Tag Archives: Observer State

Fun Was Had at the ARF Creativity Playshop

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Volume 2, Issue 28

Of course I had fun. I always have fun presenting and this was so experimental — imagine media researchers, at least one copywriter, and other marketing people meditating together as part of an industry event — I felt like a kid again. Co-presenter and Playshop co-creator Richard Zackon and I alternated in sharing research findings on the creative process and suggesting best practices as well as offering various experiential exercises. Professional coach Jane Harris supported the fun as well, at one point pulling a rabbit out of a hat and at another getting everybody to wear clown noses. The ARF was generous with its refreshments and support as well as participation by Don Gloeckler, Don Sexton, Horst Stipp, and interns Danielle Hemsley and Raphaela Hodgdon. The feedback sheet Richard passed around was responded to by 16 of the 18 participants, with high ratings for presenters, content, and fun, which got the highest rating.

Did we make a difference in terms of their creativity? Time will tell. There are free follow-up sessions and a post-questionnaire yet to come, which may give us some early indication of any increase in creativity, performance, and/or satisfaction. We’re also sending out, free, the book + DVD kit the Human Effectiveness Institute offers as a 60-day course in Creative Effectiveness.

We were happy to see that important companies sent their people to a creativity intensive, one of the largest media companies sending four people. A top car company sent someone whose nametag I hadn’t noticed — I was happily surprised to find this out the next day in a meeting with that company.

I’m also happily surprised to see that the ANA is now offering a creativity workshop. This is a terrific sign. As Richard pointed out early in the four-hour session on October 3, IBM in a 2010 global survey of CEOs, found that creativity was selected as the most crucial factor for future success.

Xyte, a self-administered online questionnaire that sheds intense clarifying light into the way one thinks — which of 16 types of thinker one is — was made available free, courtesy of Gerry Klodt and Linda McIsaac of Xyte. One participant who found it revealed her to herself in a way that was “spot on” asked for and received the two extra free passes we had been given to access Xyte, for members of her team.

The participants were given many methods to stimulate their own creativity and to look at old problems in new ways. Someone asked how to retain singlepointed focus while necessarily multitasking and was given the method of staying focused through complexity, rotating the concentration among the incoming data streams. This is described in greater detail in Chapter 7 of our book Freeing Creative Effectiveness. A few heads nodded knowingly (Don Sexton’s was one of them) at another point when I mentioned using a notepad to take down side ideas that arise while you are focused on one specific task, so the mind does not feel these ideas tugging one.

During the final exercise the participants generated many creative ideas of their own around social media, including a fascinating schematic by Don Gloeckler that could become the framework for studying the diffusion of memes through the population.

Don Sexton objected at one point when I was characterizing stress as being the enemy of the Zone (Flow State), the state of highest creativity that we were aiming at by route of the Observer State. He and I agreed that stress could produce the phenomenon of “little old ladies” suddenly able to carry large heavy men out of burning buildings. It was a moment to remind ourselves that the principles being passed along in the training were none of them black-and-white absolute rules but needed to be balanced against each other customized for every situation. At an earlier point I had cautioned that anything we said should not be applied so absolutely as to become the next block to creativity.

After the session it occurred to me that I should have said we would never have burned down the building just to get the “little old lady” into the Zone for a few minutes, although the experience might lead her to more constant Flow state capability — the cost of the building and perhaps other lives would have been grotesquely too high. So there has to always be a tradeoff between the good of the Flow state and the cost involved — courses like these being a better way to approach Flow maximization than artificially creating stress situations. (For the record, the OSS and many contemporary military and paramilitary organizations did/do in fact purposely create stress in order to gain expected benefits in the performance of individuals.)

Hopefully HR leaders at major companies will take us up on our offer to take this Playshop on the road. The Playshop could be used as part of a management offsite, extending the current Playshop into a fully customized wargame focused on the future of the specific company involved. Having created and led one such wargame recently with high-level U.S. military officers focused on long-range planning, and conducted scenario stimulation with top managements of many advertisers, media and agencies, this is the part that could afford participants and their companies the most benefit. The Playshop at ARF by its nature of having many companies in one room could not delve into confidential matters pertaining to one company. Skills could be sharpened but the focus of these skills on close-to-home opportunities and challenges could not happen in such an event. Companies that take us up on the offer to go in for more customized Playshops can begin creating their company’s future with the shackles taken off of thinking.

Best to all,

Bill

Do Something Different this Advertising Week

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Volume 2, Issue 25

Can You Make a Quantum Leap in Your Own Creativity?

If you’re in Manhattan the first week of October, it’s likely you will be attending some of the great events that will be happening as part of Advertising Week. The one event that is totally different from all the others will be the first-ever ARF Creativity Playshop led by myself and Richard Zackon, the formidable facilitator of the Council for Research Excellence (CRE). From 8AM to noon on Wednesday, October 3, come join us to stimulate your mind in some new directions conducive to breakthrough thinking. This will be an intensive immersion with groundbreaking participatory experiments that have the power to change your ways of engaging challenges and opportunities at work and everywhere.

Before the event, participants will receive the Human Effectiveness Institute 60 Day Course consisting of a book, a DVD, and a guide; a Playbook designed by Richard Zackon and myself to capture realizations stimulated by the pre-event-through-post-event process; a questionnaire to set your own goals and to later measure the extent to which they were reached; and the Xyte self-profiling instrument, which is a sensitive new litmus paper test to discern your strengths in mental/emotive processing.

During the event, the many sides of creativity will be explored in a participatory manner. Creativity is a complex cluster of dimensions, like intelligence. We know now that intelligence is not a single variable but dozens of interacting skillsets — some cognitive, some emotional, some perceptual, and many intuitive. Creativity is a special case of intelligence involving thinking the unthinkable, transcending one’s own ingrained ideas and style. In order to effect real and positive change, we won’t just talk about these subjects, we will use exercises by which each participant can find their inner truths regarding these subjects, thus creating the environment in which you will be able to discover for yourself how you tick and the levers you can pull to improve upon your strengths and transmute “weaknesses” into strengths.

Not all of the conversation will be about creativity since underpinning creativity are deep layers of mental behavior that themselves constrain or potentiate creativity at the conscious level. So there will be bold theoretic investigations into P300 waves, Observer state, Flow state (the Zone) and other subjects you’ve seen dissected here before, presented in a more comprehensive and systematic manner than blogposts allow.

We will look at obstacles, obstructions to and distractions from creativity, and how to get around them.

The Playshop will be at ARF HQ on Park Avenue and will be part of the Masters Classes offered by ARF University. It’s not called a workshop because the whole point will be that Flow state does not happen if you are focused fearfully on some outcome, the Zone happens when you are enjoying what you are doing for its own sake. We will be there to have fun together, it will be a “play date” and we will all have permission to let it all hang out. Hope I can persuade many of you, my special friends, to be there and to add your own life’s unique realizations, insights and perspectives to the party.

Best to all,

Bill

Where Does Value Reside?

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Volume 2, Issue 23

I had the pleasure recently of attending the Summer Board meeting of MASB, the Marketing Accountability Standards Board created by Meg Blair. Top marketing people from some of the largest advertisers met with world leaders in the business of estimating value of companies and their brands, to discuss the linking of marketing with finance. One of the most fascinating aspects of this unusual gathering was the discovery that accounting people are also by training philosophers, mentally athletic in the analysis of what value means in different contexts. This gave me ample stimulus to think again about what value is, and where it actually exists in the world.

To cut to the chase, value is in the heart (feeling core) of the perceiver. It is not in the perceived object that the perceiver associates with this feeling of value. Value is a perception/feeling cluster in consciousness. Consciousness is where value actually lives.

Why care? Because value is what drives us, what makes the world go ‘round. This is not just true under capitalism but in all cultures and conceivable (and inconceivable) economic systems. All action is driven by motivation and all motivation by value. We would have nothing to do — no action we would feel like taking — unless there is something we value that leads to such movement. Everything we do is driven by value — the value perceptions/feelings in our own selves.

This also answers the question of why we should care what consciousness is. If all action is impelled by value, and value resides in consciousness, then everything that we value and do, who we ourselves are, is all about consciousness. For us to not care what consciousness is, is to admit that all of one’s life is meaningless, based on unquestioned (and even incognizant) assumptions that at their essence say: everybody else is just going along with it, who am I to stop and question it, ok I am being a victim of herd mentality but so what, so is everyone else, I can’t do anything about it, so why not just drift along with the mob?

This line of self-reasoning would make sense to a person who places low value on independence of thought, and high value on belonging. That person is at a certain place in their own evolutionary path and those values and the ignoring of the Observer state — which uses consciousness to observe consciousness — are natural to him or her at the time. My only hope is that environmental stimuli will catalyze a creative spark, waking him or her up to a world of new possibilities, a vista of depths to life that make life new again, ripe with value.

We are closer than ever now as a culture to coming to grips with the foundational questions of existence. We see books flying off the eBook servers and shelves about something beyond current materialist science, some even gravitating to the center of the sea of questions, which is consciousness itself. But the near-miss of all of these books in my view is emblemized in one of the best, by Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained. Although evidently deep into the Observer state himself, Dennett is really just still trying to explain what in the material brain is happening that is associated with consciousness. This is typical of the near-miss — itself exciting because it portends that soon we will no longer be missing the point. The point is that what is is this experiential domain — this phenomenological fact that we are consciousness — and matter and energy are merely unproven constructs that we use to label and organize the perceptions we receive within consciousness. Consciousness in fact is the only thing we can empirically prove exists. It is where we perceive and receive value, where our actions begin and perhaps end. To know what consciousness is — is to know what and who we are.

Best to all,

Bill

Antidoting Toxible People

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Volume 2, Issue 22

We hear the expression “toxic people” and think: there are no toxic people, but there are people whom we allow to be toxic to ourselves. So rather than being toxic they are merely toxible. They would not be toxic to us if we knew how to handle the experience of them.

Take the case of Corporal Luiz. Luiz went through an evolution in the way he took in experience from his boss, Sergeant Murray, who never missed an opportunity to make Luiz feel small.

Early in the process Luiz daydreamed about fragging Murray. Unfortunately or not they were Stateside and fragging was not an available option, nor would we recommend it. A bit later on things eased slightly for Luiz when he got it that Murray was doing the same thing to everyone under him. His first bit of learning was to remind himself not to take it personally. This helped a lot because it put Luiz on the trail of discovering that Murray’s behavior was not the result of free will because Murray was a taken-over robot, mechanically living out a reaction script to being oppressed under the thumb of Lieutenant Gray, who probably had his own causes behind acting toxibly to Murray and God knows whom else. Serendipitously and synchronistically Luiz picked up a book by Dr. Robert Ornstein and read about the reptile part of the human brain, anachronistically still causing pecking-order behaviors in humans.

The onion peeled every day for Luiz now living mainly in the Observer state especially when around Murray. He saw that each of his peers now having fallen in helplessly with Murray’s style, were unconsciously protecting themselves by laughing at Luiz when Murray picked on him, and doing the same to each other. Again Luiz realized not to take it personally and was beginning to see the situation in the objective scientific way that automatically removes the sting from the negative emotional reaction. He used the discomfort he still felt to find the things within him that he realized needed changing, things that attracted him into such situations and were vulnerable to childish nonsense. He relived moments he had never forgiven himself for, saw more deeply into the causes, and realized that his actions had not been as basely motivated as he had always blamed himself for. He forgave himself and cleared the ancient debt list.

The first moment of triumph came when Murray picked on Luiz, and Luiz did so obviously not care one whit, that the rest of the squad was impressed and the tide began to turn on Murray. In the end Luiz turned into Murray’s mentor and wised him up on how to be free and not a robot. But that was many years later. Luiz had to wait until Murray came to him and asked.

To remain in the Observer and Flow states, observe your own negative emotion and work with it, turning off the emotional alarm with gratitude for telling you to figure out the situation and discern right action.

Best to all,

Bill