optimized-results.com

Perception is Not Reality

ianb — Fri, 04 May 2012 22:20:29 +0000

There’s an old expression that masters of illusion love to use: “perception is reality.” Actually, in the cold light of day we find that perception is not reality. Perception is what we react to, as if it was reality. Perception is a kind of story, made up of filtered memories, projections, assumptions, and most importantly interpretations of stimuli. We can perceive what is not present, or not perceive what is present. We see what we expect to see, don’t see what is “off our radar,” and emphasize or minimize in accordance with our beliefs and upbringing. What causes trouble is simply that perception gets promoted to “Truth,” and we fall into the trap of defending it as such.

It’s almost too cliché to bring up the familiar car accident witnessed by five people, each of whom sees a different accident, except that this example works so well to illustrate the concept. Witness statements are always vulnerable to cross-examination because our ability to perceive is not objective, as if through a camera lens. The interpretive aspect of our perceptions makes them very subjective.
(more…)

Verbal Accuracy

ianb — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 01:13:05 +0000

While being strongly inspired to address this subject, I suddenly felt a sense of déjà vu. Indeed I had been down this road before. In fact, Chapter 37 of my book, “Kind Ambition” is called, “Say What You Mean – one thing leads to another,” and rings as true today as it did then. So if I may be so bold as to quote myself, let’s look at an easily implemented improvement to our communication. All it requires is a little extra consciousness.

Words are wonderful double-edged swords. Their specific meanings and their ambiguity are both the joy and bane of our conversations. Wordplay depends on words having shades of meaning or multiple meanings, that we can take in one direction, and then suddenly whip in another. This is the basis of some of my favorite comedy, and unfortunately, it’s also a potential fork in the road when we’re trying to communicate. With every split, we find ourselves knee deep in conflict before we know what happened.
(more…)

Slowing Down to Speed Up

ianb — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 02:16:35 +0000

There are things we learned in childhood from fables, parables, and mythology that we either forget or dismiss by the time we’re adults. Some of them contain lessons we really would benefit from remembering. For example, our topic: sometimes to speed up we need to slow down. Perhaps because this seems to be a contradiction, we dismiss it pretty quickly.

It becomes another one of those things we know, but we just don’t follow. What’s up with that? Why don’t we do these things we know deep down inside will serve us? (more…)

Internal Prejudice

ianb — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:26:13 +0000

Hierarchies
Our less-than-conscious communication takes place both internally and externally. What we rarely think about is the unbreakable relationship between the two. As in most things in our physical world, an event is usually followed by its repercussions, in the way a pebble hits the water and ripples emanate outward.The way we talk to ourselves internally invariably affects the way we talk to others externally. Those ripples keep going as the way we talk to others then affects them, and they in turn affect others in their surroundings, and so on.

So let’s start with that first pebble. Internally, we often insult or berate ourselves when we make mistakes or forget something. This becomes a kind of “normal” way for us to react, and we don’t think twice about doing this when others make mistakes or forget things. (more…)

Patience and the Big Picture

ianb — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 06:11:42 +0000

Patience seems to be a pretty normal and accepted aspect of looking at or dealing with details, but when it comes to the Big Picture, we seem to run out, as if patience were a limited resource. People even assert their lack of patience as a function of being Big Picture thinkers, as if there were an unquestionable relationship between the two. In fact the only relationship between being a Big Picture thinker and a lack of patience is the one we create. And as much as this may annoy some people, that says more about a kind of laziness, than a necessary connection.

Patience and Big Picture thinking are not mutually exclusive; in fact they work together to create a superior outcome. We just need to put in the effort to learn patience.

There’s an almost “crazed” and frantic rush in our lives that has little connection to reality. It becomes blatant on the road, but this same impatience shows up subtly in other important parts of our lives. (more…)

Consciousness and Pain Prevention

ianb — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:14:48 +0000

Our less-than-conscious communication causes so much unnecessary pain for ourselves and others, and because it is less than conscious, it rarely gets addressed. We hurt ourselves and those around us with so much regularity that it fades into the background as normalcy. We put our energy into being tougher and more calloused, rather than increasing the consciousness around our words.

Ironically, this requires more energy in the long run, and adds the downside of further separation and isolation from one another. It also maintains an antagonistic relationship with ourselves that blocks us from achieving our full potential. The upside is that (more…)

Transparency in Communication: More is More

ianb — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:49:52 +0000

You’ve heard that nature abhors a vacuum. Things rush in to fill them. This can have a harmful effect when it comes to communication. We tend to fill in the blanks when we perceive missing information. Unfortunately, we don’t fill in the blanks with happy puppies and butterflies.

In our desire to protect ourselves, we construct negative or worst-case scenarios to fill in the voids. If we don’t get invited to a party, we’re more likely to assume we were purposefully excluded than it being an accidental oversight. This is a pretty interesting phenomenon when you think about it. Without any information at all, we invent it out of thin air. Because of this habit we have with gaps in information, over-communicating has to be superior to under-communicating. If we don’t leave gaps, people don’t fill them with negative assumptions.

I’ve addressed aspects of this phenomenon before both in “Kind Ambition,” and in previous episodes of Conscious Communication. We know that assumptions are almost always wrong, and yet reach for them as compulsively and unconsciously as the next potato chip.

(more…)

The Racer’s Edge, part II - the Individual Within the Team

ianb — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:46:09 +0000

In our last episode we touched on some lessons about successful teamwork that we can learn from Auto Racing, and there are hundreds more to be found if we keep digging. To shift our focus a bit for this exploration, let’s look at some insights and successful strategies from racing that are more for you as an individual.

One of the great things about viewing things from a systems-oriented plane is that we get to see “universal analogies” that can be applied to an individual or an organization as a whole, so we can apply them to our life circumstances in many different situations. Let’s take a look at a few of these “universal analogies,” and how they create versatile strategic principles.

Minimize Lateral Motion

This principle is so obvious that we can forget to keep it front and center. Auto Racing gives us a nice physical analogy to re-invigorate the concept.

Although they may look nice and smooth on TV, race tracks are often as rough and bumpy as the course you or your business are on. They’ve even been compared to giant cheese graters.

(more…)

The Racer’s Edge

ianb — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 03:23:52 +0000

Auto racing has become much more thrilling and competitive over the last few years. Every aspect of what makes it exciting has become more visible with technical advances in camera work and telemetry. In NASCAR, forty-three teams simultaneously playing chess at 200 mph, while staying on top of and adjusting for constantly shifting variables is quite a spectacle.

If we pay attention, we can learn a lot about how to create and maintain a championship team that wins in the marketplace. Why is it that out of those forty-three teams, the same ten or so seem to be at the checkered flag every week? What are they doing right, and how can you apply their hard learned lessons, without the pain and expense that they go through?

When we compare the top teams to the struggling ones, we see that they’re doing exactly what needs to be done by any individual or in any business, especially in the 21st century market. We can boil it down to three areas that make a champion out of a contender: (more…)

“Same World - Different Experience”

ianb — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 04:24:36 +0000

One of the most important and yet difficult things to understand is just how differently each of us experiences the same world. It seems logical that if we’re standing next to each other witnessing a car crash, that we’ll see the same car crash. So why don’t we?

Our filtering systems are such an integral part of how we process incoming information, that it doesn’t occur to us to question them. We just take in information and sort it how we always sort it.

Unfortunately the combination of this automatic aspect and the lack of questioning sets us up for conflict, confrontation, and confusion. If you’re wearing colored lenses, it affects how you see things; there’s no escaping that. If we forget that we’re wearing these lenses, and go about our business believing that we’re seeing pure truth, we get into trouble, especially with other people - especially when they’re wearing different colored lenses, and seeing a different situation.
(more…)