Just Seven Things

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

Archive for the category “Creativity”

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.

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

The Conscious Analyser

A flow of thought post.

I’ve just stood back from myself while working. I noticed that I’ve started to work slightly differently. My reading on the relationship between conscious and other-than-consciousness has led me to redefine their relationship and has created a separation of their ‘utility’ in my mind (hard to refer to the concept of the mind in this context…..)

Put simply, I’m trusting my gut/ intuitive/ unrestricted freedom of thought flow. I’m then trusting my application of my conscious analysing/ sorting/ challenging intellect to the outputs from more of the other-than-conscious thought flow.

I’m deliberately stopping myself from getting in the way of myself (if you see what I mean…)

This appears to be having the following results:

1. Ideas are flowing faster, and more clearly. They are unhindered by attempts to assess/ categorise or action on the fly
2. At the stage of assessment/ categorisation, a next stage of creativity seems to be more easily triggered because of the focus of attention that my conscious intellect has on a body of information/ thoughts/ musings that my other than conscious has produced.

Working separately, but together appears to be creating a stepped value-adding cycle of:

1. Release flow of thoughts/ feelings and unconnected ideas
2. Evaluate connections/ gaps/ conclusions
3. Address outputs from evaluation stage 2. and produce required further creative response
4. back to 2.

I’m not deliberately trying to systematise this. I don’t think this helps the process. But there is definitely a process….

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