The Thursday Thesis - 11/10/2018 Every so often I like to find somewhere remote and quiet to just sit and think; to plan the next few months – what to do, when to do it, and make sure I was doing it for the right reasons. I ask myself one of life’s great questions - which I got from Gary Keller’s book “The One Thing” (link at the bottom of this post), here it is... What's the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be made easier or unnecessary? My normal response is to scratch my head, adjust my headphones and make my pen start to move on the paper, brain-dumping all of my current and potential projects onto the page so that I could see them and objectively assess them. There are easy and fast projects, challenging and slow projects, and overwhelming projects which could take the rest of my life to complete. But now I have the buggers on paper I can begin to eliminate the low priority/low return projects, along with the ones that did not fit with my Vision of how I want the rest of my life to pan-out. Last time I did this I found my One Thing – and it’s the same One Thing that I had twelve years ago. Yep, 12 years on and I still haven’t finished version 1.0 of my project. I have three bulging lever arch files crammed with my notes, but nothing even close to a draft. What an arse! So I started brain-dumping my key ideas onto my yellow pad, line after line of Deep Magenta ink filling 8 pages of bullet points and sketches. It’s a mess, but the mess is marking the places where the good stuff will go, and the few bits of good stuff are already done. I am certain that speed is the key in these scenarios: you have to write fast enough to outrun your fear. Over the next few weeks and months I’ll re-write and fettle those notes, expand those bullets and pay somebody else to draw the pictures so that another human being can make sense of them. I will complete my “Shitty First Draft”, my SFD 01. Then the fun really starts! By the time I’ve been through SFD 1 a few times, edited it, stripped out the clunky parts and sharpened things up in SFD 2, SFD 3, and probably SFD 4, it will be tidy, ready for formatting and the day when I finally get out of my own way and hit the big scary button which says “PUBLISH”. Once that’s done I’ll ask that great question again: “What's the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be made easier or unnecessary?” and burn through another yellow notepad. Keller reckons that we must focus on, and do, only our high-percentage stuff – the things which matter most. It’s commonplace for people to spend too long perfecting things which are low-percentage activities and pay the price in lost opportunities. There’s not enough space on the internet for me to ‘fess-up to all of the low-percentage things I’ve wasted years on; for now I’ll just mention that I played nothing but “Smoke on the Water” for months when I began to learn to play guitar. That’s low, low, low percentage stuff, but I was just a kid then, and I honestly, sincerely, truly - cub’s honour - NEVER play that riff now. As a guitar teacher, I always start with the highest-percentage stuff first. If the student gets that in place first, a great deal of what follows will be a smooth progression towards their goals: without it, every week will be tougher than it needs to be, every new skill will be slower and harder to acquire, remaining less secure for longer. In every field of endeavour there are high-percentage and low-percentage activities. It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, employed in a job, working for yourself, or not working at all – figure out which activity is your most important, the one which – once completed – will make everything else easier or unnecessary. Deep down, you probably already know what it is already, don’t you? It’s the elephant in the room for most people; I know it was for me. When things matter most, we tend to skirt around them, because they’re too big and scary to tackle, despite us knowing that they are vitally important - crucial to our hopes, dreams and goals. Are you nodding, right now? If so, you might want to grab a pen and paper and start jotting down all the “stuff” you would like to get around to one day. Which one of them scares you most? That’s probably the thing that matters most and which could make the most difference. I don’t claim to know what your high-percentage stuff is, but you know what it is, don’t you? Here's the link to Gary Keller's book: https://amzn.to/2OjzmnR © Neil Cowmeadow 2018
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The Thursday Thesis - 4/10/2018
My friend gushed about her upcoming podcast, about how awesome it was going to be, how good her guests were going to be, how crisp and clean her audio was going to be, and once she’d got that nailed-down... Spot the pattern? This lovely lady didn’t need a better microphone, she didn’t need a new recorder, the very best guest, just to get things started with a bang: she needed to let the handbrake off and start moving. I see this all the time – people are afraid to start doing their Epic Shit because they:
Sometimes they’re just plain scared. I see those people, because I’m one of them! And all the time, we are feeling worse because we see people who are not as good, bright, insightful or talented as us making progress. How dare they do that – they’re nowhere near as good as we are, and we’ll show them, just as soon as... It’s like we’re sitting at the traffic lights of life in a hot car, maybe it’s a Lambo or a Ferrari, the engine is purring, eager to respond to the slightest twitch of our right foot. In our mirrors we see a little old man on a clapped-out, 50-year old Honda Super Cub moped slowing down to wait for the light, too. No problem, we’ll leave him eating our dust, won’t we? When the lights change we dump the clutch and stall the car, having forgotten to release the handbrake. We watch in disbelief as that clapped-out Honda lurches past us and pootles off down the road. And did we hear somebody shout “wanker!” as they passed our window? This is the moment when we decide that a Bigger Engine is the answer. Our Bigger Engine might be a higher dergree, a course, an internship or a mentoring program – all of which will give us more knowledge and thus, more power to apply to our sticking-points. We're convinced that we need that extra horsepower before we can move an inch. But more horses - more courses, more degrees, better mics and better guests - won’t move you or me a millimetre, unless we release the brakes. Nothing happens until we learn how to take that bloody handbrake off!! Until we do that we’ll remain stuck at the traffic lights in our Lambos - waiting, waiting... We have “All the gear, no idea”, as the saying goes. We are impatiently waiting to be perfect before we begin: wanting to perfect – right out of the box. And as we wait, our Lamborghini slowly rusts around us, the gas-tank runs dry and the engine falls silent. Whilst waiting to be ready, the clock runs out. We may die with our song still inside us, our greatest work a prisoner on our hard-drives or trapped in the labyrinth of our minds. Imperfect action beats waiting to be perfect, every time. Rob Moore says “Start now, get Perfect Later”, and he’s right: I’ve used that phrase for decades: with guitar students, coaching clients and mentees, trainee croupiers and friends. Do it badly, at first, but do it. I promise you that you’ll never be this bad at it, ever again. It will get better, you will improve. Start Now. Episode 118 - What Price Slavery? The Thursday Thesis - 27/09/2018 If someone offered you the chance to buy yourself a job as a slave, to be on-duty 24/7, required to respond to the pettiest of things without delay, to never have a day off or to leave the office; to be tracked, followed and recorded everywhere you went, records kept of everyone you spoke to, and everything you wrote or read, what would you say? You wouldn’t take that job, would you? I jumped at the chance, myself – as most people have. For me, it began with brick-sized Orbitel mobile phone, back in the early 90’s. A couple of years later it was The Internet and the speed of a roaring 14K dial-up connection. As a relatively early adopter I even thought I was treading boldly into the future! Over time the technology has improved: faster data speeds, mobile apps, GPS and a host of other gizmos. Analogue phones have given way to digital networks, second-generation, 3G, 4G, soon we’ll have 5G networks promising better connectivity and coverage, faster speeds and lower cost. And it’s gradually dawned on me – as it has for others – that I am little more than a slave to my devices. A slave who pays to be enslaved, because every month EE take money from my bank account - they have written permission from me to do exactly that. And every time I use my phone or my laptop I provide data to EE, BT, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and just about everybody else, it seems. My data – and yours – is used to develop algorithms that are supposed to make things better for us. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t make things better – it makes things worse, because all the harvested data is used to develop insight into us, our thoughts, our beliefs, relationships. Where we go, how we move, and what we say is used to develop better programming for artificial intelligence – AI – that learns and evolves faster than organic life-forms can. The Big Brother state of Orwell’s 1984 has nothing on the current state of affairs. Orwell’s horrors were the Telescreens, which watched and listened from their place on the walls: ours do it from our pockets and handbags. Personally, I have a ton of issues with mobile phones, here are a few of them:
We slaves pay out masters with our taxes and our monthly direct debits. We are slaves who worship our masters Slaves who are anxious when parted from our masters. Slaves who crave the sound of our masters’ voices. Slaves who willingly pay to be enslaved. If you thought that your mobile phone would set you free of the need to be in the office, or would mean you never had to wait in for that special person to call, then I can guarantee you won’t have seen it coming. So, here’s a challenge – I call it the Freedom Day Challenge - can you go for one day, just 24 hours, without your phone, PC, Mac or tablet? Any takers? If this got under your skin, made you smile or pissed you right off – hit the like button to Share it with your friends, family, and anyone else.
Email me at Neil@cowtownguitars.net The Thursday Thesis - 20/09/2018 Every so often we see something in a new way: our perspective imperceptibly shifts, snapping issues and puzzles into pin-sharp focus. You probably know how it feels, because we all have moments of clarity and revelation: problems evaporate, conflicts ebb, and our way is clear at last. It’s that sudden “Aha!” moment...when you and I “get it” and know that we can never go back to our old ways – that’s what I’m talking about. I had one a while ago – a massive, punch-you-in-the-face “Aha!” moment – at a seminar for entrepreneurs. The speaker was talking about the perennial fear of failure that everyone has. He told us his story of having a great idea for his business but holding back from getting started. He was afraid that it might not be perfect and the business would fail, exposing him as a nincompoop and proving right everyone who had told him he’d never amount to anything. Perhaps you can relate to that fear? Despite being a successful serial entrepreneur with multiple businesses which earn him millions of pounds, he is still subject to the fear of failure. He encouraged everyone in the room to take action on the business they wanted to start, on that great idea they’d had. And, as he talked, he drew a little picture that explained something with a clarity and precision that I’d never quite had before. He started with a big square, then divided it into four smaller squares, forming a 2 x 2 matrix. Above the left column he wrote “your stuff doesn’t work”, and above the right “your stuff works” – nice and simple. Then he wrote next to the top line of the grid “you don’t try”, and next to the bottom line “you try”. Then he said “if you stay in the top line – where you don’t try – then it make no difference if your stuff works or not, because you will fail by default”. He drew thick black crosses into the two squares of the top line. Then he continued, his voice punching the message into my ears “Only in the bottom line can you win. If your stuff doesn’t work at least you know it doesn’t work: you can either improve it and make it work, or you can move onto something else that could work”. He drew a black cross in the bottom left square, paused and said “But if your stuff works, you get a “YES” here in the bottom right square”. That was when the penny dropped: only when you try can you have a chance to achieve. The possibility matrix brought it all home with a clarity and force that had me speechless – I “got it” like I’d never “got it” before. I think it was the absolute certainty of the top line that did it; the 100% certainty that if I never tried I couldn’t win. There was no room for doubt in the starkness of that top line: not trying was the very best way to guarantee failure – how had I never seen it so clearly before now? And that bottom line? Well, that just looked like a coin toss – heads or tails – and if I called it right I could keep the coin and flip another coin. If I called it wrong I could flip the coin again, over and over, with an infinite number of coins. But only when you try can you ever do anything. I’m constantly using this idea when teaching guitarists to improvise: often they are afraid of playing a wrong note that they are paralysed into absolute silence – unable to play any notes at all! They’re stuck in top-line thinking, and my job is to move their thinking into the bottom-line, where there is at least a chance of success. And I’ve come to understand that that’s what life is all about – giving ourselves a chance to succeed, but that can only occur if we are prepared to try. We must be prepared to risk failure in order to give ourselves a chance of success. Please Like & Share The Thursday Thesis - it's sure to annoy someone!
The Thursday Thesis - 13/09/2018 Did you ever see one of those old Road Runner or Bugs Bunny cartoons? You know, the ones where a character flies off a cliff and pauses in the air as the full force of their situation hits them...just before they plummet earthward? There’s a bemused look of incomprehension that they wear just before there’s a loud “P’tyooooh!!” sound... That’s how it feels when you’ve finally completed one of your massive goals – one of your life’s great ambitions. You’ll have had a story in your mind of nailing your big thing – of taking the medal or lifting the prize - but you probably won’t have created a story for what you were going to do after you nailed it. I had that feeling when I finally published my first book “9 Weird Things Guitarists Do - The Common Myths & Misconceptions that Poison Your Playing - and How To Defeat Them” back in 2016.For months I’d written and edited, edited and written, refined and tweaked it until it was as good as I could get it. I’d striven for perfection, but ultimately decided that imperfect and done was better than perfect but never published. Man, I felt like I’d just bench-pressed the whole damned World when the book went live and began to sell on Amazon. But with the book published and my box ticked, I began to drift; a curious aimlessness set in on me as I failed to begin the next book straight away, in order to sustain my momentum as a writer. Of course, I still had this blog so I could con myself into thinking that I was still being productive, and I began to invest in property at around this time, so I wasn’t being lazy or slacking-off – honest, Guv! So what happened? The best way I can make sense of it is that I’d simply ran out of story. I had a plan to write the book and to publish it, and that was great – except it was also what was wrong. My story only took me as far as it went, and as soon as I reached that point everything stopped. Of course, I should have started to write the next book as I completed 9 Weird Things, and I should have planned to continue with the same daily ritual of writing 500 words per day. I should have written it, but I didn’t – not for a while. And – for the record - this world doesn’t deal in shoulda, woulda or coulda, because it’s too busy and too indifferent to listen to you and I making bullshit excuses for our cluelessness pleading to be let off, just this once. Ditto for completing my first marathon: I ran the course, sauntered over the line and promptly ceased to run for several weeks. My story got me to the start line and over the 26-and-a-bit miles, but after that – nothing. Zilch, nada, bugger-all, zip, squat. Now you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’d know better than to let my plan peter out as I crossed the finish line – but that’s what I did. I’m not an isolated case of stupid, either, because we all run out of story unless we have a plan that extends beyond successfully achieving our goal. Whether you’re getting married, running a marathon or playing a new song on your guitar, you’d better have a story that continues after the event is over. If you don’t have an ongoing story, all you’ll have is a sudden and unpleasant sense of running off a cliff-top and finding that the emptiness beneath you isn’t pushing you up. “P’tyooooh!!” won’t be far behind. So ask yourself, as you head off towards your Big Thing – “what are you going to do after you get there?”, because loitering in mid-air is not an option, trust me. Please Like & Share The Thursday Thesis - it's sure to annoy someone!
The Thursday Thesis - 06/09/2018
I am deeply attached to my “To Do” list - after all, we have history together. We’ve been through everything, from getting sober to getting ripped; from getting hitched to coming unstuck – well, we’ve done it all, my list and me. You may know someone like that: they have a list for everything and everything has its list... So I’m going to confess to being stupid (again!) and drag a glaring omission out into the light, so that I can remind myself of a great idea that dropped in my lap nearly twenty years ago, but I was too naive and stubborn to pick up and use. The idea is ever-so-simple, as the best ideas usually are, though their value often slips past us in the first, or even the fifty first, case. Don’t go straight to your To Do list; instead, start a new list. This is not your To Do list version 2.0 – this is your Who Do list. This is the list where you write down what you want done, then assign that work or task to someone other than yourself. So the Who Do list asks you “who can you get to do it?” instead of “how are you going to do it?” and that’s a real game-changer. Dump everything onto your Who Do list, first – assign the tasks that other people or software can do at least as well as you can (preferably at lower cost, too) and only deal with the jobs and activities that: a: only you can do b: are too expensive to farm-out c: you really love to do I plan to get really good at this over the next few years – I just wish I’d picked up on it first time around, because I’d now be an expert with a Who Do list, not a overworked muppet with a Dead Sea Scroll of a To Do list. What tasks are you going to move from your own To Do list and onto your Who Do list? Let me know if this works for you, vi info@neilcowmeadow.com The Thursday Thesis - 30/08/2018
Episode 113 - 8 Hours a Day... The Thursday Thesis - 23/08/2018 For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested in sleep. Sleep fascinates me. More accurately I’ve been interested in doing without sleep for most of my adult life. As a kid I tried to stay awake all night - night after night – in the hope that I’d be able somehow to forget to sleep once I’d established the habit. I reasoned that if I could eliminate sleep from my routine I’d have more time to read and learn, then I’d eventually know everything and life would be better. It’s funny what you believe as a kid, isn’t it? But, to a certain extent I still have the idea in my tiny, pea-sized brain, and I still have a load of unanswered questions about sleep:
Today I’m just going to stick to question 11 – “Who says we should sleep for 8 hours a day?” Well, first of all, my mum did. But I wasn’t going to take it at face value, so for years I experimented with sleep patterns of varying lengths whilst I worked shifts at a busy casino in Birmingham. Some days I’d get a long eight hour-ish sleep, and sometimes I’d only sleep 3 or 4 hours between 14 hour double shifts, bookended by my 20 miles there, twenty miles back cycle ride into the city. Ever since then I’ve slept only 5 hours a night, and I’m not alone in this – several of my friends are short-sleepers, too. Medicine would probably tell us to try to get 8 hours... Why 8 Hours? It seems to have evolved since the 17th century, when street-lamps were installed in Paris, Amsterdam, and London. With the coming of streetlights, being abroad at night became less dangerous, and mentions of the traditional/natural two-phase sleep pattern began to fade from contemporary literature and documents. Humans were – until that time – accustomed to a two-part, or “biphasic” sleep pattern, with a “First Sleep” of around four hours, a period of two or three hours of wakefulness, then a “Second Sleep” lasting another four hours or so. This appears to be the natural way we sleep, according to psychiatrist Thomas Wehr. Wehr observed a group of volunteers subjected to 14 hours per day of darkness. Within a few weeks, the group adopted the two-sleep routine without any prior knowledge of it, suggesting that this pattern is a biological norm when artificial light is absent. But that’s still eight hours of sleep every day, which seems to be a lot. Eight hours kip is a third of my life, and I’ve got better things to do with my time than have strange dreams, snore and suspend breathing for long periods of time before violently sucking in air like a man surfacing from a deep lake. So now I sleep between 3 and 4 hours a night, but take one or two naps of 8-10 minutes each during the day, multiple-sleep pattern is known as “polyphasic sleep”. This means that my total time spent sleeping every day is only 4.5 hours per day, saving me 3.5 hours per day compared to the monophasic 8-hour model. So, 7 days a week I have an extra 3.5 hours of awake time: that’s 24.5 hours more awake time, every week – an eight-day week! Is this good? Maybe... I get a lot done, but there are downsides, too: society isn’t geared-up for oddballs with unconventional sleeping habits, and no sane woman is going to put up with my crazy nocturnal habits. Now, if I could just eliminate the residual sleep I do need, I’d have time to think up a solution to that problem... It’s just a thought, but everything begins with a single thought... © 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. info@NeilCowmeadow.com Episode 112 - Losing My Religion
The Thursday Thesis - 06/08/2018 You - like me, and like pretty much everyone else around us - grew up in the shadow of Science and Mathematics , the so-called “Queen of the Sciences”. To keep it simple, I’ll lump Mathematics and Science together and call them “Science”. Science was drummed into us in school and was generally considered to be a very good thing indeed. Our science teachers were – at least to me – the keepers of The Knowledge – handing down morsels of erudition from the high table of the great minds: Newton, Einstein, Rutherford, Darwin, and the rest of that rabble. In the absence of evidence for other people’s gods, science became my god – because it made everything understandable with its Laws and Universal Constants. Then there was this thing called The Scientific Method – this is the route by which ideas are suggested, tested, reviewed and proven. It goes something like this: let’s say that I have a brilliant idea (stop giggling, because it could happen) a spark of genius so dazzling that it will change the world forever. I cobble together an experiment that proves my idea to be an absolute belter and I write a properly formatted scientific paper and send it off to other scientists for “peer review”: this is their chance to poke holes in my idea and prove me wrong. This is a good thing: giving other people the chance to disprove my idea, or “falsify” it is Science’s way to eliminate the unworthy. In Science, nobody gets a pass and every new theory has to stand up to scrutiny. Now, just to add a bit of intrigue, I’ll mention that theft is common within the peer-review process and there are plenty of well-documented cases of intellectual theft in the history of Science. This is not just a modern problem where vast amounts of money, job security and fame are at stake. In fact, Newton seems to have been a particularly good thief – and, as President of The Royal Society at the time - he could behave more-or-less as he pleased and knobble anyone who stood in his way. “Why are you banging on about peer-review?” you ask impatiently. Well, here’s the thing: Scientists are reviewing new theories and ideas from the standpoint of Science, and there are jobs, money and prestige at stake. Now, if I show up with my brilliant idea and change everything, then the Scientists reviewing my work are suddenly out of work. That’s where my faith in Science faltered and fell: the gatekeepers appear to be more interested in protecting their positions, incomes and the status quo than expanding the range of human understanding. Real scientists follow the observable facts – the data – rather than dismiss the data because Science says that the data is wrong. And God forbid that any data breaks Science’s Laws makes it through peer-review: these strange phenomena are called “anomalous” and conveniently parked out at the fringes of mainstream Science, rather than dragged into the centre. Anomalous data are a challenge to what we think we know, a red flag that there’s a hole in the theory or that the Laws of Science are not really laws but entrenched ideas that demand to be updated. That’s how Science – if it is to be worthy of the name – should be done: fact should determine theory, rather than the theory determining the permissible facts. The current darling of Science, Quantum Theory, is busily attempting ever more tortuous ways of explaining everything in terms of itself, instead of holding its hands up and saying “buggered if we know” when confronted with the apparent paradoxes of what we understand as the real Universe. Science has no clue at all about remote action at a distance, which defies the Law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and is at a loss to explain the observer effect, where the mere presence of a human being will affect the outcome of an experiment - depending on the human’s intention for the experiment. Then there are the well-documented cases of remote viewing, precognition, the power of meditation to control machines – not to mention all those inventions that have been confiscated and disappeared from the public records. And there’s Dark Energy and Dark matter, where “Dark” means “we can’t find it or explain it, but we think or know it’s there or should be there. And please, please, please don’t get me started on medicine that hasn’t been able to do a thing for a person’s chronic pain for thirty-plus years, but I can turn off that pain in a few minutes. And then there is the problem of Universal Constants... The problem with Universal Constants (like “Big G”, or G – the gravitational force - and C, the speed of light on a vacuum) is that they change. Science has fixed the speed of light problem by creating a circular reference, rather than facing up to the fact that it ain’t a constant at all. In short, Science is lying to itself and to you and I about the speed of light – and if it’s lying about that, getting caught in that might lead you to ask what else it’s fibbing about. You see, Science doesn’t know everything – not by a long chalk – but it pretends to. Things that happen but which break the Laws of Science are too often shut-down in peer review or dismissed as anomalous data. That’s why I don’t believe in Science any more: it is a useful tool, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t cover everything. And it’s a dangerous situation where a single point of view dominates the discourse and intellectual fascism rules. Science lays claim to absolute knowledge, when all it really has is a rag-bag of contingent theories that don’t always meet the challenges presented by observations of reality. Science is no longer my religion and my faith, but is - at best - a rabble of dubious dogma fit to be debunked by a long, cold examination of the evidence. Science is a self-reinforcing belief system – a fundamentalist religious sect, able only to see with its own eyes, narrowing its perspective day by day. Belief – certainty, often without evidence – is static, ossified, and immovable. Logic and reason cannot assail it, because belief is irrational and not subject to examination. And belief is the barrier to understanding. Belief is the full-stop that ends thought. And everything begins with a single thought... © 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. info@NeilCowmeadow.com The Thursday Thesis - 09/08/2018 Say the words “I am” and your entire nervous system stands to attention. Tell me what you do and I’ll likely drift off to sleep... It’s a funny thing, but when you think of those two statements the chances are that you’ll conflate them down to being the same thing – even though they are chalk and cheese to anyone interested in making changes to their lives and behaviours. Here’s why they are different: “I do” is an activity statement, whilst “I am” is an identity statement. Whenever we say that we do something we are just talking about an activity, a behaviour pattern: it’s just something we do. For example, when someone tells me that they play guitar, they are telling me what they do. This is different to when someone tells me that they are a guitarist: in this case they are telling me that playing guitar is a vital part of who they consider themselves to be. The same goes for a person who repeatedly puts lighted cigarettes in their mouth but wants my help to stop doing it. The subject who tells me that she “...is a smoker” or says “I am addicted to cigarettes...” has made smoking a part of who she believes herself to be. Making a change to her identity will be challenging and painful (for her) because it places her sense of self under threat: we all fight like demons to preserve our sense of self and what is right and proper for us. Contrast this with the same person who says “...I smoke 20 cigarettes every day” or “...I have a smoke at break-time when I am at work”. This person is recognising – probably below the level of her conscious awareness – that smoking is just something she does. In this case smoking is not part of her identity, so change will be easier to implement and maintain because it conveys no threat to her sense of self. So what? Here’s the cool part: if you consciously make the things you want part of your identity, they will feel much easier to accept into your life and to integrate with other aspects of who you feel yourself to be. Likewise, changing your unwanted behaviours can be made easier by de-coupling them from your sense of self. Both of these routes are driven by language patterns and your sense of identity; simply changing the words nudges your behaviour either towards what you want or away from what you don’t want, and this is one of the reasons why daily journaling, affirmations and goal-setting are so effective. The daily re-statement of desired outcomes, statements made in terms of our identity, realigns our sense of who we are and what is right and proper for us. In essence, we believe the lies we tell ourselves about who we are and how the world is. Try this for yourself, right now: say out loud “I am a singer”, and just notice how that feels, deep down inside... Now say “I do sing, from time to time” and notice how that feels, deep down inside of yourself. There’s a big difference between how those two statements make you feel. Unless you are already a singer, the “I am a singer” statement will probably feel bigger, more significant and more uncomfortable that the “I do sing...” statement. After all, singing is just something you do, isn’t it. This is why we resist the thing we want, rather than integrate it into our identity and do it more whilst having more fun along the way. And here’s a little sidebar to stir into the mix: some people will add a situational qualification to their behaviour and constrain it to a place or time when it is acceptable – for example, singing might only be OK when we are in the shower, driving the car, or when nobody else is at home. So what do you say about yourself, and what does that say about you? I used to say (jokingly) that I was a good guy who did bad things – just to even things out. The problem is that my tiny, pea-sized brain doesn’t have a sense of humour and interpreted the joke as a mission statement, with disastrous and life-changing consequences. D’oh! Now I remind myself that I’m a good man who does good things. And it’s getting better. Everything begins with a single thought...
© 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. info@NeilCowmeadow.com The Thursday Thesis - 02/08/2018
Episode 109 - No, Yes But, Yes And...
The Thursday Thesis - 26/07/2018 All I suggested was that we should go out for a coffee, so how did we end up here – flying a hang-glider over the snow-capped mountains, in search of owls? It must have been something I said, or she said, or both... Yes, I was on yet another course – learning more interesting “stuff” to add to the rag-bag of other people’s brilliance and the random churning of pig-headedness that pass for my mind – and now that what I learned there has been stirred into the melange and fermented... I was told to ask my play-buddy out on a first date, and we were instructed by the course leader, Claire, to answer each other with the word “No...” and then our reasons why not. It didn’t go well: within a few minutes of “no” after “no” I was done. My usual state of boundless, puppy-dog energy was flagging and my self esteem was down around my ankles. We traded places and revenge was mine! Frustration reigned and we were both battered by rejection. Claire gleefully pointed out that hearing someone say “no” to us and our opportunities – especially the incredible prospect of going out on a date with me (she didn’t actually say that a date with me was a great opportunity, but I knew that’s what she meant) – would quickly shut us down and train us to not bother asking again. Life’s like that: if you keep saying “no” to doing good stuff and life will stop offering you the chance to play. It got a little better in the next game, when we were invited to play the scenario again, but answer “yes, but...” and give a conditional response. This was simply annoying. “Would you like to meet up for coffee and to talk for a while?” She asked. “Yes, but only if we can meet at a place that serves real Italian coffee.” I said. “Yes, but Italian coffee makes me woozy, so how about Costa, on New Market Street?” “Yes, but Costa is a big chain and it’s totally un-authentic” I countered “Can we go somewhere with a more personal vibe?” Grrr – frustrating! Every opportunity was accepted, then modified or a condition attached. My play-buddy was annoyed by my evasiveness. We swapped sides and she immediately began to get on my nerves. I felt like I was trying to nail a blancmange to the ceiling: no matter what I suggested, she always dodged and added a condition. Claire stepped in before the violence began, suggesting that we try to get a date one more time, but always answer each other with “Yes, and...” and to see what happened. “Would you like to meet up for coffee and have a chat?” I asked. “Yes, and perhaps a Panini for lunch, too?” “Yes, and then we’d probably need – just for research purposes, you understand – a nice pastry or a very, very small dessert to polish it off. What do you think?” “Yes, and then perhaps we could take a walk by the river and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine?” “Yes, and if we’re having fun we could watch the sunset and listen to the owls waking up: I love owls” “Yes, and...” I don’t remember exactly how we ended up flying a hang-glider or where the snow-capped mountains were, but we laughed and egged one another on to make the hypothetical date exhilarating and exciting. That’s what happens when we say “Yes, and...” our brains get all creative and stuff, they begin to play and invent, to sniff out opportunities and possibilities. So, are you having a fabulous day? Answer “Yes, and..” and see where it takes you – you might be pleasantly flabbergasted. © 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. info@NeilCowmeadow.com Episode 108 - Your Inner Thermostat The Thursday Thesis - 19/07/2018 Deep, deep down inside of you and I there is a something resembling a thermostat. It’s just like the thermostat which governs your hot water, central heating or air conditioning. It’s the thermostat which governs us: I call it an “Innerstat”. Now, a household thermostat is a device which responds to changes in temperature (thermo) and produces a response from an attached system – say, a heater or fan unit – to restore and stabilise (static) the temperature to a pre-determined value. Thermostats are marvellous domestic gadgets, taking care of the tedious business of maintaining a stable temperature at whatever comfort level we dial-in: that’s what they are for. But our Innerstats – our internal “thermostats” - are perhaps not such a great idea. They are trying to keep us the same as we are: to resist change and challenge. This means that we will have our innerstats set for comfortable levels of health, wealth, confidence, performance, intimacy – pretty much every aspect of how we behave. And that’s the problem: every time we act in a way which is outside of the acceptable limits of our Innerstat, our Innerstat will initiate a response to restore us to our default, pre-set value or level of performance. This is a double-edged sword So, if we receive a bonus or an unexpected windfall that moves us outside of our acceptable level of wealth or income, the chances are that we’ll immediately figure out ways to be rid of the money. Maybe we’ll splash out on a new car, jewellery, a bigger home – it doesn’t matter, really. We probably won’t even notice the peculiar compulsion to blow the money: it just seems that the money “burns a hole in your pocket”. That compulsion is our instinctive response to something which is badly out of whack: it’s a drive to stay the same, to operate within our comfort zone and stay true to our concept of who we are. Out Innerstats are setting us up to sabotage ourselves, just so we can stay true to our own opinions of ourselves. How mad is that? If we don’t manage our Innerstats, they will manage us: and they’ll do it all without us even noticing what’s going on, just below the threshold of our attention. Whether you are operating above or below your default values for anything, the outcome will be behaviour designed to restore what you think is right and proper for you. If what you have is “too good”, you may begin to sabotage your situation in order to restore normality: if what you have “isn’t good enough”, you’ll probably begin to scramble frantically to restore order and your idea of what is acceptable. Putting on too much weight and wanting to start dieting or working-out is an obvious example of this phenomenon. We can manage our Innerstats, but it takes a little time to determine their initial settings and a little more time to make repeated adjustments to those settings. Money is a good example of how this works. Let’s say that you earn £25,000 per year and begin to look for another job. Research indicates that you’ll tend to apply only for the jobs whose salary is around 10% of your current salary, and that you’ll be deterred from applying for positions whose salary is outside of that range, even if you are a good fit for the job with the big salary increase. Small changes of around +/- 10% are not significant enough to trigger our Innerstats and initiate sabotage or scrambling behaviours. If our sub-10% change is positive, that’s very good news, because the new higher value will become our new normal, over time. It’s just like edging your heating’s thermostat up half a degree at regular intervals. The easiest way to edge up your Innerstats’ settings is by deliberately thinking of what you want, and making those thoughts your new “normal”, or default, settings. You see, our brains have a lot of trouble distinguishing between imagination and reality (there’s no such thing as reality, by the way), and this is a loophole that we can exploit in order to manipulate ourselves. Is it wrong to manipulate ourselves? Absolutely not – and best of all, it’s ridiculously easy. Just write down what you want – in detail – on a card that you carry in your wallet or purse, and place it so that it is visible every time you pay for something. So, if you want to raise your income from £25k to £40k, write “I earn and deseve £40,000 per year, after tax”; for your other desires, write a similar statement of fact, in the present tense. Then, read the statements on your card out aloud at least twice a day. When I'm teaching guitar or working with coaching clients and mentees, we spend time re-calibrating their Innerstats for playing guitar, business success and positive mindset, because it's obvious that a negatively maladjusted Innerstat will slow progress and sabotage success. I think you’ll agree that it’s perfectly legit to manipulate ourselves in pursuit of a worthy goal, such as a better life or higher income, deeper relationships, etc. And we would probably also agree that it’s dead wrong to manipulate someone else to conform to your will, in opposition to their own best interests. So, get busy manipulating and influencing you Innerstats to re-calibrate what you’ll settle for and have in your life. Happy Knob-twiddling! © 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. info@NeilCowmeadow.com Episode 107 - Want, Should and Gonna
The Thursday Thesis - 12/07/2018 “Michael, what do you want?” As a coach, that’s my killer question, and it really is the killer question in life, isn’t it? As our session continued, my question morphed into several, subtler variations, aiming to pick out what Michael was serious about, what was just a fantasy, and which of his answers were just other people’s plans for him. You see, we all have wants and wishes, but the chances are that we won’t end up with the things we want. Why is that? There are three levels of desire, as far as I can tell:
Those three levels of desire are based on the words we use to describe what we want. I’d go as far as saying that the elusively obvious truth is that our words are cues to what really matters, as well as dead-giveaway cues to our relative levels of desire, motivation and certainty. A wish or a want is a nice-to-have-it sort of desire: we’d like to write a Christmas number one record or wish we could win the lottery, but... That “want” is a wishy-washy kind of desire – it simply isn’t strong enough to compel us to take massive, determined and focused action over time. A “want” won’t cook the rice, as the old saying goes. And as for wishes – don’t waste your time wishing for anything. Write that wish off as a pleasant daydream with precisely zero chance of it ever coming true, because that’s what a wish is. Wanting and wishing will have you coming up empty every time, because there’s no action to back them up. And action is the key. Getting off your arse and doing something about your own life and how you want to live it will move you – imperceptibly at first – in the direction of your dreams and desires. But to inspire yourself to take action you have to focus and intensify that simple want and that nebulous wish into a desire. Our personal energy is like sunshine: unfocused, we can warm a wide area of the earth. Only when we are able to gather and concentrate that energy – like sunshine through a magnifying lens – can we begin to make massive progress. Our warming sunlight can become a blazing dot of searing heat, but we need the lens to do it. So, what is the lens for personal power and achievement? I’ll tell you in a little while, after we deal with the red-herrings of all the goals we “should” and “ought to” go for. “Red-herrings?” you say. Yes, a red-herring: a false or misleading idea or thing; a device of deception. Our should and oughta goals are not really our goals: they are somebody else’s goals, or our idea of what would be acceptable to somebody else. Whether it’s a societal expectation or the desire to match-up to another person’s expectations, those outcomes are almost always expressed as “should” or “oughta”. We might achieve those goals, but we’ll invariably find that to be a hollow achievement. Think of the executive climbing the corporate ladder for decades, finally making it to the boardroom or the CEO position, only to realise that the ladder they fought so hard to climb was not leaning against anything that they, themselves, actually gave a hoot about? Here’s another thing to consider about should and oughtas – especially if you are running a team or a relationship: if someone is pushed or coerced into complying with your wishes, then you may get your project over the line or hit your target. But – and it’s a big but – expect resistance from the team or your partner along the way: there will be pushback and passive resistance any time you are forcing the issue or compelling someone to do something they are not comfortable with or aligned with. Pressed people will get even, sooner or later. So it’s safe to say that the things we should and oughta do are being verbally flagged for our attention by the words we use. Once you perceive those cues you can set about doing something that matters to you, rather than chasing someone else’s bus. Pay attention to the words... Finally there are our highest, most puissant desires – out Gottas and our Musts. These are the ones that count, and the ones that have a chance of actually happening. The moment we decide that it’s GOTTA happen, that we absolutely MUST get it done – no matter what it takes - we are much more likely to commit ourselves to taking action and making things happen. Our moments of decision are the moments in which everything changes: the change begins as a change of state, a change of heart or a change of mind, and from that moment we are never the same again. Once your attention is focused on the goal you Must have, the you’ve Gotta do, then you begin to navigate the world based upon that goal, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of success. But this will not be easy. Goal oriented people are not like anyone else, they are changelings, and they will not be controlled or subdued, they are a tribe apart, a primal force of relentless energy - all eyes on the prize, all attention focused. So here’s the thing: what do you want? How you talk about it, especially to yourself, will be an accurate predictor of whether or not you will get what you want - that's why your words are the lens that focuses your attention. Just like a magnifying glass gathering sunshine into a pinprick of ubearable heat, the right words can gather your attention and focus your energy into a tiny dot of unstoppable power. Pay close attention to your words, they may be trying to tell you something. © 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. info@NeilCowmeadow.com The Thursday Thesis - 5/07/2018 “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I’m writing this on the 4th of July, the traditional - but erroneous – date on which the United States of America celebrates its declaration of Independence from British rule. Now, it’s a little-known fact that the embryonic United States actually declared themselves independent from Britain – not on the 4th of July – but on the 2nd of July 1776. Why the delay? Paperwork. Yep, it took two whole days for the Second Continental Congress to sign-off the Declaration of Independence, as drafted by Thomas Jefferson and the “Committee of Five”. That two-day delay is the reason America shuts down for a holiday on the 4th of July, rather than the 2nd. An American friend told me “...that piece of paper changed everything”, and she was right – except that she wasn’t. The piece of paper changed nothing – all the heavy lifting work was done by the words on that piece of paper. With only words, the drafting committee changed the World. Putting their beliefs and intentions down on paper transformed ideas into concrete principles and gave the thoughts of the committee members a sort of eternal life. Words change stuff. The right words change things for the better - the wrong words... American scholar Noam Chomsky theorises that communication has two levels: the Deep Structure is the meaning to be conveyed, whilst the Surface Structure is the form of words used to convey the Deep Structure. Think about that for a moment. Think about the deep, broad, unbounded and unfathomable bond, the innate emotional connection between a parent and child or between lifelong partners. Love is too small a word for it, yet Love is the universal shorthand for it - in all of its stark simplicity and its infinite, baffling complexity. Words change everything, especially the words we say about ourselves: they are the way we tell The World who we are, and – more importantly – we tell ourselves who we are. The words “I do” change who we are in society if spoken in a marriage ceremony. And the words “I am” change who we are in our own world. Whatever you say about yourself, you will conform to it, because it is well known that we become what we think about most of the time. Tell yourself you can’t do something, and you’re probably right. But tell yourself you won’t quit until you’ve done it, and that’s a whole new ball game. “So...” I hear you mutter, “...what’s this go to do with Independence Day?” I’m glad you asked: it’s got everything to do with Independence Day. Without the words on paper which told America what she was and what she believed in, which gave her an identity, America would have remained a resentful colony of England. And what’s this got to do with you and me on the 4th of July? Everything. Today and every day, we – like America - can declare our own state of independence, using our own words, not the dogma and helplessness of the zealots and the doomsayers, or the indifference of dullards. What words would you like to speak, write, sing, sign or dance about yourself? With our very words we summon our own realities You and I are conjurors incanting “Abracadabra!” © 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. info@NeilCowmeadow.com 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. info@NeilCowmeadow.com 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. info@NeilCowmeadow.com Episode 101 - That First Date... The Thursday Thesis - 31/05/2018 As first dates go, this was a stinker – the food was divine, the service immaculate, and my date was... well, beautiful, graceful and vivacious. So she was not the problem, but there was something going terribly wrong. “Aha!” I got it, I knew what it was. Her friends had shown up, uninvited and en masse. Our cosy little table-for-two, tucked away in a tastefully lit corner of a carefully chosen Italian restaurant, was being overwhelmed by their incessant chatter. I didn’t invite them to join us, but they came anyway, the bastards! She reached across to pick up her phone once again, did the screen-swipe thing and stared at me. I raised my eyebrow – a silent question... That was the last time I saw her phone that night. Come to think of it, that was the last time I saw her, too. It seems she didn’t like the message I’d sent to her across the table, via satellite: it read “Look at me. Talk with me. Put away your phone and let’s be human with each other, please.” She texted to say that it wasn't going to work, but that wasn't exactly any kind of news to me. “No biggie...plenty more fish...” I reasoned. Look around you: you see it everywhere – people together, but estranged. From the couple at dinner to the family at play, phones intrude and headphones exclude. How stupid have we become? When you’re with someone, really be with that person; give them your undivided attention and show them some Love. Don’t put the things that matter most at the mercy of the things that matter least: don’t make your kids, your wife, your date or your friends play second fiddle to a Tweet, Facebook update, text message or anything else. Be with them. Be with them completely, and pay attention. Leave your phone in your bag when you are at dinner with your date, partner or spouse. Leave it in the car when you’re with your kids. Believe me, nothing that is more important than the person you are with will come through your phone in the moments you are disconnected from it. Be with them. Your antisocial media will still be there in all its self-indulgent glory when the special time is over and you’re back on the hamster wheel again. Failing to honour the real, face-to-face skin-and-bone people is tragic and it is immoral. Taking a slice of time from someone’s life to be with them and then offering them only the fag-end of what’s left after you’ve “kept up to date” with everything else is a bloody insult to them. Don’t do it. Be with them. Look around you and you’ll see masses of people, hooked up to – and hooked on – their phones. Notice how often they (we) check for new messages – even at inappropriate times? We’re like a bunch of crackheads in need of a score every thirty seconds – it’s pathetic and it’s tragic. Ask yourself, honestly, do you own the phone or does it own you? Now do yourself a big one - write this down: Leave your phone in the car, put it in your bag, silence it completely. If you have balls of steel you could even turn it off – if you think you’ll be able to cope with the anxiety that you will feel should you dare to do such a thing. Put your headphones away and grow up! © Neil Cowmeadow 2018
The Thursday Thesis - 24/05/2018 “One HUNDRED blog posts! How cool is that?” I gushed as I drove Alex to school last Thursday morning.I'd jammed my moonface into "Smug" mode and It wasn't getting any better... The Urchin wasn’t impressed: he never is these days. This week his affectation is being “utterly indifferent” to all suggestions and ideas that don’t involve him spending his entire weekend playing games online with school-friends. The joys of parenthood... “So, Dad” he asked, “why do you write your blog – what’s it actually for?” I paused, and said “It’s a good question, when you stop to think about it: why does anyone write, especially when there is no expectation of reward?” “So...?” he said. “Firstly, Alex, I write for you. I hope that you’ll read my ramblings and “get it” – that you’ll have access to some of the things I’ve found useful, and have that access at a younger age than I did.” “And secondly, I write for myself because I love the process of writing - the great distillation and clarification that I get when I write about things. When you think on paper you can handle bigger, more important things, I think.” “But deep down, right at the bottom of everything I do – teaching, writing, landlording, coaching, mentoring, blogging and podcasting – I really just want to help people – anyone, anywhere – to see themselves as better than they have been told they are. I hope that, in some small way, my words will resonate with another person - I suppose I'm trying to send out a ripple into the World.: I may never know that person, but if just one idea in just post helps just one person to raise themselves up and have a better life in some way, then it will have been worth my time and energy writing a hundred posts.” Isn’t that what life is all about, too? I ask you, please, to DO something - right now - to lift someone else up. I don’t care how small or big a thing you do, just do it. A smile, a hug, or a kiss; a kind word or a thoughtful act: do something. To you, it might only be a smile you give away: but that smile might just change a tiny something in another person’s life. It’s only a ripple, but it’s a start. © 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. Neil@cowtownguitars.net The Thursday Thesis - 17/05/2018 I could have kicked myself. Come to think of it, I felt so stupid at that moment that it would have been a better idea to hire someone to kick me instead. There had been a dim recognition, somewhere in the deeper recesses of the old grey matter, that I’d soon bepublishing the 100th post of this blog – The Thursday Thesis: I knew I’d been posting once a week for almost two years, I just wasn’t sure about how many posts I’d made. My inner troublemaker was playing up again, telling me how awesome I was to have been so consistent and got something out every single week. He also said I should have a celebration to mark the event, and to be proud of myself for yada, yada,yada... But I had a problem – I didn’t know how many posts I had actually made. I’d always posted by date, rather than by episode or post number, and I had no easy way to accurately track the number of posts. Bum! It takes a lot of work to re-name all the posts in a blog and add an episode number, then to re-name the original document file in the archive. It’s also intensely dull, unless you can transmogrify the process into a game and make it fun for yourself – perhaps by thinking of the process as “capturing and branding” the wayward episodes. Life’s like that, too. So, here’s the thing I want to share: start out as you mean to proceed. When you begin something, be it health, relationship, financial, or whatever – begin with a vision of how things will look when they are done. I hadn’t started the blog that way: I just thought it might be fun to share some of the things I wish I’d learned a lot sooner. So I didn’t think of how many posts I might make, about the milestones and celebrations I’d miss out on if I didn’t keep score, or how to refer to previous episodes. It was an embarrassing planning failure, frankly. Next week I’ll post the 100th episode on this blog, so I am going to celebrate the milestone. Celebrating is something we could all do a lot more of – especially me. When I was awarded a First I didn’t want to go through the rigmarole of attending a graduation ceremony – I think that I was secretly afraid of being rumbled as the imposter I knew myself to be. Fortunately, my then-girlfriend was a lot smarter than me and persuaded me to collect my degree in person. Without her intervention I would have missed a memorable day and more or less dismissed my achievement, so I’m grateful for her wisdom. But we all do it, don’t we? We all seem to dismiss our achievements; it’s a British thing, I reckon. There’s a daft idea that anyone who celebrates their achievements is arrogant, big-headed and probably not very nice. It’s totally wrong-headed, of course, but it’s very common. One friend of mine has gone from not running at all to running 10km, solo, in less than six months: not too shabby for a woman in her sixties, is it? But she’ll have none of it: none of your fancy-pants celebrations, no “well done” messages, and no recognition of her achievements in her own mind. Personally, I’m impressed by people who set themselves a target, plan their trajectory, and launch. Oddly, their actually hitting the target is not the main thing for me – it’s the intention and the action that matter most, in my opinion. The medals, certificates, and T-shirts are just markers of what has been achieved. In themselves they are mere trash, worthless clutter – but they are concrete evidence of what happened before race day and before exam day. If we examine each fresh new day we can find something to celebrate, every single day of our lives. Embracing our own achievements can release a spurt of dopamine (your brain’s feel-good chemical) into your system, setting-up the anticipation of more and greater rewards. What’s your celebration going to be about, today? What awesome thing was it that you did? How awesome are you, today? Write it down... Do it more... © 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. Neil@cowtownguitars.net The Thursday Thesis - 10/05/2018 Sometimes, not very often, you see something you can’t explain; something that stops you in your tracks and makes you go “Huh?!” I’ve seen a lot of that sort of thing over the years, and some of it I could make sense of; well, most of it anyway. Some things, though, are just so damned odd and bizarre that reason cannot reconcile the observation with any explanation. That’s magic, or else it’s something that looks like magic to me. I saw a great deal of magic last weekend, when I spent two days in London, improving my hypnosis and NLP skills. The trainers were TV hypnotist and change expert Paul McKenna and “The Godfather of NLP” - Dr Richard Bandler. I stood, slack-jawed and incredulous, unable to debunk what I both saw and experienced. Today is Thursday, and I’m still processing what I saw at the event and assessing its ramifications: this could take a little time... I’m working on it. For now, I’ll just remind myself of - and share with you - a few truths that were demonstrated most forcefully and seemingly magically. Print them out and read them every day, once as you rise, and once again as you retire.
© 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. Neil@cowtownguitars.net Why Your Haters Hate You... The Thursday Thesis - 03/05/18 A little while ago I posted a short Facebook Live video into a large-ish group aimed at guitar players. The clip was a simple explanation of the biomechanics behind one aspect of playing the guitar. I was clear, unambiguous, and put my points across logically and sensibly. That was when the hate began. Oh my word – I had no idea that demonstrating reality meant that I enjoyed giving same-sex oral pleasure! At least, that’s what one hater said, in not so many words. Other “keyboard-warriors” piled-in to demonstrate their ten cents’ worth of ignorance and intolerance, clearly angry that I should question their beliefs and their gods – their blessed Clapton, Vaughan, Hendrix and the rest of ‘em... Then I got it: they weren’t talking about me at all – they were telling me about themselves. It was beautiful – rather than consider the facts and my reasoning, the haters attacked and proclaimed their own positions. I’d never seen it so clearly before: haters don’t hate You, they hate how you make them feel; and that’s a big difference. At the time it was a radical idea, but now it seems obvious. Whenever you or I step outside of what other people think and believe to be right, we risk the opprobrium of those other people. You see, when we suggest a different way of seeing things, a different opinion, or ideas which conflict with the groupthink, we provoke a defensive response from the group. The group tightens and “circles the wagons” to defend itself from the perceived danger of being outdone, bested, proved wrong or foolish. Very often, internal divisions within the group are set aside to defend the common interest against the outsider, the blasphemer, the heretic. Such is life. It’s never comfortable being different: ask anyone who has challenged the status quo, a governing elite, the prevailing wisdom of “experts” and the conventions of academics about the backlash and ostracism. That’s how power and influence are exercised. Some people just hate you, and you are going to have to deal with that fact if you are to be of any consequence in the world, because the only way you are not going to upset someone is to be so insignificant and inoffensive that you might as well have never lived at all. Getting your first hater is a marker, if you will, of significance: somebody, somewhere was so influenced by what you did, said, wrote, sang, painted, danced to or drove that they took time out from their lives to comment on your life. How cool is that? The hater gave more attention to hating you than they did to pursuing their own life! So, get over one simple thing: whatever you do in life somebody, somewhere is not going to like it. You’ll probably never meet that person, and they don’t know you well enough to hate you for who you are. They are strangers who didn’t like how you made them feel when their prejudices came under pressure from your ideas. That’s all a hater is – a faceless person who feels bad because you made them uncomfortable – lashing out at someone who dared to think differently. It’s dangerous and stupid to shut ourselves down and censor our thinking or beliefs because it upsets someone we’ve never met. Remember that the ultimate rational position is to please at least ourselves. Remind ourselves that other people’s opinions of us are inconstant and beyond our control, so remembering to please at least ourselves is the only logical course to follow. Some people will hate you for saying “X”, others will revile you for uttering “Y”, and then there are those fanatics who go berserk when you dare to impugn their sacred “Z”... Look, whatever you do in this life of yours, you’re going to upset someone, somewhere. Deal with that fact and crack-on with living your own life. The bottom-line is that haters always hate someone, and today might be your turn; so, take the hate – when it comes - as a compliment and a testament to your significance, then wave at them with one finger and carry on with making a difference in The World. © Neil Cowmeadow 2018
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends and family – maybe they’ll “get it”, too; maybe you’ll send out a ripple into someone else’s life. Would that be a good thing? I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. Neil@cowtownguitars.net |
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