Tag Archives: Mind Magic

Inquire of your Feelings and Motivations

Volume 3, Issue 45

Raoul’s face showed no change, while inside he suddenly seethed with impatient anger at his spouse, whom he saw as going off onto a long negative diatribe tape he had heard too many times before without ever saying a word to her about it.

Feelings are expressions of motivation — your own motivation. Thoughts have great value of course but are not necessarily brilliant readers of your own feelings. Thoughts must make extensive effort before truly understanding one’s own motivations. Isn’t that strange? Thoughts and feelings working together can make your motivations more clear to yourself than thoughts alone.

Combining these ideas points to the need to put some effort, and not thought effort alone, into discerning your own feelings and motivations. Else you would not understand yourself completely enough to be in Observer state.

But first, what is the evidence that our thinking is not automatically adept at reading our own feelings? Do we not quickly realize when we are in a bad mood, or good mood, and isn’t it almost always obvious what caused it? Can’t we articulate the explanation in our own mind?

At that level of understanding, this is true. In most cases we are quick and confident judges when we think about what we are feeling. We can categorize the feeling into positive vs. negative, and instantaneously we make a mental thought connection with either an image or an amorphous memory of events leading up to the feelings.

This program loop does not even recognize that it’s worth tying into one’s own motivations and goes on somewhat blind to the actual priorities that determine action even when it is not what you, in your thoughts, necessarily planned to do.

At the Observer level of understanding, one experiences the ability to discern the micro steps that are going on inside as one event leads to another. These events are of the four Jungian types of experience, i.e. thoughts, feelings, intuitions (hunches), and perceptions; or the memory of these four types of experience re-arising.

In Observer state, if you are focused inwardly, you can detect that first there are feelings, then there are guesses being made about those feelings, then there is closure on one guess, the guess usually being a pre-existing category with a name. If the feelings exceed a threshold of arousal there is then gloating over and seeking subconsciously to re-experience and lengthen “good” (upbeat) feelings, or to repress, get angry or afraid or melancholy about, or think objectively about in order to fix “bad” (negative) feelings. Below that level of arousal the mind typically moves on to more important and/or pressing matters.

From the perspective of the Observer state there is a skeptically-objective further questioning of the guess before the feeling of closure is allowed. There is realization that outcomes typically have more than one cause so any classification into a single box is reductionism, leaving out significant parts of the system at work, which is the very thing one is seeking to understand more.

In the Observer state too — if one has been in that state long enough for significant processing to have occurred during these times — one is aware that behind the feelings lay the motivations, which the feelings are merely the expressions of.

Acceleritis has made the Observer state an atypical experience because of the drive toward closure in the avalanche of data falling upon the newly-evolved brain, which has only been in its present configuration for the most recent 20% of the time since we came down from trees, and which only taught itself written language in the most recent 0.6% of the time since we de-arborealized. The printing press was invented in the most recent 0.04% of that time, television in the last 0.0065%, Internet in the last 0.0018%, and mobile/social as we know it now in the last 0.0002%. Notice that the jarring shocks are occurring more frequently, accelerating — hence “Acceleritis”.

In Acceleritis mode we are happy to throw the feelings into a simple bucket, with a simple cause, and move on. We do not grasp the importance of more deeply understanding our own feelings and motivations. This is one of the unfortunate side effects of Acceleritis. We do not grasp the importance of a lot of things.

The key part of the feelings system is the moment at which you name it as good, bad, or neutral. I find that “Bad” tends to get oversubscribed. The very feeling of life in the Acceleritis field is background radiation negative. When in doubt, go negative, is the subconscious mental rule at that logic gate.

Avoid hasty closure is the takeaway. More about that in this excerpt from my book, Mind Magic.

Put off deciding that you are in a bad mood. In my case this universal problem manifests most often as feeling like I am not as happy as I should be. I find that just seeing how ridiculous this is, is enough to make me LOL which invariably ups my mood.

The rest of the sensorium seems to also take a clue from the frontalis and zygomaticus muscles of the face. In a devilish feedback loop, if you are always smiling your body will always assume you must be happy. The song “Smile” is actual psychotechnology. A frown on your face automatically triggers a descending mood spiral.

Less than a second after seething with impatient anger at his spouse, Raoul was observing that seething and trying to see what it was: could he feel it in his body somewhere? The feeling ebbed away into nothingness to be replaced by a faint everyday joy in the moment, mildly curious about its look, feel, and meaning, as his mind let go the memory of the momentary inner process and felt soft emotional receptivity focused on his beloved.

Happy New Year to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

Can Creativity Be Induced?

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Volume 3, Issue 38

Waves booming, the expletives of gulls as they glide like white boomerangs buzzing us, scouting for handouts. I’m sitting with Lalita at breakfast on the terrace at the Malibu Beach Inn, reading The New York Times and I come across a book review reprinted from the Financial Times of London of the new book The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas by David Burkus.

According to Burkus, taking the review at face value, Plato and the other dons of antiquity were deluded and superstitious in believing that creativity was conferred only on certain humans and that moments of inspiration were given to them by the gods; that even today the popular notion that an “Aha!” moment exists is foolishness, and that creativity really comes down to hard work by large numbers of people working together to generate “creative ideas”. To which my first thought is “Why does it have to be one way and not the other, why can’t there be some truth in all of these ideas?”

The author reportedly goes on to point out that the efforts by organizations to instill increased creativity often backfire, instead causing people to conform so as to belong to a new groupthink where they hold back ideas that they fear would rile the comfort of the tribe and thus cause themselves to become treated like outsiders. This part also has the ring of some truth in it, as I’ve been in such situations, though found myself and a few others quite willing to bear the risk of contrarian creativity.

The book deserves to be read before coming to any conclusions about it, and it surely provokes useful thought if even its review does so. Yet all books that take seeming black and white positions from the title forward would in my estimation have low likelihood of portraying the complexity of the real world as it exists. I will apologize in this space if after reading it I must eat those words, for the review is not the book, the map is not the territory, as S.I. Hayakawa liked to say.

In my practice both at Bill Harvey Consulting and at The Human Effectiveness Institute I’ve often been asked to lead workshops aimed at increasing individual and group creativity and performance. My book Mind Magic is specifically tasked at doing that, and one edition of the book was even experimentally titled Freeing Creative Effectiveness. So as you can see I have a dog in this race, and a potential axe to grind. 😀

Can I prove that I’ve ever induced creativity by a book or workshop or any other means? Alas, no scientific proof yet (we’ll do A/B testing at some point), although anecdotal circumstantial evidence abounds in thousands of letters from readers, including this review from Dan Goleman:

“Highly recommended… will loosen your moorings and open you to creative vistas.” — Dr. Daniel Goleman

Science of course considers individual reports subject to placebo effect and various other biases including the desire to be nice.

In group work, there have been similarly non-definitive measurements. When Richard Zackon and I did an ARF creativity workshop last year it got good scores from the participants and many nice emails. Several people even followed up with telephone consultations. And beyond kind words there has been evidence that one day’s worth of a creativity-inducing workshop has had major positive effect on the directions that leaders of major companies took soon afterward.

I was amazed at the creativity I found in high-ranking officers of two different military branches during workshops I led. In one war game I created, a female officer in charge of a powerful group of units took the bait of my scenario to find a solution even more creative than the one I was going to reveal at the end had nobody thought of it.

The placebo effect and its counterpart in groups, the Hawthorne Effect, suggest that false effects can be caused simply by paying special attention to people. And yet why call these effects “false”? If one can remove pain with salt water and the powers of the subconscious why not use it? If one can cause creative behavior with hand waving, why not take all you can get?

Coming back to the Myth of Creativity book, one of its conclusions ascribed by the review is that creativity is best fostered in organizations where it is challenged. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and compressing a spring or irritating an oyster analogies do apply to inducing creativity. I used to tell my team at a certain large agency that the repressive conduct of my boss at the time was an opportunity to be “creative within constraints”.

At the aforementioned ARF creativity workshop, we had the participants anonymously hand in ratings of their own organization on a ten-point scale of creativity repressiveness and siloed confusion. The range of scores we received covered practically the entire range from zero to ten. Take a look at your own organization and see what score you would give it. 🙂

Other than distributing our book and video to your team or doing our workshop, or doing similarly with other interveners from outside the organization, what else can you do? Guard against simulated creativity-inducing exercises, which can backfire. Give people autonomy within the bounds you feel each is equipped to handle and then give a bit more. Give people permission to try new things even if they might fail. When someone screws up, be kind yet honest. Don’t just simulate that, be authentic. Check the effect on target to be sure you’re not kidding yourself to make yourself feel good when you might have actually crushed them.

One way I found it easy to get bollixed organizations to be more creative is to interview the employees and get their creative ideas and then feed those ideas to the top person who can then take credit. That person was always the bottleneck and would only act on creative ideas if he/she could take credit for them. Before the intervention, good ideas had come up in meetings and been shot down, and months had passed until the top person was able to forget that the idea had been mentioned before, then putting it in new garb and “inventing” it as his/her idea. Thus the organization lurched forward, driven by organizational creativity with a delay cycle equal to how long it took the top person’s ego to forget and reinvent.

The notion that the “Aha!” moment is a fiction strikes me as funny. I have had this experience all my life, of ideas putting themselves together in a flash. Carl Jung and William James and many others define the intuition as the mind’s way of suddenly making logical connections among bits of information lying around. Saying that this process does not exist is amusing. Daniel Goleman’s description of the way the brain works at these moments would seem to add further veracity to the existence of “Aha!” moments in fact.

As to Plato’s being superstitious in considering that inspiration can come from levels above human consciousness, please see my new book when it comes out, You Are The Universe: Imagine That, which postulates that all observed phenomena including the paranormal and religious can be accounted for by my Theory of the Conscious Universe, in which we are all one Self living through many avatars, one biocomputer server networked to many clients. In that picture of reality, Plato could easily have been right.

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

U.S. Shutdown and Showing the World What We Are Made Of

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Volume 3, Issue 34

Although there have been 17 shutdowns since 1977, this is only the second time in our history that Congress has threatened not to raise the debt ceiling, which would result in a potential default or at least slowdown on paying U.S. debts and could occur as soon as October 17. We all know what happened when Congress came to the edge of this cliff in 2011 — Standard & Poor’s lowered the perfect AAA rating enjoyed by the U.S. since such ratings have been in place — and the stock market took a significant hit (down 20% in the following months).

And that was without going over the cliff — markets reacted to the uncertainty created by a dysfunctional Congress in bringing the U.S. up to that edge.

Yes, we need to get our fiscal house in order, but threatening the full faith and credit of the U.S. is not the way to do it.

That said, something is telling us to balance our budget now, get creative about finding ways to be more efficient. The handwriting on the wall is saying it’s finally time to stop kicking the can down the road.

Meanwhile the first manifestation of our leadership is not to get creative and solution- oriented, but to continue the finger pointing. This just wastes time during an emergency, which seems practically a treasonable offense.

Too bad Congress keeps getting paid while other Federal workers are laid off. The surest way to concentrate their minds on solutions would be to embargo their pay. However, there is no time to consider options that would take too much time to activate; it is a time to be pragmatic about what can realistically be done quickly. Making Congress more accountable is something that should be tackled long range, not now.

This is the kind of challenge that can bring out the best in people. First they have to get past the anger and blame, the natural first reactions. Those with the right stuff will get past those predictable but useless reactions the fastest. And on to solution thinking and creativity. Not just passionate speeches.

Creativity in government is almost an oxymoron. Old ideas are hauled back out again whenever any challenge arises. The print/digital newsweeklies bring to light more creative ideas about what governments can do than government leaders themselves offer, despite hardworking staffs generating some creativity that I suspect runs into walls.

Scenarios that we would like to see, things each of us can do right now to help out in this crisis:

Citizens write to advise each of their representatives that they will not get another vote unless they stop the blame game and start leading with creative solutions. (My great friend and lifelong mentor Norm Hecht writes: “The founding fathers did not foresee professional politicians. [Tighter] Term limits needed, otherwise giveaways get them elected.”)
Citizens set up a website where people could pledge voluntary donations to the Federal government. (Better yet, a highly-visible news or other organization takes on the job of publicizing and handling the compilation of pledges.) I will pledge an extra $2000/year over taxes until the budget is balanced. I would hope richer folk, corporations and even wealthy nonprofits would pledge donations at many higher orders of magnitude. Maybe some people from other countries would pledge too — America is still an important part of many people’s dream for what the world will be someday. If the donations equate to an average of $1000 for every person in the USA, that would be about $300 billion/year extra revenue to help the turnaround happen faster. I’m sure most of us remember the climax of the great Frank Capra classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” where the townsfolk appear out of nowhere with money that had been stuffed in their mattresses to bail out Jimmy Stewart’s hometown bank.
The U.S. does not accept volunteers working without pay because of the potential liability that these people will demand later to be paid for the work they did. This policy should be changed using release forms as the mechanism to remove that liability issue. People who can’t afford to pledge money could pledge their time if they can.
Since a large part of the shutdown is the Republican desire to thwart Obamacare, doctors and other health care professionals who have new health care ideas should step forward and speak up publicly, offering their recommendations for improving the existing Obama law. This could contribute to conflict resolution between the parties. Crystal Run Healthcare in Middletown NY is one example of how doctors are taking the lead in the development of accountable, data-driven, efficient and effective health care. Let’s rechannel the idea of destroying universal health care into refining the plan so that all can support it.
Each department in government should be mandated to write a plan to become more efficient and deliver more for less, and to write this plan in the next week. They need to be given a target e.g. 20% saving, or whatever the economists determine is the needed reduction for year one in order to reach a balanced budget and declining debts by x date. Tax revenues need a shot in the arm too, which realistically can only come from removing tax protections enjoyed only by the people and corporations who need them the least, i.e. by adopting whatever adjustments Warren Buffett might propose. This efficiency activation has been proposed many times before and never implemented except at state and local levels as a result of Federal cuts. But the need has never been as pressing as it is now.
A week later all efficiency plans and voluntary donation pledges should be summed up in the news media, and a government consensus forecast should be issued, showing the year not too far off when the U.S. government is fiscally back on track again, not increasing but paying down debt. Any departments whose plans fail to achieve the targeted percentage will be exposed to criticism, a point which should be made in advance.
Efficiency will probably mean temporarily having higher unemployment as Federal jobs are cut. Plans will be needed for retraining and helping these people find jobs mostly in the private sector, except for urgent infrastructure rebuilds, which can effectively be done by any sector as demonstrated by FDR.
Long-term changes emanating from such a new plan would include using the schools to better prepare individuals to discover the work at which they would excel and be happiest. This would include work-study programs with internships in the summer and at other times during the school year, with the goal of helping people find careers and jobs earlier in life that will make them happier and more successful.
Other long-term implications of the new plan might be to push down many non-military government functions to more local levels where it will be easier to find creative solutions for challenges such as taking people off of Federal welfare rolls by providing local government roles and helping to connect to nongovernment jobs they can usefully perform. This stuff is much easier among neighbors. Plato believed that city-states would lose the ability to manage complexity as soon as the Polis grew to over 1000 people. The degree of built-in inefficiency of trying to manage 300 million people across so many aspects of life demands a more massively parallel approach with distributed tasks rather than centralized ones.
Based on the hopeful soundness of this plan and its wide nonpartisan support, we will have showed the world — and ourselves — once again what we are made of.
With our own confidence restored, we might find it the right move to increase the debt limit slightly right now, but with declining limits over time to ensure that the efficiency plan is followed.
In the context of these positive changes, if it still becomes necessary to delay debt payments slightly, the world should not overreact. The idea of prioritizing certain debts over others has already been criticized by Wall Street as undermining confidence in America forever, and this is the last thing the world needs. The debt ceiling has to be raised, and the only responsible way to do that is with an efficiency plan to turn the whole situation around, a plan that requires the best minds to be heard in an organized and fast process. This should be facilitated by the highest digerati giving up sleep for the next month if necessary to collate all the ideation.

Can something like this be what actually happens?

What is the alternative?

Best to all,

Bill

P.S. I’ll be signing the latest edition of my book MIND MAGIC at the Inquiring Minds Bookstore in New Paltz, NY on Sunday, October 13 between 4 and 5 PM. Please stop by if you are in the area.

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

Inner Head Language

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Volume 3, Issue 33

My daughter Nicole and I were at a book fair today, ostensibly selling my book Mind Magic from our table alongside other local authors at their tables. I say “ostensibly” because my real motivation for attending these events is to see if and how people can be helped to reach higher levels of consciousness. Everything is reconnaissance with readiness to engage with any seeker. The average seeker today has seen it all and has the t-shirt.

My great friend Stanford Silverman, who came from 25 miles away to buy yet another copy of Mind Magic, summed the answer up as “99.9% actually get no benefit from books.” He went on to say, “when the supreme reality is not understood, the reading of books/scriptures is useless, and the study of books/scriptures is useless when the supreme reality has been realized.” This is the viewpoint of a person who has found a Living Master and has devoted his service thereto, for its own sake and also to receive the kind of grace that has been observed to effect great positive changes in people.

Nicole later questioned this pessimism about our work and I repeated the stats I had shared with Stan, that out of 35,000 books sold we’ve received over 2000 letters/emails/cards from readers saying the book changed their lives in a way they wanted to thank us for. That’s 5.7% — in a considerably higher ballpark than the 0.1% stat Stan offered. And 5.7% only counts the hand-raisers, not those who got benefit but didn’t let us know. I also told her we are not doing this to see a complete world change as a result (though that outcome would be nice and was my initial vision) but rather we are doing it because it’s the right thing to do, sharing this stuff based on the 2000+ hand-raisers. Whatever effect it will have, it will have.

A man asked what the book was about and Nicole answered “It’s about you,” and I explained that “the way the language speaks to your subconscious, it brings out your own higher Self.” The language in the book is my own “inner head language” — it came unbidden and I didn’t put it into the King’s English — and as a result, coming from my subconscious, it seems to absorb directly into the subconscious layer of the reader.

One reader said it like this: “The communication so transformed and met me as to feel as though it was clearly mind-to-mind.” (Jordan Salison, Insight Meditation Society, Barre, MA)

And this, from a review in New Age Journal, “resonates with the higher aspects of our beings and is experienced as truth…”

You can get a flavor of Mind Magic here.

I am always curious to hear what I will say when a person asks me what the book is about because something different always comes out. In a bookstore I don’t want to rattle on any more about the brain, Observer state and Flow state (the Zone), I want to relate to daily life, not its underlying science.

“It’s a mood, an attitude, the book gets you into. You see opportunities to take elements in the situation and move them around in ways you actually can, to be a win for everybody. Including stuff inside yourself, which you can move around to create a win/win inside yourself.”

The most useful answer we found was to suggest, “Open a page at random and see if it speaks to you.” This worked 4 out of 4 times, at which point I fled to write this column, leaving Nicole for a hostage. One woman said it understood her, that it was exactly what she had been thinking about. The others got absorbed and read for quite a while.

In the 70s, when the human potential movement got that name it was rediscovered that intellect alone does not change behavior, emotion and/or the subconscious, something deeper than the rational mind, must be involved. This goes back to even before the Eleusinian Mysteries, before the cave paintings, as old as homo sapiens ourselves, 200,000 years. The shaman was wise by definition, understanding at a gut level that someone not-yet-wise needed certain stimuli and experiences to become wise, and so he/she did the needful. Sometimes it worked. Maybe it nearly always worked a little.

Emotion, imagination, and/or the subconscious are engaged by the “inner head language” in Mind Magic in much the same way that these beyond-rational faculties are brought into play by art, poetry, music, theater. It is this linguistic subtlety as much as the insights that make it possible to move people into the higher states of consciousness with a book — not just Mind Magic but also other books whose neurolinguistic approach engages with the deeper levels of self.

This form of linguistic communication with more than just the rational mind could be more deeply investigated by brain researchers in order to optimize the psychotechnology. This is one of the goals of the Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI).

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.