Episode 105 - Reality Check
The Thursday Thesis - 28/06/2018 “If only they’d said...” You know how it goes, don’t you? Your gut has been telling you for ages that something isn’t right, and it’s finally reached the point where somebody mentions the “elephant in the room”, the great-big problem that everybody knows about, deep down, but nobody wants to talk about. For weeks, months – perhaps even for years – the great grey pachyderm is skirted around, ignored and pretended out of mind. The problem is that reality has a habit of poking its nose in where we’d really rather it didn’t. When that happens, the secret’s out and the bad news is travelling faster than the speed of light. But, often, when the bad news hits you, it’s usually a relief. For one thing, there’ll be no more elephant-dodging, no hoping that somebody else will blink first in the game of looking-through-the-elephant that you’ve been skilfully engaged in for all that time. There’s no more stand-off with the truth. When the faecal matter finally hits the rotary air circulator, the mess is made and you can start cleaning up. If only they’d said something earlier... Former General Electric CEO, Jack Welch, is famous for asking his staff “What’s the reality here?” It’s a great question – it doesn’t presuppose that everything is awesome, and it doesn’t assume that everything is wrong, either. It just asks for an objective assessment of the situation, just the facts. Getting a handle on the reality of any situation is always, always better than trying to react to non-facts, half-truths and pretending. The sooner you get the facts, the sooner you can take appropriate action and create better outcomes. There may be uncomfortable moments. There may be difficult conversations. And yes, there may even be tears. But wouldn’t you rather have those difficult talks sooner, have the uncomfortable moments, and perhaps shed the tears, than to spend your time waiting in dread for them to arrive – spending your present time inhabiting a future you hope will never come? Ask the question, “What’s the reality here?” If your counterpart feels safe enough you might be lucky enough to find out what’s going on – and together you can deal with reality, before it becomes a crisis. And it applies to us, too – as individuals – when we are trying to get clear about our own lives. If we apply The Reality Principle to ourselves, we open ourselves up to being more objective, to square-up and meet situations that are not the way we planned them, long before we are about to be flattened by a rapidly-approaching deadline. If we can get the facts, we may still have time enough to fix things. Now, wouldn’t that be a relief? © Neil Cowmeadow 2018 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, your cat, unicorn and anyone else. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected]
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Episode 104 - Resistance is Futile
The Thursday Thesis - 21/06/2018 And then the alien bellowed “Resistance is futile, earthling!” I used to love those old black and white sci-fi B-movies – the ones with titles like The Day The Earth Stood Still, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and the wonderful Invaders From Mars – when they cropped up on the BBC, late at night. Resistance may be futile in the face of Gort, the inscrutable giant robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still, but what I’m thinking about today is a different kind of resistance: not a fictional alien threat arriving from outer space, but a real and thoroughly human kind of Resistance. Call it Fear, call it procrastination, call it what you will – whatever stops you from beginning that one thing you’ve always said you’d do some day – that’s Resisatance. Perhaps the author Stephen Pressfield put it best in his book The War of Art: “Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.” A man could catch religion from reading a thing like that... “Fear is good... fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do...The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.” The thing that matters most to us, you and I, is the thing we are least likely to do. It’s absurd and messed-up, but it’s the truth, nonetheless. Why do we fear to do the thing that matters most to us? Because it matters to us. Does it matter to anyone else, your mum and dad, your old schoolteacher, the lady in the corner shop? No, of course not! Most of these people are utterly indifferent to what you do: come to think of it, most of the people on the planet don’t care at all about what you are doing. If you knew how little time other people spent thinking about you and your stuff, you’d be disappointed: most of them don’t think of you at all you’re not around. Seriously. The Universe doesn’t give a toss about you – so what are you afraid of? The Universe is way too busy to notice anything we are likely to do, create, build, or invent – it’s just too big, too busy and too dark to know we even exist. All that Resistance comes from inside of you and inside of me; but here’s the thing about Resistance: it’s useful. Resistance can guide us and point us in the direction we already know we want to go. When we feel the fear and the repulsive force that stirs in us when we contemplate the big thing that matters to us, I believe it’s a strong indicator of the direction we must go. If the thing scares us – we must go towards it. We must go resolutely towards it and brave the pushback and fear that is Resistance. Our degree of fear will ratchet up as the significance and importance of the task rises – as it becomes more personally significant to us. Resistance is our Pole Star – the True North of our lives. Let’s see where our compass points and set our course towards the dark black heart of Resistance, through the badlands, deserts and jungles where the bandits, dragons and wraiths lie in wait for us... What scares you most? Ask yourself; What would you dare to do, if failure was impossible? What would you dare to do, if your ultimate success was assured? What is the biggest, most audacious thing you can imagine doing? That’s what you should do. Link to: The War of Art © Neil Cowmeadow 2018 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, your cat, unicorn and anyone else. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] Episode 103 - What's In The Box? The Thursday Thesis - 13/06/2018 Of all the things a state’s education system has to be good at, top of the list has to be imposing conformity, suppressing new ideas and discouraging critical thinking. No wonder Tony Blair was a big fan of Education. But when you impose conformity and suppress new ideas, you inevitably kill imagination and murder Play. And when The Right Way to do something is dogmatically enforced, and when non-compliance is punished, children shut themselves down to avoid negative consequences. That’s what school does to kids. An American study found that 98% of pre-schoolers described themselves as highly creative – that’s exactly what we’d expect if we watched a bunch of kids for any length of time: they have no limits on their play or their imaginations. But put the little ‘uns into the sausage machine of school and watch their creativity die down, down, down...until there is little more than a faint glow. Then, when the US school system finally released the researchers’ cohort, the percentage describing themself as highly creative had plummeted to a miserable 5%. This is not good. But what’s worse is that the majority of the now-uncreative kids had a paper trail of documents, reports and exam certificates that proved – categorically and absolutely – that they were not creative. Armed with such undeniable evidence and a negative belief about themselves they will probably shy away from anything related to creativity. I see a lot of this legacy of education in my work. Time after time, guitar students and coaching clients tell me that they are not the creative type; they tell me they’ve never written or created anything since they were kids. Obviously, I’m not going to accept that! So, here’s my favourite game to get playfulness and creativity back on the menu – it’s called “What’s in the Box?” and it came from Patricia Ryan Madson, of Stanford University. I ask my student to close their eyes, then I tell them that I am handing them a box with a lid on it. “There is always something in the box” I tell them. “Now, open the box and tell me what’s inside” Usually the student is reluctant to say anything about what’s in the box, but a little encouragement can work wonders. “A cat” they say, or perhaps “a wrought-iron bathtub”, “a pair of scuba flippers”. What they “find “ in the box is then made the subject of a song, lyric, story or poem. And they simply created it out of thin air – not bad for an uncreative person! As soon as the box is opened, the student has something to work with – a seed of an idea. “Tell me more” I’ll say. “What colour is it?” I’ll ask, if they are having trouble getting started. “Where did it come from, and what is the secret it is hiding?” Together we play with the contents of the box, we toss the ideas back and forth until the student is capable of looking after it - all by themselves – when they begin to be creative again. I’ve lost count of the number of students who have discovered that there is always something in the box, that they were actually highly creative and could enjoy playing this imagination game, and who could cheerfully ask themselves “What’s in the Box?” So tell me - what’s in the box, right now? © Neil Cowmeadow 2018 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, your cat, your unicorn and anyone else you care about. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] The Thursday Thesis - 07/06/2018 He looked at me - unblinking, glaring and fierce. I began to speak, or – more accurately – I tried to assemble a few succinct words into what I hoped would be a devastating rebuttal to his awkward question. In the end I settled for “Errrrmmm....” “Well” he said, “how dare you?” I had no answer, and he knew it. So he continued, determined to nail-down my fault. “Are you telling me that nearly twenty years on, you still haven’t written the book to help other people with the same problem?” “Well, I’ve written most of it up, already, but it isn’t perfect...” “No buts” he cut in, growling. “Finish it and get it out there”. “How many people could you have helped if you’d got out of your own way and just got your system out there?” I said nowt. “And how many more people could you have reached, if you’d only had the balls to finish?” I was shtum. Clearly on a roll, he pointed at me, calmly and flatly and asked again “How dare you deprive The World of your insights, deny it your ability to explain what you’ve discovered? It’s outrageous – how dare you?” Sessions with my mentor, Mark, were often full-on, but today he was more steamed than I’d seen him before, so I asked why he was so het-up. “Which book was it that changed your life – the one you read that made the penny drop and changed everything for you?” he asked. “Think and Grow Rich”, I answered immediately, “by Napoleon Hill. My old boss, Norman told me to read it; that would be nearly thirty years ago.” “A classic – that was the book that changed it all for me, too.” Mark said. “Now imagine that Hill had never published it... Imagine never beginning to understand that you could change yourself and your life: what would life be like for you, now, without that one book?” “Jeez... I can’t imagine it... bleak, I suppose. I’d probably still be drinking far too much, stuck in a shit job I don’t enjoy and just feeling hopeless and miserable. Bleak – bleak and hopeless.” Just thinking about that trajectory was horrible: I could feel my shoulders sagging and my head sinking. “Can you imagine Hill keeping it to himself, never getting it out there for fear of being judged or making a mistake? Think of the millions of people over the last eighty-odd years who’ve read that book and it’s changed their lives. Now stop whining and get your life-changing shit out there!” I looked up, and Mark was close to tears; anger, frustration, and passion lit up his face. He shook his head, and leaned a little further across the table. “It’s your personal moral duty to get your work out there. Just get it done and get it out there. Accept that it’s never going to be perfect and that some people will hate you. Man-up: grow a set of balls and stop fannying around. It’s wrong for you to hold something back if another person could benefit from what you know: it’s wrong, selfish and cowardly.” I figured that he’d got it out of his system at this point, but there was more to come. “It’s bloody immoral to deprive someone of what they need, it’s like watching someone starve instead of sharing your food and shelter with them. And you’d only not save them because you were worried about the opinion of someone you’re never going to meet, over a smudge of ink on a page? That’s pathetic - I thought you were better than that, I really did. Enough said - next item?” And that was that. We simply moved to the next thing on my list of burning issues that I wanted Mark’s input on, but I knew something had shifted, something in me – something that needed to be tamed and dealt with. I published, finally. Nobody died and the police didn’t come looking for me. Some people even read my little book and loved it, and some of those people actually wrote reviews and said it had helped them. Why do we resist doing the very thing that matters most to us? Because it matters to us, of course! If it were trivial and immaterial we’d just do it. Over the years I’ve come to understand that the thing which I’m most attracted to and which acquires greatest meaning for me is inevitably what frightens me most to do. We all know that to be true: in every aspect of life, the significant things are hardest to do. But they are hard only because they matter to us. The thing, in itself, is often simple – but still we resist. I don’t know what it is, but I know there will be something in your life that you’ve always wanted to do, but somehow have never quite got around to either starting or finishing. The half-written book, the love affair that withered for lack of commitment, the business you dreamed of starting. I don’t know what it is, but there is something there, isn’t there? That’s the thing to pay attention to - navigate by it. That persistent thought, constant as Polaris, will guide you. Set your course by it and steer your boat by it. It will never leave you, and you have a choice: do the thing you fear, or regret not doing it - every single day of your life. As for me, I have another book to write. I’m ashamed to say that I wrote the first draft twelve years ago, and it’s still here, waiting. So, today I’ll start over on it, much like I’ve done countless times before, but this time feels terrifyingly different – it feels like a moral duty. Thanks Mark. © Neil Cowmeadow 2018
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