Tag Archives: Observer State

Dial Back on Arousal to Reach Highest Performance

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Volume 2, Issue 3

Science verifies the Vedas, Tantra, Qabala, and other ancient ideas

Hope you’re enjoying the new “2-minute read” format.

Thousands of years ago, individuals who trained themselves to be introspective all learned the same wisdom about the mind, in Greece and Egypt as in India and elsewhere. I’ve also rediscovered those bits of wisdom in a lifelong self-training to be an objective introspective observer — so as to really learn things and not just prop up my own ego, as we are all mostly forced to do by the information overload pressure that all too often sinks us into EOP.

The ancient wisdom even more applicable in today’s accelerating culture says that if we care too much we ruin it. Whatever “it” is. The word “attachment” is the meme of this wisdom, the gene from which a Pandora’s Box of linked ideas emerge.

Some became Buddhists, but most of the kids in my college class went on with their lives with their attachment level dialed way up, and this caused them painful life lessons from which they have grown up and consequently dialed down their attachment levels.

Although we find it expedient to ignore ancient wisdom, believing our science to be light-years ahead, science is only now coming to the same conclusions as the ancients but by humorously roundabout trips. If only psychology had listened to William James and seen introspection as a valuable tool of science. Science today would be accelerating into Observer and Flow state discoveries, leapfrogging over my mere intuitions and practical experience.

Consider the following “now-scientific” evidence. The widely-accepted Yerkes-Dodson law in psychology says that the optimal level of arousal for highest performance is moderate — a word Aristotle would also have chosen.he inverted U-shapes relationship between arousal and performance, known as the Yerkes-Dodson law, interacts with the complexity of the task.

Note that arousal should be set even lower for more difficult tasks. Not rookie over-eagerness, but a fatalism that is above caring about success or failure — kind of a playful fun resignation to whatever outcome the universe chooses, so long as you like your play.

Arousal in this context means the same thing as the mental causes of physical and brainstem arousal — we call these motivations. If we are attached, meaning too highly motivated such that not succeeding would be anguishing — then we are not going to give our highest Flow state (Zone) performance.

Dial back the arousal. In future posts we will address the next question: how does one actually do that?

Best to all,

Bill

Finding That Hidden Switch Inside

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Sensible procedures for quickly returning to your best self

This blog aims to provide a new psychotechnology for maximizing human performance and happiness, derived from a synthesis of the author’s experience and the relevant findings of science both modern and ancient. The construct posits three levels of waking consciousness:

  1. Flow state — the most desirable state in terms of performance and happiness, where things happen perfectly and one feels a seamless part of everything. A non-ordinary, altered state of consciousness that occurs when you are totally immersed in and merged with an activity you have practiced well and you have simultaneously given up caring whether you win or lose, rising above all negativity and all of your usual ordinary concerns. Action just happens without hesitation, like a child at play.
  2. Observer state — the second most desirable state, in which your attention misses very little of what is going on inside you and around you. The access window to Flow, this state is a form of meditation/contemplation that requires no closing of eyes or immobility, but does require self-honesty/objectivity and paying very close attention both inside and outside.
  3. EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure) — the typical state of the overwhelming majority of human beings today, from which individuals spring infrequently into the higher states in rare moments of clarity and nobility. In EOP there is always a background dilemma, a sense of incompleteness, of wanting and being attached to something that you may or may not get.

In my theory the EOP state is not the natural state of the species but arises from a multi-millennial delay in integrating our evolutionarily most recent brain part, the cortex. Like children handed loaded machineguns, with our newfound inventiveness running amok, our weapons-centric culture has handed control of the planet to those who possess the most powerful weapons, and now through proxies they control everything else as well. This has been true since earliest recorded history. In fact the invention of written language appears to have been the catalyst for the only culture we know, which has made information overload and distraction the way we spend our days, separation our hidden assumption, and EOP our state of being.

Yet every philosopher worthy of such designation has explained that we need not live this way. Each in his/her own way has explained how to peel away the tarnished layer of the outer accidental self to find the pure inner self that exists always, despite whatever culture we find ourselves in. Collective wisdom and understanding from philosophy, theology, science and commonsense proverbs have always existed as a form of primitive psychotechnology. “Primitive” because the whole problem has never been clearly defined. Therefore the solutions have always been merely rote methods that work for reasons beyond the understanding of even those who practice and teach them.

I’ve spent my lifetime trying to figure out the things that spontaneously propelled me into the higher states, having first experienced Flow when performing onstage as a child, being part of a show business family. Over the years, working at it daily, I’ve discovered procedures that help me stay in the higher states more of the time. I rediscovered many of the same procedures that others before me have rediscovered. There are few among us who themselves have not discovered some of this — each of us has come upon some of these truths of how to be one’s highest self. Like me, most people strive to be the best they can be, often without even knowing they are doing this, nor explaining it to themselves in any philosophical or otherwise reasoned way.

Years back I founded The Human Effectiveness Institute to share these procedures, the ones that work for me and for 3000 or so readers of the first edition of what is today the book Freeing Creative Effectiveness — all reporting (unsolicited) positive results. The Institute also exists to understand the underlying scientific mechanisms, i.e. why these psychotechnological procedures work to elevate the mind into the higher states. In an earlier post I provided hypotheses drawn from my theory as to which brain parts are involved in each of the three states of waking consciousness. These hypotheses are the starting point toward making psychotechnology more of a science than an art. Today it is an art more than a science — or a soft science in contrast with the highly-regarded hard sciences.

In the rest of this post we’ll focus on what to do when you find you are not in your best place — and how to get back to your best self as quickly as possible. We’ll divide this into two short sections: (1) the first time you do this, and a few times a week after that, when you can grab an oasis of alone space to check in on your self, and (2) on an ongoing moment-to-moment basis.

The first time, and in alone spaces after that

First, how do you know you’re not in your best self? That part is easy, here are the symptoms: you’re not happy, something is bothering you and you may not even know what it is. You are making mistakes and making things worse. There is a loop going around in your head telling you so many different things about you and your life that you don’t like — you don’t know where to start and you feel defeated before you start. Those conditions are the clue to quickly find that hidden switch in your head.

The practical, sensible procedure when you are having this kind of experience, the first time it happens from now on, is:

  1. You need to be alone for awhile.
  2. You need to let your mind dump the problem statement and whatever solution idea fragments it may have by simply transcribing — taking dictation from your mind, in the form of incoherent notes or however they spill out when you are not trying to make them read well for other people.
  3. Note how much you care about — are dependent upon — certain attachments, as if you are an outside observer watching yourself as a scientific subject. Note how many of these attachments are ignoble things — like envy, jealousy, pride, vanity — that you would rather not see in yourself. Consider what you might do with your life if you gave up caring so much about these specific things or about any specific things. Being looked up to, having more money, whatever forms your attachments take.
  4. Give it all up. Even if you are just pretending, or experimenting — picture and feel that you are tired of it all, and you don’t want these things any more. You are not dependent on anything or anyone. Whatever happens, you will be strong enough to start from scratch and be creative and make decisions to flow with whatever reality deals you. Vividly envision losing it all, and being tough enough to withstand that loss.

One piece of psychotechnology common to many Buddhist and Hindu traditions is to meditate on a corpse in order to eventually lose all horror about it — a common practice also for doctors and nurses. This illustrates the psychological principle at work: it is possible to get used to anything, to the idea of losing anything, given enough time and mental practice. It doesn’t happen overnight in most cases, although sometimes it does.

Will life be worth living, you might ask, if you stop caring about all the things and people to which and to whom you are now attached? You don’t have to stop caring — you can still love people and things even more — it’s just that you are becoming fatalistic and accepting of whatever might happen that would cause you to lose these people and things.

In the moment, in the midst of action

Any time you notice you are not in your best self — making mistakes, losing your temper, feeling lousy or scared, whatever it is — re-set your mind by erasing everything. “Clear the mechanism” as Kevin Costner’s character says to himself in the movie “Love of the Game” (a film that shows what Flow state feels like to a baseball pitcher, as Bob DeSena points out).

Assume that any sense of dilemma is a lack of clarity, that if you were thinking straight you would be accepting what is and dealing with it without negative emotion, just with pure effectiveness. The one thing you want is to take whatever life hands you and deal with it most effectively, and anything short of that is rejected out of your mind and body instantly.

At first you will find yourself re-setting again and again as you slip back into the old time-worn ways of mental hand-wringing, but over time your mental muscles will toughen up. Just stick with it and you will become indomitable.

I know that many of my readers have already been practicing this for a long time, and this post may seem elementary to you, though the review can’t hurt. Since our aim is to always widen our audience to reach as many people as possible, we will sometimes return to basics.

Wishing you Flow and Observer filled days.

Best to all,

Bill

Recall the Moments When You Shined

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Not for ego gratification, but to be that You on command

We’ve got to start taking daily vacations. Not only is that what life is all about — what it is meant to be every second of every day — but on top of that, we then give far better service to each other.

Emotion is more powerful than Will in the average person today, because of Acceleritis, and the EOP condition it causes, bringing us down from Observer and Flow states where our Will is stronger than our emotions.

Emotion is the body casting its 800-pound vote through a cascade of brain chemicals, resulting in specific neuron energy gains in the amygdala and other brain locales, specific neuron energy reductions in the prefrontal cortex and other places, glandular secretions, and adrenalin. There are so many powerful brainwashing mind control technologies in play that you are typically helpless, in EOP, to do anything but be swayed into whatever those tyrannical electrochemical drivers impose on us.

It’s not at all dissimilar from what happens in the brain from chemicals such as sodium pentathol and more modern/secret drugs used in paramilitary and military interrogations. In the case of emotions the brain’s chemical process doesn’t necessarily get us to tell the truth. What it often does is restore sovereignty of our actions for a time period until we get out of it, to a loop between our limbic system and left brain, which is our “lower self”. Call it the ego. 

You believe your self to be that being.  (I know “your self” is one word, but made into two words it has a different meaning and is a provocative subconscious stimulus to a more empirical mental stance) You unhesitatingly fall back into those positions that are so easy to slide back into. You have those rapid flashes of envy, resentment, fear, etc. that you are so used to you don’t even notice them or consider them abnormal. You say things to your self that if you were listening like you do in the Observer state, you would see you are just wasting time trying to project an image to yourself of your latest achievements, or some other useless folly. You are not showing the noble side of your character.

You are highly unlikely to get flashes of insight, inspiration, happiness, gratitude, or love in EOP. These things are not at home in that state because the brain signatures are very different. The allocation of energy armies across the various parts of the brain is not conducive to these more beneficial and enjoyable experiences. Nor to high performance for your organization, your family, the world in general, your self, or the Universe (the power and brains behind which, some call “God”).

High performance is our obsession at The Human Effectiveness Institute. It is so easy to move the world toward improved decision making. These little tricks are not so hard. They make us feel so good that they fairly quickly take over as our preferred state of being. Challenges can kick us out of that state and in the early going it takes us a while to notice and then work our way back up to Observer/Flow states. With practice, we are kicked out, clear the mechanism, and get back in. Sooner or later we are almost always there, with rare relapses. But from the start, the process just makes us happier.

Don’t you know people who seem to be so mentally strong that they almost always seem happy, positive, never say a bad word about another person? There are more of us every day. It’s happening already. It’s happening all around us. More and more of us practicing random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty. Loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. Our actions coming from the knowledge that “with all beings and all things we shall be as relatives” (Sioux Indian proverb).

Sure, some of those people are still basically egotistical. It’s a phase. They’ll grow out of it. At least they are enthusiastic about something even if it is their own self.

An upbeat attitude goes a long way to inciting higher performance in one self and others. The affective/emotional is more powerful than the intellect. Negative emotion — even mild background radiation so-used-to-it you forget that it is inherently negative — conditions and entrains weak intellectual strategies/tactics, whereas positive emotion does the opposite to the cognitive faculties.

It’s worth a lot to get your self into a good mood. And where’s the penalty — what’s there to lose? It’s all upside — it feels good — you feel good — and you make others feel good. A total no-brainer.

So how do you get your self to feel good? A daily vacation is a great start.

All it means is you take a break and do whatever you want to do. Create a space away from other people (sometimes that is not necessary but it usually is in the beginning). Then you just do whatever you feel like from second to second. You play. Like a child again. Like who you really are.

Take notes if you feel moved to do so. Only then — no pressure.

If you’re home, empirically seek inner detection as to the feelings evoked in you when you gaze at objects in your home. Best to start with one and stay on it for a minute.

The point of this is in part just being attentive in the moment, slowing down, deceleration from Acceleritis — but it’s also to reconnect with parts of your self that might be buried just beneath the surface. Things that are so familiar to you, you no longer notice how you feel about them. The fact is, you probably love practically everything that is in your life right now. You probably would miss some of the things that you suppose you hate. Maybe I’m wrong but you are the only one who will know, you’re the only observer who can tell what the truth is about your own feelings.

When you’re on vacation, you want to be in bliss. It’s the whole point, so why not do little experiments that are fun and are part of checking out your feelings, in order to make sure they are in bliss — and if not, you get them there.

You aren’t in a hurry when you’re on your daily vacation. You won’t accomplish the vacation objective fully if you are conscious of how soon you have to get back to work and thus trying to cram in the fun, still speeding, still in the clutches of Acceleritis.

A personal experience as an example. I was taking a vacation alone at home on a Saturday, my day for most of my weekly nonprofit work and writing. I always feel great on the Sabbath as a result of it being a vacation day for me.

So I happen to be in my closet and my eye falls on a particular shirt. I feel a wave of love wash over me. I love that shirt. It is like a human being to me or a pet — I feel such tangible love for it. I realize that wherever I look I am still feeling love. It’s not just the shirt. I love all of this. I love life. It feels like it’s been this way continuously for as long as I can remember, although that’s not quite the case. Yet the way I feel at this moment is that I’ve always loved everything and how could it possibly be otherwise. I feel like I am looking at the Universe the way God would — the way God does.

I am back in the original consciousness in terms of the affective dimension, although not omniscient not omnipotent. I think of God then and a wave of gratitude comes over me — reverence too but mostly gratitude. What a great game you/I/we created. I love this game!

When I go back to work it is not because the vacation ended but rather it’s what I really want to do. A flood of ideas later validated by experience rush me so fast I have to write in my own shorthand, leaving out letters.

Start giving your self these daily vacations, please. And during vacation whenever you feel like it, jot down the times you were at your best in this lifetime, whatever times you shone mightily like the Sun. There is a richness of positive emotion at these times, and it’s good to bask in that feel-good-ness, to remember what it feels like rather than to bask is ego-glory. Capture it as an Observer not wallowing in ego about these events. Scientific detachment. Objective honesty with your self. Record the facts as a scientist in your diary or journal or whatever note keeping system you have for these vacation journeys.

Go back and look at this “Possible Flow State” record whenever you feel like it.

The point is to deeply realize without blockage or limitation that you can do this again. You can be that you on command.

In fact there is no scientific reason why you cannot live in Flow state virtually all the time. You might need a five-year ramp to get there and along the way there may be more Flow experiences each month, which you can record in your objective log.

It’s not just to pump your self up. It’s to manifest more Flow and Observer state in your life, so you enjoy life more but particularly so you can give high performance in your work and your love life and your life in general.

This I wish for you! And you can do it with no help from anyone. And it is not effort-laden work because it is vacation. So please, start now!

Love to all,

Bill

You Are a World Changer

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Start activating change where you are now

What’s my evidence that you’re a world changer? You read my stuff. That’s my evidence.

I get an interesting if fuzzy picture of who reads this blog from the people who thank me for it. And from some indirect measures, such as how rarely people leave public comments, instead emailing me; what does this tell us: private types who read in this blog information that is also kind of private. It’s about the inner life. Inner, not outer, means that it isn’t something people talk about. If they’re going to talk to me about it, they don’t want to do it publicly.

Aristotle considered the inner life the most important thing to Humanity. If he saw what Acceleritis has done to shrink the inner life down to the smallest part of one’s existence, he would become depressed.

But somehow in my readers that inner life is strong. Why else read about it?

Another indirect measure is how I picked the list I started with when I launched this blog. Out of some 8000+ people in the contact list I culled about 1600 whom I see as game-changing people. People who have already visibly changed the industries I touch. People I resonate with because they too are on another plane, looking in at life from angles that are open to change every instant, to triangulate all the hidden corners. This is what the Flow State is like. People like us who flash through the Flow State spend a lot of time getting back there from the lower states that capture us, usually through distraction and attachment coming at us both at once. One of the universe’s trickier sparring partner moves.

So, given that you’re a world changer, what to do about it? It’s not as if you haven’t been asking yourself this continuously all your life. Therefore my answer may not be new, as you may have already said it yourself. Wherever you are now, whatever job you are doing or trying to get, that’s where to change the world first.

Pretty much the only way to do it anyway. Getting out of your current situation into one that affords you more power to do good is as you know an uphill battle. Where you are is where you are. Change things there. Make it better there.

Then it can roll out as a sphere of integration, all the 3D iron filings working together in harmony around a magnetic intention, a plan, a feedback loop, through moment-to-moment Flow State actions. Get that to work in your company — or even your department — first.

How do you do that?

  1. Start to take notes as if you’re seriously going to do this thing. You are serious.
     
  2. The first notes — all will flow naturally, no need to push, just wait and be ready to jot — will be problem/challenge conditions you’re out to fix. Don’t attach the usual negative emotions — you’re the consultant here, the cure, not part of the bad weather. Just write trigger phrases — a small number of words, often just one or two — that will remind you of a whole train of thought and the feelings and images that go with it.
     
  3. Later make a clean table with the smallest cluster of problems organized to the left and large spaces to the right to fill in approach directions toward the solutions of each challenge cluster. You don’t have to rush to jot down the approaches; just let them come naturally and write them in.
     
  4. When the time is right, contemplate the filled-in table. Be alone and uninterruptible. Critique the solution approaches and note their weaknesses and strengths because this is a springboard to fresh ideation. Add more ideas as they come. Start a new clean table and fill it in with the high points of the new ideas that come to you at this step in the process. Let the old ideas fall away — you can add them back later if merited.
     
  5. While on the private front you are undergoing this process with notes and ideas, in your public self, become unpredictable.

Is that all there is in the way of technique? No, there’s a rich body of technique to convey; the universe — life — is the most complex game ever invented. But that’s enough to start.

What does being unpredictable mean? And why be unpredictable?

Within your organization you have found a certain footing, a certain platform. It is your basis for leverage and it limits your leverage, which is held in place, i.e. limited, by the perceptions others have of you.

If they can predict what you are going to say next, it has limited throw weight. If you’re going to change the world you have to become unpredictable. You have to look past the answer you always give. Include those ideas in what you finally do say, but go to the next level. What other factors are relevant that you could include in your response to a situation?

As you become unpredictable, your perceived biases will stop being your driver, and so people will notice that and think more carefully about what you said. Right now they apply Kentucky Windage to what you say based on what they think your bias is in the situation. Remove the Kentucky Windage factor and you can move people and the world further each day.

Becoming unpredictable is only one principle, which has to be balanced with all the other principles on a situation-by-situation basis. There are no black-and-white rules. Every principle has situations that are exceptions to the rule. You can’t let your company make a wrong move, for example, just because you’re changing your image.

Then, follow your plan, and evolve it with changing circumstances and new information. Don’t get stuck in the first plan. Let it be the plan du jour until there is such solidity to the success trend that you know it’s the right plan.

If the success trend is not there, you have to keep varying the inputs — try new stuff, start the ideation process described above, all over again from scratch.

If you don’t feel the world changing around you within 30 days, email me and let me help. Let’s face it, the world needs changing. We see world-class threats at all levels — military, economic, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, environmental… In my 9-5 life, I see the first solution in 50 years to make companies more profitable — yet it can only in the most brilliantly-led companies make it quickly through the thicket of confusion and lack of communication. This is all due to Acceleritis. Changing the world means tackling Acceleritis. Getting people to think more clearly and to reach the right decisions more quickly, scraping aside the emotional historical perceptual baggage.

This requires releasing people from Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) so they can spend more time in the Observer state, where they can slip through into Flow.

Perhaps you want to change the world in ways that seemingly have nothing to do with changing people’s effectiveness levels, but I submit that your desired change will occur all the more easily if your audience of co-workers is at a higher level.

If they are in EOP, scared to come out of the meeting having lost something, good luck getting the best decisions.

How do you get your colleagues out of EOP? One on one. Take them to lunch or coffee or drinks and just talk — but mostly listen. You’ll find out what they really want and what you have that can help them. You’ll also see how certain of your ideas are not yet covered on some particular flank, which is pivotally helpful. Are you doing enough reconnaissance? Are you doing it in the right spirit — nurturing, guiding, mentoring, listening, being a friend and/or ally?

The number one thing everyone is feeling is fear. One of the biggest fears is that the game is going too fast to keep up effectively. This is a rational fear, because it is true that the game is going too fast. That’s Acceleritis for you.

However it is not rational to hold onto that fear. Fear is an alarm clock, and you turn off the alarm clock once you get its message. Move on from fear to dealing with the challenge slope such as it is. Fear only degrades your performance on that slope. Rationality therefore dictates removing the fear as a preliminary step to functioning at all.

A contemplation for burning out fear is to dwell on it until you hit bottom. Since this doesn’t usually happen overnight, schedule times for this contemplation over the course of days, preferably when you are alone. Visualize the worst possible outcome in the most complete detail possible, actually feel it as if it is happening. When the “so what?” feeling comes over you, you know you have burned out that circuit. If the feared scenario ever happens that way, you won’t seem to care as you simply deal with it, and you will have a great chance of turning the whole thing around just by your state of being in that moment.

You won’t be able to talk to all of your associates about the inner life, as some will not be ready. Follow your intuition. You don’t have to address these subjects directly to communicate the essence of attitude adjustment — people see it in you. Just hanging out and being a friend is more than enough to get the entire process to work perfectly.

You certainly don’t want to become manipulative and try to brainwash people. That’s what got us here. We’re trying to go the other way now.

Ultimately you want everyone to make up their own mind. You just want them to do it in the Flow State.

As we all work together to change the world, one situation at a time.

Best to all,

Bill