The Open Book by Dan Christian Lavric
Just something that occurred to me today as I was taking a note of what one of me client senior managers had said to me that I wanted to learn from.
How many leaders and managers consciously look to learn from their teams? How many are both open to the fact that they could learn from the people that they’ve hired and that work for them, as well consciously seeking out opportunities.
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.
Optometry by S Nada
I read something fascinating at the weekend that really made me think. In David Allen’s book ‘Ready for Anything’, he entitles chapter 26 ‘The value of a future goal is the present change it fosters’: ‘It’s value is not about achieving something in time, but rather about how it changes the substance and quality of the decisions you’re making in this moment’…. ‘Imagining a positive outcome forward in time provides a believability of the scenario and matures the consciousness. In spite of ourselves, we begin to act as if it has truth’
Now how powerful is that?: It doesn’t matter what the goal is, or whether it is achieved. What matters is the present change that it catalyses and that this change is of value to you.
This thought was then compunded by further reading of Claxton’s Hare Brain (yes, I know it’s taking me forever to read)
Claxton made a comment about how the unconscious can take a set of inputs and act as if they were true. It will not question in certain circumstances the validity of the inputs unless they are tagged or raised within the conscious as being invalid: ‘the more vividly you can get someone to fantasise, the more likely they are subsequently to misrepresent this experience as a true memory’
To tie the two together therefore for you to see what I’m getting at:
1. We create a fully formed vision of a successful outcome (particularly using NLP techniques)
2. We consider in the first instance that this is a valuable vision or goal
3. We ensure that the vision or goal is as wild or inspiring as we want it to be (but we have to believe it to avoid the conscious stopping movement towards it)
4. We start to act as if it were true and unconsciously do all that we can in the present to take action to deliver
Job done.
Just Seven Things 