Category Archives: Mental Optimization

Rediscovering that Ancient Territory: Your Own Mind

Volume 2, Issue 33

All of us are naturally curious about our own selves. When someone who knew us when, someone older than ourselves, tells us a story about something we did when we were too young to remember it, we are raptly attentive.

If it were not for the culturally ubiquitous time pressure, we would have the same curiosity if offered a searchlight method to see more deeply into our own mind than ever before. This blog post offers just such a searchlight, followed by my own “field report” on using the method, and what I found.

Find 5 minutes when you can’t be interrupted and there is nothing dragging you away like a deadline. This means you probably won’t find time to try this until the weekend, so leave yourself a note somewhere you’ll see it Saturday or Sunday morning.

Sit with your eyes closed and back straight, with your head drawn up toward the ceiling. First, still the mind by experiencing your breath going in and out, without trying to control the breath in any way. After a half-dozen breath cycles or whenever you feel as if your mind is relatively still, begin the exercise.

The exercise is simply to watch for what happens at the very beginning of a thought or feeling. This is not as easy as it sounds because we tend to get so instantly caught up in the thought or feeling we forget that we are doing this exercise. That is, until through exercises very much like this, we find that we have gained true control of our minds. This tends to be a gradual process — we get better and better at it over time.

One trick is to pretend that you are a soldier and you are watching for the enemy that you know is going to come over the rise ahead. A thought or a feeling is going to arise. You are in a state of concentrated sharp attention and the game is to see that arising as quickly as possible, identify what it is, and be able to remember the experience of it as accurately as possible.

Before you sit down to do this experiment, consciously strip away everything you have ever thought about the nature of the mind, all preconceptions, theories, maps, structures, models, concepts, hidden and overt assumptions. This allows you to see what is really there without biasing it by slapping a label on it or gestalting it into a preconceived category.

In the addendum below — for our more scientifically minded readers who may be interested in the nascent science of consciousness that has been very slowly emerging over thousands of years — is my field report on my own experience as a result of doing this exercise. You might want to defer reading it until after you have done the exercise yourself, so that I do not bias your own findings.

Best to all for an enjoyable holiday season,

Bill

PS — Hope to see some of you Friday, November 30, 2012 at the ARF Industry Leader Forum, where I will be speaking on a panel at 1PM, “New Methods to Drive Insights into the Future”.

Field Report: Investigating Bill’s Brain from the Inside

In order to get into the two higher, most effective states of consciousness — the Observer state, where we can really see what is going on inside ourselves rather than being puppeteered by software in our heads, and the Flow state (Zone), where we are spontaneously doing everything just right — we need to become experts in the empirical study of our own minds and inner life. This week’s blog post is about classifying and understanding the basic building blocks of all inner experience — thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and perceptions. We see these not as four different things but rather a smaller number of things that metamorphose so as to seem to be four different things.

Why bother? The reason we are writing this is to ask you to consider — or to reconsider — all of the experiences you have had of your own mind, your own inner life. In effect, this posting is a brief exploration into the architecture of inner experience to offer you the opportunity to look for yourself, empirically, into your inner self. What are these things you call your thoughts, your feelings, your hunches, your perceptions?

Carl Jung defined the four functions of consciousness as perception, feelings, intellect and intuition — the latter referred to in day-to-day life as “hunches”. These are four kinds of events that can go on in consciousness. According to Jung, nothing else besides these four styles of experience can be experienced. Do you agree?

Modern psychology studies emotions, which are the objectified manifestations (heart rate, skin conductance, etc. — measurements taken by instruments) of what consciousness phenomenologically experiences as feelings.

Within consciousness, what we experience first is something inside that motivates us and moves us toward or away from something. Those are feelings. Instincts – hardwired genetic carryovers, part of the machine, inherited before birth – are partly responsible for some or all of our feelings. The rest arise from motivations we accumulated during our lives, stuff we learned or decided to want or not want as a result of our experiences since birth.

When I watch what goes on inside of me, it often starts with a feeling that is also somehow an image at the same time.

Then what happens inside is that another part of me takes that feeling/image and interprets it as a conscious thought — putting names, categorizations, and other specific recognizable details onto the original amorphous feeling/image.

I think that’s what a thought is. An interpreted feeling/image. I posit that Jung was not quite correct — thoughts and feelings are the same thing, at different stages of development.

Thoughts add details to feeling/images, turning them into specifications, bringing out additional information that had somehow been packed into the feeling/vision.

Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) classifies feelings as “kinesthetic”, making them bodily feelings albeit in some cases infinitely subtle. I’m not entirely convinced that all feeling/images can be felt in one’s body, but the term works intuitively.

Possibly feelings are the most substantial and primary actor, coming out of our most intimate connection with the vehicle we identify as the material sovereignty of our self, and arising to be transmuted into intuitions and/or thoughts and/or emotions and/or images/visions.

Perceptions coming in from the “outside” accompanied by an equal stream of feelings from “inside” – suggests that feelings are another sense, like seeing and hearing. In which case, we simply perceive, and the rest of the functions are what evolves from our perceptions. In other words, feelings are inner perceptions, and what we call sense perceptions are outer perceptions. Inner and outer perceptions are the raw stuff of experience, and as we turn them over in our minds, those perceptions turn into thoughts and/or intuitions.

So instead of Jung’s four-way classification of inner experience, I suggest that perceptions evolve into what Jung classified as thoughts (intellect) and/or hunches (intuition). Outer perceptions — the five physical senses — are what Jung called “perceptions” — and the inner perceptions are what Jung called “feelings”. Close inspection of these feelings, in my own empirical experience journeying within myself suggests to me that these feelings have both a body-type kinesthetic aspect and an imagistic aspect. The raw stuff of my inner life is comprised of feeling/image arisings that I then articulate internally as thoughts, with either words or not, or observe as hunches, without inner words.

Those feeling-image packets hit “the worder”, which often perfectly articulates the intent of the feeling-image packet. Just as often, “the worder” seems unable to get it right and comes out saying something other than what you intended — the right words don’t seem to come.

“The worder” physically sits above your left ear – Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area – decoding incoming words and encoding outgoing words, respectively. I observe that my own outgoing words are preceded by feeling-image packets (often invisible unless I am concentrating on seeing the details of inner head action), sometimes with more image, often with more feeling.

If it can be proven that both thoughts and feelings have a common root in the feeling-image packet (FIP), then Jung’s 4-way design would be reduced to 3-way. But what if it can be reduced further?

Intellect and intuition have always been seen as similar functions. Intellect reaches new conclusions step by effortful step. Intuition gets there in one leap, involuntarily, all by itself.

Sometimes when the intuition or hunch is particularly credible and important and came out of nowhere, we call it inspiration, suggesting help from some outside invisible source.

If these two sides of cognition may be thought of as a continuum, then the formula for consciousness would not be a series of 4 items in no particular order, it would be:

S→P→[FIPs→Cognition→Action]

Where “S” is stimuli, “P” is perceptions, and these impinge upon the consciousness (symbolized by the square brackets) in which what goes on are feeling-image packets that turn into cognitions that turn into actions we take as a result of the process. Many of these gratefully are non-actions.

We need maps to study consciousness. We also need meditation to concentrate on seeing what really goes on inside for oneself.

This was my somewhat unusual sharing of my inner experience. You might find it worthwhile to look inside of yourself to see what arises moment-to-moment — and see how it might compare (or not) with what I’ve described in this “field report”.

By looking inside, we can begin to cut through dogma and other people’s beliefs, and see for ourselves who we are in our inner worlds.

Best to all,

Bill

Optimizing the value of feelings in decision making

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What are feelings? How are feelings optimized?

Besides the input from the five physical senses, human consciousness receives feelings. Upcoming posts will offer experiments focused on this input stream, which you can conduct yourself. These experiments will establish whether you can achieve measurable improvements in your own effectiveness stemming from better channeling or processing of feelings-type information.

To prepare for the experiments, let’s contemplate: what are feelings?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.

Feelings are urges that arise to sensibility within us, within our minds and within our bodies. Feelings are experiences, states of consciousness resulting from motivations, sentiments, preferences or desires. These terms all really mean the same thing: motivations, what we value, what we want, what we are trying to get, what we want to avoid.

Feelings are the way we respond internally to external and internal phenomena, based on what we are trying to get and avoid, and how current events can help or threaten our desired outcomes.

Therefore feelings generally come in two valences, positive or negative. The feelings are positive if current events appear to favor our targeted outcomes, and they are negative if events seem to be heading away from what we want to have happen.

Positive feelings are valued universally in themselves. We don’t need to argue in favor of them, we all like them, and would like to have them all the time.

Negative feelings not only make us feel bad (by definition), they lower our immune system thus making us more prone to disease, and they distract our cognitive concentration thereby reducing our effectiveness. These bad feelings can also serve a positive function as an alarm system to get our attention to the problem fast. Ironically, if the bad feelings continue while one is grappling with the problem on a rational level, it will take longer to solve the problem.

When a problem arises and is sensed partially by the bad feelings within oneself, alerting us to focus on the challenge, it’s easy to say, “Turn off the alarm and get on with solving the problem.” However, it is not so easy because of attachment and Acceleritis.

Acceleritis, the unending acceleration of information entering the human brain each day, simply overloads the average human being’s capacity to do effective mental work of any kind. One kind of mental work we are supposed to get better at as we truly mature and “grow up” and become a “mensch” is to be able to sanely and in a balanced way take our feelings into account in our actions, without being stampeded or reduced to hand-wringing by those feelings. Acceleritis therefore also escalates the power of other mental subsystems that push in the direction of closure, black-and-white thinking, snap decisions, self-consistency and self-imitation — anything to simplify. Complexity is tacitly perceived as the main threat and pain causer. Acceleritis therefore lays many of us low with attachment — if Acceleritis were not present, we would actually have the mental and emotional maturity to cope with the situation without attachment.

What then is attachment?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.

Attachment is the excessive dependency on something. It is actually love carried too far. You love something so much (a wonderful thing) you cannot do without it, and so you fall prey to fear of losing it, and this distracts the mind so that Observer state and Flow state are impossible. Your mind tends instead — in the Acceleritis-induced state of Emergency Operating Procedure (EOP) — to go around in circles wallowing in the fear of loss or the sense of loss, or the anger and bitterness related to the loss or threatened loss, or the hopeless defeated depression of having lost it with no hope of regaining it. No useful mental work is achieved, no problem solving, no creative new leaps rising to meet the challenge sideways, as would occur in the higher states of effectiveness, namely, the Observer and Flow states.

As discussed in earlier posts, these effectiveness states are posited to be real physical states in the brain, differentiated from one another in measurable ways. Our Theory of Holosentience is based on the hypothesis that the primary dimension determining the state of the brain and consciousness is the degree of harmony among functional areas of the brain (inhabiting our entire sentience at once) — wherein thoughts, feelings, motivations, and the other aspects of self achieve a synchronous integrity in both the experientially measurable consciousness domain as well as the scientifically measurable biometric material domain.

This brings us back to feelings. Feelings have always been less studied and talked about than thoughts. Descartes did not say “I feel, therefore I exist.”

The word feeling originally may have related (Wikipedia says) to the sense of touch, and then its meaning expanded to include the ineffable internal sense that brings us more bits (information) than the five physical senses in terms of the way it affects our actions.

What evidence is there that we are generally more driven by our feelings than by our thoughts? Freud established that thoughts are more likely to be rationalized in support of feelings, rather than people being able to use their thoughts to control their feelings. And yet, how valuable it is to be able to do just that — to have the mental self-discipline to focus one’s thoughts effectively even when one’s feelings are in an uproar.

In a nutshell, feelings are a manifestation of our motivations colliding with the external world. What feeling would we have if we had no motivations?

Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.

You can actually discover this for yourself, by meditating. While there are many specific methodologies for meditation, all of them have this mind/gut mirror effect of showing you what your own motivations really are, where they have gotten you, and why you have each experience you ever have. You can also achieve such objectivity that you can, as it were, turn off certain motivations for the moment and see what that feels like — what visions of future possibilities arise now that X motivation is gone, how are you breathing, how do you feel?

This gaining of perspective through meditation makes you feel good. In other words, it not only helps you inspect deeply your own feelings and their consequences in the world, it also generates a feeling, and a very good one.

What is that very, very sweet feeling? Is it happiness? Is it ecstasy? Yes, it’s all those things and more. Then what is it?

It’s love. A word that provokes instant uneasiness all round. It’s a word that makes us all feel silly. The guy has lost it. You don’t talk about such things. Verboten. Just for family talk, not public talk. What an interesting word to have such an effect.

The F-bomb has become popular in meetings with both males and females, at least in certain businesses I have moved through in the last decade. It is more acceptable than the word “love” in such venues.

Beyond getting the author in hot water, what is love?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
$Pink sheer heart shape, computer generated fractal abstract background$ It is the master feeling, the one all the others come from. Love is white light whereas each feeling is a color.

Love is the residue that is left when motivations are tuned down into conscious perspective, in light of an open-minded empirical philosophy of demanding proof for everything, dropping every bit of information one has heard onto a trial workboard in the consciousness storage bin, and taking it offline in terms of decision making. This is the perspective of yoga. Zen. Meditation. Contemplation. Focused singlepointed attention. A way of life for millions of people today and throughout human history. These multi-strands of movements see themselves as part of a whole, although to those outside they seem like a bunch of cults that are all different. They are all the same in achieving perspective, distance from motivations that the bodymind otherwise assumes are immutable, non-negotiable. These methods are among those crystallized into simple steps in our book Freeing Creative Effectiveness.

Why does love remain when one has achieved objective distance from one’s motivations? What evidence do we have for that assertion, and what explanation do we have for it?

As an individual my only evidence for any assertion here are my own experiences. Every time through meditation I clear away the built-in locked-in powerful sway of my own motivations, I discover that I am content, every tiny aspect of what I am experiencing is enjoyable and interesting, I simply love it, all of it, I love myself, and everyone. Others have reported similar experiences, enough so that I know I am not an isolated case. In the next post we will offer a meditative experiment whereby this may also happen to you.

Why should it be so? Why should we feel love when we are not being driven this way and that by irresistible motivations?

In my cosmological Theory of the Conscious Universe (TOTCU) we are all dubs of the master consciousness, like MP3 copies of a master recording of a song, each of us a microcosm of the whole universal consciousness. When we rise above the petty motivations that seem so all-important to us in our daily lives down here on this one planet, we partake of the carrier wave motivation we share with the master consciousness, the one that is always there under all the other motivations, from which they draw their power. Love that is omnidirectional is the wellspring, the source from which we splinter off love of money, love of power, love of sex, love of the idea of getting that big job, and so on. All other motivations are modulations of love. So when the splinter motivations are quieted, the background radiation that differentiates itself into these “local” motivations becomes visible. This is how I explain it to myself, that I have this omnidirectional love experience whenever I am centered and immune to the compulsions to protect and seize what I feel I must have.

Acceleritis makes it very difficult for me to communicate this so that it is widely credible, because Acceleritis works against the stopping of the momentum of the mini-mind —so it seems ridiculous to assert that we already have an abundance of love without having to get anything we don’t already have. And yet, if you allow the possibility of a universal consciousness of which we are all a part, what motivation would it have to be doing this universe if it did not love the doing of a universe as a game in itself, the master game, the master art form, the ultimate form of self-discovery.

Acceleritis makes it much easier to deal with information overload by focusing on differences and categorization into buckets mostly on a single continuum from good to bad. This goes on constantly below our conscious awareness. Making automated decisions that are often the wrong ones. This leads to all sorts of feelings, many of them bad. Clouding over the master feeling that exists already, unbrokenly from beginning to end. It is there underneath all this debris. It comes out when we clear off the rubble.

Now that we’ve explored “feelings”, the next post will describe an experiment you can carry out yourself on the optimization of feelings.

Best to all

Bill

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PS – Humorously, Wikipedia says that feelings are the conscious subjective experience of emotion. This is funny because psychology defines emotion as the aspect of feeling that can be measured in the body, such as glandular secretions, muscle tensions, breathing rate, brainwaves, perspiration, etc., and you could just as easily say that feelings cause emotions as you could say emotions cause feelings. The leftover behaviorist psychology way of looking at it would be to make emotions more important — in fact 100% important, with feelings relegated to the trash bin of mind as epiphenomenon, a sound track that actually has no control of what the body is doing.

Such behaviorist Pavlovian thinking is now almost a century out of date, yet remnants of that thinking still creep into the generally excellent Wikipedia (which needs our donations incidentally to stay alive, and someone should tip them off to using advertising to support themselves, doing it in a PBS-like manner to the side all the way down from top to bottom, with true sponsorship tonality). Behaviorist ideas permeated so much of our thinking as a culture when they held reign that growing up we each got a dose of such ideas in the background conversations of adults we overheard. This is where we got the idea that we can just let the mind and body do their thing the way we always do and the way other people do, without any stopping to check out what the hell these operational action decisions are being based on.

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Creating a Mood of Mental Optimization in Your Organization, with the Power of Respect

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The charter of The Human Effectiveness Institute defines our mission as improving decision making. As you delve into our material you discover that it is clarity we aim to engender as the means to improved decisions. A clarity that is lacking due to Acceleritis and EOP .

Distraction is the agency through which Acceleritis diminishes our clarity. The control of distraction both externally and especially internally is the focus of many of our methods. But even when one is paying singlepointed attention/concentration to one thing, the Zone may be elusive.

The Zone block in that case could be motivational. If we are attached to the outcome, feel overmatched, or bored — if these types of feelings are present, they too are distractions, even if we are not consciously aware of them until someone or something brings them to our attention. Our methods are designed to help you notice these subliminal feelings in yourself sooner rather than later, with no need for something external to jog you to realize the presence of such feelings.

Mental optimization is the underlying idea behind Psychotechnology, which is our rubric for any methods that help you work better in the world through clearer decisions. Methods that move you from EOP to Observer state to the Zone.

Mental optimization is a mood — a modality of consciousness that shapes the choices consciousness makes, shapes its information processing priorities, shapes everything that consciousness does. The way large masses with their gravity shape spacetime.

Mood is a supervening variable. It is where consciousness starts out each moment before any thoughts or feelings, memories or sensory percepts, or hunches/intuitions, arise. This is why mood is the shaping governor of which specific thoughts/feelings/percepts/intuitions arise and get your attention.

If you run the show, you can create a mood of mental optimization in your organization. The list of benefits is endless. Everyone will be in a mood of enjoying the game of making everything better, each second, the way a hero/heroine does, without internal pettiness to ruin the perfect pleasure.

Organizations run enormously better this way.

It is like expanding what you do in optimizing a marketing plan (demand), and optimizing the supply chain, and optimizing the balance sheet — applied even more broadly to optimizing the entire operation.

It is also the single best thing you can do to mentor and make good on the promise of nurturing and developing your team members, bringing out the best in each one of them. Showing them the mood, getting them into the ultimate game, where they feel its gamelike fun through and through — this is the basis for which they will continually choose this mood until they wake up every day with it fully operational in their consciousness.

How do you do this? How do you get them into the mood?

It starts with you being in the mental optimization mood. Telling them it’s your new modality. Offering to share it with them. They will ask, “Okay, so what do I do first?”

You’ll tell them the first rule is to assume, as an operating principle regardless of right and wrong, that negativity inside is useless and obstructive to optimization.

You’ll have to give examples and practice this. The best examples will be closest to home. Describe how you did it yourself — something happened recently to the organization and your first feeling was anger at certain people or entities — then you quickly set that aside as not optimal and began your search for problem definitions, opportunities hidden or obvious, and solution oriented win-win action plans, including provision for major refinement based on feedback along the way. Give a few examples of how you turned a challenge into a win for the organization by not wasting time with negativity nor letting it interfere with your ability to conjure a win-win solution.

Obviously you can’t come up with perfect win-win ideas while you want someone to lose because you are mad at them.

You’re even less effective at hurting them when you are sucked into negativity. Not that we espouse hurting anybody as a reasonable goal for an organization. Just pointing out how useless and counterproductive negativity really is.

But, dear reader, I hear you thinking, “Sure, Bill, you already told us about negativity in the last post. What else is there?”

There is respect. Respect is the second principle worth sharing here. Everyone wants it. The thing that usually causes people to quit ultimately comes down to respect. Either they didn’t feel it enough, or the position somehow compromised their internal self-respect, or usually both hand in hand.

Of course most people are in EOP almost all the time, so although their true self wanted respect, the way this manifested was that their ego was wounded and/or they were attached to having their egos flattered. This was coming not from their self that was born, but rather from the software layer functionally called the ego and structurally consisting of neurons built in the brain since birth, which exhibit the robotical behavior that highjacks the mind — this is EOP.

These people could have been kept in the organization by providing them true respect in the right ways and not necessarily by fanning the flames of their ego. What is the right way to show respect? There are many, including:

Not interrupting.
Providing just the right degree of autonomy i.e. not micro managing.
Not utilizing lateral second guessing as a quality control process.
Offering suggestions in the right way i.e. aimed at optimization goals held in common by those in the conversation, and without putting down anyone else’s ideas.

Not an exhaustive list. Let’s delve more deeply into each of these just for clarity.

You should run the meetings you are in either openly or subtly. If it’s someone else’s meeting, be subtle but make sure people are always allowed to finish their thoughts (method 1). Exceptions would be the rare but obvious cases where someone is talking too much and slowing things down. In those cases be careful to use respect and ensure respect from the group to the person who is being longwinded, while keeping things moving. Often the way to do this is to offer an offline meeting with that person at a later time. At that meeting you would employ method 4 above — showing respect in the way that you offer corrective constructive feedback. Your employee will appreciate the feedback if you do it in the right way — the optimization focus with respect — not a put-down.

The optimization mood gives you permission — in fact mandates you — to tell employees the hard truth of what they are doing wrong — but with respect so they can actually appreciate it.

Flashback war story. Hal Miller, my first boss in the media business, was a great mentor and implementer of all these principles. In his training program with two other people at the time we developed full marketing communications plans for a fictitious brand. He had each of us present to him alone in conference room with him pretending to be George Washington Hill, CEO of American Tobacco Company in the 30s and early 40s. Hal’s feet were up on the conference table and there were holes in his socks. He smoked a big cigar and interrupted annoyingly five times on every flipchart.

All of 21 at the time, I was polite at first and gradually became snarky in shooting down his objections one by one by my superior understanding of the technical research underpinning my case.

Later in the hall he came up to me and said “You know you really knew your stuff, and were brave in defending your recommendations,” and at this point he pinched my cheek and looked into my eyes, “but you didn’t make us love you.” Thus he showed respect for my work while giving me feedback that I was then able to appreciate.

I won’t explain micro managing (method 2) since we all know what it is — giving a person less autonomy than is customary across all industries based on that person’s experience, title, and/or responsibilities.

Method 3 above relates to a subtler form of micro managing, where a boss has one person within the organization systematically second-guessed by peer review, as a matter of course.

All four of these methods are forms of restoring respect that has diminished within an organization as a result of sub-optimal practices slowing things down and leading to sub-optimal decisions as well as to losing employees.

So far in these posts we have covered the first three principles of creating a culture of optimization within your organization:

State the goal of optimizing everything and everyone. Explain it, give personal examples, stay the course over time.
Explain and follow the Negativity Rule. When broken follow the Respect Rule and bring everyone back to optimizing.
Explain and follow the Respect Rule. When broken follow the Respect Rule in bringing it back for everyone, understanding that it is all for optimization.

The optimization mood feels better, and it’s also more fun.

Click here for a relevant sample from our book FREEING CREATIVE EFFECTIVENESS.

Best to all,

Bill