Just Seven Things

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

11 Oct 2008

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….

Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity, Focus, Learning and tagged Brainstorming, Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity | Leave a comment

07 Oct 2008

The Power of Focus (how many times?) and AA Principles…

The Last Drop by Zsuzsanna Kilián

I apologise profusely for being a broken record on this. As a colleague today said in the kitchen at Madgex ‘Well of course, focus is the key to life’.

You can get a sense of the level of the conversation when I’d been suggested that we pull together a group of (we thought) similarly self-aware individuals who were all struggling with the same problem: the consistent management of their attention. I suggested we use the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous in terms of peer/group support and create our own steps for ‘recovery’.

The whole theory of it being a ‘recovery’ however really brought it home to me what a holy grail/ key to life it is. For me it fits as follows. In a pre-dawn moment at the weekend I brainstormed the following under the heading: ‘Observations, realities and reminders’

• MY CONTROL OF MY ATTENTION WILL be my lifetime USP/ core competence
• Deliberate practice is the only way that life gets easier
• Mindfulness and self awareness are the cornerstones to my future success
• Deliberate, clear and constantly referred to goals are at the heart of the engine room of effort
• Focus and consistent, persistent hard work takes a crazy amount of effort
• I only achieve through hard work and constant endeavour
• Deliberate focus on efficiency, volumes and throughput is the only way to get better faster
• A driver of hard work and persistence should be time for the creation of creative/ pleasure/ research

I decided just to put these out there in this post without any further explanation as my stake in the ground/ hat in the ring of what I intend to achieve in the short-term of my life

Posted in Action Orientation, Control, Focus, Mindfulness, Time Management and tagged Attention, Focus, Goals, Mindfulness, Time Management | Leave a comment

01 Oct 2008

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The Power of Game Playing Over the Unconscious

Floral Abstraction by Japonka

It’s been a while since I’ve explored one of my favourite topics: game playing. But I must update in this post on some of the ongoing reading from Claxton’s Hare Brain

I am pleased that my conclusions in August (bold in particular):

‘I think that the common component across play delivering personal change and enabling creativity and problem solving is at the level of this ‘what-if’ modelling. It enables us to try things out in the safe environment of our minds. Actual mental game play and just a natural relaxed ‘playful’ state of mind are not too far away from each other on a spectrum when considered from this perspective. Equally, I think that adopting a playful state to personal change scenarios enables the activity being undertaken to deliver the change on a repeated basis to go lower under the conscious ‘radar’. We build less mental conscious resistance to change when the activity supporting the change is tagged ‘game’.’

are mirrored (far more eloquently) on P118 of Claxton’s book:

‘When self esteem is at stake, delicate unconscious forms of information and intelligence seem to be disabled or dismissed, and the way we act becomes clumsy and coarse. When we are less ‘on our best behaviour’, the glimmerings of knowledge from the undermind are more available to guide perception and action…… The same kind of relief from pressure can be achieved by presenting the ‘test’ as if it were a guessing game, rather than a measure of achievement. When we treat something as a ‘pure guess’, we do not feel responsible for it in the same way. We are freed to utter things that come to us ‘out of the blue’, because there is no apparent standard of correctness or success against which they, or we, will be judged’