Posts tagged ideas

technocratic

Sacking The “Berlusconi Of The Brain”

Nov 15th

Posted by Judy in Body-Mind

3 comments

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Berlusconi no longer runs Italy. But is the “Berlusconi of the Brain” still in charge in your own world?

According to Iain McGilchrist, the left hemisphere of the brain is like Berlusconi because it controls the media. It airbrushes reality, creating rational, linguistic arguments to generate an illusory perfect, mechanistic world.

When you combine that idea with the fact that the left brain is more interested in what it already knows than in new things, the result is a hall of mirrors, in which the left brain knows more and more about what it already knows, and is less and less open to new ideas – and to grubby, imperfect reality.

McGilchrist is interested in the effect of that at the level of society and culture. He argues that society is becoming more and more “left-brained” – technocratic, bureaucratic, mechanistic.

He quotes Einstein, who said: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

I’m curious about how all this affects More >

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Do You Know The Right Answer?

Nov 14th

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

1 comment

How often do you ask a question to which you don’t know the answer?

“Never!” is apparently the answer trial lawyers would give. Makes sense – they dont want a witness embarrassing them on the stand with something unexpected.

But the rule seems to spread beyond the courtroom.

At the Clean Business Exchange on Friday, my friend and colleague James Lawley told the story of some consultancy work he had been doing with teachers in a particular school.

Studying transcripts of their interactions with children, he noticed that they hardly ever asked a question to which they didn’t already know the “right” answer. And when a child gave the “right” answer, there was never a follow-up question such as: “Is there anything else about that?”

I wonder, how would that approach influence the children’s thinking processes?

What kind of children would those kids grow up to be?

And what difference could better questions make in your immediate environment?

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Breakthrough Sessions

Sep 22nd

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

2 comments

If you were to have a “breakthrough session”, what kind of “breakthrough” would yours be?

My friend James Tripp and I were talking yesterday about how various coaches and therapists offer “breakthrough sessions” – and I must have subconsciously asked myself: “What kind of breakthrough?” because a personal story sprang to mind.

(James pointed out that this was an example of how Clean Language enthusiasts typically find themselves coaching themselves using the questions in their own thoughts, without even noticing it. It’s a great side-effect of using this coaching approach.)

When I was about nine years old, an architect friend of my parents came to dinner. While they ate, and chatted (about property, among many other things) the architect noticed that the house was configured in such a way that it would be relatively easy to create an extra bedroom.

My parents were sceptical but curious.

The architect nipped home to fetch a hammer and chisel. Then, watched by my dad, he knocked out a couple of bricks in a wall.

They peered through at a perfectly room-sized space!

That was the breakthrough.

They didn’t go on to smash the whole wall down – there were young children in the house and it might not have been safe.

Months later, the More >

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The Perfect Elevator Pitch?

Jun 8th

Posted by Judy in Influence

8 comments

How much can a label such as “coach” or “mentor” say about you? My recent blog Call Yourself A Coach? promoted some interesting discussions, online and off.

The consensus? Of course a label can’t say everything about you – because there’s more to you than the label.

But my point was that labels aren’t just about you – they have their primary effect  “in the eye of the beholder”.

When someone who doesn’t know you sees your logo or web URL, hears your elevator pitch or even just catches your name in conversation, they have a response which has more to do with them – their knowledge, their experience, their assumptions, their prejudices – than about you.

Typically, if they feel that they understand the label, that’s it. They’re satisfied. They put you in a mental category and close the lid. No open loop, no more thinking to do.

And what happens next? They move on, and probably instantly forget you.

I’ve recently been doing a lot of work with coaches to help each of them find a commercial “sweet spot” (I hate the word “niche”!)

Frequently, at the start of the process they expect that once they find their perfect niche, they’ll have an elevator pitch that everyone More >

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Are Second-Hand Metaphors Restricting Your Life?

May 16th

Posted by Judy in Clean Language

4 comments

Are you living your life according to your own metaphors? Or is your system being restricted by ill-fitting second-hand ideas, images and connections?

As I’ve mentioned frequently in this blog, the metaphors you use in your thinking (including your subconscious processing) have a profound impact on your behaviour. It’s inevitable, because metaphor is the language of the unconscious mind. The metaphors we use in our language (at a rate of around six per minute in English) can provide clues to the metaphors in our thoughts.

You’ll certainly be living in a world of second-hand metaphors, because they are profoundly infectious. We’re constantly picking up metaphors from our environment: for example, when you start work in a new industry you’ll soon adopt the jargon used by your colleagues.

As small children, we adopt metaphors from parents and other carers. As we grow up, we borrow them from friends, from advertising, from TV. It would be impossible not to think in second-hand metaphors.

But we rarely stop to ask, “Does this metaphor actually work for me, or is it restricting my thinking?”

And we probably never stop to wonder about the details of our metaphors, and how these may have been altered in the process of adoption. As More >

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