Just Seven Things

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

Archive for the category “Successful Outcomes”

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
29 Aug 2008
1 Comment

How do Vision and Mission Improve Communications and Group Interaction?

Tug O' War by Kevin Luu

Tug O' War by Kevin Luu

I was struck today by how powerful the outcomes of setting a good, clear vision and mission are: particularly in how they impact communications and group interaction.

They impact various types of communications, including personal, interpersonal and corporate (internal and external):

1. Communicating clearly to yourself to focus and prioritise the activity that will maximise your ability to achieve your mission and vision

2. Amongst a group sharing the same vision/ mission (i.e. a corporate, not-for-profit, social group etc.), there are a number of benefits:

– The creation of a common set of values: they naturally align to support delivery of a commonly held set of outcomes

– The creation of common underlying goals and activities: clear actions enabling all members to pull in the same direction

– The creation of common understanding: even if people are communicating at apparent cross-purposes (in non-mission/vision groups), in those with mission and vision, common understanding shines through whatever fuzzy interaction takes place

– The acceptance of difference is enhanced when all parties are known to share the same vision/ mission

– The allowance for divergent personality traits: less drive for normalising behaviour if it doesn’t matter in the short-term relative to long-term goal achievement

– The allowance for ‘journey’ differences: the route to a goal matters less if the achievement of that goal is shared 

3. A group seems more aligned to external observers when the purpose is common

4. Shared vision and mission (more obviously) makes the outwards communication of shared purpose easier

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Posted in Communication, Successful Outcomes, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , ,
16 Jun 2008
1 Comment

The Power of As If

I went to a speech by Simon Woodroffe of Yo Sushi fame about three years ago. Fascinating guy, and he told a great number of stories about acting ‘as if’ and the power of ‘I am’ (sorry if I’m paraphrasing/ butchering what was said but they’ve percolated away since then and I think they’re important to relate)

There’s a great one about him getting continued funding for his first restaurant because the Chairman of his main supplier made an assumption about his size because of the ‘support’ from organisations like JAL, Sony, Nippon (could be making these up here – apologies). But big Japanese firms whose logos adorned the original Yo Sushi menus. The beauty of the story being that he’d written to them and said that he’d like them to be sponsors/ supporters, that no money was required., and that if he hadn’t heard from them by x time he’d assume a yes. He didn’t hear back from them but in effect their ‘support’ enabled him to survive. The power of ‘As If’.

He referred at the end of his talk to developing a box of ‘I Ams’. Numerous ways of being and acting that could be adopted when required in different situations and to achieve different objectives.  

I didn’t really make the full connection at the time about what underpinned the ‘I Ams’ and ‘As Ifs’, but since then I’ve seen more and more evidence for the huge progress to be made in achieving a goal or effecting an outcome by starting off by acting ‘As If’ or already being that ‘I Am’. The power of acting and thinking in this way provides a huge accelerant in NLP terms; especially for the core function of modelling behaviours.

I then was reminded about quotes at the back of some Beeson Gregory (now Evolution Securities) marketing literature when we were using them as brokers during the set-up of Vinopolis. One was from Aristotle Onassis:

“To be successful, keep looking tanned, live in an elegant building (even if you’re in the cellar), be seen in smart restaurants (even if you only nurse one drink) and if you borrow, borrow big”

The Power of As If

Posted in Business, NLP, Successful Outcomes and tagged , ,

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