Neil Cowmeadow - The Expert Guitar Teacher in Telford. Guitar Teacher and Author. Guitar lessons that work! Dedicated to Teaching Since 1999 - Accelerated Learning Techniques mean that You Will Learn Faster, Play Better Guitar, and Understand the Instrume

The Thursday Thesis – 6/12/2018

Have you ever been told “If you want to learn a foreign language, the best thing you can do is fall in love with a native speaker who speaks little English”?

I have, on more than one occasion – by friends I both love and respect.

But is it true, or just another old wives' tale?

At first flush it seems sensible: we become involved and rapidly absorb the language of the beloved.

Why is this?

Some of the process is down to trusting our lover whilst we fumble around their syntax and bludgeon their grammar.

We presume they will be patient and forgive us as we foul-up and gradually improve - like a parent patiently encouraging their child to walk.

The parent encourages and supports the youngster, enthusing over every attempt at the vertical and smiling at each tiny progression.

Patience and safety work: that’s why almost every child learns to walk – the parents don’t watch junior tumble for the first time, then say “this one’s not a walker...” and abandon the child.

Better still is the gentle delivery of feedback – the “Breakfast of Champions”, though I always thought toast was what they ate.

But there’s something else which might just play a large part in the acquisition of a lover’s language: a natural hormone called oxytocin, which is manufactured by your body’s hypothalamus and pituitary gland.

Oxytocin production is stimulated by – amongst other things – bonding, falling in love, cuddles and orgasm; good old fashioned love ‘n’ sex.

Here’s the bit that matter most: as well as virtually eradicating the stress hormone cortisol, oxytocin is associated with neuroplasticity – your brain’s natural ability to reconfigure itself and learn new things.

Your brain is always changing: it’s a “trembling web”, according to Ian Robertson in his book Mind Sculpture: Your Brain's Untapped Potential. (See the link below) 

A rush of oxytocin is like an earthquake in that trembling web.

To put it another way, just imagine your brain is made out of chicken-wire, with connections criss-crossing all over the place...now heat up that chicken-wire with a blowtorch and notice how squishy and pliable it’s become.

That’s your brain on oxytocin; that’s your brain in love.

Seems to me that those old wives knew a thing or two and science is just catching up with them...




Link to MIND SCULTURE: Your Brain's Untapped Potential  https://amzn.to/2PpqvN9

© Neil Cowmeadow 2018

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Info@NeilCowmeadow.com
 
 
 

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?
 
 

The Thursday Thesis – 8/11/2018


When the tough cop Dirty Harry suggests that the freshly shot bank robber should ask himself “...do I feel lucky?” you might think Harry is just taking the piss: after all, the dude is lying in a pool of his own guts and blood while Harry - the bouffant-haired cop - stands over him toting a .44 Magnum.

By definition, it ain’t the felon’s lucky day.

But what is luck, anyway?

I’d describe good luck as an innate tendency to attract positive situations, circumstances, people and things into one’s life.

Bad luck has the opposite effect.

So what about you – do you feel lucky?

Ask yourself if you are lucky, neither lucky or unlucky, or plain old unlucky. There’s no right or wrong answer, but your answer is important because you’re going to need a baseline of how lucky, or otherwise, you are right now.

You’ll need that baseline because – from today – you’ll know how to be lucky, every day of your life.

How would you like to be lucky every single day of your life?

Suppose I told you that there is a way to be lucky – how suspicious would you be?

Would your bullshit radar start bleeping, 8 to the bar?

Mine would!

Don’t take my word for it, have a gander at the work of Professor Richard Wiseman, an English psychologist, who set up a study of more than a thousand people, that lasted 10 years.

According to The Prof, luck isn’t anything unusual or supernatural; neither is it a gift – it’s a mindset and a behaviour.

So, chuck out your lucky rabbit’s foot, your four-leaf clover and your lucky horseshoe, and check yourself in to the School of Luck.

Wiseman’s study divided its subjects into three groups:

1. People who believed themselves to be lucky – the Lucky People.
2. People who believed themselves to be neither lucky nor unlucky – the Control Group.
3. People who believed themselves to be unlucky – the Unlucky People.

Then the fun started...

Across a variety of tests, the Lucky People consistently spotted opportunities which were only spotted half of the time by the Control Group, and which were spotted rarely by the Unlucky People.

After much testing and thinking, Wiseman concluded that Luck was really the combination of four key factors:
1:     He thinks that Lucky People create and notice opportunities. They are optimistic and curious, open to possibility, and see opportunities everywhere.         

Furthermore, Lucky People tend to be sociable, outgoing, helpful and likeable. They are attractive to other people, and their helpfulness generates reciprocation from others. That’s why Lucky People always seem to know the right people – they simply  know more people and those people know them in a positive way.

Unlucky People were more pessimistic and less sociable, helpful and less likeable.

It seems common sense that you’re not likely to meet the person of your dreams or have that life changing idea if your are uninterested, holed-up in your room for days on end, and don’t experience much in the way of real human contact with a number of people. Maybe this is why stroppy teenagers who live online think that they are unlucky and life is unfair?

2:     According to Wiseman, Lucky People make lucky decisions by trusting their intuition and instincts: They trust themselves and their decisions much more than Unlucky People do. Consequently they are much more likely to make any decision and take action on that decision, which naturally increases the likelihood of a positive outcome.

This conclusion of the study is just another way of saying “make a bloody decision and get to work” and “trust your gut” – two very old ideas that still hold true.

3:     Wiseman’s study concluded that Lucky People create self-fulfilling prophecies: they know what they want and make plans to achieve it, based on their idea of what should happen.

This is no surprise to anyone familiar with the vast body of research on the effect of goal planning because Wiseman’s idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy is really the common sense idea that a person with a plan will achieve far more than a person who has no plan at all.

4:     Finally, Lucky People are resilient and turn “unlucky” events into “lucky” outcomes: which is another way of saying that Lucky People are determined, resourceful and are able to see the positive potential in any situation.

Again, none of this is news: the annals of history are full of the stories of people who experienced unfortunate events but who were able to transform that event into the springboard to greatness, fame and fortune. 
 
So, all in all, the science seems only to re-state a few unfashionable old ideas that our forefathers knew:

1. Stay positive and help other people; be nice and be interested in the world.
2. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect – make a decision and get to work.
3. Know what you want and make a plan, then work your plan and make it happen.
4. Stay strong and stay focused on your outcome: when things go wrong, make them right.

I’m not sure if we really needed a ten-year academic study to verify that Luck is really nothing more than a placeholder word for these qualities and processes, but Professor Wiseman has sold a mountain of books based on his research – the lucky bastard!

For a fuller read of Wiseman's findings, get the book here:
https://amzn.to/2RKmNPE

The Thursday Thesis – 1/11/2018


Last episode you read about the difference between zero and one - the biggest difference you can imagine: the difference between nothing and something.

You may recall that going from zero to one is absolute, but going from 1 to any other number is just a difference of quantity.

I know that going from zero to one takes balls of steel, whilst going from 1 to 2 to 3 is easier, because you’ve done it before and it will be easier next time.

But following someone else’s pathway to success is altogether less scary.

Ever hear of Conrad, Gordon and Bean?

They’re not a law firm, they’re the crew of Apollo 12, and you’ve never heard of them.

You probably remember the name Neil Armstrong, but who was that other bloke in the Apollo 11 Lunar Module...Buzz something or other...Lightyear?...no...it’s gone...

If you believe that NASA managed to put a man on the moon nearly 50 years ago – something they can’t do today because they have ”...lost the technology” - think of the difference between the first mission (Apollo 11) and the second mission (Apollo 12).

Apollo 11 proved the concept, Apollo 12 merely reiterated it.

Another great first was the Four-Minute Mile and Roger Bannister: once RB proved it was possible, how many more sub 4-minute miles were there that year?

Well, just one actually – John Landy.

“John who?” I hear you ask...

Since Bannister’s breakthrough, hundreds of other runners have clocked a mile in less than four minutes. It’s a great achievement, but they all followed Bannister’s lead.

And that’s my point: whatever you want to do, just have a look around and see if anybody else has already done it. If somebody has already done what you plan to do – get rich, lose weight, write a book – whatever it is, you have a precedent.

Success, as they say, leaves clues.

One of the smartest things you can do is look at someone who is already successful in your area of ambition – a role model or mentor – and once you have found, get busy digging. Find out how they managed to become successful, find out what they did, how they thought, what their beliefs were.
Then steal their best ideas to help you get what you want by taking consistent action that moves you in the direction of your desired outcomes.

There is an abundance of wonders in the world, opportunities are everywhere and there is plenty to go around. The pathways to success criss-cross the world, they are the biographies, books, teachings and wisdom of people who have achieved their own version of success.

Hidden in plain sight, in the multitude of bookshops and libraries, online archives, podcasts and teachings are the pathways to your own success – there, right under your nose.

You don’t have to be the first to be successful.

In fact, there may be a reason why nobody has done it before.

But if you can find anyone who is crushing it in your field, watch and learn; read and understand, listen and assimilate.

Success leaves clues.

The Thursday Thesis - 25/10/2018

Two years ago, today, I bought my first investment property – Happy Birthday to me!

As the completion date approached I was edgy and nervous: at that time I was terrified of taking money out of the bank to invest in a house I wasn’t going to live in. Deep down I sorta-kinda knew my limited knowledge of property investing increased my risks, but the stubborn part of me was seeing it through, no matter what.

The truth is that fear had me in its grip and I almost pulled out of the deal at the last moment.

And when the deal was done and my bank balance was emptied, fear rushed in to fill the hole. That fear got a lot of attention from me, so it should have been no surprise that it stayed around, stinking-up my thinking for weeks.

But something had changed: me.

Doing that first property deal moved me from Zero to One; flipped my mindset from “I want to...” to “I do...”

Your first guitar lesson willl be the very worst, ever - you'll never be that bad again, I promise.

And that's because the difference between zero and one is the biggest difference you can imagine.

It’s the difference between nothing and something.

From 1 to any other amount is just a difference of Quantity: zero to one is a difference of Quality - it is a fundamental change of nature.

Going from 1 to 2 to 3 is easy, because you’ve done it before and it will be easier next time.

Going from zero to one takes balls of steel, because it is virgin territory and you’ve never been there before.

The difference between zero and one is absolute: it is the shift from infinite nothingness to finite somethingness.

After that, it’s just a process of refinement.

That’s why Episode 1 is the hardest, why your first child is the toughest, why the first deal is the most fearful.

The first time for anything is usually terrifying – think of the first time you had sex!!

The fear didn’t stop you trying it though, did it?

Armed with the certainty that you were SO not a stud or a total sex-kitten, you still went for it, didn’t you?

And you’re worried about your first poem, book or deal?

If you’re looking to do a business deal, first reconcile yourself to the fact that your first deal will be abysmal, the second one will be a little less bad - just north of Shittsville – and your third deal so-so: the fourth might rise to the dizzy level of OK.

By the time you are 5 or 6 deals in, you’ll know what to do, based on experience and a trail of cock-ups and disasters. You’ll learn faster by doing it than by waiting, learn deeper from experience, and have light-bulb moments and flashes of inspiration along the way.

If you are learning to play guitar, your first chord or riff will be bloody awful, but you are a guitar player from the moment you pick up the guitar and play your first bum-note.

And what’s most important is that you’ve done it, for real. You cannot deny that you are the genuine article, since your first deal is incontrovertible proof. It’s that concrete, that simple – that easy.

The fundamental transition from Zero to One is the greatest possible change: after that, all that changes is the size of the numbers.

So trust me on this: whatever it is you want to do, whatever it is you want to become, learn or begin – begin it.

The first step, the first deal, the first chapter will be dreadful, but it will change you from a Wannabe to a Gonnabe, and the second step, the second deal and the second chapter will be better...

And you will have become the person you wanted to become.
 
Have a Fantastic Day!

The Thursday Thesis - 18/10/2018


The seminar was about to close and the delegates began to fidget, eager to gather up their folders and bags before heading out on the long drive home.

The speaker had been an absolute barnstormer – boundless energy and charisma from beginning to end: he had everyone fired-up and ready to bench-press the World.

“Remember to drop all your notes and folders in the bin on your way out!” he called, grinning, as we filed out.

I approached the stage and shook hands with him, thanked him for an inspiring experience and asked him what he’d meant by that comment about notebooks and bins.

"It’s kind of a joke, except it isn’t”, he said. “You see, most of the audience will never open their folders or notebooks ever again – they leave, and it’s over. Nothing happens for them because they don’t take action. As good as my stuff is, and as passionate as I am about helping people, most of them will do precisely nothing with what I’ve shared with them today: it’s really sad.”

The two-day finance seminar had been the easy part: the hard part lay ahead of us all.

What I’ve learned over the last two years is this: to really get maximum value from a course you must pay for it twice.

First there’s the easy part – the cash and time investment in the course. Whether you spend a few pounds on a book or tens of thousands to hire the best mentor you can find, there’s an investment of money involved. Then there’s the time – in the course or seminar and travelling to and from it..

Once you’ve paid your “Entry Fee” you have to get busy paying all over again.

And this is the hard part, because this time you are going to have to pay for it with a lot more of your time – the most precious of all your resources.

Within the Personal Development industry there’s a saying that goes “The people who take the courses take ALL the courses”, and there’s a lot of truth in that.

“Course junkies”, as they are known in the trade, stride purposefully from venue to venue rather than take meaningful action in the direction of their dreams.

All too often, Course Junkies delay action until they’ve finished the next course.
Inevitably, once that course is completed, there will be another course that is essential before they unleash themselves...

So, when I next bump into that guy from the ABC course at the XYZ conference, the chances are he’ll grimly tell me he’s no further down the road than he was at ABC, six months previously.
I’ll try not to look surprised.

He’ll doubtless marvel at the work I’ve put in and the small amount of progress I’ve managed in that same six months – possibly he’ll tell me I’m “lucky” that my hard work has paid off.

This “Lucky” business makes my teeth itch with rage, because luck has very little to do with success, as far as I’ve been able to discover from researching successful people, their live stories and business book.

“The harder I work, the luckier I get”, as the old saying goes. In other words, they work hard and prepare for when opportunity shows up. Luck is an opportunity wearing working clothes.

What I’ve noticed about the many courses and seminars I’ve attended, the webinars I’ve sat through, the Expos and Fairs I’ve spent precious time walking around is this: the vast majority of attendees do absolutely nothing as a consequence of taking the course or attending the event.

This is very good news for me, and it’s all a matter of simple math.

Only around 3% of the population voluntarily take part in personal development of any kind. Yep, less than 1 in 20 of the people around you and I will ever set foot in any kind of Personal Development or educational seminar.

And here’s the really amazing part of what I’ve been able to discover: of that tiny minority who actively do any kind of Personal Development training, only around 8% will take meaningful action based upon the course or seminar.

So, 3% show up, and 8% of them execute, which gives me a ball-park figure of 0.0024% of the population investing in themselves and then taking action on what they’ve learned.

That’s also why you and I shouldn’t worry too much about competition – because there’s not much of it around, when you stop to think about it.



© 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 - 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

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:

• Don’t know how
• Haven’t finished the course
• Don’t have a degree
• Have no experience
• Are too old, too young; too black, too brown, too  white; a bit too male, female etc etc etc

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:

• Distraction by alerts, pings and ringtones
• Separation anxiety – “OMG, I’ve forgotten my phone!
• It’s something else to carry around
• Conversation killer
• Attention lowering effects
• Encourages the inability to delay gratification
• Expectation of immediate response
• Trivialisation of communication
• 24/7 tracking – you bought yourself an electronic tag
• Remote access to camera / microphone – Orwell’s telescreen is in your pocket
• Microwave radiation next to your brain...not the best idea, ever!
• Retards driving and texting – what kind of cretin believes a text message is more important than watching where their two-tonne metal box is heading at 60 mile per hour?
• Remote working means there’s no escape from work – business overheads are now your problem, and you have lost the ability to leave the office at 5pm
• The ridiculous expectation of immediate response. Grow up!
• Above all else, remember that EVERYTHING you do is under surveillance.
  • Big Brother is not only watching you, he is listening in to every conversation you have.
  • Security Service computers are analysing your speech patterns and assessing how much of a security risk you might be.
  • Your every text message is analysed and searched for “dangerous” keywords and “suspect” patterns.
  • Your every move is plotted and recorded, 24/7.
  • At any moment, your device’s camera and/or microphone can be remotely switched on without you ever knowing about it.
  • What you search for, buy, or chat about is analysed and checked, so that your next search or purchase can be influenced...

I’m not talking about hackers and criminals doing this – I’m talking about the people who make your devices, your mobile phone network company, national security agencies, elected officials and the non-elected agencies. These are organisations with a naked interest in knowing everything about you and me, and a greater interest in maintaining the population of willing digital slaves, like us.

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.

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.

Episode 115 - Why Your To Do List is Screwing You Up

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
 
 

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:

1. Why do we sleep?
2. Why do we dream?
3. Why don’t we act-out our dreams?
4. Why are dreams bizarre and strange?
5. How do we exercise bladder control when we are asleep?
6. How does my sleep apnoea affect the quality of my own sleep?
7. Snoring...?
8. How does a person’s body-clock affect sleep?
9. What about naps – do they count as proper sleep?
10. Can I get paid to sleep? I could turn professional!
11. Who says we should we sleep for 8 hours every day?

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...

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.

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 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:

• Wants and Wishes
• Shoulds and oughtas
• Musts and Gottas.

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
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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
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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
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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
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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!