For the last 24 hours or so I have been suffering from a really dreadful bug. Fever, hacking cough – all the usual stuff. As a result my mood has been vile. Let me tell you a little bit about how that relates to a concept from NLP.
Over the last few days I have been watching the Pakistan v England test match in Dubai. England, the current number 1 ranked team in the world, were comprehensively beaten by 10 wickets inside 3 days! Let me give you some insights from the perspective of an experienced sport psychologist.
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The other day I presented to the Systems and Cybernetics in Organisations (SCiO) Group at Manchester Business School on the exotically named subject ‘Aligning Intra-personal Systems with Organisational Systems via NLP’. Without going into too much detail of the presentation let me look at one of the analogies I used to make my points.
Someone is stuck on a problem. They’ve thought about it endlessly to no avail. Someone suggests that they “sleep on it” and, lo-and-behold, the following morning the solution is staring them in the face. We’ve probably all had experiences like this and wondered if the emergence of a solution was by the chance passage of time or was genuinely associated with restorative sleep. I will argue that sleep is the magic ingredient.
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Today I read a post from an intelligent, accomplished and resourceful person lamenting the fact that if she wanted to get another two hours work done a day she would not be able to continue getting out of bed at 7:30am. Let’s set aside the fact that half past seven in the morning is still the middle of the night for me (and what would that make rising two hours earlier?) and ask whether encroaching into sleep time in this manner is actually likely to increase overall, systemic productivity. “Not more on sleep, Damian!” you may be crying. “Yes, more!” I respond, as I believe it is that important.
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In my last blog I looked at how ambiguous stimuli, such as Rorschach ink-blots, take on meaning solely due to the fact that the perceiver projects an interpretation onto them. Once such an interpretation or set of perceptual ‘filters’ is proffered by one person it can often shape the perceptions of others and form the default perspective that then becomes reified through familiarity as the only way to view a particular situation. The default filters we create and reify in this way are often enshrined in language.
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I was watching the semi-finals of the Darts PDC World Championships last night and witnessed one of the greatest sporting comebacks of all time. In this ‘First to 6 Sets is the Winner’ match, James Wade was 5 – 1 up against reigning champion, Adrian Lewis. Lewis was written off by the commentators until he reeled off 5 consecutive sets to continue with his attempt at defending his title. Here is my view as to what occurred.
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There is an urban myth that Eskimos have a multitude of words for ‘snow’. In truth this is more the case with the European Sami people but you know what I am referring to. Equally, in The Structure of Magic, John Grinder and Richard Bandler refer to the fact that the Maidu people only have three colours in their language. In this blog I would like you to consider the power of language to limit what we perceive and also to create – to draw forth – something from nothing.
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So, the New Year is almost upon us and many of you may be thinking of the changes you want to see happen in 2012 and framing those as New Year’s Resolutions. Let me give you a few pointers and I’ll be brief.
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Over the Festive Season some of you may have used the services of the personalised greeting card company, Moonpig. Let me do a little bit of name-dropping here and also show you how to extract opportunity from adversity.
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Follow Watt WorksHello and welcome to “The Lightbulb”.
The Lightbulb is a blog that brings you the best in systems thinking, neuro linguistic programming and sports psychology and how the ideas and concepts from these areas can enhance performance for both individuals and organisations.
I’ll be bringing you ideas and concepts from a variety of disciplines … and including ideas from people such as Stafford Beer, Peter Senge, Humberto Maturana, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Gordon Pask, Warren McCulloch, Buckminster Fuller, Heinz von Foerster, Milton Erickson, Alfred Korzybski, Virginia Satir, Peter Drucker, Russell Ackoff, W. Edwards Deming and many, many more.
If you have an interest in individual or organisational change, transformation or coaching there should be something of interest here for you. I’ll be exploring the application of ideas from the greatest thinkers of our time to a wide variety of issues in order to improve such things as personal and organisational communication, strategy creation, creativity and innovation, policy formation, performance management, governance, marketing, sales, facilitation and problem solving.
