Monthly Archives: March 2010

Increase Your Genius

Aha!

The other day I was cleaning out my closet, in preparation for an upcoming move, and I happened across an old book that I hadn’t read for a while. Perhaps it’s because I’m basically a very lazy person, and am always looking for an excuse to take a break during anything that resembles any kind of physical labor, I decided to take a look through the book, as I remember having several “Aha!” moments when I first read it.

I had a friend once tell me she went to a lecture of a prominent mental health professional a few months ago, and he mentioned that there are some leading theories that suggest that the more you have those “Aha!” moments, the less likely you will suffer from any decrease in brain function that is normally associated with aging. Those “Aha!” moments can be tricky to come by, they often times come when you aren’t expecting them.

You’ll be watching some TV show about something, and it will remind you of something that happened a couple days earlier, something that you now see in a different light, or a new understanding. That new understanding, that feeling of making a neural connection that wasn’t there before, is where that “Aha!” feeling comes from, or so I’ve heard.

It’s like when you’ve driven to your favorite restaurant across town, and you have to go through all kinds of huge intersections where you are always stuck waiting, then one day by accident you find some small back road that is almost devoid of lights or stop signs, giving you a straight shot. There’s a new connection between you and your favorite food.

Sometimes those “Aha!” moments can be cultivated, like when you are learning a new language, and you take a break and watch a TV or movie that’s in your target language. What used to sound like gibberish, now is peppered with words that you can sort of understand, and instead of guessing what they are talking based on their body language and facial expressions, you can now sort of verify with the words here and there that you understand.

Or when you’re reading some long novel with many different characters and a fairly convoluted plot, then when you get close to the end the loose ends start to tie themselves up in nice understandable chunks of reckoning.

“Aha! So that’s what he meant!”

“Aha! So that’s why he hid the ice cream!”

“Aha! So that’s why she rejected his proposal! I get it now!”

And so on.

When you get a particularly dense string of “Aha!” moments then your brain is really juiced. Which is maybe why I decided to sit down and have a look through that book.

The book, in case you’re wondering, is The Einstein Factor, By Win Wenger. You can check it out on Amazon, or there’s plenty of info at his website.

But the book is chalk full of exercises to give your brain a thorough workout, and several of them have been clinically proven to actually raise your I.Q. One of the most famous is called “Image Streaming.” I tried this for the first time at a seminar I went to on Photoreading.

Image Streaming is when you close your eyes, and just describe the imagery that is in your head, whatever it is. No matte what you are doing, the brain is constantly feeding you images. The unconscious never stops. It’s best to do this with a friend, or at least to describe the image stream into a tape recorder. Otherwise you’re likely to fall asleep.

For every hour of image streaming, you’ll raise your I.Q. one point. Now if you try this, it can seem near impossible to keep this up for five minutes, let alone an hour. But just like any other practice, the more you do it, the easier it gets. And if you only did it ten minutes a day, six days a week. That would be one I.Q. point increase per week. If you took two weeks off every year, you’d increase your I.Q. fifty points a year by only doing this simple exercise ten minutes a day.

There’s plenty of other simple exercises you can do in that cool book. One of them is called “Borrowed Genius.” In this particular exercise (or hallucination, as that seems to be a more appropriate term) you think about a problem.

You imagine somebody that you are pretty sure could solve your problem. You get your friend or your tape recorder ready, and close your eyes. You start to describe your problem in as much detail as possible, and while you are doing so you slowly walk up behind the person you imagine could easily solve your problem.

Then you come up behind them, and quickly switch heads. Yep, you read that right, you switch heads with them. (See why this is best called a hallucination?) And as soon as you plot their head down on your shoulders, you immediately start jabbering away at your best guess to the solution to your problem. The reason you need a friend, or in this case a tape recorder might be better, is that you’ll get several great ideas, several of those “Aha!” moments, but since your jabbering away with some other persons head, when you switch back to your own head you might forget what you just said.

Another trick is called “Over The Wall.” Same concept, instead of walking up behind somebody and stealing their head (or borrowing it) you imagine that there is this big wall, and just on the other side is the solution to your problem. You walk up to the wall slowly, describing your problem in as much detail as possible, and leap up to the top of the wall, and immediately, and as fast as you can, and in as much detail as you can, describe what you see on the other side.

Again, make sure you have a trusted friend (who can take notes really fast) or a tape recorder, or your voice recorder on your computer.

I highly recommend the book, “The Einstein Factor,” or at the very least have a look at Win Wenger’s website. There’s tons of great info there on how to explode your genius and creativity.

Have fun.

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Plan For Luck?

Showtime

I wasn’t sure how this was going to work out. It sounded like such a good plan when we’d laid it all out. On paper. In the safety of our hotel room three hours earlier. Now it didn’t seem so easy. Not that we had any chance to back out. We had committed. We had to follow through, or else pay the consequences.

Charles had thought of this plan back when we were in Tucson, three months earlier. We had been working on this hotel, construction. The three of us had been doing odd jobs for the past several years, ever since the incident. Nothing more than a few months at a time. Trying to stay ahead. This was supposed to put us over the top, but you never know. Sometimes things have a way of backfiring, and ending up not quite like you’d expected. But then again, sometimes everything goes perfectly, and you end up coming up much better than your wildest dreams.

That had only happened once before. About halfway through, I thought that everything was going to go quickly to hell, but suddenly everything turned around, and all the pieces magically fell into place. It was perfect. The most beautiful thing you could ever imagine, unfolding right before your eyes. Something like that can spoil you, if it happens to early. It’s like you get a taste of perfection, and you spend the rest of your life chasing after something that only has a probability of happening once every three or four lifetimes. Only they don’t tell you that until it’s too late.

Something told me that this was one of those times.

You never know. Even when it’s too late, even when it’s obvious you should just cut and run, people tend to ignore the obvious and hold out for a miracle. I’ll never forget how it went down that one time before. We had been planning it for about six months, everything was detailed out, every last angle was sketched out, and planned for, and rehearsed. Every contingency was brought up, acted out, role played to death. Everything.

Then that kid showed up when he did.

I mean, what the hell are you supposed to do when that happens, just ignore it? You can’t do that. I mean there he is, right in the middle of everything, you can’t just not pay attention to something like that. So we hesitated, and tried to blend him into our plan, to make sure everything turned out ok. At first it looked like we might have a chance, a real shot at success.

But then they showed up. Like they were expecting us, almost as if somebody had tipped them off. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? We’d been so careful. Maybe the kid had something to do with it.

Then all hell broke loose. People screaming, alarms going off, tires screeching, everything you didn’t want to happen, happened. And just when we thought we were done for, that guy just showed up out of nowhere, with a solution so obvious, yet so outstandingly bold, we jumped at the chance. The kid and everything. And before you knew it, we were in the clear. Everything was just clicking, like it was all planned out.

Only it wasn’t planned out. We were just making it up as we went along. And the funny thing was, it was working out much better than our best plan. There we were, with this total and complete stranger, why he was helping us I still don’t know, and we were completely making things up as we went along, and it was going better than our best laid plans.

Nothing was ever so easy after that.

Every other job since then was never as perfect as that one time. We tried everything, but you just can’t plan for things like that. Sometimes we planned as much as we did that one time, other times we relied on chance, but never did we have such an easy follow through as when that guy showed up.

And we never even figured out his name, or where he was from, or anything.

Just as quickly as he showed up, he was gone. No advice, no words of wisdom. He only lent a hand, and then split.

So there we were, things looking like they might collapse at any second, but not nearly as worse as they’d been before. So we kept pushing, and hoping.

But not praying. Never praying.

That was the one thing that we were forbidden to do. Not that we argued. It seemed a good enough reason when the edict had been handed down. We’d readily agreed, given our options. Sure, sometimes, some of us secretly wished we’d never struck that bargain, but we held fast to our agreement.

No prayers.

It was almost time to make the move. I checked, made eye contact with the other two that were within sight, and they both checked the two they could see. We all gave each other the signal. It was time to move.

Now or never.

We burst through, with as much hope and force as we could muster, given the circumstances.

We had no idea what was waiting for us on the other side…

To be continued….

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How Does She Know You’re Lying?

Congruence

I was reading this book a few weeks ago. It was an old, out of print book that I picked up in some old bookshop, by an author that wrote another, more popular book that I’d read. So naturally, I picked it up, since it was only a quarter. The first book “Dress For Success” by John Molloy was a bestseller, and although written back during the seventies had all kinds of useful advice for what kinds of clothes to wear in what kinds of situations.

The interesting thing about Dress For Success was that it wasn’t written as an opinion piece, it wasn’t just another collection of self-proclaimed fashion guru’s advice based on his own personal tastes and experience. The materials in the book were the results of scientific research. The author owned some kind of social research organization, and they would frequently conduct “experiments” by sending people out in public, and have them perform certain tasks. And the only variable they would vary was the clothes that the people wore.

Of course, many of the results were the results of surveys, e.g. asking people’s opinions after “experimenters” would pass by wearing certain clothes. One example is that they had a bunch of guys go out wearing black raincoats. Then they would follow them, and ask people what they thought of them. They would say they were doing an experiment, and have them fill out a questionnaire. Invariably, the people that were wearing beige raincoats were judged to be more professional, and more upper class than those wearing black raincoats.

Another interesting experiment was they sent several men out in public, and had them eat in a restaurant. After they’d finished eating, they’d explain to the waiter/waitress that they’d forgotten their wallet, that contained their ID’s, but they had their checkbook. (This was before debit cards were invented, and many people still paid by personal check). About 80% of the guys swearing button down shirts with ties had their checks accepted, while almost none of the guys without ties had their checks accepted.

The entire book was filled with useful information on how to dress if you are interested in how others perceive you.

But this other book, called “Live for Success,” was more about general lifestyle habits rather than what kinds of clothes you should wear.

For example, they had several guys that were wearing clothes and had bodies and faces as close together as they could get. The randomized them, and then had them walk into social environments, like bars or clubs, for a long enough period of time so that people would remember them when asked a few minutes later.

Half of the group walked with their shoulders slumped forward, and their head hanging down. The other group walked with erect posture, shoulders rolled back, and head straight up. Keep in mind that everything else between each group was as consistent as they could make it. Clothing, hairstyle, facial makeup, facial hair, etc. What the found, although not really surprising, was interesting nonetheless. The group with erect posture was rated an 8 out of 10, on average, while the guys with poor posture were rated at a 6.5 out of ten. The obvious take away from this is that simply by walking with correct posture, holding your shoulders back, and your head up will increase your “attractiveness” score by a full point and a half out of ten.

What I found to be the most interesting chapter was on congruence. They did a case study on a guy that, on paper, should have been a fairly likeable guy. Decent job, decent family, good income, decent education. But when they interviewed his friends and coworkers, they all described him in completely distasteful terms. The company that employed him had consulted with Malloy’s company (the author of the book) to try and determine what it was about this guy that turned people off so much. Many times people just couldn’t stand to even be in the same room him. The guy didn’t swear, didn’t have excessive body odor, didn’t leer at females inappropriately, nothing obvious that you would think of when you would hear somebody described with such obvious distaste. Nevertheless, whenever his coworkers would see this poor guy coming, they would make a beeline in the other direction.

After a few weeks of study, Malloy and his associates found out what it was. The guy was completely incongruent. His facial expression was incongruent with his message, his body language was incongruent with his speech, and even when he was agreeing verbally with what somebody was saying, his body language and facial expression was screaming the complete opposite. His body language, facial expressions and gestures were always completely opposite of his speech and his language.

Now this may have had some deep psychological reasons based on childhood or something, but Malloy and his associates weren’t there to fix that. All they were hired to do was to find out what it was about his guy that turned people off so much. Once they put their finger on it, they gave him some exercises and pointers to get his non-verbal communication more in line with his verbal communication. They had him do practice exercises in the mirror, hold his head and body still while he was talking, and other things that slowly brought his body language in line with what his verbal message was.

The interesting thing was that although everybody knew that didn’t want to be in the same room as this guy, nobody could quite put their finger on why. And it took a professional social research firm a few weeks to figure it out as well. After several week of practice, most people accepted him as “normal” and didn’t despise him as much. And he found it much easier to make friends, and be productive in his work when it involved interacting with others outside the company.

The clear take away from this is to always make sure you’re body language is in congruence with your verbal message. Any guy who has come home late at night, and tried to lie to his wife or girlfriend, knows how quickly significant others can pick up on incongruent communication, especially females. Females seem to be much better at picking up incongruencies in communication than males.

If you’re in sales, being incongruent can kill a sale before it even starts. Even if you believe in the product you are selling, your body language can shoot you in the foot. I used to work with this guy that would shake his head back and forth (the universal sign for “no”) whenever he talked about his product. This would turn of clients, as it appeared this guy had a distaste for his own product.

But the truth was, when he was speaking of his product, his thought was “nobody can do it better than us” which led to his head shaking. This was often misinterpreted by potential clients as a disbelief in his product’s quality. So even if you have a strong belief in something, you can project a conflicted message if you’re not careful.

The simple way around this is to simply get out of your head, focus on who you are speaking with, and focus on your message. Just like the guys in the bar, hold your head up, keep your back straight, and look them in the eye. You’ll have much more success this way.

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The Final Battle

A Second Chance?

They had been waiting for generations. One group lined up behind the next, and the next. Sixty in all. Roughly thirty in each group. The clans had come together in what they hoped would be the final push to their independence. They were tired, they were angry, they were ready. The plan was to attack at noon. It was just after eleven.

Inside the farmhouse, they were nervous. They had never seen so many outside. Well, that’s not exactly true. They had seen this many, many times. Or more. Only before, they’d just swirled around in some random collection of black specks against the sky. But not today. Today they seemed prepared. Organized. As if they had some kind of plan. But that was impossible.

“What happens if worst comes to worst, and they attack in some kind of organized fashion?”

“Don’t be silly. There’s got to be an explanation. They can’t be organized. That’s impossible. That would mean…” he trailed off, not willing to complete his thought.

“Just supposing they do, what should we do? I mean, I have two shotguns, and maybe thirty, forty shells with me. There’s got to be a couple thousand of them out there. Even when they feed, shotgun blasts don’t bother them much. If they were organized somehow…”

“OK, worst case, we save our ammunition. We lock all the windows, the doors, seal up all the entrances. Just choose a spot, and pick ’em off as they come.”

He didn’t sound convinced of his own plan.

“And when we run out of shot?”

“Hunker down?”

“Why don’t we call the state police, they might know what to do.” She finally said. She had been quite the entire time.

“By the time they got out here, it would be too late. Sides, they wouldn’t us anyhow.”

They were all silent for several minutes. They were startle when the clock struck noon.

The leader felt the time was right. His kind didn’t need clocks or alarms. They just knew. They had developed a form of telepathic communication centuries before, and the elders of time past had agreed it would be best not to communicate with the humans. For what they knew about the past of the humans would plunge their world into eternal darkness.

For several thousand years they had allowed them to grow, to build, to prosper. To allow their cities to expand and envelope their own territory. But they had gone too far. They agreed they would never be able breach the communication barrier set up many thousands of years ago, for obvious reasons. It would mean certain doom. The humans had reached a critical mass, and the knowledge of they kept hidden would destroy not only them, but also everything else.

The elders had foreseen this, but had allowed them to flourish anyway. There had been hope they would see; that they would avoid what many thought was inevitable. But they hadn’t.

Now it was time.

The leader took off, sounding the cry of attack. Those that studied these particular species, had they been paying attention, would have noticed that his particular cry had never been heard before, never been catalogued in any scientific journal, never been studied and meaning determined.

This cry reserved for only the final battle. And to all those that heard it, and repeated it, it only meant one thing.

Kill them all. Quickly and without mercy.

“Jesus Mother of God!” He said, dropping his shotgun. The others stood, and outside the windows, off in the distance, the thousands of black figures took off as one, and formed a shape in the sky. A shape so terrifying and recognizable that it only meant one thing.

No hunkering down would save them, no running, no desperate call to the office of the state police. Shotgun shells, what little they had, would be useless.

The women among them fainted, and the men began to weep, and howl as children.

Death was coming. Fast.

The same scenario repeated, all over the world. Before sunset, the entire of humanity had been wiped completely off the face of the earth.

Almost.

There had been a few left alive. It was believed that the shock and horror of what they had seen sold wipe their memories clean.
They would be allowed to start over again. To spend hundreds of thousands of years wandering as nomads before inventing fire, and the wheel, agriculture, religion, and their gods. Perhaps it would be different next time.

Perhaps.

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Italian Food Is Hard To Come By

What Did Euclid Know About Meatballs?

Spaghetti and meatballs. At least that’s what she promised me. It was on the fence when she called me and invited me over for dinner. There was a good movie on, I had woken up early that morning had finished a long painful day at work. I had a lot of personal things I needed to get done the next day, so I was looking forward to some cheesy movie in TV, and then an early night. If I went out, I knew I’d stay out late, get to bed late, and sleep in the next day, sabotaging all my plans.

But it had been a long time since I had a good plate of spaghetti and meatballs. And she doesn’t just make them the regular way. She does something extra, I’m not sure if it’s in the sauce, or the meatballs themselves, but it’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted before. And in my neck of the woods good, authentic Italian food of any sort is hard to come by.

Hence my dilemma. So there I was on the phone, trying to decide. She wanted an answer, as she would need to get started. I don’t why she decided to cook that that night, or why she called me. I wondered what thought came first in her mind. The spaghetti, and then me to help her eat it, (as she knows I love it) or was it me, and the spaghetti was merely a lure (as she knows I love it).

What to do.

What hell. I told her I’d be over at seven. It was 4:30. I had finished work at three, after starting at 5:00 A.M. It was going to be a long night. The only thing I hadn’t figured out yet was why. For I was about to begin one of the strangest evenings of my life.

Once I tried to make spaghetti and meatballs myself, but it came out disastrous. I think if I focused only on spaghetti, I’d be OK. Any fool can make spaghetti. Boils some noodles, open a can of sauce and stick it in the microwave for a minute or two. Dump some Parmesan cheese on top. Bam. Meatballs, also, not a stretch. Take some hamburger meat, mix in some spices, maybe an egg or some breadcrumbs, and cook them somehow. I’m told the best way is to throw them in the sauce as it’s cooking, but when your strategy for cooking spaghetti sauce is pouring it into a bowl and nuking it for two minutes, that doesn’t work. Two minutes is enough to warm sauce, but not enough to cook meatballs.

I was reading this article in a science magazine the other day. It was talking about some of the fundamental differences between men and women. According to the article, it goes way beyond just plumbing. Females are better at communicating, and multitasking. Males are better at something else, like watching TV. It has something to do with how many connections there are between the hemispheres of the brain. A typical female can talk on the phone, cook dinner, and watch the kids all at the same time. If a man tried to do that it would be a disaster. Our fields of vision are different as well. Men are much better at seeing things far off in the distance, but have terrible peripheral vision. Something to do with our evolutionary past of chasing after zebras and throwing spears at them. Females on the other hand, have much better peripheral vision, along the aforementioned communication skills. Something to do with collecting berries, watching the kids, and keeping up to date on everybody’s ever changing social status back at the cave while the men were out chasing zebras.

The article mentioned that this is one of the reasons why most teachers are women, and most air traffic controllers are men. Two completely different skill sets, filled by people who are naturally proficient with those skills. It also mentioned that the person with the best set of natural skills to be a leader in a society that wasn’t always at war would be a woman, but the person most driven to become a leader would be a man.

So I think I tried cooking the whole shebang, spaghetti, meatballs, sauce from scratch, only once.

Never again.

I don’t even want to go into what happened. Which is why I agreed to go to my friends house. And by the time I got there, her motives were clear. The spaghetti was the bait, and I was the prey. Not that I was complaining. Seeing what other bait she prepared for me, my plans for the next suddenly didn’t seem so important. In fact, as I stood there, looking at her, smelling that delicious aroma wafting in from her kitchen, I could scarcely remember what my plans were to begin with.

Something to do with Euclidean Geometry, and a Taco Stand, but I could be mistaken. I often am.

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Structure, Content, And Pajama Wearing Elephants

Would You Mind Passing The Guacamole?

Once I had to meet a friend of mine at the last minute to play a round of golf. I was at this party the week prior, and one of my buddies was talking about how he’d recently started playing, and we should play sometime together. He’d asked me if I wanted to play the following weekend, and I said “sure, why not.” The way he asked seemed to be more like a “we should play sometime” rather than getting his calendar out and actually filling in that morning.

I figured if we were going to play for real, he’d call me during the week to let me know what our t-time was. Little did that his idea of playing golf was just to show up at the course and wait for the first available slot. He didn’t mention any specific times, nor did he call me during the week to confirm, so I was surprised when he called me at 6:30 on Saturday morning, from the golf course, asking me where I was. I suppose you get much better luck just showing up on a Saturday if you show up at 6:30 in the morning. Silly me.

One of the interesting things about language that Seven Pinker points out in “The Stuff Of Thought,” is how we humans tend to cloak our intentions behind our language fairly often. If you were to look only at the surface structure of language, we’d have a lot of miscommunication. The example Pinker gives is when sitting at the table with friends or family, we rarely blurt out “Pass me the guacamole,” in it’s the pure imperative form of the word, even thought that’s exactly what we mean.

Even in something as simple as asking for the salt or pepper among close family or friends we shield our raw intentions through vague language. If somebody took the surface structure literally when we said, “Could you pass me the salt?” We would never get the salt.

It’s amazing that misfires in communication like in my golf story don’t happen more often. My friend assumed I knew that “Lets play golf next Saturday” meant it was not only a done deal, but also it meant to show up at the course at 6:30 A.M.

Often times when we communicate, we don’t even have an intention to shield. But we don’t want to give our freedom completely over to our friends, so we attempt test out their intentions and see if we like them, or we’d like to improve on them or not. This happens frequently in the familiar “I dunno, what do you want to do tonight?” Once I spent about two hours on a date (thankfully not a first, or it would have been the last) driving around going back and forth like that.

When two people that don’t have a plan come together, not much is going to get done. When people don’t have a plan, we tend to gravitate towards a feeling of ego protection, so we tend to not want to try new things. For most of us, in order to try something completely new, we’ve usually got to specifically plan to do so, or have somebody that knows what they’re doing take us along.

Once I had a boss that wasn’t quite at skilled at oblique communication (either that or it just didn’t matter much to her). I was working on a project, and wanted her input. I asked her advice, and she said, “I don’t know. Tell me what you think and I’ll let you know if it’s acceptable or not.” Thanks for the help, boss.

Many a vaudeville routine has been built up around miscommunication, or misunderstanding of what each other is saying, the most famous being the “Who’s On First” routine by Abbot and Costello. (Recently enjoying a surge in popularity due to the president of China being a guy named “Hu”). Many jokes are set up so that the first have is interpreted one way, and the punch line is based on a completely different interpretation. Couple examples:

Losing one parent is difficult. Losing both is just plain careless.

Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.

Why did the guy keep a clock underneath his desk? He wanted to work over time.

Ok, I’ll stop.

One way to use vague language is in sales, seduction, and hypnosis. Most people are not completely aware of their criteria in these areas, what they want to buy, who they want to hook up with and how they want to solve their problems.

When you skillfully use vague language in such a way that the target of your words can fill in the blanks, even on a subconscious level, you can elicit some pretty powerful states and desires. If you’re in sales, you can elicit a strong pleasurable feeling of buying something really nice, without really getting into specifics of what that actually was. Most people would be hard pressed to describe in detail what it felt like when they bought something they really liked.

But when you artfully vague language, you can elicit those feelings, and attach them to any product you want. Likewise for seduction and therapeutic hypnosis.

If somebody comes to you with a bad habit they’d like to quit, you don’t have to specifically elicit how they got rid of other bad habits you can just elicit that resourceful state that everybody has experienced when they know they can overcome something. Everyone, through the simple fact of still being alive, has over come hundreds if not thousands of obstacles in their lives. All you need to do is elicit a few of those strategies, as well as a belief that it’s within that persons capabilities, and you can effectively transplant that strategy and self belief into their current habit they’d like to quit. All without really being specific about anything.

This entails using a lot of “structure language” rather than “content language.”

Content language:

This water has been filtered through .04-micron filters seventeen times, and then aged in walnut casks to give it a pH of 7.3, which has been shown to be the perfect pH for thirst quenching, according to the latest research. There we fully recommend “product name” water for all your drinking needs.

Structure language:

I don’t know what it’s like for you, when you feel that wonderful feeling, of cool water hitting the back of your throat, and as you easily quench your thirst with every delicious gulp, and as you feel the weight of this water in your hands (show picture of water you’re selling), you know that your thirst will be gone in a matter of moments, and you get that sense of safety and satisfaction knowing that you are in full control of your desires, and have the capability to satisfy those desires (emphasize bottle of water) anytime you want, you know that “product name” will be waiting to serve you whenever you need it.

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Nature Or Nurture?

Peer Pressure

I just finished reading this fascinating book by Steven Pinker called “The Blank Slate.” In it he challenges the popular notion that people are blank slates when we are born, and are easily shaped by our environment, parent, religious upbringing and childhood. It’s a fairly controversial idea, as many people think that the idea of people coming into the world with some kind of pre set nature will lead to discrimination, or something like eugenics, (or worse, nazism) which was all the rage at the beginning of the last century.

He touched on several hot button topics in the book, ranging from politics to race to feminism. Most of his points were well argued, and he had plenty of data to back up his claims.

One hot button topic he spoke about at length was the influencing factors that contribute to an individual’s behavior. There’s always been the old “nurture vs. nature” debate. Are we the way we are because of our genes, or because of our environment? The answer, according to a growing number of social scientists is both, which makes sense. Our collection of behaviors as adults is due more or less to fifty percent genetics, and fifty percent environment. Of course some behaviors will be influenced much more than others than environment, so not every individual behavior is fifty-fifty. But taken collectively, our general behaviors, beliefs, ideas, and personalities all mashed into who we are (or who we think we are) is roughly fifty percent from our genes, and fifty percent from our environment.

But the shocking part (for some) is the particular environment that we are shaped from. When they say fifty percent of our behaviors are due to our environment, they are referring to our non-family environment. That means our behavior is determined much more by our peers than our parents. Who we are has nothing to do with how we were raised, by how we related to our friends and our peer groups growing up. What roles we played in the group, whether they were a positive influence, or a negative influence.

Study after study after study, involving twins raised together, twins raised apart, adopted kids raised in the same family, non twin siblings raised together, and raised apart bear this out.

This makes sense when you consider the social influence factors described by Cialdini in “Influence, Science and Practice.” Two of the biggest factors of influence are authority, and social proof. Authority is pretty much anybody who knows what they’re talking about, and is generally respected as such by those that he or she is talking to. Social proof is simply going along with the crowd. Of course, these two can powerfully work together, as authority of any one person can be greatly enhanced by social proof.

Anyone who studies covert language and hypnosis for sales or seduction knows one of the key skills to have is to gain rapport with your target before persuading them. By gaining rapport, you show that you are one of them. You are part of their social group. But gaining rapport is only the beginning. You’ve got to not only pace, but eventually you’ve got to start to lead if you want them buying your product. You’ve got to convince them that you are an authority in their world enough so they’ll feel comfortable buying your product, or doing whatever else it is you want them to do.

And if you’re a kid growing up, who do you have the most rapport with? Your parents? Your teachers? Or your friends? And who them, has the most authority in your world? You may fear punishment by your parents or teachers, or you may crave the rewards, both emotional and otherwise, from your parents and teachers, but he “leaders” in your peer group have the most juice when it comes to real authority. If you’re a parent, you how seemingly impossible to fight peer pressure. Often times a threat of severe punishment is the only way to persuade. And if you’re in sales, using a threat of punishment in order to persuade somebody usually doesn’t work so well.

In NLP, there are a lot of procedures to change behaviors based on re engineering your past. There’s even a procedure called “Perfect Parents.” It’s a popular notion that if you are “messed up” as an adult it’s due in large part to your parents not doing such a great job bringing you up. But what if the most influence your parents had on you was by giving you their genes? What if those that influenced you the most were the kids you hung out with while growing up?

All those procedures in NLP to change the way your parents brought you up may actually be barking up the wrong tree. It may be helpful to reengineer your historical peer group, or our place in your peer group next time you try on a different history to see how it affects you present.

When trying to learn a new skill, it can help to remember times in your past where you exhibited some aspect of that skill while you were with your friends, and there weren’t any adults around.

These ideas may turn out to be completely full of holes, but at least you’ll gain some flexibility when looking into your past to understand your behaviors and beliefs in the present. And as a general rule, the more flexible you are, the easier it will be to come up to a solution to any problem that may come up, and a way to conquer whatever obstacles you may be dealing with.

It’s a sad truth that many adults carry around a deep resentment for something their parents did to them, or didn’t do to them when they were kids. But it may turn out that whatever they did, or didn’t do, has no impact whatsoever on your life today. Anyone harboring any deep-seated resentment for their parents would do well to remember the words of Nelson Mandela:

“If you hold a grudge, it’s like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies.”

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The Power Of Congruence

Fake It Till You Make It

The other night I was watching this movie called “The Sphere.” It was an OK movie that was taken from an OK book; it had some decent actors in there. I think they were trying to somehow tap into the idea that “our thoughts create our reality,” or something along those lines. This, of course, has been written about since time immemorial, but in the movie they had to introduce the idea through some alien spacecraft found at the bottom of the ocean.

What was interesting was that they had this huge laboratory way down deep underwater, all the way down deep, and the conditions on the bottom were completely calm, no matter how bad the conditions were on top. At some point in the movie, there was a need to communicate with the surface, but there was this huge storm brewing, and it was a question whether or not their communication ship would be able to get to the specific point or not. But deep down underneath the surface, it was just as calm and smooth as ever. No matter how rough and disastrous it seemed on the surface, down deep was always calm and stable.

Of course, when the so-called alien sphere started with messing with people’s heads, it became not so calm, until they figured out it was there own fears that was messing with them. Every character happened to see something that represented their worst fears. They figured that the alien sphere was somehow tapping into their fears and projecting them out around them. A nifty metaphor for the idea of creating our reality, good or bad. Whatever is internal will create the external, and whatever you see on the external is a reflection of whatever is going on internally.

I remember reading a discussion on an Internet form regarding seduction. They were discussing the efficacy of one “guru’s” method of acting a certain way around women. One particular camp seemed to be arguing that if you acted a certain way, you’d get a certain result. Like obviously if you smile at people, you’d much likelier get a smile in return than if you didn’t smile. But the other camp was arguing that exhibiting behavior that isn’t natural is “fake” and won’t work.

I guess an analogy would be to walk around forcing yourself to smile at people when you aren’t in a good mood, and see what would happen. It would be an interesting experiment. Start off with four groups, two happy, two unhappy. Then half of each group would smile at everybody for a day, and the other half wouldn’t. So you’d have half of the happy people smiling, and the other half forcing themselves to not smile. And the half the unhappy group would not smile, and the other half would force themselves to smile.

Here’s how I think the results would pan out:

The unhappy group that didn’t smile would remain unhappy, as only a small percentage of people would smile at them. And those that did, the unhappy group probably wouldn’t notice, since they’d be too busy being unhappy.

The unhappy group that forced themselves to smile would likely have a higher percentage of moving from unhappy to happy, as they’d probably get some return smiles, which in turn might make them happier.

The happy group that didn’t smile would probably have a tendency to become unhappy, as even though they were happy, they wouldn’t get any smiles from people, and that might cause them to feel sad.

Then of course the happy group that smiled, would likely increase in happiness, as their smiles would elicit return smiles, thereby increasing their happiness.

I believe that the two groups that acted in congruence with their true feelings would amplify their true feelings the most. The unhappy group that didn’t smile would become even unhappier, and the happy group that smiled would become happier.

But I also think that both groups that acted incongruent with their feelings might actually shift their feelings to be in congruence with their actions, to a certain extent. After a while, the happy people that didn’t smile may become unhappy, matching their feeling with their outward behavior. While the unhappy group that forced themselves to smile might become happy, matching their feeling with their outward behavior, despite it being forced.

The bottom line, then, is that congruent behavior that matches your internal state will amplify your internal state. But a consistent behavior that is incongruent with your internal state may be enough to change your internal state, until it becomes congruent with your internal state. Form follows function, and function follows form.

Of course, this is only one kind of congruence, and it’s assuming quite a bit that is probably impossible in real life. In real life, you can have some parts of your outward behavior that is congruent with your internal state, and some parts of your outward behavior that is completely incongruent with your internal state.

And of course your internal states maybe congruent themselves, leading to a mismatch of external behavior. You may be happy to see an old friend, on the one hand, but on the other hand a little nervous since the last time you met you got into a big fight. Or you may run into a girl or guy that you just started dating, but happen to be on a date with somebody else.

One thing that most success gurus preach over and over again is that the best way to reach your goals is to act and communicate as congruently as possible. If you have a goal to lose weight, but you eat ice cream every night, that’s not very congruent. If you want to become financially independent, but work over your credit cards, that’s not very congruent.

Incongruent behavior can be the result of subconscious conflict as well, and can often times be misinterpreted. If you are a guy, and you really like a certain girl, but are terrified of rejection, you may exhibit some less than useful interpersonal skills whenever you’re around her, making you come across as socially inept and unattractive. She may interpret this as you not valuing her very much. You may want to ask your boss for a raise, but are afraid of getting rejected, so you don’t put too much congruent effort into your proposal. Your boss will think that you may not believe you don’t really deserve the raise, and subsequently reject you, giving you the fear you feared most.

The old adage, “fake it until you make it,” can be helpful in situations like this. Just like in the above thought experiment with the smiles, you can lead your inward state by your outward behavior, providing you keep it up enough.

Just like a kid on swing, by moving your body in the right motions, you can some pretty big amplitude after a while.

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How To Model Others To Easily Achieve Excellence

Doin Some Cookin?

I was watching this cooking show on TV the other night. I don’t usually watch cooking shows, but this guy was pretty entertaining. One thing I liked in particular was he didn’t seem to measure any of the ingredients. It was a handful of this, a pinch of that, a little bit more of this. Even when he cooked some of the dishes, he never said what level to set the heat to or for how long to cook them. Just throw some stuff together, stick it in the oven until it’s done, and next thing you know you’ve got a gourmet meal on your hands.

I took a cooking class, two cooking classes a few years ago. Asian cooking. We learned to cook Chinese, Thai, and Japanese food. Two different course, and two different instructors. But they had two completely different approaches to cooking.

The first class I took (the classes were each four weeks, one night per week) she was extremely specific. Cut this exactly this way, measure this, make sure to shake the measuring spoon exactly three times to let the ingredients settle, but don’t shake too much, otherwise they’ll settle too much. Make sure to wash your hands and the instruments (cutting board, knives, measuring spoons, etc.) after each and every step. I was even lectured about placing the washed utensils in the drying rack at the proper angle so they would dry properly. Extremely detailed. The food, however, was magnificent. I don’t remember what we cooked exactly, but it was better than anything I had in a restaurant.

The other lady, who was from the course I took a few months later, because I had enjoyed the first course so much, was completely different. She was more like the guy on the cooking show. Put some of this in; add a bit of this spice, and a dash of that spice. Cook until it looks done. The food came out just as tasty, but not as “perfect” as the first class. This lady seemed to have the philosophy of showing us the general idea of how to make stuff, which we could later add to our own tastes. Whereas the method taught by the first lady didn’t seem to lend itself too much to improvisation. Being somebody who likes to cook, but rarely from a recipe, I rely heavily on improvisation. I have cooked some doozy experimental meals in the past, some good, some outrageously horrible. Once I tried making peanut butter popcorn, and it didn’t come out so good. One of the many tragedies of theory meeting reality.

One thing I noticed about the temperament of the two ladies is that the first lady seemed to be what I would describe as a type “A” personality. Detail oriented, always has a shopping list when they go to the store, lives and dies by their personal planner.

The second instructor seemed much more relaxed and a “make it up as you go along” type of person. While neither is better or worse, both characteristics have their strong points and weak points, there is evidence of type “A” people suffering more from stress related diseases. There’s also evidence of type “A” people making more money than the slackers among us.

One interesting idea I read in a book on personal development is that you can train yourself to be either type “A” or type “B” depending on the situation. If you need to perform some consistent behavior to get a specific result, you can train yourself to follow a specific set of instructions to maximize your success. Likewise, when it’s the weekend, you can easily switch into type “B” mode, and sit on a park bench and stare off into space when it’s time to unwind.

The trick is to develop a “switch” that sends you into automatic behavior mode when the situation calls for it, and being able to turn the “switch” off when the job is done.

One way to do that is through modeling. When you model somebody, you unconsciously soak up as much as their behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes as you can to achieve the same result they want. For example, if you are a student, and you have a difficult test coming up, it may help to model the most diligent person in your class. For the time being, simply pretend that you are them, as much as you can.

Where do they study, how long do they study, how many breaks do they take, how long, and how often. How do they motivated themselves, whey they are feeling lazy, what do they say to themselves to keep them focused, what do they visualize when they see themselves achieving their goals. Are there any authority figures from their past telling them supporting messages (in their imagination) while they are studying.

These some things that can collectively turn you into a studying machine. If you need to “switch” on this behavior, develop a kind of external anchor that you can use to put you in study mode. I had a friend once that was studying for a chemistry exam, and one of his “heroes” (as much as you can have a hero if you are a chemistry geek) was the guy that came up with the chemical structure for benzene from a dream he had of a snake eating it’s tale. This guy (the hero) had a relentless desire to figure out how stuff worked, so much that it permeated his dreams.

So when this guy (the student) wanted to get into “the zone,” he would sit at a table, place both palms on the table, close his eyes, and take a few deep breaths. Then he would imagine the ghost, or the spirit of the benzene guy slowly slinking into his body from behind, and giving him all his motivation and desire to figure out how stuff worked. He (the student) said this really helped to study, and he always did well on his chemistry tests.

So if you can figure out what you want to achieve, figure out somebody that has already done it, and come up some kind of physical “switch” along with a useful hallucination to help you take on their behavior. You may find that this can help you more than you realize.

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A Meta For You

What’s The Meaning Of That?

The other night I was supposed to go to this party with a couple of friends of mine. Within thirty minutes each one called me with some last minute emergency that kept them from going. Not such a big deal, it was a birthday party of a friend of a friend, one of those things where nobody is really spearheading the effort. Like when you get a group of people together, and everybody’s first choice of what to do is different, but everybody’s second choice is the same, so you go with your second choice. That’s kind of how this plan got formulated. Which is why it disintegrated without much fanfare.

After they bailed out, for reasons I’m pretty sure were honest and legitimate, I bailed out myself. So there I was, left without any plans for the evening. So I did what any other normal person would do with an evening suddenly free of organized activities.

I went to work in my basement to further my research on alternative energy sources using a combination of hybridized cold fusion with solar image refraction.

Just kidding.

I watched TV.

It started out like any other night of TV watching. My TV, my remote, and my attention deficit disorder rapidly clicking through channels, pausing at any thing that resembled girls in bikinis.

I happened across a documentary about something, I think it was a religious program on the bible or something. It was one of those shows where they have the host, which really isn’t an authority on the subject, but a recognized figure, and a bunch of pre made clips spliced in with so called “experts” sitting in some office with a large impressive bookcase behind them, talking about the particular subject.

They were talking about the various stories from the Old Testament. I think the gist of the show was how much of the Old Testament is historical, and how much is mere allegory to explain a particular point.

For example they showed the story of Noah and the great flood is fairly ubiquitous throughout many different religions that predate the Old Testament. Most of the guys they talked to seemed to agree it was symbolic, as water is often used as a cleansing metaphor in stories, both religious and non-religious. I remember a professor of philosophy explaining to us, as we were studying Siddartha, by Hesse, how when the main character crossed a river, it had metaphorical significance, and then later when the main character became the actual ferryman, that had even more significance. For those of you who haven’t read Siddharta, it’s basically about the Buddha before he became the Buddha, and how he reached enlightenment.

There were a couple of guys they interviewed that maintained the story of Noah and the ark was literally truth, and there is evidence of an Ark somewhere in Turkey. Sonar imagery shows something that appears to be boat of pretty much the same dimensions as described in the Old Testament.

One interesting metaphor, or truth, depending on your belief system is the Temple of Solomon. The temple of Solomon is often referred to, and is believed to be an important Temple of King Solomon long before Kind David.

If you’ve ever read the DaVinci Code, or seen the movie, part of the story involves the Templar Knights, who, as a group, gained an enormous amount of power during the middle ages. The supposedly found some secret hidden in the remains of Solomon’s Temple, and that is where they got their power. Some say that it was a secret so devastating to the Catholic Church that they effectively blackmailed the pope, giving them enormous authority.

Then, on the other side of the spectrum are those that believe the Temple of Solomon is completely metaphorical for the power of the unconscious mind.
There’s actually quite a bit of Gnostic thought that seeped into both the Old and New Testament. When the Romans politicized religion, they pretty much stamped out any beliefs that didn’t see the Pope as the supreme ruler, and any Gnostic thought was made illegal.

Basically, the idea behind Gnosticism is that the entire power of the universe resides in every person, and is easily accessible if you know how to tap into it. According to this theory, the Temple of Solomon is simply a metaphor for the power of the unconscious. Of course, if you are a Roman leader, and you’ve got millions of people you need to control, this idea doesn’t do you very much good. It’s much better to invent an idea of the power of the universe residing in some spiritual leader or guru, upon whom the people depend on for their salvation.

If you are the Pope, having the power to excommunicate entire nations can be extremely powerful, more so than whole armies of soldiers willing to die.

Obviously, when it comes to Biblical stories, there’s no proof one way or the other. You can believe they are literally true, or you can believe they are simply metaphors designed to help people out. Whether or not you believe the sun is the son of Zeus traveling across the sky, or merely a huge ball of hydrogen slowly turning into helium that the Earth is revolving around doesn’t really matter when your alarm clock rudely shakes you out of your sleep on a Monday morning. You’d better get out of bed either way.

I suspect that all this is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to how we humans perceive our environment, and our shared history.

The conclusion of that show wasn’t really much of a conclusion, rather than a restatement of the original questions. But it was certainly interesting to hear all those different opinions.

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