hours in total. Granted, there was travelling, but I worked every minute of that time. The second point is how I felt at the end of the day. Building on my last post, I felt that all the non-important tasks were rightly put in their place. That the siren call of the urgent was drowned by the sense of achievement from the important. I had done the right – commensurate with my responsibilities and accountabilities – things with my day.

Now don’t get me wrong. Today hasn’t been a bad day. Productive things have been done. But the challenge of ignoring the urgent task siren call has been remarkable.

I am left wondering whether it is a personality ‘type’ thing. Does my need for control/ power show itself in a restless frustration when I’m not all over my inbox and detailed task list? Does this undermine my trusted system? Have I just taken what I accept in to my action list too far, such that it’s seeping out at the edges?

I think an interesting flip to observe is that in the situation I am blogging about, my conscious/ other-than-conscious position is reversed. I know what I need to do: the important and less of the urgent. I’m kidnapped though by my other than consciousness.

And I don’t know why.