Tag Archives: The Zone

Re-Imagine Your Life with Fewer Constraints

Featuring two Mind Movies

What if you suddenly had more freedom? You could do whatever you wanted to do. What would you do? Before continuing to read, take a moment and jot down a few quick notes as you ponder this question.

Read on, and you will get one major step closer to that freedom in the next few minutes.

Now, take a look at what you wrote down (or thought about, if you didn’t actually write anything). This is supposedly what you really want out of life.

Is it? Is what you wrote/thought really what would make you the happiest?

If the answer is anything but a resounding YES!, then perhaps you have not been fully honest with yourself in the past, and perhaps your biggest current plans in life are still, deep down, something that you are settling for, because you believe you cannot have what you really want.

What would your ideal life actually be? Drop all constraints in your thinking — the question is not what might be realistic but rather what is the ideal, unconstrained and unrestricted.

Every moment we face choices. When we make these choices it is always in the context of our options. But we don’t consider all of our options. Therefore we make some choices that might be okay but without realizing it we just threw away a choice that could have been superb. A choice we didn’t even know we had.

Why don’t we consider all of our options? Hidden assumptions keep us from even posting those options on the bulletin board of our minds. We don’t have sufficient insight into our own thought process to even suspect that we only consider the options we think might actually be do-able — just a small proportion of our real options.

And by restricting our thinking to what we at the moment think is do-able for us, we are leaving out too much.

First of all we might discover that something has changed so what was unrealistic before is realistic now. But more importantly, unless we start from the ideal, we will never fully understand ourselves and so cannot be creative in bridging the gaps to get to the ideal. Settling for a “good enough” scenario, whether for our lives, or for our company, or for any situation, is not the way to generate creative thinking. The real value of the ideal is that it always generates creative thinking because achieving it seems out of reach.

Creative thinking is valuable because, even if it doesn’t always get you to the ideal, it gets you closer than if you just exclude the ideal from the beginning of your thought process.

We are operating within self-imposed constraints. We have been told so many things are impossible and advised to not aim so high because we will be heartbroken when we fail.

We also live in a reductionist culture that tends to lop off possibilities from our thinking —this would not normally occur to us, because reductionism is so ingrained in all of us. You might have a hunch taking a certain path could get you exactly what you want, but the reductionist culture says hunches are irrelevant, so the hunch gets left out of your set of alternatives. However, your hunch might have been right, and you might have just thrown away your biggest chance in life.

Hunches should not be thrown out. Include them in the list of possibilities you consider when facing an important choice.

From time to time in these postings we bring you summary insight into one new method for optimizing performance for you and your team — bringing you first into the Observer state and then into the Zone. We write these postings in hopes of directly lifting the probabilities that the largest number of people spend as much time as possible in the Observer state and Flow state (the Zone). We hope also to move more people to read our book, which contains much more than summary insight, including detailed instructions for spending more time in the Observer state and Flow state.

Recently we have brought you summary insight into the mood of optimization, negativity controls, and the power of respect. Today we are talking about the power of imagination.

Most of the population most of the time is in a mental state that has all but shut down the imagination. We have dubbed this state EOP, for Emergency Oversimplification Procedure. It’s what happens when there is an information overload. All parts of consciousness are negatively affected, none worse than the imagination.

Relaxation would be most conducive to imagination, but unfortunately Acceleritis — the acceleration of the global information overload — produces stress not relaxation. This robs mental energy needed to propel imagination, limits the perceived time to do something so seemingly impractical as using our imagination, and creates a mood that blocks imagination by focusing on a list of must-do’s under time pressure.

But even worse than any of these limitations, even when we give ourselves time and let our imaginations run free, our imaginations have been constrained for so long by a reductionist culture that we don’t even realize has stunted our assumptions about reality.

We find it hard to imagine things that quantum mechanics has already proven do exist. In our gut, even if we go to church, we may feel strongly that God is just wishful thinking and superstition, yet we may not realize that God could be something different than what religion teaches — something more than what religion teaches. A universe that requires an observer — the universe we live in, according to quantum mechanics and relativity — could have an original observer that came before all other observers. As soon as we realize this, the question of whether in fact God exists becomes a completely different conversation. Who was the original observer?

Our imaginations fail again to keep up with latest science in being unable to conceive of consciousness as just as primary as matter or more so — which is true in the universe we live in, according to quantum mechanics, relativity, string theory, multiverse theory, and the latest scientific findings regarding extrasensory perception.

In a universe in which the observer is mathematically impossible to remove from the scientific picture, all of our materialistic assumptions about our personal identity, the existence of God, whether death is the end of consciousness, become equal to superstition in the degree to which they are unproven and unscientific.

It is time to live life with a conscious awareness that we do not know the truth about any of these subjects — that anything is possible, and our actions second-by-second need to factor in more possibilities than we ever imagined.

The fact that we would like one set of realities more than another does not automatically mean that the one we like is impossible.

Science today is in fact beginning to lean toward hypotheses conjecturing that by liking one reality we help create it. The mind does appear to be able to modify probabilities.

Some of what we think is impossible is probably not impossible. It’s time to loosen the assumption machine up and see how this changes things. It’s time to re-open our minds to the existence of all possibilities — just as science now has.

Stop saying “No” when you imagine possibilities, even if you do this just as an experiment.

Let’s try two experiments right now. We have opened up our minds together. Now without shutting down again let’s co-produce two Mind Movies.

Einstein rocked the world with his mind experiments. We like to use our Mind Movies in much the same way but on a more personal, less cosmological level.

First, the movie of your life. Get comfortable, remove any sense of time pressure, and imagine the rest of your life as a movie playing out from where you are now to where you would love to be. What are the little successes that add up one-by-one to take you to your ideal state?

Jot down a few quick notes of what you discover. Might be a few workable ideas in there that you can turn into reality.

Now, let’s write the movie of the world. Get comfortable again, free yourself of time pressure, and see a movie of how the world moves step-by-step from where it is now to a perpetual paradise — what steps do you see happening in the ideal world?

Jot down some quick notes again.

This exercise can be used when planning for your company. One clue is to look at competitors in terms of what they do best and what your company does best, and see which companies besides yours could continue to thrive by counterspecialization, without limiting your success. What bold or subtle moves could you make that would push the situation so that competitors would get the idea to follow specializations that are different from yours? How could you use coopetition* to bring about a counterspecialized situation that leaves room for more competitors to be successful?

This movie-of-the-ideal-outcome exercise can be applied to interpersonal situations or to pretty much anything. Our ability to stretch our imaginations is surprisingly resilient and can spring back very quickly despite decades of neglect.

All we have to do is let ourselves imagine the ideal.

Here’s a relevant selection from our book Freeing Creative Effectiveness.

Best to all,

Bill

* Coopetition refers to companies that compete finding ways to work together in specific areas.

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

The Three States of Waking Consciousness

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Western science has it that there is a single state of human consciousness. In his landmark book The Meditative Mind, my wonderful friend Daniel Goleman presents the ancient Eastern wisdom of the Visuddhimagga and other sacred texts, showing ten waking states above an access state which itself is superior to the everyday state on the path of concentration, and nine such waking states above access state and everyday state on the path of insight. This suggests that there are around a dozen waking states.

Obviously in the East they allowed self-observation to be considered a path to objective knowledge, a technique little used in the West. This is why psychotechnologies – ways of controlling our mental states by acts of will and concentration – were developed first in the East.

If there were only one state of waking consciousness, this means that Osama when he was reportedly high on heroin and about to be shot was in the same state of waking consciousness as Einstein was in when he had the insight of Relativity and the relationships between matter and energy, space and time. How plausible is that?

Even if we want to be snobbish know-it-all Westerners, unscientifically closed-minded and not even interested in experimenting with Eastern mental maps, is it not pretty easy to allow that there could be more than one state of waking consciousness?

As in the paths of concentration and insight in the example above, it is possible to conceive of a number of different maps of states of waking consciousness, all being true from their own viewpoint. There could be a map showing what you go through when you focus on your concentration in itself, and discover higher and higher degrees of your ability to concentrate. There could be a different map for what you experience when you practice ways of achieving deeper and deeper insights into what exists in your purview.

Here at The Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI), because we are singularly focused on the goal of increasing human effectiveness, we divide waking consciousness into three states. We recognize that there are other valid ways of distinguishing states of consciousness, and that there are undoubtedly sub-states within the three states that we use as a basis for our psychotechnology. However, for utilitarian reasons, we simplify to these three states:

Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP). The “functional” state of the human race today. You are acting like a robot. Somebody who knows you well can predict accurately what you will do in a certain situation. He or she could get rich making bets on your next actions, were there anyone to take those bets. You always say the same things, keyed to the situation. You have the same feelings and go through the same mental loops when the same types of things happen to you. You are focused on quickly classifying incoming situations into types so you know what to do.
The Observer State. You can see that you have been acting like a programmed machine. You can see that it’s hard to stop the robot part of you from controlling your actions even though you are wide awake to the situation.
The Flow State. Aka The Zone. Often for short periods, some of us are able to spontaneously do exactly the right thing down to miniscule subtleties, and it all happens automatically while you watch your self do this, from your ringside seat.

We hypothesize that there are underlying measurable brain states corresponding to these three experiential (perceived from the inside) states. It’s possible that one drives the other but we need to be careful in coming to conclusions about which drives which.

In EOP, we hypothesize that there might be high functional connectivity (or functional coupling) between neural networks in Brodmann Area 10 (sense of self; aka BA10) and the limbic system and other brain areas involved in the ancient fight-flight reaction syndrome.

In the Observer State, we hypothesize that there is high functional coupling between BA10 and the prefrontal lobes.

In the Flow State, we hypothesize high functional coupling across a number of brain regions, signifying natural harmony, possibly appearing in brainscan as symmetrical and balanced, possibly crystalline pattern of moving energies. Users of low cost EEG devices such as Mind Mirror since the early 80s have seen this yantra/mandala--like pattern in EEGs of advanced meditators. The Mind Mirror device is conducive to showing these artistic brain patterns during subject Flow State because the display shows left and right brain from “above”.

Computer science professor and prolific science fiction writer Rudy Rucker uses the pre-existing term “autopoiesis” (self-creation) to mean the degree of control an individual has over his or her self. (Rudy’s characteristically quantum mechanics infused twist on the term makes for a paragraph interesting to read.) Using Rudy’s meaning, the three states of waking consciousness as we have defined them, constitute stages along a continuum of self-creation/self-control. In EOP, regardless of what one thinks, one is not in control of one’s actions, which are being driven mechanically by people who push your buttons and by what appear to be stray events. These events may or may not being dragged (by inter-personal signaling among mirror neurons) into your purview, attracted by your fears; it certainly seems that way. Your fears keep attracting the feared situation.

In the Observer State, there are degrees of control. At the earliest stage of learning how to be when in the Observer State, one can see what one’s robot is doing but cannot stop the robot from doing it. Later on there is a higher degree of control.

In the Flow State, one has such a high degree of control that it has become autonomic such that the individual’s will has no inertial drag as it processes through to motor control.

We define “psychotechnology” (the word had earlier meanings in the 1930s) as anything that helps people get from EOP into either or both of the two higher effectiveness states of waking consciousness.

I have been creating such psychotechnology for my own personal use all my life, and began packaging it for others in the 1970s. In 1976 I founded the Human Effectiveness Institute (THEI) and others who saw the effectiveness increases from the early psychotechnology gathered around THEI to help disseminate it. We are working toward an even more effective package with the next book and its accompanying DVD video.

We hope you will experiment with these psychotechnologies on yourself.

Looking forward to that. All the best,

Bill