Category Archives: Flexibility

Altering Behavior Can Lead to Tremendous Results

I was waiting at the station the other day, waiting for a train, and I happened to be sitting next to a guy that was working on some very complicated math problems, or problem. I wasn’t sure if it was a bunch of different problems or if it was on big problem that was somehow interconnected to all the rest. Because he had them written on several different pieces of paper. He would write a bunch of equations, pause, and stare off into the distance, and then write some more. There were many people walking around, and it is summertime, so there are a lot of distractions that can steal your attention from a math problem, if you catch my drift.

Sometimes you can only focus on a problem for a certain amount of time before you need to give your brain a break. It’s kind of like lifting weights. You can only do so many sets before you need to set the weight down and give your muscles a chance to repair themselves. That’s how you get bigger muscles. When you lift weights, you are actually breaking down the muscle fiber, and then if you give yourself enough rest in between the exercise with proper nutrition, your muscles will rebuild themselves better, stronger, faster, just like Steve Austin.

Sometimes working on a mental problem is the same way. You need to give your brain a rest. I don’t know if there are brain fibers that break down and grow bigger, although it certainly can seem that way if you’ve ever done a lot of math homework. Einstein said that you could never solve a problem at the same level where it was created. So maybe staring off into the distance every so often gives your brain to look at things in different perspective.

Finally after the guy seemed to stare off into the distance longer than normal, I asked him what he was doing. I didn’t think I was disturbing his thought process. His body language seemed to indicate that he was taking a longer than usual rest. He told me he was working on some thermodynamics applications for his business. He is a chemical engineer at a local beer distillery, and he was working on some equations that are related to the process before fermentation. He was that they result that they were getting was adequate, but if they could streamline it a little bit, without giving up any quality, they would be able to increase their profit margin.

He said it’s all a matter of results and behavior. He said the problem is when you focus on only one side of the equation. The results, in this case, were the end product. The different brands of beer that his company produces. There are specific ways to measure results in his particular case. He explained that it’s important to stay away from measuring results subjectively, because obviously different people will have different opinions. It’s important to have an objective way to measure the results you get, so you can reproduce them or even improve on them. Specific gravity, alkalinity, color refraction index are different ways to measure the exact results. The other side of the equation is behavior. In this case the behavior is how the chemicals interact with each other in the fermenting tank. Time, temperature, sugar levels, ingredients of the initial mix are all things they can vary. The trick is to vary the behavior and see what the easiest and quickest ways are to get the results that you want. If you can find a relatively easy behavior that will give you the results you want, you’ve got a winner. Then you can go about varying your behavior and see if you can even improve on your results, which is even better.

I wish I would have gotten his name, or business card though. Going on a tour of a local brewery would be a pretty cool experience. I never thought that brewing beer was such an involved, scientific process. Go figure.

How to be a Jedi Master of Conversation

So the other day I was hanging out with this new set of friends I had met previously. I had run into them a few nights ago in a local bar, and we started talking about various things that you usually talk about in bars with strangers. The conversation steered it’s way around to baseball, and I turned out the had an extra ticket to a game last weekend. They offered, and I accepted. So there we were hanging out in the parking lot, having a few and cooking some bbq like most people do before a baseball game.

It’s interesting when you pay attention to the way a conversation flows. It’s a highly dynamic and interesting phenomenon. It’s like it has a mind of its own. One interesting thing you can do next time you find yourself in a conversation that is kind of wandering around aimlessly without any intended direction is to do some experimentation. I wouldn’t recommend doing this when the conversation is somewhat important, like if you happen to be testifying before congress or anything. In that case you might want have your game face on.

But if you think of the topic of conversation as a separate, living, breathing organism, it can be fun to experiment with it and see how many different ways you can stretch it. Sometimes it’s like when you chase a chicken. You can delude yourself into thinking that you are controlling it, but in reality, a chicken has very limited intelligence, and is operating on pure panic and fleeing in any direction possible, sometimes completely irrelevant of the noises you are making to communicate to the poor chicken that you really aren’t going to chop off its head and eat it.

Try this experiment: Next time you find yourself in the middle of a conversation of little global economic importance, choose a topic, completely at random, and as completely far removed from the current topic as possible. Then try and slowly steer the conversation towards your selected topic, but try and do it in such a way that the other people bring up the new items of the conversation. To do this you’ll have to introduce little intermediate transitional breadcrumbs and hopefully covertly help people to think of the connection on their own. The more you practice this, the sooner you’ll realize you can steer a conversation any way you want, including towards things to your immediate benefit. Which will pretty much make you a Jedi master.

Change – Hit the Ground Running

The other day I was having lunch with a friend of mine. He was a little worried, because he just found out that he was being transferred. He wasn’t only being transferred to a different city; he was being transferred to a different job function as well. The place where I live, it is fairly common for companies to do this, and when they do, the employees usually have to choices. Accept the transfer, or find another job. Because the latter is tantamount to professional suicide, the only real option is to take whatever the company decides to dish out.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been faced with a large and unexpected change in lifestyle, but it can be pretty intimidating. Especially one that involves something as important as your livelihood. Many studies have shown that the older people get, the more we like the same routine over and over again. It’s one thing to change lifestyles again and again when you are young, as many people do when they change schools, make new friends, and generally grow up and learn about life. It’s something else altogether to have this happen when you think you are well established in your career, your family, and your community.

The key thing to consider when facing issues like this is that you always have the ability to learn new skills. The one thing about humans that separates us from all the other animals is our ability to change and adapt. And the heart of changing and adapting is the ability to not only learns new things on a regular basis, but to figure out how to apply old learnings in new situations. I don’t know if you’ve ever been able to experience this, but it really is a natural part of human behavior.

Some people resist change completely. I’m sure you know people that resisted change so much, by hanging on to old ways that they’ve really lost out when a new and better way to do things came around. The hallmark of a modern society is the natural ability to adapt and change with the times.

When I caught up with my friend a few weeks later, he was ecstatic. He had applied the skills form engineering into his new job as a regional sales manager. Because he was able to combine skills from different areas, he vastly exceeded his supervisor’s expectations, earning him a top spot in the company. And his wife and kids had similar success. All from being able to accept, embrace, and realize your full potential and the ability to use change to your advantage.

Untie Your Elephant Leg and Roam Free

The other day I was reading this really interesting article on the Internet. You know how you are just surfing around and come across something that intrigues you somehow. You get a feeling of curiosity, and you have to read this, like something here is really fascinating.

The article was about elephant trainers in India. It was talking about how when they take an elephant at a certain age, they tie a long rope around it’s leg, and the other end to a large post in the middle of the elephant training camp. The interesting thing about this is that they have to tie the rope to the elephant’s leg at just the right time, or else it won’t have the right effect.

Timing is very important in cases like this. People can realize how important timing is because life itself is a long succession of events, which are dependent upon events that transpired before them. When you think of how events are really based largely on what happens before them, you can appreciate the value of proper timing. I’m sure many comedians have made the mistake of telling a punch line at the wrong time, to unhappy professional consequence.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried stand up comedy, but it’s an interesting study in communication, there is a unique style of communication that makes doing stand up particularly humorous. And when you can combine the skills of stand up with other acting skills such as improv, then you can be really influential with your communication. There are lots of different books on this subject, if you are interested in improving your communication skills. Most people can realize the importance of being able to improve your communication skills.

So when they tie the elephant’s leg to the middle of the camp, they only need to keep him tied up for a few months before he learns of the limitation. Even when they remove the rope later on, the elephant still thinks he is constrained by a physical limitation that is no longer there. Some elephants can go their whole lives and be tied by an imaginary rope that was taken away a long time ago.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been constrained by something in the past that no longer applies, but it can be useful to look through the list of limitations in that you keep in your head and go through them. You might be surprised to find that many of them are no longer applicable. And when you can take any list of things where most of the items on the list don’t apply any more, most people just go ahead and crumple up the whole list and throw it in the garbage.

When you can remove all your limitations just like that, you are free to do pretty much anything. Have sex with beautiful men and women, make lots of money, run for president, whatever you can think of is how way more possible than when you had that old list of outdated ideas in your head. Something to think about next time it feels as though something is tugging at your leg.

Where’s my Burrito?

The other day I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant downtown. It was remarkable in that my city doesn’t have very many Mexican restaurants, and I am a huge fan of Mexican food. Maybe because I grew up in Southern California, or maybe because I’ve traveled to Mexico several times, I just can’t get enough of the stuff. My favorites, of course, are the tacos you can buy from street vendors.

I’m sure you’ve eaten several different ethnic dishes in the past that you’ve thoroughly enjoyed. Just sitting there now, reading this, you can remember some of those dishes now. Maybe you ate them recently, or maybe it’s been a while, or maybe you’re even planning on eating soon. I think one of the greatest things about living a world with so many opportunities for cultural interchange is the incredible variety of food that you can enjoy. Realizing this can really give you an appreciation for different cultures. Most women know that the path to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but most people aren’t aware that the quickest way to the heart of another culture is through their kitchen.

When you realize this you can automatically begin to feel a great sense of appreciation for the other wide variety between cultures that is available to you, right here, right now. In this day and age, it is easy to understand this. And by eating the food of other cultures, it allows you to find other avenues to explore.

I have a friend who is a seasoned world traveler. She tells me the cuisine of a particular country has a great impact on her overall opinion of the place. Her favorite places are where she enjoys good meals. I don’t know if you can feel the same way or not, but when you understand the vast richness that cultural exchange can afford, you can easily begin to understand the benefits of world traveling.

Many people have realized that traveling is the best way to enrich your life. I was at a seminar a few years back, and the instructor was saying that people who have been to other countries tend to have an easier time learning new things. When you go to another country, and find yourself surrounded by people that look and dress and talk differently that you, you can find those things that you thought were important starting to drift away, making space in your mind for new and better ideas and beliefs. Of course, while few people have the time and resources to travel abroad extensively, everyone can find ways to expand your mind in your own neighborhood, even if it is going to an authentic restaurant, or studying a foreign language in your spare time.

Studying foreign languages is much easier than most people expect. People feel that can’t easily learn something new, but they realize that they can, you can begin to wonder how you may apply new ideas to increase your skills. And when you do this, you might be able to realize how easy this is.

Of course, most people realize the importance of learning. The understanding that most people don’t have yet, and you are receiving now is that learning never stops from occurring. There are those that say the biggest block to learning is education, because it removes your natural ability to learn things on a regular basis, so that you may easily and consistently improve yourself. You can understand this, can’t you?

One thing that can make the most pervasive changes in your life in several areas is the idea of continuous and conscious learning of new things. Whether it is of new cultures, new food, a new language, expanding your mind will always benefit you in the long run.

Now, back to my burrito.

The Power of Perspective

I lot of people have been talking recently about that new idea that’s been going around. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it or not, but it’s one of those things where you can’t be sure if it is just a passing fad, or if this will turn into something really worthwhile. I friend of mine found a copy of this a bookstore. Not the newer one, but the original book that was circulating around before that international guru got a hold of this and brought it back into the public consciousness again. I’m not sure if he is being true to the original authors work, but it seems to be starting off on the right track. You never can tell, though. I usually like to hold off judgment on things like this until they have reached a critical mass. I don’t know if that is good or if I’m just lazy, but it seems to have worked for me in the past.

It’s interesting the way things are looked at differently when considered from different angles. Especially when you throw history into the mix. Some ideas seem totally fantastic and obviously wonderful. Nobody can find any fault with them, as they sweep the nation with a wildfire rapidity usually reserved for deadly diseases. Then ten years later, you look back in time and think, “Dude, what were we thinking?” It’s interesting how a power of perspective can greatly give you expanded views of what you think is so obvious.

I took a seminar once on this very subject. We were instructed to sit in a chair, and imagine that we were a fly flying around our bodies. With our eyes closed, we imagined the fly looking at our hair, our ears, our legs and feet. Then we imagined looking at ourselves from the ceiling, the floor, and even through the window from the outside. Then we later tried during a normal conversation. We would sit across from somebody, and while we were talking and maintaining eye contact with the other person, we would imagine seeing and hearing ourselves from the other persons perspective. This is a lot more difficult than it seems. Quite often we would stop in mid sentence as we tried to focus on all these different things at once. One cool thing that happened is that after a few practice, runs, when we were finally able to maintain this new angle of perspective and hold a normal conversation, we found that our minds became very calm and quit. You don’t really know what all those voices are chattering on about in your head until they shut up for once. I really recommend trying this out next time you are having a not so important conversation. Hold off on doing this when talking to your boss, otherwise he or she might think you are a bit off. This takes some practice, but once you get the hang of it, it gives you an amazing clarity of concentration and focus.

The next step in the seminar was to look at our lives from different perspectives in time. From a newborn babies perspective, trying to imagine what it would be like before learning to walk and learn the alphabet. Looking at our present abilities would be astounding to an infant. Some things that we take for granted are really wonderful gifts that we overlook. Another exercise we did was to look at our lives from the perspective of our great great grandchildren. Some of the big problems that we think are so important looked absolutely tiny in comparison. Many people found that this simple exercise helped them to discover what is really important in your life. When you can release the small problems that are taking up valuable space in your brain, and sort out the three or four things that are really important, it can really give you a fresh enthusiasm for getting what you want out of life.

I would recommend doing this as often as possible, from as many different perspectives as you can imagine. The fly, the infant, the great grandchild, even of God, if you can allow yourself to do that without violating any of your beliefs.

People that do this on a regular basis find that your world will naturally expand and you will find yourself discovering new resources that you never thought were possible before. And all of this is possible with only a few minutes of imagination.

What Size is Your Cage?

This morning I was out walking, and I saw a woman with several large dogs. I think she is watching a couple houses for people that are on vacation, so she promised to take care of their pets while they are gone. It’s interesting how such a small woman can command such a large group of powerful looking dogs. It reminds me of that story of the circus elephant. When the elephant was a baby, they tied a rope to its leg, and then tied the other end to a nearby tree. As elephant grew, he realized that he could only go so far from the tree. When he became an adult, he had learned through experience, trial and error, that his world was only confined to a certain area around that tree. Because he was fed and cleaned on a regular basis, he never really had the motivation to and try and move past his confinements.

It’s like when I was in a fish store once, looking at the various fish. On one side of the store, were all the fighting fish. These were fish that you don’t put into a tank with another fish, because they will fight and fight until one of them is eaten by the other fish. The other side of the store is lined with passive fish. Passive fish are content to stay in a tank with many different kinds of fish, and get along well without ever feeling the need to eat each other. I noticed on the side with the fighting fish that there were two sharks, that looked as though they were the same species, or breed, or whatever you call fish, but they were much different sizes. Much different than you would expect from a parent and child. It was as though one of them was a miniature version of the other one. Of course because they were on the side of the fighting fish, they were in different tanks.

Sometimes when you try and see what is really going on behind something that looks different than you think it should, you can be amazed at the complexities that are all around us every day. When you look at this, you might see one thing, but when you look again, you might see something completely different. I’m not sure if you’ve had this experience before. It’s kind of like Déjà vu, when you see something, and you can’t quite put your finger on it. You feel that feeling, and get those sensations, and those allow you to remember those things that you’ve been thinking about for quite a while. It’s those things around you can get really interesting, and you start to really become curious about this. Like you really need to find out more , and discover the truth. Many people, like you, have the courage to follow through on your natural curiosity, while others are content to sit and wait and see what happens.

So when I asked the shop owner why the sharks are different sizes, he said it was because of how they grew up. If you put a baby shark in a small cage, it will only grow to the size of the small cage. But if you put a baby shark in the big cage, it will grow to match the size of its big cage. And the interesting thing is, even if a shark is an adult, and you switch to a bigger cage, you will see an increase in growth when you increase your cage size. Even better is when you get rid of the cage altogether, and roam free. Then you can grow to monstrous proportions.

Which is what happened to the elephant. While he didn’t grow to monstrous proportions, he realized that rope that was holding him to the tree was no match for him. One day there was a fire, and he looked down at the rope decided that it had served its purpose. It had kept him safe long enough, but if he continued to ignore it, it might actually cause him harm. So he quickly broke it, and after he found his freedom, he went and helped the other circus animals and performers escape. He has been roaming free ever since.

How about you?

Choose Your Own Criteria

There is a new bookstore in my town I’m just dying to go to this weekend when I get a chance. It’s on the other side of town, so I’m going to have to make a day of it. It is four stories, and has an Internet café on the fourth floor. Internet café’s in Japan are really cool. Not only do you get the Internet, but also you get free drinks (non alcoholic), a nice comfortable leather chair, and a semi private space to do whatever you please. They even have huge racks of comic books that you can read if that is your thing. But one of the reason’s I’m particularly interested in this book store is they built it next door to a coffee shop, and I heard they knocked down the wall between the coffee shop and the bookstore, so customers can kind of go to two shops in one. It’s great when you find that some things just go together.

Like some people are just a perfect match for each other. I’m you know several couples that you just couldn’t picture except with each other, like they’ve known each other for many many lifetimes. And the funny thing is, is that they are both similar in many ways and different in many ways. Like God somehow picked them specifically to be with each other. Some people fit together like a simple jigsaw puzzle, but an old one that is kind of bent and faded. It’s easy to get the pieces to match, but they fall apart quickly, and it doesn’t take long to hook them up. Others are like those really complicated brain puzzles you find where it takes almost forever to see how they fit, but when they finally fit together, it suddenly becomes obvious. And they don’t want to separate, because they don’t want to go through the hassle of being put back together again.

Other puzzles are the trick ones that magicians use in their magic acts. They look like there is no way they could fit together, but with a magic flick of his wand, they suddenly become inseparable. These of course, are only built to look like they are connected, and even though everybody knows on some level that they aren’t really connected; they kind of play along and make believe they are connected. Nobody wants to be the guy that stands up and reveals how the trick is done. That can ruin it for everybody.

Then there are those once in a while situations that you come across. Like when you see a cat and a dog hanging out together. Maybe their owner had them since they were a puppy and a kitten, or maybe the dog is suffering some midlife crisis and he thinks he is a cat, but there they are. Natures sworn enemies have somehow decided that it doesn’t matter if they are supposed to be enemies, if they want to hang out together, they are going to hang out together. They don’t care what anybody says. They have found the secret of being able to create your own happiness without being dependent on the opinions of others. Who knows, maybe many animals, dogs and cats, lions and zebras, cobras and mongooses try and be friends with each other, only to find out how powerful peer pressure is, and fall back into the roles that their respective societies have chosen for them, and give up on being able to think for yourself, so you can define your own criteria for happiness.

Which is why I am looking forward to going to that bookstore. It is not a mainstream bookstore, and it is kind of on a small side street, so it won’t likely be very crowded. One thing I like to avoid is large crowds. There is nothing better than discovering some really cool like this, and sharing it with your friends.

How to Speak the Local Language for Powerful Success

I was hanging out in a coffee shop the other night. It was one of those coffee shops that is attached to a large bookstore. The large bookstore is inside of a large mall. So the area of the coffe shop kind of bleeds into the bookshop area, which in turn melts into the mall area. I happened to be sitting at a table near the back, facing outward, so I had a fairly good view of the bookstore, and coffee shop table area, and the area just out in front of the book shop inside the mall. As I was sitting there, watching people walk by and read their various magazines and drink their various coffee drinks and other things, I saw a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. I motioned for her to come and sit down, as she was alone and seemed to be wandering around aimlessly, as people like to do during their free time.

She had just come back from a trip to Europe. She had bought on of those multi-country rail passes, and had traveled through various countries. She spent lots of time telling me about the different food and culture she’d experienced, as well as some of the new words in various languages that she’d picked up. She said that people really reacted well to her when she spoke the local language. She also said that the words “Please” and “Thank you” were very powerful. She mentioned that a few times she ran across some tourist that seemed to have a condescending attitude, which didn’t get them very far. She even was able to secure a table in a restaurant that had been refused to two tourists just in front of her.

We started talking about how important it is to speak to others in their own language. It would seem that this would be obvious to most people, but apparently her experience says otherwise. Some people when they speak to others assume that everybody has same experience and frames of reference as they do. This can be extremely unhelpful, and the person listening has to work twice as hard. One to figure out exactly what frame of reference the person is coming from, and two to try and figure out exactly what the message is.

It reminded me of a lecture I saw on a memory expert. She was saying that everybody has a different “memory map” inside their brains, and we all operate from different memory maps. Even people that grew up in the same family in the same circumstances can have very different memory maps. The lecturer explained that one of the biggest failures of western style education is that it is assumed that every student that enters school has the same memory map, as they are all taught the same way. Teachers can become frustrated when they are trying to teach students that have vastly different maps than they do. I guess it’s not so bad when teaching something as straightforward as mathematics or hard science. Even then you have to be careful and make sure the person you are talking to is at least one the same level as you, and not higher or lower.

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of having an argument with somebody, and you were both arguing about two completely different things, for two completely different reasons. I can remember several heated engineering discussions I’ve had in the past with an engineering manager of mine. On the surface, it would seem that something as cut and dried as engineering would be simple to talk about. But when you add in two different egos, expectations, and experiences into the mix, and you suddenly find yourself in a heap of trouble.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. The biggest hurdle to overcome is getting over your need to be right. Getting over your need to get your opinion heard so that you can maybe get some recognition and ego gratification out of the deal. The paradox is that by focusing on imposing your opinion, you actually get less validation and ego gratification. By stepping back enough to make you sure you understand the other person enough to more effectively present your opinion, so that it is actually heard rather than argued with, you will be much more successful. And you actually might learn something.

How to Slay the Demons of Your Fears

I was having breakfast with a friend this morning. She wanted to try out this new restaurant that opened up nearby. It’s interesting how difficult it can be to open and maintain a restaurant. They can be incredibly rewarding, if you open up in the right location, and have the kind of food and environment that people like. There are a lot of variables that go into it. I remember reading a survey a while back, asking people what was the most important thing about a dining experience. I think the quality of the actual food came in third or fourth behind ambiance, and the general feeling of the place. Even McDonalds’ mission statement stresses “experience” over anything else. Experience can be a tricky thing to define. It can be really subjective, many people experiencing the same thing as different. Some people might not really enjoy something, but others can really like this. It’s like when you see this, you can really think to yourself how much you can enjoy this.

My friend was telling me about how she came up with an interesting way to help her toddler overcome nightmares. He is three, and is starting to have scary dreams. She was telling me how her physician told her that some children have more bad dreams than good dreams, so it’s important to develop good strategies to help overcome  fears. She had read a few books on child development, and being an ex kindergarten teacher, she was pretty well equipped to handle these kinds of things, so of course I was interested in what she did.

She said that whenever her son would wake up from a nightmare, she would ask him to describe it. She noticed that the more he described his dreams, the scarier they got. The monsters became meaner, with bigger teeth and hungrier looks in their eyes. Sometimes he would even imagine that they had blood dripping from them. So my friend decided to try something. She gently helped her child change some of the things that he’d experienced in the dream, without really changing the actual content. She changed the meaning behind the content.

For example, instead of having teeth that were dripping blood, the monster suddenly had teeth that were dripping chocolate sauce. Instead of having hungry looks in his eyes, the monsters eyes were red from laughing at a funny cartoon. And instead of having a mean look on his face, it became a look of consternation as he was trying to quietly fart without drawing attention to himself.

I asked her if this worked, and she said that it didn’t take long for her kid to begin to do this on his own. He would wake up, and as he started to recall his dream, he could change the pictures around so it wouldn’t be as scary. She said the trick was to take whatever pictures you come up with, and play with changing around certain aspects of them. You can use it for things other that scary dreams. You can use it on memories, or imaginations of the future, as well.

For example, if you have a particular memory you’d like to change, you can still remember the actual memory the same way, but change the meaning of the content. Like if you remember somebody yelling at you, you might have remembered that it was because you did something wrong, which would in turn cause you to feel not so good. But if you remember them as yelling at you because they were in a bad mood because they themselves got yelled at, it’s not so bad.

She went on to say that you could also play around with changing the actual content. For example, you can take a memory of a teacher yelling at you in front of the class in third grade, and shrink the teacher down in your mind to where she is only three inches tall, and her voice sounds like Mickey Mouse would if he had inhaled some helium. Then when you remember the class laughing in the background, you can remember them as laughing at her, and not you.

I thought that that little three year old is pretty lucky to have a mom that would become so interested in making sure that you can do these things to make your fears go away. I’ll be interested in seeing how much he can turn into a more resourceful person with so many skills to help others.