NEIL COWMEADOW - THE EXPERT GUITAR TEACHER IN TELFORD. GUITAR TEACHER AND AUTHOR. GUITAR LESSONS THAT WORK! DEDICATED TO TEACHING SINCE 1999 - ACCELERATED LEARNING TECHNIQUES: LEARN FASTER, PLAY BETTER, AND UNDERSTAND...

The Thursday Thesis  - 30/4/2020

I love teaching guitar!

This won’t surprise any of my guitar students – they’re used to me grinning and laughing during lessons.

What does surprise them though is the simplicity of many of their favourite songs.

It’s a funny thing, but it keeps on happening.

Heads are shaken, brows furrow, and "it can't be that easy..." is regularly heard.

It's as though I'm breaking some kind of rule, making playing guitar so simple and easy...

But that's because there's a type of thinking error known as misattribution – the assigning of qualities to a person or thing which has nothing to do with the real qualities they possess.

I did it myself for years – decades actually – and it really didn’t help at all.

These days, not so much.

Here's how the misattribution error goes for music fans and wannabe guitar players, singers, and just about everybody else:

1. I like this piece of music: I judge it to be Good.
2. I’m a sophisticated music fan
3. Logically then, I wouldn’t like simple music because I am such a fan of music
4. It therefore follows that this piece of music (which I consider to be Good) must be hard to play.
5. That means it is going to be hard for me to play...
6. Produce evidence to confirm your assumption - the classic Confirmation Bias I've talked about before on the blog.

Obviously, there’s no causal link between liking a piece of music and it being a technical challenge to play.

In fact, the more popular a piece of music is the less complex it tends to be. If you don’t believe me, just listen to the mainstream radio stations: most of what you’ll hear are short loops of a few simple chords, assembled into blocks (usually called introduction, verse, chorus, middle 8, bridge and outro) and produced to make them more interesting and variable than their deep structure really is.

I’m not knocking it – I’m just pointing out that the reality of music is not what we think it is, most of the time.

So reflect on this little thought: before music became something you bought – as a recording of some type – music was something you did; something you made for yourself, just for the fun of it.
Back then, almost everyone would get up and sing, play something and join in with whoever else was playing.

Back then it was easy and commonplace – so how did so many of us get convinced that we needed to have a “gift” or a special talent?

We fell under the hypnotic power of marketing, hype, bullshit, and the loud voices who seemed to know what was what.

Did music get harder, or did we get stupider, less “talented” and less musical?

Or did we just allow ourselves to be deceived by charlatans - and our own assumptions?
 
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2020
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The Thursday Thesis  - 5/12/2019

Back in the 90’s I lived and worked in Kiev, the capital city of the former Soviet state of Ukraine. During the brutally cold winters in the city I started to train at a local gym to stay active when it was too cold to be outside for long.

I’ve always been a bookworm so I read everything I could lay my hands on about training and exercise, trying to shortcut my progress and build muscles I could show off on the beach at Gidropark when the summer rolled around, instead of hiding my puny torso under a baggy T-Shirt.

The books gave me an exercise plan and I did everything they told me to do, I did the prescribed 10 repetitions (reps) of each exercise, grouped into sets, which I repeated in accordance with the guidelines and training principles laid down by the experts, adding new routines and exercises from the articles in various bodybuilding magazines.

Every morning I’d climb the stairs to the gym, unlock the outer steel plate door and the inner steel-barred gate, turn on the lights and watch the cockroaches scatter before I changed into my gym baggies and hit The Iron. An hour and a half later it was all over and I’d go home to bed.
Day after day I trained my arse off in that little gym, spent a fortune wolfing down the supplements advertised in the magazines and stuffed myself with as many calories as I could stand.

I just did what everyone else did and got what everyone else got: bigger muscles, chronic fatigue, burnout and injuries. Looking back, I realise that what I believed was keeping me healthy was making me ill and hurting me.

Daft as a brush.

That was twenty-five years ago. But to this day there’s a purity and honesty about weight training that appeals to me: it’s just The Iron versus Me, and there’s nowhere to hide. You can tell yourself you’re strong, that you are indestructible and fearless – but The Iron knows better and it will always find you out. The Iron will always beat you up and tell you that you are full of shit, because The Iron never sleeps and The Iron has no Soul – it just keeps coming at you and it will always tell you the truth.

Now, as I return to The Iron I bring a different understanding of how to train. Gone are the 10 sets of 10 heavy reps, splitting the workout over multiple days with split routines targeting my legs one day, my chest and arms another, and my back on another day.

Also notable by their absence are the downsides of training – chronic fatigue, burnout and injury.

I’m training only twice a week, now: one heavy-duty routine which targets all of the major muscle groups for just one set of around 8 reps, and one routine where I am doing something I would have thought absurd back in those Kiev days – one single rep of each of 5 exercises, using only moderate weights, and each rep takes FIVE MINUTES!

Five-minute REPS!

Like most people, I thought it was BS to train one rep for 5 minutes – NOBODY was doing it, but the science behind it looks way more robust than the workouts in the magazines and bodybuilding manuals, which don’t talk much about rest and recovery, or mention the vast amounts of drugs used by pro bodybuilders.

And I’ve rediscovered the fun of challenging The Iron, but this time on my own terms. I’m getting more out of the gym than I’ve ever got before, but I’m putting a whole lot less time and effort into it. This is a much more sane approach than going Old Skool – spending hours in the gym and not ever really recovering from a session before starting the next one.

Minimum input, maximum output.

What I’ve learned from my research into the science of training and the Freaks at the fringes is that Conventional Wisdom is frequently wrong, and what works best is what works best for you.

A couple of cheerful gym rats have told me that 5 Minute reps can’t possibly work and that they can help me to train more effectively, but I’ll do it my way and we’ll see how it goes. If unconventional works, it’s a win. If it fails I can always return to doing things conventionally.

Maybe I’ll prove them wrong – we’ll see.

It’s just a test. In life, everything is a test, all knowledge is contingent – a best guess while I wait for more information with which to prove myself wrong and update what I think I know. Understanding that fact means that I’m always looking for better ways to train, teach, play, write and do business: in this mindset of  ongoing curiosity, fun and adventure there is always something new to discover and explore.

It’s time to play.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis  - 28/11/2019

In the cult TV show Star Trek, Spock - the half-human, half-Vulcan Science officer – coined the phrase “Live long and prosper” as a greeting to fellow Vulcans, accompanying it with a hand gesture dividing his fingers into two pairs with the thumb extended.

To me, it’s a great salutation – far better than “Good morning” or the ubiquitous “Hi”. Live Long and Prosper is an affirmation of life and all its potentials: therefore it is deeply cool in my book.

But there’s something missing, in my opinion.

Living Long and Prospering is all well and good, but how should we die?

Personally I’m a fan of being astonishingly active and rudely healthy, deep in to old age – enjoying perfect health right up until the moment when I drop Dead.

I want to arrive at my own graveside absolutely spent: exhausted, gulping my last breath as I skid my motorcycle sideways to a halt, tipping me effortlessly into the pit as the lady who I was having sex with dismounts gracefully and pirouettes away, just seconds after our final, tumultuously synchronised orgasms.

And as I look up at the sky from six-feet below the grass I smile, murmuring “What a ride – now I’m going to have a lie-in” as the vicar and the gravediggers start shovelling the dirt in – clearly terrorised by the thought that I might change my mind and spring back out of the hole before bounding off in pursuit of more fun and misadventure.

Sounds good to me; that was probably how life ended for a good many of our prehistoric forebears – long-term diseases were rare and (if you made it past infancy) life expectancy seems to have been pretty good.

Archaeologists tell us that heart disease was virtually unknown and cancer was rare in ancient times – ancient humans seem to have been on the go right up to the end of their lives.

The medical establishment tells us that cancer and heart disease are difficult to treat without spending vast amounts of money on drugs: funny how Johnny Caveman had no problem with the modern killer diseases, isn’t it?

As we grow older we are expected to sicken, weaken and decline before we die – but aren’t we buying into a dodgy model here?

When we accept that growing older must mean a loss of powers, declining strength and virility we accept the notion that we are victims of an irresistible force set out against us: we begin to adopt the habits, movements and lifestyle we have been told is appropriate for us and acceptable to society.

So life is good for a short time, just until we reach the tipping point where we cease to consider ourselves young and unlimited, transitioning into passive riders on the long, slow downhill path to a medicated dotage and ultimate release...

It doesn’t have to be this way.

There is a mountain of research demonstrating that most of today’s major diseases are caused by the dismal diet (built on false premises and the suspect recommendations of Governments) we are peddled by big Corporations, compounded by our lack of movement. What the research suggests is that changing one’s diet and walking around could just about transform your life and the lives of entire nations.

But you probably won’t hear about all that research, because it’s been kept out of the mainstream media by people with too much to lose if we ever find out the truth about the Western Pattern Diet (also known as the Standard American Diet – poetically abbreviated to SAD) and how its ideas poisoned the World.

Since much of the Western World began to adopt the SAD and looked to the nutritional guidelines of the US’s Food Pyramid (low fat, high carbohydrates, low salt etc) diseases and chronic illness have mushroomed. In countries all over the World obesity and type 2 diabetes (formerly called Adult-Onset Diabetes) have tracked politely behind the introduction of SAD.
It’s not a coincidence – it’s causation, not correlation.

In every Country where the SAD has gained a hold, the story is the same: rising levels of disease and obesity, with long-term sickness occurring earlier in life, necessitating vast spending on medication to manage the problems caused by the SAD.

And as UK’s the population ages, more and more of us will become sick, medicated, and helpless; reliant on drugs and healthcare to manage our symptoms – just like America - and every other country infected by the SAD.

We owe it to ourselves to be vigilant and to be difficult: to question the advice given to us about our food by the food industry, about our healthcare by the people who sell us drugs, and by a society whose “average” citizen is fat, sick and medicated.

That’s not how I’m planning to live out the next fifty or so years: I’m going to Live Long and Drop Dead - how about you?
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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Episode 178 - White Belt Mind

The Thursday Thesis  - 21/11/2019

It is said that when one begins the journey into Buddhism the hardest thing to do is to clear one’s mind: to achieve Shoshin – the so-called Beginner’s Mind.

Shoshin is an empty mind; no preconceptions and open to anything when studying a subject. And it is a mind without place-markers for meaning or a frame of reference the initiate can easily feel lost and disoriented.

In meditation we should try to simply be: to quiet the seemingly incessant chatter of our “Monkey Mind”    which is our usual waking state – unsettled, restless, capricious, whimsical, fanciful and inconstant; confused, indecisive and almost completely uncontrollable.

Monkey Mind's thoughts rise up inside us, capture and fixate our attention, then  fade into darkness like fireworks in the night.

The aim is to simply empty one’s mind and notice what comes and goes, without reacting or judging, usually by paying attention to one’s breath and the flow of air into and out of the body; to observe our Monkey Mind thoughts rise, subside and fade, only to be replaced by more thoughts, which – in turn – also pass and are replaced, endlessly and continuously.

All that Monkey Mind sounds pretty tiring to me.

In Beginner’s Mind we accept that we know nothing – because we are beginners (the clue is in the name).

When newcomers to the guitar come for their first lesson the biggest problem is that they already know that learning to play guitar will be difficult, that they have no talent, no rhythm, that there are no musicians in their family, etc, etc, etc. Their Monkey Mind has been yapping away for years – often decades – based on knowing bugger-all about playing guitar!

Yep, based on no knowledge of the instrument they (we, really – because I used to “know” how hard it was to play guitar, too) have convinced themselves of a whole bunch of unhelpful things, so the very first (and most important) thing in the lesson will be the systematic elimination of those beliefs – to engender their Beginner’s Mind and to clear away their unfounded certainty.

Subduing Monkey Mind takes time and...

And what?

Not effort, but attention.

Once you become aware of Monkey Mind and simply notice its prattle, you can let it talk and talk – allow it to rage and rail, worry and fret – notice that thoughts rise and subside, endlessly forming and drifting away. You come to realise that most of it is just nonsense and, over time, become less attached to your thoughts and reactions: the mind clears and empties itself.

We can come to understand that we know nothing and in so doing begin to learn the first lesson. The lesson is that it’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know damned well and that isn’t true that hurts you.

Your Monkey Mind dances with untruth, worry and your own fears turned back in on yourself, and by stilling that Monkey chatter you can open up your mind to learning.

The first step to learning to play the guitar - or anything else for that matter - is to clear away the untrue, the second is to acquire the true.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019

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The Thursday Thesis  - 10/10/2019

When I was a freckly sprog I’d sit and watch the flames and glowing coals of my grandma’s open fire – it’s something I love to do, even now. Shapes change, bright spots flare and subside, and shapes shift to become....

Well, what exactly?

More often than not it’s a face – not the face that my great grandma warned me about, because that was always the devil’s face I had to be careful of – or something that looked enough like a face for my eyes and brain to connect the dots of randomness until they began to resemble the familiar.

We all do it – it’s a universal human trait with its own fancy name: pareidolia. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary it is “...the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern...”

It turns out that we humans are wired to sort for the familiar and especially for other humans – which is no surprise given our evolutionary need to find food and a mate.

But the most important word in that definition is “familiar” because we can manage what becomes familiar to us – it’s something we have control over.

If we have love and security, that’s what we’ll expect to be around us and we’ll seek out love and security.

Likewise, if we are surrounded by mistrust, hate, violence and division – such as our news programmes are crammed full of – then guess what...?

Yep – we’re going to expect to find that everywhere we go.

So when we begin to remove undesirable things from our lives (top tip: start with your television) that will begin to reduce our tendency to find those things in random events and objects.

When we don’t have doom, gloom and depravity forced down our throats every day, then guess what – we see less of it in our everyday environment.

Conversely, if we are surrounded by positivity and optimism, we will recognise those things in apparently random objects and occurrences, instead.

So, looking at ambiguous images such as the ten inkblots of the Rorschach inkblot tests can indicate what a person’s biases are, as the viewer “projects” what they think should be present onto the random shape of the inkblot.

So next time you glimpse a face in a cloud, or notice that a car’s front-end seems to wear a certain expression, relax – you’re not going mad, you’re just seeing things.

And that’s ok by me.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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Episode 168 - The Art of Looking Sideways

The Thursday Thesis  - 12/9/2019


I can’t remember when I first heard the phrase “a sideways look”, but I do remember that it was in a story of a wise woman facing down a villager who accused her of witchcraft. In the story that Sideways Look was all suspicion and contempt as the wise woman cowed her accuser.

And it’s such a funny idea, looking sideways, that it stuck with me. Tumbled by time and stained by my ribald life it’s acquired a new meaning for me, no longer is it haughty contempt – not in my sense of the phrase, anyway.

No, for me it’s become a look of deep curiosity, this sideways look.

Maybe it’s like the look of romantic interest, sudden curiosity and potential passion, and maybe it is charged with suspicion; but whatever it is, you know a sideways look when you get one.

Time freezes briefly when someone looks at you that way.

We feel our souls are being scrutinised by a sideways look, our very essence assayed and examined.

And it all happens in an instant.

That Sideways Look takes nothing at Face Value, it asks questions and weighs things up.

When you Look Sideways you don’t just begin to think about what was said – you begin to factor-in who said it, how they said it, the context in which it was said, and what they did not say.

Whatever the delivery media - Speech, book, video, commercial, print ad, radio or TV show - you begin to probe the speaker’s motives, their choice of words, their body language and posture, vocal nuances and rate of speech.

Looking Sideways isn’t just about face-to-face encounters with real people, and it definitely applies to advertising, marketing, mainstream media, social media, music and the Arts

A sideways look is really critical thinking, looking beyond and around, as well as into and through, the surface of events, messages, conversations. It squints at what is being shown, listens intently for what is said, hears the creaking of distortion and the sly whisper of Spin – moreover, it reaches into the dark silences of what is being left out.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis  - 27/6/2019

Is classical Time Management missing the point?

The Thursday Thesis  - 20/6/2019

I have a voice in my head.

You have a voice in your head, too.

If you think you don’t, whose voice was it that just said “no I haven’t”?

We all have voices in our heads – not the schizophrenic’s auditory hallucination kind of voices – but the voices that haunt us and screw us up.

They’ve been around for so long that we usually accept them as permanent and just another part of us: they’re part of our identity, even though they are usually just repeating echoes of long-ago, distorted, corrupted and twisted by time.

Mine is the schoolteacher who told me that I’d never amount to anything, and the protective parental voices counselling me to not take risks and to find a nice, safe job. They lurk just below the level of my ear, slightly behind my right shoulder – the same place they’ve always been.

What’s yours like?

Maybe – like me – you’re still hearing the words of someone with authority and upon whom you depended for approval or love, all rolled together into the voice of your Inner Critic

And maybe you’ve been listening to them talk crap about you, too - maybe for decades - just like my own inner voices have been talking trash about me and giving me their ten cents’ worth for decades,  making me play it safe and doubt myself.

Well, they used to do that...

You see, a little while back, I got lucky. James, one of my mentors, showed me how to turn my own inner critic (a.k.a. my “Inner Bastard”) into my new Best Friend Forever.

As he guided me through the process, he asked “...the voice in your head is always in the same location when it speaks to you, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh...” I agreed.

He pressed on “...And it always has the same characteristics of tone, volume, cadence – and it usually says the same old words it has been using since...well since forever, doesn’t it?”

I think I nodded.

“It’s giving you the same message – like a tired old telephone answering machine that’s played the same worn-out tape for decades...” He said.

“Now we’re going to change the tape, but the voice will remain exactly the same: the same position, the same intonation, volume and cadence, but now it’s going to speak different words. It’s like we’re going to change the tape in the machine: use the voice – change the tap... use the voice – change the tape... use the voice – change the tape.”

I moved my hands through the actions of removing the imaginary cassette tape from the imaginary machine and inserting a brand-new, shiny imaginary cassette...then pressing “PLAY”...

Now my old schoolteacher was telling me “Neil, you’re an oddball – a creative guy, very bright and full of fun, and I am absolutely certain that no matter what obstacles you face, you’ll find at least three possible solutions that are positive for everyone involved, and usually an opportunity that nobody else has spotted, too.”

Thank you Mr Roberts! Why didn’t you say that forty bloody years ago?

Then my dear old mom and dad chimed in – but what they said to me on the tape is private and sacred.

The effect was immediate, and I was close to tears.

James had me repeat the tape-changing process and tweak what the voices on the tape said until it was exactly right, then to leave the machine turned on and ready to play the tape for me at any time.

This was some pretty weird stuff to take in, but I gotta tell you that it works: it works better than almost any self-talk intervention I’ve ever seen or read-up on.

Some self-talk modifiers suggest that we should draw Mickey Mouse ears on the voices and give them helium to make them squeaky voices; others suggest moving the voices further away or moving the mental volume and tone controls. They also work, but not for everyone and not always quickly or permanently; I suspect that this is inconsistent because we have changed the attributes of the voice and it loses its authoritative qualities – that’s actually the whole point of the exercise.
But here’s the thing: if you retain the attributes of the voice – instead of changing them - it retains its authority, credibility and power.

Now, when the voice speaks to you, it still has all the gravity, power and credibility it has always had, but now it is saying positive things to you.

What would you prefer your Inner Critic to say to you?

Change the tape, and notice the difference...

How cool is that?
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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Episode 155 - The Wisdom of Baldrick

The Thursday Thesis  - 13/6/2019

Baldrick: Wait a moment, My Lord! I have a cunning plan that cannot fail!
                                                          Blackadder “The Witchsmeller Pursuivant” 

Yep, even Blackadder’s sidekick – the downtrodden yet optimistic Baldrick – had a plan. And Baldrick’s plan was always very cunning – at least to Baldrick.

And it’s a funny thing, but growing up in Wolverhampton in the sixties and seventies, nobody mentioned plans for our lives: certainly not at school, and not at home either. At no point did anyone suggest that having a plan for your life would be a good thing, or that aiming high was to be desired and admired. Though, come to think of it, I probably wouldn’t have listened to them if they had: I was always a stroppy little sod.

As the seventies ended and the decade tipped over into the eighties the story was still the same: plans for your life were not talked about: they were not what you did. I do distinctly remember being told that if I were foolish or arrogant enough to dare to make a plan, I could expect Fate to thwart and frustrate me at every step.

It seemed that Life Plans were for dreamers and delusional oddballs; the know-alls and nutjobs. And there was something comedic about these people with plans, too – as though they were dreaming a little too hard...

Now I understand that if we don’t have a plan for how our lives should be, we’ll end up working for someone else who does have a plan for us and whose plans probably won’t be much to our benefit: I just wish I’d found that out forty years ago!

You don’t have to look far to see people making plans – invariably the wrong plans. It’s commonplace to spend a very long time planning one’s wedding or annual holiday – but it’s much less common to really plan a life for oneself, based upon what might be a fun way to spend the next seventy or so years.

Doesn’t that strike you as odd – or is it just me?

If you have a plan, then there’s a chance of things going the way you want them to. Without a plan we are unlikely to end up with what we want.

Like a beautiful ship without a map or compass, we can sail and drift for years – sometimes for a lifetime – even though the rudder is working and the sails are full of wind, but without a course to steer by, even the best ships wreck and run aground on unknown shores.

In the military it’s often said that “no plan survives contact with the enemy” and  it’s true. The armed forces are masters of planning, and the phrase “planned with military precision” has become synonymous with effective and efficient operations. Here’s the thing, though: the army knows that its plans will not survive contact with the enemy, but it still invests time and effort into making plans to ensure that the desired operational outcome is achieved with minimal losses – after all, what kind of army goes off to war with the idea that they’ll maybe go and “...wander around – probably in that country over there - and maybe do some fighting...”?

It would be ridiculous for an army to act in that way, and it would be ridiculous for anyone to act in that way, too.  

For an army many lives may depend upon the operational plan: for us as individuals, we are entirely dependent on our plan, or – more often than not – no plan whatsoever.

We march forth into each new day, becoming too focused in the day-to-day business of daily life to pause and look a little further down the road, survey hazards and scout for opportunities, and to make plans for their evasion or exploitation. Lost in the fast-paced busy-ness of everyday life, crisis of the moment and our immediate needs, we forget to plan what happens after today’s crisis has passed.

So I think it’s a great idea to take time off, once a year, and get away from work for a day or three. Isolate yourself from anything that could distract you from figuring out how you’d like to spend the next ten, twenty or more years and deciding what your life might be after those years have passed.

Write it all down and review your plan – in depth, every month; refer to your plan on Monday morning and notice how things are progressing or not progressing; then identify the short-term activities which will move you closer to your desired outcome.

It’s not rocket science, but a plan is usually the thought-foundation upon which everything else is built.

You see, making a plan is just like creating a blueprint for your life. There will be changes and amendments, re-thinks and re-drafts along the way, it will never be completely right, and it will never be perfect, because no plan ever is - but even a fairly good plan has a better chance of success than having no plan at all.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis – 30/5/2019

Warning: Do not listen to the audio version of this blog if you are driving or operating machinery, as it contains hypnotic language patterns  and may induce rapid Trance.

Mention to anyone that you’re a hypnotist and you’ll often get funny looks from them.

To many people there’s the image of the stage hypnotist and people quacking like ducks as they waddle around him; to others there’s the Svengali-like figure exerting mind control over his victim.

But hypnosis – or Trance - is a natural state which we all pass into and emerge from throughout every day of our lives, and Hypnosis has been recorded in human history since the dynastic period in Egypt, around four thousand years ago.

So – if everyone does it every day - why do people have strange ideas about trance and struggle to define what hypnosis is all about?

Here’s my favourite definition of Trance: the condition of focused attention and the establishment of acceptable selective thinking.

One thing that training in hypnosis has taught me is that people are in trance for almost all of the day: their family trance, their work trance, their geezer-down-the-pub trance – behaving differently from one context to another.

Any parent who has lost their child for what seems like days on end as the child is absorbed in the latest computer game will have observed this, just as we have all seen people staring intently at their phones, impervious to the world around them. Computer games are designed to create absorption in order to keep the user in the game and create dependence by a carefully constructed pathway strewn with rewards and schemes: they are designed to induce trance in the players and to offer them a more engaging experience than dealing with reality.

They’re not zombies, they’re just in trance and are not paying attention to what we call reality – just like I did as a child transforming myself into Spiderman, a Commando, the Wolves’ captain or my flavour-of-the-week favourite pop star.

Being aware of trance phenomena has been a huge help when I’m working with my guitar students – particularly the ones who tell me “...I have no musical talent / I can’t play guitar... / I have no sense of rhythm...”which is just about everybody!

The problem isn’t that they lack talent or haven’t been blessed with a “Gift”: the problem is that they’re stuck in a trance and don’t know how to get out of it. Over a lifetime they’ve accumulated evidence which supports the “no talent” statement or any other belief they hold about themselves: they have learned to focus their attention on what they cannot yet do and to only think in terms of how hard it would be for them to learn.

It’s a circular belief system – a positive feedback loop – which demands that the student pays close attention to what they don’t know how to do (because they haven’t tried it yet), reminding them that they can’t play guitar and reinforces the belief that learning to play will be super-hard...especially for someone like them, who has no talent or natural gift....

They have a robust system of self-reinforcing beliefs and focused attention: that’s a Trance.

Here’s the rule: if you’re not aware of it, you can’t affect it.

That means we’ll rarely experience a change in ourselves unless we pay attention to how we move through the world; how we think, how we interact with others, how we talk to ourselves and how we
view our experiences every day.

How may we know to wake if we were not aware we are asleep?

The other really cool thing I learned from hypnosis is what hypnotists call “Utilisation” – the process of using everything that happens as being a natural part of the client’s journey into Trance.

For example, let’s suppose that - as the client relaxes ever more deeply and becomes more inwardly focused – a car alarm goes off in the street outside. The imperturbable hypnotist will utilise the unwanted noise to reinforce the client’s focus, as though the blaring horn was just another component of the mechanism of Trance, by saying “...and as you notice the sound of a car alarm in the street outside, you’ll simply pay closer and closer attention, now, to the sound of my voice as the car alarm grows quieter and more distant with every breath you take and every beat of your heart... and you notice once again that the sound of my voice takes you deeper and deeper down into the feelings you have that are the most relaxed feelings you’ve ever had, in the way that is most right for you...”

This is a very powerful technique for the hypnotist to use, but suppose we just stole that idea and applied it across the everyday business of living?

What new meaning could we make from the flat tyre or the laddered stocking, the deal that fell through or the date who stood us up?

“...And as I leave the cinema and I attend to my breathing, I can thank my lucky stars that I can quickly eliminate her from my enquiries, which means that I retain a space in my life for someone who will show up for dates and who will be a better partner for me...this is a good thing”.

Suppose we figured out how to make everything that happened to us a necessary precursor to our success or achievement of our worthy goal?

Wouldn’t that be a Trance worth going into?

 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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Episode 146 - So Right, It Feels Wrong

The Thursday Thesis – 11/4/2019

Her eyes narrowed and she seemed to twist bodily on her stool, just to give my diagram a sideways look.

After twenty years of teaching guitar, I’ve grown to know that look and the body language that goes with it.

I recognise the uneasy brow and the needling eye...

I feel suspicion daggering at me...

They’re waiting for the other boot to fall; for the dreaded “but” that snatches away what they want most of all.

And they’re deeply weirded-out by the whole thing.

It’s my own fault, naturally.

Ah, if I’d only been content to let her continue to believe in the Unicorn of Cleverness...

But that’s not how I roll.

I knew the signs and the symptoms, because I’ve had them myself - over and over again as I studied with great teachers, read hundreds of books, trained with experts and blended what I’d learned.

It’s a sudden insight, a moment of clarity: where one glimpses the elusive obvious and gasps.
It’s when the problem we’ve been wrestling with finally shrugs its shoulders, stops playing hard to get and solves itself before our very eyes.

That’s when the new problem begins...

After years of struggle - sometimes decades of confusion – everything makes perfect sense. We can see it, we know it works and we know why it works.

Everything makes sense, at last, and we hate it.

We squirm uneasily and tell ourselves that we must have made a mistake.

“That can’t be right...” we say, as we look for the pitfall.

It’s known as “Cognitive Dissonance” in psychological circles: the uncomfortable feeling a person has when facts contradict that person’s beliefs.

In an unexpected moment of clarity and insight, everything we thought we knew is called into question and dragged kicking and screaming into the bright light of critical thought.

For this particular new student – let’s call her Sonia - Cognitive Dissonance was playing an absolute blinder.

Confronted by a reality that was a radically different from – perhaps even diametrically opposed to – what she thought it should be, Sonia was not a happy chicken: this was not how it was supposed to be, surely...this was too easy, wasn’t it?

And here’s the thing: if we set out in the belief that something is difficult and hard to learn, or that it is joyless and boring, then our tiny, pea-sized brains will fight like demons to prove us right – even though that will thwart us in our endeavours.

So maybe we should ask ourselves the question “do I want to learn quickly and easily, or do I want to be right?”

It’s up to you...
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis – 4/4/2019

Nestled within every great religion is the idea “as within, so without”.

Makes you wonder why, doesn’t it?

What does it mean, as within, so without?

At the deepest level, it means that we hold in our minds becomes reality for us: our dominant thoughts become our reality.

Our brains are neck-top computers, running whatever software and programs have been loaded into them – whether that’s the malware and viruses of manipulative regimes or political parties, or the positive quest for a worthy goal. Our brains run the programs and are not fussy about the quality or direction of the processing: it’s neutral and blind.

With the programs running, our brain sets off to create our reality – a reality which conforms to the thoughts and programs running in our neck-top computers. We begin to notice certain things are judged to be important to our thought processes: it’s called “confirmation bias”, and it means that we tend to reinforce what we expect to be there by searching it out within all of our experiences.

This is why we resist change so stubbornly: we want to keep on doing what we are already doing and make the world conform to our prejudices.

Beliefs are slow to change as our minds cling to whichever thoughts and programs we are already running. Massive and immediate change is possible, but it is rare.

So rather than wait for a Damascene conversion, a more reliable change pathway is via the creation of a “mental blueprint” for yourself and your life. Taking time to create the blueprint, then regularly reviewing and reinforcing it, is what goal setting is all about – but how many people do you know who have a written plan for their lives?

“Not many” is my guess.

Our minds respond to mental images, and it doesn’t matter where those images come from; whether they are received from external sources or generated within the mind itself. Once the image is captured and added to the programming active within the mind, our minds get to work on making the image a reality.

This is why I don’t own a TV...

The mind can’t tell the difference between a real image and an image it has imagined with sufficient detail and clarity: differentiating the two is the job of our critical faculty, which tires easily and has only limited capacity.

We all know that the two pillars of imagination are playfulness and curiosity: playfulness makes it all a game, and curiosity asks “what if?” and “what else?” and embracing them makes it easy for us – with practice – to create a vivid and compelling mental blueprint for ourselves – for what we want, who we wish to become, and what we will be remembered for: the blueprint for a life of intention and purpose.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis – 21/2/2019
 
As everybody knows, we live on a mis-shapen spinning ball of rock. It’s a very nice ball of rock, casually hurtling through space at a breathtaking 67,000 mph – that’s around 18 ½ miles per second; which is knocking on in anybody’s book.

But that’s just its orbital velocity – its speed around the massive ball of bad-tempered plasma and nuclear fusion reactions which we call The Sun.

That very same Sun is also in motion around the centre of our galaxy, at the brain-frazzling speed of 137 miles per second – that’s a whopping  493,200 mph. Naturally that means the numerous celestial bodies in orbit around The Sun are also zipping through space at stupidly fast speeds.

So, The Earth is doing 67,000 mph, plus 493,200 when travelling in the same plane as The Sun’s motion around galactic centre, for a total of 560,200 mph.

Now imagine yourself standing on the equator, where there speed of rotation around The Earth’s axis is greatest – just a smidge faster than 1000 mph.

Add that to The Sun’s meandering speed and Earth’s orbital velocity and we’re doing up to 561,200 mph while we sleep.

Now we have to remember that our own galaxy itself is in motion – at around 1.084 million miles per hour!

Stop The World – I want to get off!

That’s why I never tire of watching the stars at night in some remote nook or other. Sometimes there will be meteor showers, and every so often – for instance a few weeks ago – a lunar eclipse.

The sky is beautiful, magnificent, terrifying, unfathomably vast and ever-changing; sprinkle in the fireworks of meteors when we pass through the debris fields of ancient comets and it’s a sight like no other.

When was the last time you stood, silent and still, in the inky blackness and just looked upwards?

And here’s the thing: Go and do it. Grab a flask of steaming coffee and take yourself to a dark place, then sit back and just watch the skies. See what you see, drink it in and notice it.

If it makes you feel good, go “Wheeeeeehhhh!” at the thought of how fast you are travelling, all the time rooted firmly on the spot.

If you want a puzzle to mull over whilst you’re there, here’s one I like – the ISS, or International Space Station.

Measuring almost 110 meters long and 73 meters wide, the ISS is about the same size as a football pitch, looping around Earth at 17,500 mph.

This is what puzzles me: I’m out in the wilds at night, on the shadow side of The Earth, looking up at a football-pitch sized structure that’s whipping across my field of view at nearly 5 miles per second.

And the ISS is not self-luminous, but it still appears as a bright dot traversing the sky.

So I’m wondering how it is that I can see an unlit footie pitch 250 miles away, in the dark, as it wazzes past at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour?

Buggered if I know, to be honest; but it seems to be incredible unlikely to me - how about you?
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019

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The Thursday Thesis – 3/1/2019

Well, well, well...

Having successfully “bah, humbugged” my way through the Christmas period, retreated into the cave and quietly read an intriguing book whilst the rest of the world got drunk and let off fireworks for hours on end last night; then being dragged out of the house at stupid-o’clock this morning by a couple of my friends who think that running around in the cold is a great way to start the year – frankly, it’s a joy to be back at my keyboard.

The Christmas break is always deeply unpleasant, as the well-oiled wheels of life have the sticks of social expectations poked between their spokes.

Anyway, as a slid in the mud and turned my left ankle over this morning it struck me that I should pay a bit more attention to the negative occurrences of life. I mean, it’s all very well me being insanely optimistic and positive, but what about all that bad stuff that crops up?

Having trained my depressed and moping twenty-something self to “think positive” all those years ago, I’m very good at it now.

Perhaps too good.

Before you howl me down for being “too good” at thinking positive, based on what you read in Episode 108, bear in mind that unconditional positivity and optimism have one drawback – you tend to negate the importance of problems.

There’s a real danger that being unconditionally positive, belligerently happy and generally a pain in the arse could make me miss something, completely - something that I need to know, hidden in that very adversity or problem.

So here’s my New Year’s Resolution: to pay more attention to the adversities, the difficulties and the problems – because tucked away inside every single adversity is a chance to learn, grow, solve a problem or make a change for the better.

I suppose that I’m going to be more positive about negatives.

Adversities are warnings that the chosen path isn’t working; that I’m drifting off-course and need to make a correction.

Inevitably, some will be the products of my own stupidity: that’s a given.

And some will hit me from the blindside on a sleepy Tuesday afternoon, when I’m expecting nothing more dangerous than a small fine for returning my library books late.

However they arrive, this year I’m going to honour the adversity, treat it with more respect and figure out what makes it tick, why it’s showed up in my life and what it’s trying to tell me.

Then I’m going to flip it around, spank its arse and make it my best friend.

Bugger! There I go again – being ridiculously positive towards negatives.
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019

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The Thursday Thesis – 20/12/2018

“So, what do you do?”

Once you’ve eased past the Great British obsession with the weather, that’s one of the most common questions you are asked when beginning to make someone’s acquaintance, isn’t it?

Back in Episode 111 I rolled-over the difference between being a guitar teacher and doing the work of teaching guitar, so there’s no need to re-visit the question of identity versus activity: you can find that episode in the blog archives.

No, I’m mulling that question over for another reason, which will inevitably take me down the rabbit-hole of human potential, where The World went wrong and what we can do about it.

You see, last week I was asked what I did...

“Pause, Neil. Pause and think...” I told myself.

That wasn’t going to happen, was it?

After all, I’m stupidly enthusiastic about what I do: just give me a sliver of a chance and I’ll soak with my enthusiasm and emanate passion for teaching guitar. Just ask me about it, I dare you!

That also makes me a general pain in the arse to anyone who wants to be boring.
So I gushed – I couldn’t contain myself!

“I’m glad you asked, Olga, because what I do is unlock the secret code that makes playing the guitar easy, setting my students free from years of frustration and self-doubt, and by giving them the secrets of music they unleash their own creativity, find self expression and develop unstoppable self confidence...”

The lady looked puzzled and asked again, “So, what do you do, really?”

Damn – I’d only paused to snatch a lungful of air before I started on the good bits...

We laughed and pinged back and forth until she (sort-of) got the idea that what I do is hang out with my wonderful friends, laugh, tell jokes, and play guitar – all the while infecting people with insane positivity.

“How long have you been doing that?” She asked.

“Nineteen years, with the last ten being full-time.” I said.

Then it hit me: TEN YEARS!!!!

That’s why today seems like an opportunity to mark that anniversary and remind myself that I’ve been blessed to make my living doing what I love most: helping people to get what they want.

Ten years ago I quit my job in finance, because I didn’t think that the company’s products were something I wanted to be a part of.

My old boss, David, was probably glad to see the back of me, and at the time I was glad to be getting away from him, too. With hindsight, I recognise what a good, honest and diligent man he was. I didn’t see it back then and missing the opportunity to learn from him was a great loss and my mistake.

David thought I could do better with my abilities – and I think we all can. Every single one of us is capable of way more than society thinks we are, whether that’s behind a guitar, singing, in business, relationships, health...every single thing you can think of, you can be better at it than you think.

I reckon that if a washed-up pudding like me can turn themselves around, anybody can.

It takes effort, but we can all do, be and have more of what we want. Most people won’t try, because they’ve been told not to be “too ambitious / driven / weird / selfish / rich / successful /etc, etc, etc.”, they’ve been told to fit in.

For the last ten years I’ve put in more time and effort than most people would consider sane, worked 90-plus hour weeks and earned a First, written a couple of books, a lot of songs, and a ton of other cool stuff.

Maybe I’ve been lucky – maybe I’ve just worked really hard.

But here’s the thing: I haven’t done a day’s work in ten years, because my work is my favourite game.

Every day I get to follow my natural inclination to teach what I love and to help people see themselves better, to rekindle the vital spark of humanity and creativity, fun and joy that school, university and the world of work bullies into submission, causing the spark to die down to acceptable, manageable levels.

But the spark never goes completely out. It flares when we sing in the car, dance in the kitchen, marvel at a sunrise or cradle our firstborn.

In those moments we remember what we were before we learned to turn down that flame until it dimmed to almost nothing...

My friend, fight, every single day to keep that spark alive. Guard it, nurture it and feed it, then fan it into flames, then make it grow into an inferno.

That spark is the essence of who you are when nobody is around to make you fearful, to make you need to fit in, submit or conform.

I ask you, “Why do you work so hard to fit in, when you were born to stand out?”


© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
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The Thursday Thesis – 22/11/2018

Left, right...left, right...left, right...

You don’t even think about it – you just think “I’ll go over there” and magic happens: the teetering stack of bones, tendons, muscles and fat just goes – seemingly effortlessly.

In essence, a walking human is a collection of four perfectly synchronised pendulums, both supporting and supported by a gristle-bound scaffold of calcification: bones.

But here’s a funny thing: if I had a pound for every one of my guitar students who’ve told me that they have no sense of rhythm, I’d have a ton more dosh in my pocket.

Some of those guys (and it is mostly the guys) are serious about their condition, and some of them make a joke out of it. But it’s still there, hogging their mindspace and stinking-up their thinking – despite the evidence to suggest that they are so obviously, so screamingly phenomenal at rhythm.

Way too many of us are convinced that we have no sense of rhythm, and – as a consequence – we lose our inborn capacity to sing, dance, play the guitar, piano, drums: this is malware for your mind.

If you had a virus in your computer, you’d fire up the toughest, most kick-arse, anti-virus software you could lay hands on and annihilate the virus.

If you were ill and couldn’t sing or dance – wouldn’t you seek medical help to restore what you’d lost?

In the same way that a person who doesn’t read has no advantage over someone who cannot read:

if you don’t dance, sing or make music you are no different to someone who can’t do those things.

Here’s the thing, though: every child sings, every child dances, every child will pick up a drum, pluck a string or pound a piano key.

So why are we born with music and rhythm, but grow up to believe we have none of that good stuff in us?

We’re born rhythmic because – as far we know – humans evolved as a pack animal; something like wild dogs or hyenas.

Ancient Homo Sapiens used their natural endurance and unique ability to cool-off as they ran, chasing prey animals to the point of collapse before moving in for the kill.

It’s called persistence hunting, and it is still used in isolated places where “civilisation” hasn’t choked the practice out.

Pack animals have to communicate with one another whilst on the move, and in the absence of language or in noisy environments sound may not be an option. Thus humans became masters of non-verbal communication and rhythm as our ancestors bounced along in perfect synchronisation with one another so they could maintain eye contact and pick up on one another’s body language.

Look at that group of joggers next time they come pounding past your window – they’ll all be in step with one another. Nobody is keeping them in time: they just instinctively fall into step together.

Ever see a couple who are out of step with one another?

What might that tell you about the state of their communications or relationship?

So don’t ever tell me that you have no sense of rhythm, because you, me, and everybody else...

Well, we are all just rhythm monkeys.

It’s our ancient inheritance, our birthright, and it’s what we do when we think there’s nobody watching. We dance when we are alone, when are inhibitions are lowered by alcohol or narcotics, or we are in a socially sanctioned place where dancing is acceptable – clubs and dance classes for instance.

When was the last time you saw someone dance in the street or in their workplace?

It’s been a while...

We all have rhythm, we all have natural – effortless timing – until someone tells us how hard it is and that we shouldn’t try, just in case we make a mess of it and look stupid.

Isn’t it time we let our rhythm monkeys out of their cages?

So shut up and dance, Monkey-face!
 
 © Neil Cowmeadow 2017
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The Thursday Thesis – 15/11/2018


You know the bass-line I mean, don’t you?

It’s the most-sampled bass line in music: three short pulses of a deep note, a pause, then a walk up a scale to three short notes at a higher pitch, then a funky turnaround before the whole business repeats itself.

No wiser?

Try this: Bom, Bom, Bom – baba ba baba ba ba baba bom, bom, bom  - badaba baba ba bap baaah... ba-boppa bum...

No?

You might know it from The Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers’ Delight, but me – I know it from the source: Chic’s Good Times.

It’s my favourite bass guitar line, and there’s so much about it to love. So when I was in search of musical insight, it seemed only natural to go to the source of my favourite bass-line and ask for wisdom.

The only problem is that Bernard Edwards – Chic’s bass guitarist and the man who wrote that bass-line - died in 1996.

Strangely, earlier this year I spent ten minutes being Bernard Edwards, using a process known as Deep Trance Identification, all under the supervision of NLP’s co-creator Dr Richard Bandler and best-selling author and media personality Paul McKenna at a training event in London.

The idea of DTI is that a person – the subject - enters a state of trance and inhabits the body of a target person from whom the subjects wishes to elicit knowledge, insight or understanding.

The hypnotist acts as an interviewer, asking the questions and posing the problems upon which the subject wants the target’s viewpoint and wisdom.

One of the key ideas that make this such an effective technique is that the subject is addressing their own questions from the point of view of the target person, and draws upon the resources of the target person, experiencing it all from the perspective of the target person.

As a trained hypnotist I’m used to seeing unusual things happen – it’s part of the process. But I hadn’t touched DTI in over ten years, and I’d pretty much forgotten about it.

So, my questions for Bernard Edwards were these:

What’s the most important thing in music, in your opinion?

What makes the difference between a good bass-line and a great bass-line, in your opinion?

What’s the one thing you have learned during your career and your life which has made the greatest difference to you?

Armed with my questions, Jason (my training partner for the morning) guided me into deep trance and into a seat beside Bernard, from where my consciousness drifted across into Bernard’s body, my mind reaching into his fingertips as my posture shifted to sit like he sat.

Once I was comfortably installed, Jason started with the questions:

“So Bernard, What’s the most important thing in music, in your opinion?”
            “Rhythm. You know, rhythm is everything in music – it’s the difference between music and noise. Hit it on The One and let the music tell itself to you. Trust the music, because it already knows what it wants to be, and you and I are just the faucet on that flow: our mission is to remain open to it.”

Some of it I already knew, so it was kind-of expected. But what I didn’t expect was to be speaking with a Queens, New York accent – just like Bernard Edwards did.

Strange.

Jason made notes and thanked Bernard. I listened closely, knowing that I would remember everything, because hypnosis is mostly heightened awareness, rather than the zombie-like state often portrayed in films and telly.

“Bernard, in your opinion, what makes the difference between a good bass-line and a great bass-line?”

            “Shhh! That does – it’s the spaces between the notes, the little air-gaps where the music catches its breath and the listener can’t help but lean in to the song, just trying to catch the first whiff of the next phrase. That’s what makes the difference: the spaces between the notes.”

Right on: Mozart is reputed to have said it, and I say it all the time. We instinctively know that silence is the other half of the music, because – without silence and the discontinuities it creates – music is...well, rubbish.

And again, that voice; I sound like an African-American from Queens.

Peculiar.

“And finally, Bernard - What’s the one thing you have learned during your career and your life which has made the greatest difference to you?”

            “Hmmm... You know, I think that the most important thing of all is to give all that you have and trust in the power. Empty yourself and more will be given unto you.”

This I did not expect – delivered in someone else’s voice, out of my own mouth – there’s a pointer to deep faith and something beyond the self. When we broke for lunch I was still marvelling at the DTI experience and what I felt I had been told – I’m anti-religious, so Bernard’s last piece of advice rattled me a bit, as did the biblical form of words “more will be given unto you”.

Maybe it was Jung’s collective unconscious, maybe it’s The Force of the Jedi, or maybe it’s just god, with a little g or a big G?

Who knows?

But it’s interesting to ask yourself who you would like to become, for just long enough to have them answer your questions.

So – over to you – who would you like to be, and what would you ask them?