Just Seven Things

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

Archive for the tag “Communication”

23 Jun 2008

The Power of As If II

In my post on NLP and the power of using successful outcomes in business, I pulled together some thoughts on the power of acting ‘as if’ and ‘I am’. In relatively simplistic ways I considered the success to be achieved in modelling behaviours and also the impact on image to others.

What really struck me today while I’ve been preparing for a presentation on ‘The Behaviours of Managers and Leaders’ for Madgex‘s ideas and learnings programme was whether I’d missed a bit of my own point….

I wonder whether some of the power also lies in ‘the acting’ part of it. This observation comes from my realisation that my ability to learn and assimilate new information has much improved over the last few months of running nearly weekly presentations and workshops .There is the obvious explanation that if I’m not researching for a subject then I won’t be learning. Therefore in starting to swot-up on areas of interest for the presentations I’m putting more information in front of myself than I have done in the recent past.

Read more…

Posted in Business, Communication, Knowledge Management, Learning and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
19 Jun 2008
3 Comments

Influenced by Randomness

I’m reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s marvellous Fooled by Randomness.

A couple of initial observations:

1. I love the comment in the acknowledgements for the updated second edition: ‘human warmth: Something in our nature may help us grow ideas while dealing and socializing with other people’. It felt like an angle on my comments in my post on creativity and focus in talking.

2. I fear I am on a journey from being a ‘utopian who believe(s) in an idealized humankind….. your how-to-reach-happiness-in-twenty-steps and how-to-become-a-better-person-in-a-week book writer… thinking we (I) can control our nature at will and transform it by mere edict in order to attain, among other things, happiness and rationality’

Item 2. very much makes me observe (already) that I feel like something has shifted and that I currently feel like a different person from the one who wrote over a number of days the happiness system series of posts.

Posted in Communication, Conscious and Unconscious and tagged ,
12 Jun 2008
1 Comment

The Creativity and Focus of Talking

For a long time now I have wondered at how powerful it would be to be able to tap in to the creativity of a 121 conversation whilst on your own.

I’m talking about how focused you are on the topic under discussion. How everything else has to fade away from your brain for you to be able to formulate the words required to talk and have a conversation with the person you are in discussion with.

I’m not even sure it’s the same when you are in a group or a brainstorming. In these scenarios maybe you have the downtime to have the kind of internal conversations you may have on your own. Of course the 121 conversations will mean that the prompts from the person you are talking to – their thoughts and assertions – are going to trigger your creativity. But is there something more happening?

Maybe it’s just me and the way in which I work? However, some of the best thoughts that I have fall out at the end of conversations, or statements that I’m making (I’m admitting to a tendency to wax over-lyrically. A development point I am working on)

It’s as though in my brain working hard to a. construct a thought and b. formulate the words and sentence to clearly communicate, it enters a place of greater creativity. When in this place things seem to both occur and resolve at the same time.

Maybe this is why people start talking to themselves?

Posted in Communication, Creativity and tagged ,

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