Just Seven Things

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

Archive for the tag “Game Playing”

24 Dec 2012

Nudge Yourself To Change

Back to the game playing idea, I read an interesting article in the Times loosely based around Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge.

Thaler and Sunstein ‘demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice’. They suggest how accepting our ‘peopleness’ and suggesting rather than telling will lead to greater success in change.

They show that by knowing how people think, ‘we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society’

Trial Run to Overcome Your Procrastination

Back looking at Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind and I’ve hit a brilliant point where our belief system is explored:

‘We possess a whole variety of beliefs, many of which are themselves unconscious or unarticulated, which specify, more or less rigidly, and in more or less detail, our character and our psychology. They define what kind of person we are, our personality or ‘self image’, and even how our minds are supposed to work.’

He goes on to query whether our beliefs about ability, and needs to protect self-esteem can also lead us to become more mentally clumsy when faced with a challenge that increases our vulnerability.

Back to the game playing psychology that I have explored many times here (see tags in sidebar to right), we can trick ourselves into activity.

By starting work on something as a ‘practice’ or trial run, we both overcome the procrastination build-up against starting actually do something ‘that we may not be good at/ may not be actually able to do’. But we also ‘open ourselves to the undermind’ and the creativity latent within us.

So the key is to just start. Have a bash. Act as if you can do it.

Posted in Action Orientation, Conscious and Unconscious, Game Playing and tagged Conscious vs Unconscious, Game Playing, Pretend | 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’