Flowing in the pool hall

Published on 25 July, 2009 in Creativity and genius. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Late last night, I dragged my brother Andrew out for a quick game of pool at the local pool hall. It’s a simple place – a big room filled with blue felt-covered tables, open 24/7, and cooled by cigarette smoke-infused vents.

A pool table in Café Zéphyr, Paris, France

A pool table in Café Zéphyr, Paris, France

Living on different continents, we don’t get the chance to play as much as we once did and I’m so amazed at how good he is! Refined by many hours of play, his technique is really very good. Impressive… and perhaps a bit scary since he’s so much younger than I!

I’ve noticed how I play my best when I’m not thinking too hard. Not that I’m not concentrating – on the contrary, I’m totally focused on what I’m doing. But I am not consciously thinking and analysing as much as I am allowing the shots to be played.

When I analyse and evaluate, I miss shots. My skills aren’t refined and disciplined enough to consistently shoot the ball where I intend it to go all that often, so even if I calculate things “right” there’s a good chance that it still won’t work.

But if I can allow myself to be guided by my intuition and just go for the shot that I feel is right, it’s amazing how consistently I can pull off the most remarkable shots. You (or Csíkszentmihályi) might call it a state of flow.

Yet, my emotional state becomes even more important. If my attention starts to wander or my mind starts to drift, I can also miss the easiest of shots! Playing through my intuition makes me able to do things my technical skill level wouldn’t allow yet it leaves me vulnerable to making horrible mistakes if I don’t keep in that ‘zone’.

It’s like when I sense that I’m ’supposed’ to call someone or meet with someone, even if I don’t understand ‘why’. Or if I pick up a book that I sense I should read – even if I don’t understand what it could do for me. Being open and being ready is challenging and potentially risky, yet it has the most amazing rewards.

And with thanks to Drew, I can appreciate being in that space through something as simple and common (or, in our case, perhaps uncommon) as a game of pool.

Design Thinking rocks

Published on 24 July, 2009 in Design. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

I love my Moleskine. It is simple. It is not technologically advanced. But it works. It does precisely what I want it to do. It is designed.

I love my mobile phone. It was the most advanced piece of electronic gadgetry I (and especially my inner geek) had ever laid my hands upon when I bought it – and it still rocks today. It does everything that I want it to do. It looks great. It is designed.

I love and marvel at so many things that are beautiful, functional and that work well. The things we love – whether it’s an iPhone or a Brioni suit – are designed. We see the patterns of design in the natural world too, almost as if nature has built-in design attributes to the evolutionary process. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Everything that we love is designed.

Design is everywhere around us – some better, some that might benefit from a bit longer on the drawing board. Bruce Nussbaum came up with a few higher-profile examples last week.

I wonder whether “Design IQ” is the next of Gardner’s multiple intelligences… and how we can cultivate Design Intelligence in our engineers, in our lawyers and perhaps even in our politicians.

In fact, let’s see how we can increase the Design Intelligence of everybody… so that we each can more appreciate the design and beauty around us.

Preparing to Awaken Genius

Published on 30 June, 2009 in Creativity and genius and Self-awareness. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Tonight we have our second Awaken Your Genius event (also on Facebook). It’s really exciting for me – though challenging to compress the very best material into perhaps 90 minutes!

It’s always like that though. There is so much that we can say, yet we have very limited attention spans (ala my friend Warwick’s book, The One Minute Presenter)… effective communication is so often more about deletion than it is about creation.

When we communicate with people that we care about, we need to delete information. We can’t tell them everything. So we generalize. We delete. Sometimes we even (innocently?) distort what happens and what is going on.

One of the participants on my current Personal Transformation workshop shared how she doesn’t tell her parents what she is doing because she fears that they wouldn’t understand and instead would just worry about her. But we all do it.

We change our focus on the basis of many things. Mostly these are unconscious. But what happens when you can take personal responsibility for the spotlight of your attention is amazing.

It’s genius.

Years ago, I found that I could survive on 4.5h sleep but…

Published on 28 May, 2009 in Lifestyle, Self-awareness and What I am doing. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Years ago, I found I could survive on 4.5 hours of sleep per night but that my creativity died. Seems that Jim Collins feels the same way http://is.gd/HCXE

It was while I was at university, and while I found that I could work hard enough to get some of my best academic results, I felt drained. Not that I couldn’t think – but just that I could only think within the rules. I couldn’t look beyond the rules, frameworks and paradigms that were presented to me, and I certainly couldn’t explore the connections between systems. So I went back to enjoying dreams.

Still, it was a worthwhile experiment!

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Finished our fourth NLP Prac

Published on 23 May, 2009 in What I am doing. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

NLP training is great fun. It not only provides me with an amazing opportunity to connect with some fabulous people, a context to develop my understanding through explaining useful techniques and strategies to new people, but it also challenges me to grow. It’s one of the most fun things that I’m lucky enough to be involved with :)

Jeff and I are running our next Practitioner-level training in June-July.

Also coming up: Wendy and I will be leading a training on love and intimacy.

And of course, China NLP has events coming every other week if you’re in China.

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Little things… there’s nothing bigger, is there?

Published on 19 May, 2009 in Creativity and genius, High performance and Self-awareness. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

Last night I was reading about George H. W. Bush. Here was a man who was the son of a Senator, who became President and whose son became President. Today, some perceive that he is part of a “major family” in the United States. And yet, what does that even mean?

George Bush was talented. He did a great job when it counted. He was ambitious. And he got lucky.

But how does that equate to being part of a ‘major family’?
How easy is it to forget that he has just done what was in front of him to do?

Greatness is built by little decisions. Continue reading ‘Little things… there’s nothing bigger, is there?’

Remembering the importance of state

Published on 30 April, 2009 in Cool friends and ideas, High performance and Self-awareness. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

This afternoon I grabbed a coffee with Greg Layton. Greg and I went to school near each other and even studied business at the same time, though it was NLP that finally led us to meet. He had spent a few months training with my good friends Chris and Jules Collingwood, taking out his Graduate Certificate in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and as he shared with me his inspiring experiences, I was reminded of the importance of state.

Sometimes we are happy; sometimes we are excited; sometimes we are not so resourceful – some of us might even be a bit grumpy from time to time. That state – our subjective emotional condition – opens and closes possibilities. It’s like a pair of sunglasses that tints the way we see the world.

And for colour blind people like me, those filters change what we can see at all.

Greg reminded me how important it is that we can get back into our core state of being.

It’s about alignment. We can be happier and more fulfilled when we deliberately design our experiences and our lives so that we can move towards that core state consistently.

A General Evaluation

Published on 1 April, 2009 in High performance. 2 Comments Tags: , , .


Last Monday night, I gave an evaluation of the meeting of China’s oldest Toastmasters Club, Shanghai No. 1, at their 499th meeting. You can watch it above but some of the key points are below:

  • Utilization: Use whatever happens to get across your message.
  • Frame the message and prepare the audience.
  • Say less; communicate more.
  • Take your time. When you do, speak with a purpose.
  • Share the emotional component of the message, not just the content.
  • Everytime we stand up, we’re looking to expand our skills.
  • Set the frame – when you speak, identify the criteria for success or at least the guidelines that you are working towards.
  • There are no excuses – don’t make them for yourself or give them to other people. Give your best.
  • When things go wrong, strive to make the problem invisible. Make it look as though it was part of the plan.

Little things we pick up

Published on 29 March, 2009 in Self-awareness. 0 Comments Tags: , , .
Chrysanthemum tea

Chrysanthemum tea

Right now I’m drinking chrysanthemum tea.

I love to drink it with rock sugar. I started drinking it that way the first time I tried it and have done so ever since.

For years, when I had coffee, I always had cappuccino. I tried Vienna coffee once and latte a few times. But I always came back to the chocolate coated foam with a cappuccino. And I developed a ritual about how I would drink my cappuccino too. I would eat the half of the foam closest to me – not all of it, just half – and finish the cup before consuming the remainder of the foam. Oh – and I didn’t take sugar. I learned to drink cappuccino that way on 22 September, 1995 – and did it almost exactly the same way for many years.

And then I woke up. I realized that I was not drinking it the way I like it – I was drinking it the way I’d happened to pick up along the way. And I actually didn’t like it!

While drinking cappuccino wasn’t a problem for me, once I started challenging the way I had been doing things, I found that I actually preferred a cafe latte – though it can change according to my mood.

Until I was 15, I wore my watch on my right wrist. Most of my peers wore their watch on their left wrist – again it wasn’t a problem. But I wanted to be able to change it. I wanted to be able to stand out if I wanted to but to be able to be ‘normal’ if I chose to be. Being at an age when I wanted to control everything, I figured that being different was fine provided that I was doing it deliberately. So I changed. It wasn’t hard – I just practiced putting my watch on my left wrist. Ultimately it became as natural to wear it on my left wrist as to wear it on my right wrist. Then I stopped wearing a watch.

We are all unique. We all have something different to offer the world and those around us. Sometimes, the part of us that stands out is brilliant and beautiful. Sometimes it isn’t. We can influence our habits and change our patterns. And once you can get yourself out of the habit (or rut?), you can put yourself back to being able to choose.

Zarraffa's Affogato - though skip the cream...

Affogato - the way Zarraffa's makes them - though skip the cream...

Maybe you’ll choose cappuccino. Or cafe latte. I choose affogato – when I can get them!

Maybe you’ll wear a watch or maybe you won’t. How would you like things to be?

Great short speeches

Published on 18 March, 2009 in High performance. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Everytime we speak we have an opportunity to refine our skills. Whether it’s for one minute while giving a timer’s report, 1-2 minutes for table topics, 2-3 minutes for an evaluation or for a longer role, a great deal of our speaking skill can be seen in just a few moments.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book (called Blink) on the subject of how we make snap judgments based on very little information. It’s just how we all are.

As I was watching one speaker making a very short presentation last month, three things stood out:

  • Use your best voice
    Some people sound terrible. Maybe it’s the pitch, or the pronunciation, or the smoothness or the resonance. Listen to your own voice and notice how you can make listening to yourself even more appealing. I always remember my cousin getting so excited about listening to Mark Hunter who she described as having “a voice like chocolate”. Now we heard him delivering a speech in about 1999 but a few years later he made it through to the World Championships.
  • Use stories
    Nice stories. Tight and clean stories – with a point and that are interesting or amusing. Stories that validate your authority to speak and support the emotions you are looking to transfer to your audience.
  • Look to make a point
    Have something to say. If you don’t know what to say, think about it. Great speakers give something to their audience rather than talking out loud.

Use every opportunity to speak and refine your skills that you get!

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