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

The Thursday Thesis  - 30/4/2020

I love teaching guitar!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These days, not so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or did we just allow ourselves to be deceived by charlatans - and our own assumptions?
 
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2020
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The Thursday Thesis  - 23/4/2020

Warren Buffett – the World’s greatest investor – has a very simple way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff in his life. It obviously works, because he’s grown his company, Berkshire Hathaway, from nothing  to billions, so we might be wise to take a tip or two from him.

And that’s the thing – most people take advice from their peers.

Big mistake.

Huge.

Why is it a mistake?

Because your peers are more or less your equal, and are often less informed than you are. They are also navigating from their own map, applying their own prejudices and biases to your situation – making judgements based upon their values and principles.

A far better plan is to get your tips from people who are doing better than you in the area of life you are concerned with.

So – if you want to be financially successful – don’t take the advice of poor people.
If you want to get into great shape – don’t take diet and exercise advice from fat people.

Got it?

Good.

So, what did Warren do to keep his mind ON what he wanted and OFF what he doesn’t want?

He made just two lists.

List One is the DO list – the half-dozen most important things in his life.

Half a dozen, max.

List Two is everything else – the plethora of things that he absolutely didn’t want to do.

He lives by List One.

How simple is that?

I wish someone had told me this when I was a spotty, long-haired kid.

D’oh!
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2020
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Episode 198 - The Other Operation Paperclip

The Thursday Thesis  - 9/4/2020

Here’s another little idea I use to help me manage myself and keep a lid on my own stupidity – Operation Paperclip.
Now, it’s got nothing at all to do with the real Operation Paperclip: America’s offering safe haven and jobs in government agencies to Nazi scientists at the end of World War.
My Version of Operation Paperclip just helps me to manage my coffee consumption and my Wing Chun martial arts drills.
Here’s how it works:
I have a cup and saucer next to the coffee machine.
I place a number of black paperclips in the saucer, equivalent to the number of double espressos I’m allowing myself to drink every day.
For each cup of coffee I have, I move a paperclip from the saucer to the empty cup, and – as the beans are ground and the machine whirrs – I perform my Wing Chun drill of the day.
If I’m drinking milk I’ll remove a black paperclip from the saucer and add a single white paperclip to take its place – representing my one latte for the day.
When all of the ‘clips have moved into the cup, I’ve reached my limit for the day.
Simple.
To reduce my initial, ludicrous, cup-count, I just reduced the number of ‘clips in the saucer by one a week for ten weeks. The result was a gradual, manageable moderation of my caffeine addiction – without the headaches or cravings which accompany going “cold turkey”.
That’s how I got down from fifteen(!) double espressos a day to just five– that’s still a lot, but it’s less crazy than getting wired on thirty shots of seriously strong coffee.
You can use this simple idea to ease into or out of any repetitive action or habit – try it for yourself and see how it works for you.
© Neil Cowmeadow 2020
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Our Darkest Day is Here and Now


Quiet, isn’t it?

Hardly a car on the road, not a soul in the lane, no beer in the pub.

That’s the sound of submission and acquiescence; that deafening stillness is freedom’s dying, silent scream.

With hardly a murmur of dissent, the sheeple of Britain have applauded the theft of their personal freedom – all in the name of a disease less deadly than the annual ‘flu season.

Last Tuesday was the darkest and most shameful day in our history.

We will live to rue the day.

The blustering dolt we elected to the office of Prime Minister imposed sweeping draconian restrictions on every single one of us.

Yes, the loveable clown, Blundering BoJo, seized almost absolute power with hardly a dissenting murmur of concern.

Hardly anyone said a dickie-bird about it.

It was a supremely slick seizure of power: any common-or-garden dictator would be envious.

They call it “Lockdown” – because it’s so much less inflammatory than “House Arrest”, don’t you think?

The media praised and the public applauded, not counting the losses or considering the legacy we are bestowing on the next generation and many generations still to come.

And so began a suicidal, manufactured, economic catastrophe, in which our kids have been sold into future slavery to pay back the mountains of imaginary money borrowed by government to be thrown willy-nilly at the smoke and mirrors “pandemic”.

Cowardly people-pleasing politics, exalting the Sacred Cow of the NHS, or something altogether more dark and sinister?

Let’s be clear here: people will die of COVID-19, because viruses kill people – especially sick people.
Viruses are a fact of life.

People die.

That’s a fact of life.

But the choices being made “on behalf of the British People” seem to miss those two vital facts, and the ensuing immorality of selling my son, and all of your sons and daughters into a lifetime of debt slavery is beyond me. My gorgeous boy and every single one of your gorgeous girls and boys will be gifted the debts of these cowardly politicians, goaded into action by the corrupt media and the mass outcry of the gullible herd.

It sickens me to see Britain – and much of the World – spooked by a so-so disease which has been marketed as a “pandemic” by the corrupt World Health Organisation.

Frankly, it’s unbelievable that the WHO is taken seriously by anyone.

This is – after all - the same World Health Organisation which thought Robert Mugabe (the notoriously corrupt former president of Zimbabwe – yes, that Robert Mugabe) would be a suitable “Goodwill Ambassador”.

The same World Health Organisation whose Director-General is accused of suppressing news of Cholera epidemics in Ethiopia and Eritrea in order to shield political cronies.

Mugabe was forced out of the post after a day or two, but the stench of corruption hangs around the WHO and Dr Tedros, who remains in office to this day.

The WHO estimates that up to 650,000 people die of ‘flu every years – COVID-19 stands at a paltry 47,174 deaths.

Flu doesn’t blow-up the economy, neither does it rob people of their freedom of movement and association, the right to assemble, or put them under house arrest.

We’ve always had ‘flu and we probably always will.

We’ve always had freedom, of a sort, but not any more.

How many lives would Government spend to fight a hot war for freedom against an oppressor?

Many, many times more than C-19 will cost.

But the unfought battle is already lost.

Freedom will be returned to us, but not in full.

There will be no full roll-back of the “Johnson Decree”. We, and all our children – and all of their children - we will all be poorer as a consequence of this irrational madness and the monstrous theft perpetrated in broad daylight.

The story so far:

1. Loss of personal freedom of movement
2. Open, mass-surveillance imposed without shame
3. Loss of the right to assemble
4. Loss of right of free association
5. Loss of freedom to conduct business/trade
6. Loss of freedom of speech (censorship of material contrary to The Script)
7. Imposition of massive debt burden on every future citizen of this land
8. Damage to social relationships, friendships, (Divide and Rule policy) and family
9. Presumption of guilt in law, rather than innocence. You need to prove you have a reason to be out of your house/cell.
10. “Key Workers” compelled to do jobs they are not trained for, or face disciplinary action
11. There is more to come...

And the future?

1. Upcoming forced vaccinations? (I suggest the slogan “No Jab, No Job” and hereby claim copyright and all royalties for this. Ker-Chinng!)
2. Future hyper-inflation – this looks inevitable as the government ask the private banks (Bank of England, The Federal Reserve and their slimy ilk) to print more “fiat” currency: that’s “pretend Money” to you and me. This is “Quantitative Easing” – the euphemism for Devaluing the currency by printing more of it.
3. Economic hardship more severe than the Great Depression?
4. Mass unemployment?
5. Nationalisation of private assets and businesses?
6. State-decreed minimum wage/universal income
7. Headlong rush to adopt 5G technology – which research has already proven to be unsafe
8. Cashless society – everything can and will be taxed, everything will be surveilled
9. And much, much more...

I don’t know about you, but that looks pretty grim to me.

But the biggest loser was our collective ability to think. To dispassionately consider the facts, look beyond soundbites, disreputable politicians, self-appointed “experts” and government sidekicks, to ask difficult, penetrating questions and be courageous in the face of Truth.

The war has already been lost, and in War the first casualty is Truth.

Lockdown is the new Normal, so get used to it, because it will get worse – probably much worse. Little by little the ratchet will be applied: tightened, released a little, then tightened a little more; over and over again.

You were warned, oh yes you were warned.

The Thursday Thesis  - 13/2/2020

It was Monday, and the storm ebbed away after throwing her tantrum all weekend long, leaving a few gusts of rage hanging around like someone who knows they have lost the argument saying “and another thing...”

Outside, the blown-down trees were being cleared away, torn fences mended and ripped roofs patched up as the rain finally stopped and the wind piped-down.

Somewhere a tree has torn down the electricity lines to my little town, so I’m camped out in Costa coffee whilst the leccy company try to restore power, and I’m having a good time scribbling away at an idea I’m working on.

As usual I’m making a lovely inky mess as my fountain pen loops and scurries its way across the yellow pad I always carry with me, leaving a trail of deep magenta ink behind it, and I’m away with the fairies for a little while as my latte goes cold.

Suddenly there’s a voice, saying quietly “I hope you don’t mind me disturbing you, but it’s just so nice to see someone writing with a real pen for a change”. I look up to see a smiling, pretty woman whom I quickly thank before she wishes me a good day and trundles off.

The whole thing lasts maybe twenty seconds or so, and I take a sip of my lukewarm latte as I mull over the brief exchange and survey the other punters. Half a dozen of them are tapping away on laptops and tablet devices, the rest are phone-bothering. I’m the only person using a pen and paper: a singular luddite.

Gadgets have their place as a necessary evil of the modern world, but there are times when only a real pen will cut it: for real writing and the sheer joy of stringing ideas together, nothing beats a pen.

A proper pen.

A proper ink-pen with creamy silken paper and ink the colour of dragon’s blood.

I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I suspect it’s an act of rebellion against my schooling, against having my natural left-handedness knocked out of me and being made use my right hand because “left-handed people are the devil’s work...”

Bizarre, but true.

And it feels like I’m poking a finger in the eye of convention, raging against the crappy regulation biros with which I scratched away my school days.

And it takes me as far away as I can imagine from dusty classrooms and writing “lines”, the misery of detention , or the humiliation of the remedial handwriting classes which did bugger-all good and only left me feeling like an imbecile.

I now know that there wasn’t anything wrong with me: I’d just been told to do daft things with a pen which made it nigh-on impossible to do what I was told.

And many years later I came to recognise the stupidity of compelling a child to use their less able hand to write with, and to question the logic underpinning that decision.

Later still came the secret love of writing, the shape of words, and the appreciation of how beautiful the solitary act of writing could be...

My fountain pen is truly one of my treasures. Made from lava erupted from Mount Etna, heavy in my hand, yet poised and balanced;  it sighs as it caresses the creamy page like a lover’s skin, kept safe between the hard covers of my old-fashioned notebook.

If only I’d been taught that the process of writing could be innately pleasurable: like a beautiful dance, from the first contemplation of the virgin beauty of the empty page and the first kiss of inky colour. The hand simply moves, and thoughts coalesce into droplets of dragon-blood condensed from the mind, now given the freedom to flow – unimpeded by touchscreen or keyboard

Ink on paper is permanent and immediate, it doesn’t crash, and handwriting is rarely corrupted and seldom deleted by accident. A notebook remains present and instantly accessible, unlike the oubliette of a hard drive where files are saved and never seen again.

Few things are as cool as flipping open an old notebook and discovering something which one has written and then forgotten all about.

There are practical reasons for writing longhand, too: research indicates that we think differently when writing – there’s a sort of reprocessing of ideas which improves cognition and retention.
Most of all, writing with a real pen is simply a pleasure, unseen by the disapproving spelling and grammar checkers.

Set free the vagabond pen to roam and twist, spiral and swirl across, or up and down – the page. And perhaps it is this - the freedom of real writing - that compels us most. As the hollow promises and hype of digital technology are exposed, and that which was supposed to set us free enslaves us, there is a growing resistance movement and a resurgence of real writing – a sort of analogue underground – and I for one am proud to wear the inkstains of the writer on my fingers.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2020
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The Thursday Thesis  - 23/1/2020

Well, here we are – three weeks into a new year and what’s changed?

For most people, nothing has changed. Just a few weeks down the line from making definite, potentially life changing promises to ourselves, most of us are already right back where we started – or we soon will be.

Our New Year’s Resolutions are beginning to fall apart, with around an 80% failure rate, according to Inc Magazine.

So the majority of people make definite decisions to take action and change their lives for the better, but 8 out of 10 of them will fail...

Once again, it seems that doing what most people do is not a good idea. If we are prepared to observe the masses and do the opposite, there’s a chance that the 80% failure rate could become a thing of the past.

It’s not that New Year’s Resolutions are bad, in themselves – who could argue that taking better care of one’s health, finances or relationships is a bad thing?

No, the problem isn’t the Resolution, it’s the implementation.

Here’s what doesn’t work, most of the time: we make a decision and try to stick to it. If we diverge from our decision in any way, even just once, we throw out the whole thing and beat ourselves up for having no willpower, backbone or self-discipline.

We have failed, and it is over.

Sometimes this leaves us feeling even worse than we did before we made that decision, and that can have profound ramifications.

But what if we were wrong about that failure – how would that be?

Let’s suppose your New Year’s Resolution was to give up booze, but last Friday you had a couple of drinks with friends. You didn’t want to break your resolution, but your friends were so persuasive and bought your drinks for you.

When you woke up on Saturday you felt disappointed – you’d let yourself down and everybody knew you’d broken your resolution. Now you feel like crap and begin to tell yourself that there’s no point even trying again, because everybody knows that New Year’s Resolutions always fail...

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

But what if we chose to think of that catastrophic and final failure to stay clean – that unwanted behaviour - as something other than the end of our resolution: suppose it was really a successful test?

What you really found was a successful test of a behaviour that you didn’t want. That test was necessary to make sure that you didn’t want to do it, wasn’t it?

If that were true, you could eliminate it from your list of potential actions and resume your ongoing tests of behaviour that will support your long-term aims, in this case you New Year’s Resolution.

The core of the problem is that we over-respond to a single, momentary failure and let it define us. If we had decided to stop drinking alcohol and “go on the wagon” at New Year, but had fallen off the wagon last weekend, the sharpest thing to do is to get back on the wagon right away. An intelligent person would ask themself what happened and what they could do differently in order to stay on the wagon, rather than curse themself and throw themselves back under the wheels.

The intelligent person reminds themself that it was just a test, and then asks themself “so, what might work better?” because they know that is a thousand mile journey, but it is lived in inches. The intelligent person recognises the inch of lost ground when they fail, then strides out to regain that inch and then some.

So, if your own New Year’s Resolution – or any other decision – has been broken, today is another inch of your thousand mile journey: another chance to test what works and what doesn’t work, another chance to become who and what you want to be.

Keep Testing.


© Neil Cowmeadow 2019

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The Thursday Thesis  - 5/12/2019

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

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

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

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

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

Daft as a brush.

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

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

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

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

Five-minute REPS!

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

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

Minimum input, maximum output.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there’s something missing, in my opinion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t have to be this way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not how I’m planning to live out the next fifty or so years: I’m going to Live Long and Drop Dead - how about you?
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis  - 10/10/2019

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

Well, what exactly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s ok by me.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis  - 03/10/2019


As a spotty teenage guitar wannabe, all I knew about feedback was that it was a hideous, high-pitched scream emanating from my Marshall amplifier when I had the volume cranked and I was too close to the speakers.

These days, my amps are smaller, my guitar playing slightly less bad, and electronic feedback much less common.

But feedback is the bread-and-butter of daily life – it’s how our bodies respond to our environment without us even thinking about it, and how we decide upon which behaviours to adopt, continue or abandon.

In fact, feedback is the core of human behaviour: look at any behaviour pattern and feedback will be present, one way or another. From our eating habits to our exercise patterns, sexual proclivities and spending habits (no connection between these last two), everything comes down to feedback.

So what is feedback, how does it work, and how can we hijack ourselves to get more of what we what and less of what we don’t?

In a nutshell, feedback is the tendency of a system - in this case, us – to respond to received information (sensations or feelings) in a consistent way in order to produce more or less of the incoming sensations.

If we are receiving information we find pleasurable or positive – say, a delicious taste, sexual excitement, rewards or peer esteem – we will continue to perform the activity which produces those desirable sensations. This is known as Positive Feedback.

And if the sensations being received are unpleasant or negative – for example, food we don’t like, pain, punishment or exclusion from our peer group – we will modify our behaviour to reduce or eliminate the unpleasantness.

Freud’s Pleasure Principle is a pretty good summary of how feedback works: “people to seek pleasure and avoid pain”. That’s really the nuts and bolts of feedback – it’s pretty simple.

So how do we hack our own feedback loops to be happier, fitter, wealthier?

Just two: words: pay attention.

Notice what is working for you and do more of it.

And notice what isn’t working for you, then do less of it.

It’s simple, and it only takes a moment of detached consideration and honesty to ask yourself the simple question “Is what I am doing now producing the kinds of results which will make me more like the person I want to become?”

If the answer is “Yes”, do more of it and improve it.

If the answer is “No”, stop doing it as soon as you possibly can.

Suppose you’re mouth is watering at the sight of a yummy fresh doughnut...

Before you wade in with all teeth blazing – just ask yourself “Is eating that doughnut going to help make me the sort of fit, slim person I want to be?”

And be honest with yourself.

If you're wrestling your guitar and getting nowhere, pause and ask yourself "is what I'm doing now helping or hurting my development and enjoyment on the guitar?"

"Success leaves clues", as they say - and so does failure...

If you spend your life doing things consistent with the actions of the person you’d most like to meet, you must – inevitably – become that person.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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Episode 168 - The Art of Looking Sideways

The Thursday Thesis  - 12/9/2019


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

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

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

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

Time freezes briefly when someone looks at you that way.

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

And it all happens in an instant.

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

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

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

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

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

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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Episode 166 - Observe The Masses...

The Thursday Thesis  - 29/8/2019

Within the world of business, finance and investing, Warren Buffet is pretty much a legend in his own lifetime.

Now in his 80’s the Chairman of the Berkshire Hathaway investment fund is still playing The Game he loves most – the Game of Money.

You might ask “Why would he want to keep on working at his age?”

Because it is his game – his fascination and his calling.

He certainly isn’t in it for the money itself: with a personal net worth of around 80 Billion dollars it would be hard to make much of a dent in his fortune. In fact, that amount of money invested at just 3% would earn him an eye-popping 2.4 Billion dollars a year, pre tax.

He's a lone wolf - happy to pursue his own passions and interests when it flies in the face of popular opinion.

Buffet is, by nature, a contrarian - believing that he should try be brave when everyone else is fearful, and when everyone else is brave – he should be fearful.

Part of his philosophy is, in essence, Observe The Masses – Do the Contrary.

There’s a curious logic to the way he thinks: reasoning that there are fewer successful investors than unsuccessful investors, those in the minority have the best odds of success.

Observe the masses...

It works across all areas of life – even learning to play guitar – where the most common approach is to “teach yourself” what you don’t know how to do, and only a minority book themselves in with a teacher to accelerate their progress.

 That’s why most wannabe guitarists quit or are frustrated and stuck.

Observe the masses...

Work surveys constantly report that around 70% of people hate their jobs, approximately 25% are indifferent and only around 5% of people actually get paid for doing work they really enjoy.

Observe the masses, do the contrary.


When everyone around you is moaning about the economy, Brexit, the state of the country, or how crap the local football team is doing this year, feel free to run the other way. Consciously choose to be positive instead – don’t get caught up in a game of one-downsmanship with people who are more negative than you are.

You know the game, don’t you?

It’s the one where – no matter how big their problem is, yours is so much worse.

When the usual crowd are milling around - moaning and bitching about the crap on TV last night, the price of a pint or that trollop from accounts and her new shoes – run. Just get yourself away from their tractor beams before you are sucked into their negative vortex and begin to compete for the “My Life is Crappier Than Yours” prize.

There’s a lot of competition for that award, but even if you won it, you’d still be a loser.

Given the choice between what most people do and what the minority do - day in, day out – do you want to run with the pack or howl with the lone wolves?

Be more wolf: Observe the masses, do the contrary.

Harrrroooouul!!


© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis  -22/8/2019

Precise.

Specific.

They are two words I adore.

They’re solid words, and there’s something very reliable and dependable about them: they stand for accuracy and certainty, a gimlet-eyed no-nonsense attention to detail and a straight-backed “X marks the spot” rigour that borders on being finicky.

I love the words, but recoil from their rigidity.

Nobody could argue against Precision and specificity in the study of absolute measurements: mathematics, logic and the like.

But they’re words which don’t play nicely. Their strictness excludes them from the creative act, because they lack the sense of fun which is the hallmark of invention, creativity, the arts and true insight.

They are also the sworn enemies of learning.

So, how do we learn best?

It turns out that learning can be learned and accelerated - just like any other skill.

The trick is to begin with what I call Useful Generalisations: the core ideas which are true for the great majority of cases, the great majority of the time. In other words, find out what works most of the time, and which – logically – has the highest probability of being correct, most of the time.

With the most common and therefore most useful concepts secured, we can shift our attention to the next most likely occurrences: the most common exceptions to the Useful Generalisations. By noting their deviations from the Useful Generalisations we can develop a set of rules – an algorithm – we can now handle the great majority of situations and occurrences.

This learning pathway always delivers the most “Bang for the Buck” for us, because it always attends to the highest-returning investment of our time first, and prevents us from becoming lost in the fine detail of the seldom-encountered, the rare, and the unusual.

So to begin learning anything always try to find experts - teachers, coaches and mentors to show you the most important ideas first.

With hindsight, trying to teach myself something I didn’t know how to do was not a wise approach, and it cost me too much time.

Yet I tried it, and the chances are that you have done so, too.

The Broad Sweeps, the Big Ideas and the Useful Generalisations must come before the unlikely, the Rare, the Precise and the Specific, because (to quote Goethe) “...the things which matter most must never be at the mercy of the things which matter least...”
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis  - 18/7/2019

Steve Jobs of Apple told the graduating students of Stanford University “...you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

To put it another way, when you are further down the line, you can look back and see the turning points and decisions that got you to where you are: you can see how everything connects up along the way and – from the future’s perspective – make it seem inevitable that things turned out the way they have.

For most of us, “Looking forward to the future” is a pretty good description of how we think, because when we imagine the future we usually create images and visions of the future in front of us, and usually dead-centre.

Maybe it’s because humans’ normal direction of movement is forward that we hold the future in front of us, as though we could step into it in the same way we walk to the corner shop.

But the future is more like a fall, backwards into the unknowable, looking at the “dots” which preceded the fall.

This is why imagining your future is vital to any kind of planning and personal growth; by visualising our future we can “step in to” our idealised, imagined future and observe our course from that position.

We can visualise the steps of the journey which culminated in that imagined future, notice the turning points and critical moments, the decisions and actions which shaped the pathway to where we imagine we want to go - our imagined future.

You can’t do it from where you are, but you can fast-forward into the future and look back, joining the dots and admiring how perfectly the route you took got you to where you wanted to be.

What’s your future going to look like - and when you look back from it, which dots will you connect up?

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis  - 4/7/2019

Unless you - like me - are a geek, chances are that you’ve never heard of Warren Buffet, the American investor, businessman and philanthropist.

Now, Warren is an interesting guy – maybe even a genius – content to conquer the world of investing from Omaha, Nebraska rather than a glass tower on Wall Street.

In fact, Warren thinks differently about almost everything; “observe the masses, do the contrary” could almost be his mantra.

Here are a few key points about “The Sage of Omaha”

• He is 88 years old and is still in love with his work
• He has an estimated net worth of 88 Billion dollars, but reportedly takes a salary of only $100,000 per year
• He limits how many deals he does each year, to avoid becoming scattered and unable to go deeply into each deal
• He still lives in the house he bought in 1958 for $31,000
• He drives a standard Cadillac car – no Lamborghinis, Ferraris or extravagant supercars
• He plays bridge for 12 hours a week
• He has pledged to donate 99% of his net worth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on his death: until then he wants to grow as big a pot to donate as he can.
• He plays ukulele and often breaks out into song at shareholder meetings of his firm, Berkshire Hathaway, and the businesses he invests in.

Apart from his philosophy of thinking long-term and being frugal, Warren has a pretty cool trick up his sleeve when it comes to managing his time – here’s an overview of the process:

First he makes a list of his top 25 goals.

From that list he identifies the top 5 goals.

His top 5 goals go on his List One: The Vital Few things which will make all the difference.

The other 20 goals go onto his List Two: the Avoid-At-All-Costs List.

I think that’s brilliantly simple – and I’m whittling away at the unnecessary things in my own life in order to focus on the “Vital Few” things which will be of greatest value to me and the people I love.

It’s a very clear system, but it requires discipline and focus to stick to it, because it’s hard to let go of things we love – even when they don’t serve us – and it’s hard to resist the temptation of short-term pleasure in order to achieve a long-term goal.

But above all else, Buffett’s system demands we understand what is important to us.

So, put the kettle on and brew yourself a nice cup of tea, then sit quietly and mull over the questions:

What would be on your Vital Few list?

What would you have to disregard in order to have only 5 things on your own Vital Few list?

Your answers could change your life.
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis  - 27/6/2019

Is classical Time Management missing the point?

The Thursday Thesis  - 20/6/2019

I have a voice in my head.

You have a voice in your head, too.

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

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

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

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

What’s yours like?

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

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

Well, they used to do that...

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

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

“Uh-huh...” I agreed.

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

I think I nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Change the tape, and notice the difference...

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

The Thursday Thesis  - 13/6/2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wouldn’t that be a Trance worth going into?

 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis – 2/5/2019


Humans are funny little creatures.

This is not news, by the way – it’s a stone-cold fact.

Give a human one thing and he’ll immediately want the opposite, give her what she said wanted and it will immediately change.

Bit of a bugger isn’t it?

And here’s the thing: everything is a continuum with us. Somewhere between extreme X and extreme Y we’ll settle...but not for long. The overwhelming impression is restlessness and a need for change, accompanied by an infuriating need for sameness and familiarity.

When we experience too much sameness we say that we are bored, that everything is routine and life is dull.

Give us too much change and we feel out of control and insecure, that we are stressed and scared.
The minute we have too much of one or the other we react by trying to create more of what we were trying to get away from!

Infuriating, but oh-so-human.

And this change-versus-boredom pattern shows up in music, too. We like music to be sufficiently similar to everything else we’ve ever heard that it’s familiar and relatable; whilst at the same time needing it to be different enough to be interesting.

You hear this all the time, when people say “Ooh, that reminds me of that old song by so-and-so...” or “All their songs sound the same...”

There’s a reason for the similarity between songs: if a band or “artist” (pretentious terminology alert) suddenly switch genres or styles, their audience has a WTF moment and there’s uproar. Such reinvention is a risky strategy for a performer or a brand – having built an audience by being one thing, there’s a real danger of alienating that audience by suddenly becoming something else.

Fans want their favourite acts to produce more of the same, but new versions of it.

Every band or performer has their little quirk, their stylistic wrinkle on things; this is what their audience unconsciously identifies and resonates with.

And every song has this continuum, too: verses establish the basic idea, but after a couple of verses we begin to want something new... that’s where the chorus comes in, to disrupt the pattern and change things...but now we begin to want more of the original verse idea, don’t we?
Pretty soon, we’ll tire of the verse/chorus pattern, too – so that’s an opportunity for a guitar solo or a breakdown section, a “middle 8” that takes the music in a different direction.

It’s fractal, as the same pattern emerges across all of life: sameness versus change.

Do you recognise the pattern in your own life, just like I see it writ large in mine?

Sameness keeps me comfortable, but too much of it and I’m bored rigid: massive change is scary and uncomfortable. Somewhere between the two extremes I find a tolerable compromise – and immediately begin to destabilise it.

Infuriating, or what?!


© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis – 18/4/2019

Yesterday, the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris was in flames.

Today, the people with the means to donate millions of Euros – of their own money – are being vilified for being rich enough to do that.

Yes, hard-working, successful people are giving away vast amounts of their own money...and some people are actually getting the hump about this?

I ask you, is it really anybody else’s business what Bernard Arnault or Francois-Henri Pinault do with their millions?

Why is the media giving airtime to self-appointed loudmouths who decry people for being successful and wealthy – what gives?

Why is social media lit up by keyboard warriors spitting hate at those who have dared to break the rules and become successful?

Is it just me who thinks that being successful and wealthy is something to aspire to, not revile?

Am I the only person who gets pissed-off with this sort of self-righteous “rich people are evil” crap?
If we are free to make choices for ourselves – as we surely should – are we not free to strive, thrive and flourish; without being lambasted for our pains?

And the greatest travesty of all is the misuse of the magic word “Equality” by the haters, who mistakenly think their precious Equality governs outcomes: it doesn’t.

Think about it for more than a few knee-jerk seconds and it will become clear that Equality must be given at the point of opportunity, and the individual must be free to pursue their own legitimate goals from that point, because, if you are denied the freedom to choose your own path, you are not free at all: you are either a prisoner or a slave; you are not a free man.

Equality must not be confused with the imposition of uniform mediocrity upon everyone – because that condition is mere slavery.

So tell me, is it just me who thinks that a person who has grafted for decades, created businesses and employed thousands, who has given their customers what they wanted at a fair price – not stolen from them at gunpoint, as our governments traditionally do – should be free to give away their hard-earned cash to rebuild an old church, just because they want to?

Yes, there are kids who could use the money, hospitals that could be built; any number of worthy causes who’d love to get their hands on Arnault and Pinault’s dosh: but the point is that it’s THEIR dosh, and how they dispose of it is none of your bloody business.

And if the Freedom and Equality gobshites have a problem with that, they maybe need to look up what the words Freedom and Equality actually mean.

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

The Thursday Thesis – 11/4/2019

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

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

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

I feel suspicion daggering at me...

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

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

It’s my own fault, naturally.

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

But that’s not how I roll.

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

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

That’s when the new problem begins...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Makes you wonder why, doesn’t it?

What does it mean, as within, so without?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not many” is my guess.

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

This is why I don’t own a TV...

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

We all know that the two pillars of imagination are playfulness and curiosity: playfulness makes it all a game, and curiosity asks “what if?” and “what else?” and embracing them makes it easy for us – with practice – to create a vivid and compelling mental blueprint for ourselves – for what we want, who we wish to become, and what we will be remembered for: the blueprint for a life of intention and purpose.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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Episode 144 - Close to The Edge

The Thursday Thesis – 28/3/2019

The buzzard’s wing flashed white at around 900 feet, just off to starboard, turning easy circles in lift and I eased the stick into a gentle banked turn, feathering the rudder until the variometer wolf-whistled me into the twisting, rising air where I settled in  below the great bird.

“Nice...good” said Dave the instructor, his voice calm and steady.

The vario whistled contentedly as we gained height, 1300... 1400...1500 feet.

“What are you thinking?” Dave asked

“I’d rather be in my studio, playing guitar” I answered. “I think I’m done, Dave.”

“Ermmm... what do you mean?” he said.

After a few words I exited the thermal and began to circle down and back toward the airfield, enjoying the scenery and the feeling of release. This was my thirteenth flight and I was well on my way to earning my glider pilot’s licence – and I couldn’t have cared less.

For most of my life flying had been the ultimate confrontation with fear.

I think it all started when I scared my mum by climbing onto the flat roof of the shed – I’d be about six years old at the time: six years old and fearless. Before then I can’t remember being afraid of heights, but since then – like a fissure in my character – it’s always been there.

“Feel the fear and do it anyway” is one approach that’s become a mantra in the self-help world, and it’s helpful – up to a point. But the fear never goes away, it’s always there, ready to defend its residence in my mind.

Old beliefs, childhood indoctrinations and phobias have deep roots; the older the belief, the harder it is to shift, and whatever gets into our minds first always resists most strongly.

But in our moments of greatest fear and closeness to death we feel the strongest love of life and the greatest clarity.

Looking our own fear of death in the eye and staring it down puts things nicely into perspective, so they say, and I can personally verify that a Glock 9mm shoved in your face is a tremendous focus-puller.

No wonder we get hooked on the adrenaline released by massive risk or danger, chased up with a jolt of dopamine when we escape from whatever bloody stupid position we’ve gotten ourself into.
It’s a lethal combination...

The guidebook says that deaths are a regular occurrence here.

And the Mountain Rescue people told me it was “extremely dangerous”.

I walked past the battered sign that read "Danger - Crib Goch" and scrambled toward, then up over The Pinnacle stones standing sentry to the west .

Edging along until I reached the sharpest of the knife-edge where the drop-offs to either side were 300 feet or more. If I stopped I’d be crag-fast, afraid to go either forward or back; certain that if I slipped it would be sudden, a handful of seconds – whirling and spinning downward over sharp remorseless granite... earthward gliding.

Inch by careful inch until the edge became blunted and the exposure was less fierce, finally rejoining a well-worn path down to the valley road where my boots thundered down as I starined my eyes to catch a glimpse of my girl's car, slogging up the snake-road throught her boulder field to the pass.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more glad to be alive or more grateful to see anyone than at that moment.

And that’s what I mean about fear and immediate danger of death being great clarifiers: they point out who and what it is you want to stay alive for.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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