I recently came across a famous quote from Bruce Lee (the noted neurosocialpsychologist): 

“You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.”

This reminded me of Carl Rogers essay on the fully functioning person who is living “the good life.” When I hear about mindfulness I am often reminded of this essay by Rogers.    

Carl Rogers was one of the 20th century’s most influential psychologists. His essay on the Fully Functioning Person was “an attempt to spell out the picture of the person who would emerge if therapy were maximally successful.” Rogers wrote he “was somewhat frightened by the fluid, relativistic, individualistic person who seemed to be the logical outcome.(1)” 

This was based upon his observations of patients whose therapy was successful and who had subsequently made good progress towards, or were living, what he calls a good life. Rogers was surprised and a bit concerned to observe that these people never reached a particular state of being, a homeostasis. This was in contradiction to many influential psychological theories of his time. Instead, he writes:

If I attempt to capture in a few words what seems to me to be true of these people, I believe it it will come out something like this.
“The good life is a process, not a state of being.
It is a direction, not a destination. 
The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction.  

This strikes me of a pretty good description of someone who is living mindfully. 

Rogers found The characteristic qualities of this “process of movement” which “crop up in person after person” were:

• An increasing openness to experience. 
• Increasingly existential living. 
• An increasing trust in his or her organism. There is a wonderful description of decision-making which foreshadows the work of Kahnemann and Teversky and dozens of books since then such as Blink and The Righteous Mind.  

——  Notes ————-

(1) This was the inspiration for his original paper, which he never published but circulated among friends and colleagues for feedback. Later when he considered the paper for a collection of essays and speeches titled On Becoming a Person, he found “many of its most central themes had been absorbed, and perhaps better expressed, in other papers.” So he used a later paper on “the good life” which “expresses its essential aspects in briefer and more readable form.” 

Jeff Pfeffer and the Sources of Power

Distinguish between sources and uses of power
Distinguish between power and force

David Bradford and the Sources of Influence

Distinguish again between influence as a source or power and how we use it, and the dynamics of using influence instead of other sources

Baba Shiv and our emotional brains

They are making most (possibly all) of our decisions
Cognitive brain navigates – emotional brain decides where we want to go. It accepts or declines suggestions from cognitive brain.

The Big Intersection which runs our world: emotional brains interacting with other emotional brains.

Working with the unconscious-unconscious conversation

John Gottman
Cesar Milan
Advertising
Inspirational leadership

Mindfulness

An intellectual relationship with my unconscious Self
…it is only possible in certain ways.. searching for clues at the scene of the crime.

 

[Where do these items connect ]

Unconditional positive regard

Lesson 1 – Division of Labor and Trade.

Imagine two villages a very long time ago. In each village, everyone shares. Everyone works at everything and shares in everything. One village has better apples nearby. The other has better fishing. They exchange and value is created.

Carrying the apples and fish is also value. From the village with more abundant apples, we carry apples to the village with more abundant fishing. That adds value for which they will exchange more fish.

For this to work, expectations are key. We collect and carry apples because we expect you will give us fish. They catch extra fish expecting the apple gatherers to come for them.

We don’t have to own anything for this to work (more on ownership later). The apples are near our village, the fish are near theirs. They could walk over to collect apples, and we could walk over and fish. The simple division of labor and trading create value.

Lesson 2 – Prices

How many apples are worth one average-sized fish? We might start with as many apples as one person can carry in exchange for as many fish as that person can carry. But that is not the best price.

Lesson 3 – Ownership

In our simple example, everyone contributes to the village and everyone shares. We all farm together, forage together and hunt together. Everything belongs to everyone.

We might even share our land with other villages, but eventually we will claim territories. This starts in the animal kingdom and extends to humans.

That means we may have to fight for and defend our territory.

We may also have ownership within our village. If I spend many nights making a tool or a weapon to hunt, I can claim it as mine. If my tool or weapon is more skillfully made than those made by others, I own the benefits of that superior tool.

Lesson 4 – Expectations – Confidence and Information

For all of this to work, we have to have confidence in what to expect. Before I do the work catching extra fish to trade with you, I have to expect that you will come with apples before they spoil.

And that you won’t just come attack me and take the fish.

And you have to have some confidence I’ll have fish to trade before you pick the apples and carry them all that way. And that I won’t steal them from you, or that robbers won’t along the trip.

In addition to fish and apples, information is created, shared, and exchanged through our trading.

This part of the economic process is where governments, from tribal chiefs to kings to legislatures, bureaus, and central banks, play their most critical important role. And it is arguably the least understood and greatest area of malpractice and outright mischief.

Lesson 5 – Side Effects

Which brings us to side effects.All economic processes, all decisions, have side effects. This is mathematically inevitable because economic systems, at least those to date on our planet, are closed systems with feedback loops.

To defend ourselves and our territories we may have a powerful Chief. He organizes and leads our conflict with other tribes. But then the chief may use his powers to claim extra rights and privileges for himself and his friends and family.

Lesson 6 – Productivity (Technology and Innovation)

Through division of labor we can develop can lead to specialized skills.

Instead of having everyone share in every task, it makes sense to divide tasks. It doesn’t make sense for the whole village to walk a long ways to the hunting ground and wait all day for prey. It only takes a few of us, and the others can stay home and farm or fish or forage. This division of labor creates value. In addition, we can develop specialized skills.

Specialized skills change the division of labor. The new ox-drawn plow requires less people for farming.

Within the village this can work even if everything is shared. Some farm, some gather, some care for children and elders and prepare food, some hunt, some fish. But all of these are contributed to the common pot.

This sharing requires norms (morals) to enforce sharing and discourage free-riding.

Lesson 7 – Resources (Territory, Sustainability, and Generations)

Natural Resources

Environmental side-effects

Sustainability

Inter-generational transfer (or not?)

Lesson 8 – Regulation

It’s the referees, dummy. And the Commissioner.

The issue with regulation is not how much more or less, but how effective.

Lesson 9 -Information Technology

From cuneiform tablets to printing presses to coffeehouse pamphlets to yellow journalism to radio and television to the internet… this is the 800 pound gorilla.

 

 

One of a series of unedited “top of mind” posts which are works in progress.

Today I will practice being fully present.

What does it mean to be fully present?
And what about “authenticity” which is so often mentioned?

Being fully present means being fully present to my emotions. Most of us have become conditioned to tuning them out to some degree, but they are always there, like a group of children, impulsive and spontaneous and filled with the energy of life. Although we become conditioned to tuning them out, we all have multiple emotional reactions to everything around us in each moment.

Being fully present means being present to my intentions and values. These also come from our emotional brains. In fact, they begin in the deepest parts of our selves. They start with our love of life, our love of family and friends. They are arise from our instincts and are shaped by the wisdom of our experience.

Being fully present means being present to the power of choice. Of all the qualities which distinguish us as humans from the other beasts, choice is the monarch. It’s sovereignty precedes even language and logic. Choice expresses our values, intentions, and feelings.
The consequences of choice, in turn, shape who we become over time. This dynamic cycle is what makes choice so powerful. In 30 days we can completely change our self and our life. The impact of our choices over years is hard to overstate. It is even hard for us to comprehend.

There is much talk these days of being authentic, although the meme is hardly new. A person’s authenticity is one of those qualities which is instantly familiar and therefore seldom clearly defined. We all recognize when someone is authentic and we generally admire it and yet past that point we have little clarity about “authenticity.”
Is authenticity key to interpersonal influence or connection? Sometimes it seems to be.
Is authenticity key to leadership? Sometimes it seems to be.
It authenticity key to success or happiness? Sometimes it seems to be.
The answer to all of those questions seems to be yes and no.

What if authentic is what others see when we are more fully present? Then the influence of that authenticity surely depends upon what we are present to:

If I am present to and with emotional reactions, I am authentic. I am spontaneous and impulsive and perhaps endearing but probably also childish and self-indulgent.

If I am present to and with my values and intentions, and if they are authentically congruent with one another, I am authentic. I am also powerful and inspiring. I may also quickly become tiresome and pedantic.

If I am consistently present to and with my power of choice, and those choices serve my values and intentions and emotions, I am authentic. My emotional reactions and values and intentions all show at times. I am likely to be experienced as engaging, responsive, and available. I am probably a leader in whatever situation or context in which I am present this way.

Done for now. End of thoughts. Emptied out. Not sure what to do next with these. I choose to try something new.

 

We now know our emotional brains run our lives
We knew this for a long time.
Socrates, Hindu philosophers, Plato/Aristotle, _____, Jefferson[?]
In the 1970s psychologists Kahnemann and Teversky applied scientific study to the decision-making.
Now we have modern neuroscience and neuropsychology, and behavioral finance.
Then Emotional Intelligence
John Gottman

We have known this for along time. For example, I am pretty smart. I have a math degree from MIT. I have a pile of certificates and credentials documenting that I am smart.
But I do not run a large organization or have a private jet. Part of that is luck, especially regarding the private jet. But the part of that which is not luck has little to do with smart, but about heart. By heart I don’t just mean compassion. I also mean street smarts and people smarts. EQ.

This is not a talk on neuroscience or decision psychology. We could fill a weekend seminar on those subjects. I am not an expert in them. If you are, I apologize. Some of what I am going to say is not even precisely accurate. It is an approximation, a mental model, a framework. But I claim it is accurate enough to be useful. Incredibly useful.

The two brains and their conversations.

Cognitive brain holds concepts ideas and symbols. Future. Past. Me. These are all thoughts. Thoughts are incredibly useful. And they get us into trouble.

Emotional intuitive brain is here and now. It is not cognitive or symbolic. It cannot tell one person from another who makes it feel the same way. It runs on pattern recognition and conditioning. It listens to the thoughts in the cognitive brain and reacts to them too. My emotional brain is not actually in my heart, as far as we know. But to my cognitive brain, which holds all these concepts, everything is somewhere down there. There is a real basis for this. The rest of our brain extends into our bodies. Our emotions and intuitions come it. They are associated with our somatics, our posture and tone. To our thinking brain it is all somewhere down there in our body.

Here is the key part: Our emotional brains unconsciously drive our body language, including and especially our facial expressions. Also our tone of voice, our posture.
And our emotional brains pick up all these micro-signals. They are having their own separate conversation. All the time.

How often have you been in a conversation where there seemed to be a dynamic that was separate from the topics being discussed? How many of you have observed that in a conversation between two people? They are talking about one thing, but there is clearly something else going on.

Yes all the time. Even now? Yep. Here is a demonstration.
What if I were giving a lecture and you were sitting in the audience. Pretty low level of emotional engagement. So that emotional conversation isn’t very active. And yet a good talk comes form emotional connection with the audience.
Ok so lets change things. What if the speaker suddenly picked you. What if they addressed you directly? What if they asked you to sing the national anthem (or sing and dance like Shakira on that World Cup Video]? All your faces react.
With a real audience – pick on a person. Their face reacts. I react to that with empathy and humor. What message did I send? That I care about your expeirence and that makes you safer with me. Because I care I’m less likely to do something embarrassing.

So what does this mean for my life? It means when a conversation matters, either because the subject does or the person does, our emotional brains are in charge. My thinking brain can’t even follow everything that happens, because it is too fast, too subtle, too subliminal, too unconscious.
So what does this really mean? It means if I look back at the most important conversations of my life, “I,” my thinking self, wasn’t even in them. When I am talking to my spouse, or my boss, or my teenage child, or that important client, or that colleague who gets under my skin, my emotional brain in in charge. My thinking brain, the one I think in in charge, can’t even follow what is happening.

Quote Ogilvy partner here?
• Riders and elephants
• Head office and press office
• Economists 20 years, psychologists 40 years, craftsmen in advertising and marketing, 60 to 70 years.

Influence. So what does happen? Emotional connection. If we establish empathic connection, we influence each other.

Ok, so this is all pretty humbling. What can we do?

Good news: we do not have to think about it much more. Whew. That’s a relief. We don’t have to think about it because we cannot think through the red brain conversation. Where do we follow this conversation? In our heart.

Example of Jim Flick. Most golf books describe the results of a smooth, relaxed, confident swing, not the causes. And ironically, thinking about all of those resulting details pretty reliably keeps us from having a smooth, relaxed, confident swing. We are going to develop our feel for the golf club, and a swing that feels good.

By attending to what I practice, I can become aware of my skill level. I can practice new skills. It turns out this is actually quite easy and a little bit of the right practice quickly makes a big difference.

The sign in the Arthur Murray studio (the learning model)

Unconsciously incompetent
Consciously incompetent
Consciously competent
Unconsciously competent

So we start noticing what we are missing, by bringing our awareness to our feelings, because that is where we get the emotional conversation. The heart is our receiver-transmitter for that frequency.

Sorry, what exactly am I supposed to practice again?

1. Notice my emotional reactions, including my physical reactions (somatics) and impulses, whether I act them out or suppress them. Notice my behaviors, both my conscious choices and my unconscious (habitual and conditioned) responses.
2. Notice my thoughts as thoughts. Our thoughts mix actual observations with assumptions and guesses. We organize them into stories.
3. Notice the dynamic in conversations. A good start is to assess each response as towards, away, or against. Notice how I react in this dynamic.

This practice is similar to beginning dance lessons. First I notice my feet and what they are doing. Then I start practicing doing particular, intentional things with my feet.

Practicing the emotional conversation.

1. Get curious about others. Look to empathize. Look past the words to the emotional content and the behavior.
2. Allow myself to be more fully known. Share my intentions and my emotional reactions to what happens.
3. Make empathic connection. What does it look like? Turn on your television. Pretty much every show that you really like, that engages you, will have empathic connection at the core of almost every dialog.

What happens with practice

These practices force us to discover our own hearts as well as our emotional connection with each other. Which brings us to JoHari’s Window. Through dialog I allow myself to become known at this level, and allow myself to know the other, and in that discover things about my own emotional self which were not known to me.

And that takes vulnerability and courage. Vulnerability can have more than one meaning. It can mean being unguarded, exposed. This is not the same as being weak or little. It means putting my guard down, dropping my armor, opening my kimono, extending an unarmed hand for a handshake. This vulnerability requires strength and confidence.

It is essential, because we cannot make emotional connection without being open to it.  Being unguarded is essential to being open, which is essential to emotional connection which is essential for influence. For emotional connection to happen, I have to be available for it. I have to show up and be open to the other.

When Brene Brown studied vulnerability, she discovered a quality she called wholeheartedness. The word courage comes from the word heart. This is because it does not take courage if we are not afraid. It does not take courage if we are foolishly reckless and unwise. It takes courage when we are afraid and understand what is at stake, but care enough about something to step forward anyways. Courage comes from caring, from passion and drive and commitment.

And so this red brain conversation is not about flowers and ribbons and hugs, although it can be. This not about soft and nice, although it can be. Emotional connection is bigger than that. Winston Churchill, George Patton, Ronald Reagan, Vince Lombardi, even Hitler all made emotional connections, both one-to-one and with audiences.

By attending to what I practice, I can become aware of my skill level. I can practice new skills. Eventually I can be effortless and gracefully skilled.
Then I can live from the heart with effortless grace. And I can connect with others from the heart with effortless grace.
Then my world will open like a flower in bloom, like an oyster, and all its riches will become available to me.

Other items to add into the framework:

Intention. My emotional brain carries my reactions to everything that happens. It also carries my values and my intentions for whatever context I walk into.

Power. (Back to that private jet and corner office). Jeff Pfeffer described 5 sources of power. One is influence. It is often the one we can best control in any given moment. Influence comes from emotional connection.

 

A journeyman is a skilled worked who is in between apprentice and master. This concept delights me in a bunch of ways.

It fits my own path. I have little idea what craft I have been working to master, but clearly I have been at since I was a youth. It started in coping with my family but evolved into something broader and more professional. As a young scientist, a mentor advised me to “be multidisciplinary.” He meant within the sciences but I went much farther than that. My interests extended into architecture and industrial design, and economics, and interpersonal dynamics (sales, management, coaching and leadership).

I am also watching a sea change in our economic life during my era. skills are becoming important again as they did in the middle ages.

Agriculture organized people into lords and serfs and created a static structure. Guilds were the remedy.

Manufacturing turned into owners and workers. Unions were a remedy which caused problems as well, locking workers into new structures.

Automation is creating a new and more challenging level of wealth inequality. Will we have guilds of knowledge workers? I’m not sure we need guilds. They provided accreditation and branding in a time when you couldn’t look up the references of the journeyman who arrived in your town. Now you know them online.

I also attended the first Journey Man seminar with Kevin Billett, which was really fun.

This might be better organized as a mind map, or even one on paper. But I would misplace the paper, or never be able to find it when I encounter new information.

It is remarkable how spiritual traditions say the same basic things in different ways. This from The Celestine Prophesy, a very popular pop-enlightenment book from the early 1990s(?)

The sixth insight states that childhood dramas block our ability to fully experience the mystical. All humans, because of their upbringing, tend toward one of the four “control dramas”:

• Intimidators steal energy from others by threat.
• Interrogators steal it by judging and questioning.
• Aloof people attract attention (and energy) to themselves by acting reserved or withdrawing.
• And poor me’s make us feel guilty and responsible for them.

 

Notes for work in progress.

What’s up with this preoccupation with growth? Why it matters.

Innovation is the only sustainable source of growth.

Collecting notes for a post 

2015 looks like 1915 in so many ways. 

Fortunately not because of a generation-crushing European war.

But in many ways it looks a lot like the late 1800s, when American humorist and commentator Mark Twain coined the phrase “the Gilded Age.” Then rapid technological change divided the economy into those on the right side of the new disruptive technologies and those on the wrong side. If you designed assembly line machinery, it was a boom. If you made carriages by hand, it was a disaster. 

Cross reference: This is similar to W. Arthur Lewis’s 2-speed disarticulated economy. Like the inflation story, this is really about tradeable and non-tradeable goods. The internet makes code (and IP) tradeable in a way that houses in Detroit simply are not, in a way that even cars are not. A car can be manufactured in Detroit for markets anywhere in the planet. But a piece of code written in Fremont, California (or a makeup video recorded in San Mateo) can be traded in a way that has no comparisoin to shipping automobiles or any other manufactured good.

The meaning of tradeable and non-tradeable are evolving in real time. 

This has major implications for prices, and consequently how we understand and apply the concepts of inflation and inflation.

References

The Vertigo Years
Talks about how rapid technological change, especially communications technology, disrupted society and left many people feeling unnerved and distressed. Yes, pretty familiar.