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 If I were to coil a thick rope like a snake and set it on the forest floor next to a hiking trail, it is inevitable that someone would eventually come upon that coil of rope and mistake it for a real snake.  If that person were wearing a helmet attached to a mobile MRI machine, you would be able to see the parts of their brain that went all nutty-active with a fear response and then loads of adrenaline.  You could actually map out the parts of the brain that were involved in that process of registering and then reacting to the snake.  Except they’d realize that it wasn’t a snake, and other parts of their brain would kick in.  You could map those, too.

If you repeated the same experiment except this time with a real snake instead of the rope, you could use your MRI helmet to map the subject’s brain again.  This time, since the snake would be real, the hiker would have other reactions, and you could map the parts of the brain that fire up when someone is running away and screaming about a snake.  

If you took both sets of data and lopped off the divergent point, the moment of realization that the rope wasn’t real, up until that point both sets of data would look the same.  Identical.  The same parts of the brain would be firing in the same sequence, making the same connections, processing the same stimulus, and preparing the same body for a response.  The physical brain response and the emotional response of the individual would be no different.

The weird thing is, the stimulus would actually be different.  The objects in the physical world would actually be different.  The nature of the threat would actually be different.  Yet…to the brain…no different.  

Lesson 1: Perception truly is reality.  My dad always says that, and it is true in ways we don’t quite comprehend.  It doesn’t matter if it really is a snake as long as I think it’s a snake.  My brain says so.

Lesson 2: Our brains often do not distinguish between what is real and what is imagined.  Think on that for a moment or two.  I have heard about and read about this being confirmed in countless studies in countless ways.  The result is always the same: our brains often do not distinguish between what is real and what is imagined.  It works that way with ropes.  It works that way with snakes.  It also works that way with insults.  It works that way when you tell someone that they are stupid.  It works that way when you tell someone that they are worthless.  It works that way when we silently berate ourselves for being fat.  It works that way when we shamefully wish we were someone other than who we are.

But it also works that way when we imagine positive results in our lives.  In works that way when we wish for healing.  It works that way when we smile at ourselves each morning and tell ourselves just how wonderful we really are.  It works that way when you wish for nothing but peace for those you meet.

Sure, the outside world may not always listen to what’s going on in your brain.  It often has its own agenda.  But the outside world might also trick you into believing that a rope is a snake.  Sometimes there really is a snake, but sometimes it’s just a rope.  Sometimes our reality is all about perception.

 I took a break to help me refresh.  At times I put too much stress on myself to be this perfect writer/blogger type.  Then I stop and think about how ridiculous it is to make one of my pure, personal sources of joy a labor.  So, I took a few days break.  Besides, I am trying to land on the correct writing schedule for me that balances my creativity, my time, and my discipline.  Still tinkering…

So, tonight I intended to be brilliant.  Instead, I did this: http://www.dyson-game.com/.  Stay away from Eufloria.  It is addictive.  I have played the DEMO for a game that has sucked me in this hard.  I think they will be earning my money in the not too distant future.

There was a time when I envisioned a life where I worked for myself and traveled the world.  I leveraged technology to keep me in touch with my business, and I could get things done from anywhere I chose.  My wife traveled with me, and we showed our children the world.  It was a good vision.

Obviously, I didn’t convince myself that I could pull it off.  If I had, I’d be writing these updates from a Tuscan villa, a Western-style coffeehouse in Tokyo, or a hotel with a view of Mount Kilimanjaro.  I’m actually writing this from my basement.  It’s getting outside these days.  I’ll be going to bed soon and waking up long before dawn starts to show its crack just so I can get in my car ahead of the rush.

I am grateful for my life and for what I have.  Trust me, I recognize how good I have it.  At the same time, my approach remains too passive.  It must be more active.  Perhaps a part of me didn’t really want that jet-setting lifestyle.  Perhaps part of me did but didn’t believe I had it in me.  Perhaps part of me knew it was possible but was afraid to fail.  Perhaps all of these things are factors.  Even so, tell me this: why should I not have that life I envisioned?  Did the world deprive me?  Certainly not.  Did I deprive myself?  Certainly.  The reason?  Again, could be any number of things.  Who really knows…?  

Well, I suspect I do know.  It’s just a matter of whether or not I’m going to let myself in on the secret.

All I know for sure is this: it is best to live a life created by choices, not a life created by of chance.  The difference between the two is a matter of perspective.  And perspective is all about choice.  

My choice is a life by design.

We experience life through our physical senses and through our cognitive activity.  Our brains are at the epicenter of both of these.  Our physical senses are the way in which we take in the world around us.  I would categorize these into two general groups: the senses which require immediate contact with the environment and the senses which do not require immediate contact and diminish with distance.  One could argue that both sets of senses require some sort of contact with the environment either through interaction with photons (vision) or with airborne particles (smell).  This argument is true, but I believe the idea is what matters: our senses represent our perception of the world around us.  They are mechanical in that they obey the laws of physics and are themselves manifestations of these laws.  They occur without thought.  They are automatic.  

Conversely, cognitive activity is entirely voluntary.  It requires energy above and beyond the mere physical.  Cognitive activity is what knits sensory input together.  It creates stories about the surrounding environment based on things like past experiences, layered sensory data (like the smell and sound of an approaching bear), and behaviors that can be taught.  In humans, creativity, imagination, emotions, and desires are all cognitive activities.  They can occur regardless of sensory input.  The paradox is that there can be no cognitive thought with all of these senses.

Of course, we know this isn’t entirely true.  Loss of or absence of one or more of these senses does not mean that cognitive activity cannot occur.  It just means that we, the average person, cannot perceive that cognitive activity as easily.  I know this young woman who has been living with Rhetts Syndrome (http://www.rettsyndrome.org/) for most of her life, and it is not easy for the casual observer to understand her cognitive activity.  But she is there, as surely as I am, and her brain is functioning, her cognitive processes are active.  They are just a little different than yours or mine.  I’ve seen her laugh.  I’ve seen her be frustrated.  I’ve seen her in pain.  Like I’ve said before, we all share the same basic needs, the same range of emotions.  She is no different.

All of our sense are connected to our brains.  Neurons link the whole hardware infrastructure together.  Synapses and neurotransmitters govern electrical activity in our brains.  Scientists can use machines to peer into our heads and watch pictures of our brains light up when we think, use language, watch a sad movie.  They can pinpoint the areas of our brains that produce language, that process speech, that infer the emotions of others based on photographs.  They can send an electromagnetic pulse through your brain and cause you to misattribute someone’s motivation.  In short, scientists can show us how our brains are connected to our senses physically and operationally.  

But none of them can show us why.  Why we cry.  Why we laugh.  Why we love.  They cannot show us why we assume the worst in someone who has offended us.  They cannot show us why we feel all aflutter when that special someone walks in the room.  They cannot tell us why our hearts feel a tug when we remember old friends fondly.  They cannot tell us why our cheeks flush when we remember old passions.  None of them can tell us why our consciousness works the way it does.

And none of them, not a single one, can point to a part on your body and say, “Here…here is where your soul lives.”

The soul, no matter how you define it, is just above and just outside the reach of science.  And even if someone could say, “This is the part of the brain that we call the soul,” they wouldn’t be able to tell you what it connect to…what lies just beyond it, just behind it.

This is consciousness.

It’s interesting that people who try to speak about the world and the human experience in qualitative terms based primarily on subjective analysis tend to be dismissed as “woo woo,” “crackpots,” and “amateurs.”  However, if you attempt to analyze the world in more commonly accepted quantitative terms then you instantly have credibility.  Often, statistics and repeatable processes are the favored methods of validating a position on these quantitative terms.  This is particularly true of psychological and behavioral discussions.  

There’s an irony at work there somewhere.  I think it has something to do with the fact that so much study is dependent on subjects relating to researchers or interviewers their completely subjective experience of a particular situations or stimulus.  If you amass enough of these subjective stories you somehow are left with an objective set of data.

Huh?

I don’t know; maybe I think about this kind of thing too much.  All I know is that not enough credibility is given to those who would teach others on the basis of objective and subjective analysis.  In the end, the vast majority of the accumulated body of human knowledge is simply based on observations made by biased individuals.  I think more emphasis should be placed on learning and teaching based on individual observations.  Your experience of this existence is just as valuable to me as my own.  I have as much to learn from your story as I do from the stats presented to me in some textbook.

Fear of judgment erodes self-confidence and, worse yet, inhibits a person’s ability to perform the tasks in front of them.

If I wanted judgment passed on me, I’d commit a crime, try to hide it, turn myself in, then let the judicial system do its thing.  I wouldn’t wake up every morning at 4:30 AM and drive in to work.  I think most people would concur.

There is a time and a place for evaluations.  Evaluations of the work we do, the way we do it, the results we get, the mistakes we make, and the wisdom of our decisions all have their place in business.  Most of us are, after all, employees accountable to other people, and, as such, accept that others will evaluate our performance on behalf of the corporation.  That’s how we roll.  That’s how most companies roll.

I don’t mean to over generalize, but I think it is safe to say that a common source of conflict and struggle comes in when the evaluation turns into judgment.  It gets stickier when the judgment creeps outside the scope of performance.  It gets downright ugly when judgment is based more on conjecture than on fact.  Yet…how often do we fall into the trap of passing judgment on others by the “water cooler” based on our own subjective observations?  How often do these judgments begin to affect work relationships and work results?  If these kinds of judgments exist on a casual, peer-to-peer level, is it unreasonable to assume that leaders may be influenced by them, too? 

If your objective is to torpedo others, then, by all means, make the water cooler talk all about judgment based on personal bias.  My years of experience as a leader have lead me to the conclusion, however, that 99 % of the people who work where I work want to do the best work they can.  They want to succeed.  They want their teams to succeed.  They want their…dare I say it?…peers to succeed.  They want this COMPANY to succeed.  I have no evidence that there are people who wake up each morning eager to sabotage The Company. 

So, I will run on the assumption that few people are deliberately orchestrating torpedo attacks or SCUD launches.  What we intend, though, and what we do…well, those two things aren’t always in synch.  That’s sort of a human problem, this inability to be perfectly aligned between thoughts and deeds.  If we can accept that, then we can forgive others their trespasses.  If we can accept that, we can forgive ourselves for our own indiscretions.  If we can accept that, we can ask for forgiveness…but only after we own our actions and live with the consequences.

Passing judgment is not an act of kindness.  It is not an act of compassion.  It serves no one but us.  We pass judgment to seek validation of our own opinions, our own thoughts.  We pass judgment to quell our own fears.  We pass judgment to make ourselves feel better about something.  We pass judgment to make ourselves feel better about…ourselves.  When I feel the urge to judge, I remind myself that the closest relative to judgment is resentment.  I ask myself, “Why do you resent that person’s actions?”  The heartbeat or two it takes to just ask myself the question is often long enough for me to jump off the crazy train.

So, the next time you see a peer come in late or leave early or call-in a “work from home” at the last minute, don’t assume the worst.  Just keep your eyes open for an opportunity to help a person who just might need a friend more than they need a judge.

 

 

 

The whole “smooch to make the memory of the scary siren noise go away” thing just rolled downhill last night like the proverbial snowball, and it turned into an avalanche of insight and understanding that thundered through my life today.  It was such an enlightening day, and the presence of and appreciation for simplicity was at the root of it all.

Oh, I could have had a crappy day, no doubt.  All the ingredients were there…like a kitchen set from a Food Network show.  But I chose to make something other than what was on the recipe card.  I chose to make something different.

I chose to make something simple.

It would be nice of things were simpler.  Not everything, mind you.  Because…well, then life would probably be boring.  I enjoy certain challenges.  I just like to be able to choose the time and place for life’s complex moments.  I would rather not have them just sprung upon me.

I think that the Universe is simple.  When we look at the Universe and find complexity, I think it is complexity that we actually make.  On the scale of the Very Big and on the scale of the Very Small, the Universe is simple.  Complexity is a matter of perception.

Yet, here we are, living in a world that is painfully complex.  We could make it all so much simpler, but we choose not to.  How simple is too simple?  I wish I knew.  Perhaps there is no such thing as “too simple.”  And perhaps there is no such thing as “too complex.”  How can I say that?  I say that because no matter how screwed up and convoluted life gets one day, there always seems to be a way for things to get even screwier and more complex.

If you were wondering, yes…sometimes I make words up.  

There’s a child upstairs screaming my name.  He heard a siren outside.  It woke him up.  It scared him.  His great big eyes were filled with great big tears.  One ran down his cheek.  I asked him if he wanted a hug.  He said, “Mm-hmm.”  I gave him a hug.  He squeezed me back, tightly.  I kissed his cheek.  It was wet.  He said he was OK now.  He smiled at me and went back upstairs.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, we make life complicated.  At times, my children remind me how simple it can be.  I needed that.

Dead spiders fascinate me.  I’ve seen everything from a tiny dead jumping spider to a bird-sized tarantula dead on the forest floor in Mexico.  No matter the size, no matter the place, no matter the cause of death, all dead spiders look essentially the same: a spider with its legs curled up touching its abdomen.  And they tend to be on their backs.  And they look like spiders.

How is it that a creature so varied in form and so plentiful on this Earth should end up looking exactly the same in death regardless of species?  I’ve never seen a dead spider that wasn’t all curled up.  Even those goofy daddy long-legs attempt to do the curling up thing.  Of course, they are so brittle that their legs break off, but you can just tell they are trying to ball it.  It’s crazy.

It just doesn’t make sense.  Different species.  Different sizes.  Different in so many ways…yet not so different.  It is clear that there is a commonality in how these creatures are constructed that defies logic and common sense.  It defies intuition.  Yet, there you have it…all dead spiders curled up into balls large, small, and all sizes in between.

I marvel at the simplicity of the message: all spiders are one.  Really, they are.  They come from the same place.  They are interconnected.  As varied as their forms have become over the course of thousands of years, there are fundamental characteristics of all spiders that make them undeniably…spiderish.  And it is the same with people.  

We are one.  We are the same.  We come from the same place.  We are interconnected.  As varied as our forms have become over the course of thousands of years, there are fundamental characteristics of all people that make them undeniably…human.  Make no mistake; every color, size, and shape is a variation on a theme.  We may not curl up into a ball when we die, but that doesn’t mean that we retain even one iota of our perceived uniqueness once death and time have had their way with us.  

We become food for worms.  Our bones are ground to dust.  There is no you, and there is no me.  What we were transforms into something new.  Our borrowed matter returns to the source only to be used again.  Over and over and over…again.

Our uniqueness exists today and today only.  While we may be unique, we are not isolated.  Uniqueness and apartness are not the same thing.  We are unique, but we are not apart.  We are a part…a part of the whole.  We are interconnected.

So, love the next person as you would yourself.  Or maybe you should love yourself as you would love others.  I don’t know…maybe it’s both…  

Just some thoughts after contemplating dead spiders.

 And so we come to the SYSTEM.

There is a system in place that operates on the assumption that money is a good motivator.  I think I already established that fear of death is not a good motivator (http://odracir72.livejournal.com/14524.html).  So, if Death herself cannot motivate most people to make positive change in their lives, then why on Earth should we expect money to do any better?  Well, the truth is that it doesn’t.  I have known this intuitively for years, but I’m finally finding that there is bona fide scientific data to support the idea.  Recent evidence: this wonderful talk by author Daniel Pink (http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html) about the science of motivation.  In this talk, he explores the statistical and experimental data that demonstrates that individual performance is not positively influenced by monetary reward.

I know, I know…what the heck am I talking about, right?  In this day and age, these are dangerous words to speak and to write.  It’s probably very easy for me to have these thoughts since I have a job and can feed my family and protect them from the environment.  But that’s just the point.  Improved performance isn’t guaranteed by a paycheck; a paycheck simply positively reinforces the minimum effort required to keep one’s job.  NEWSFLASH: this isn’t groundbreaking information.  This is how the system has always worked.  People tend to do what they need to do in order to keep their jobs.  That’s the minimum standard.  Superstars emerge not as a result of compensation but as a result of a mix of some inherent characteristics of the individual plus alternate forms of positive reinforcement.  Personally, I think the most important component of stellar performance comes from within the individual.  It’s an intrinsic form of motivation that transcends external reinforcement.  Motivation, though, is a topic for another today.

The paradox of the prevailing view of compensation in most corporations is that the intended result (increased performance) is not positively correlated with the intended motivator (compensation).  So, corporations spend way too much time focusing on money as the carrot to dangle in front of the employed masses.  Ratings, pats on the back, public recognition, and other forms of reinforcement are under-utilized.  The logic is that all people really want is money.  But, as I once told someone, if you spend your life chasing after money, you will never be happy.  In the end, money allows individuals to afford survival.  With a little more money, all you get is the ability to buy more stuff.  And that just increases the cost of living, the cost of “survival.”  There is no long-term satisfaction in that.

Years ago, I remember busting my ass at work.  I did everything I was asked, and then some.  I came in early.  I stayed late.  I toiled and toiled and toiled.  I managed more people than I’d ever managed before.  I made my boss look good.  I made my boss’ boss look good.  I bent over backwards and drove myself hard.  The net result?  A “satisfactory” rating.  I received a raise that was more generous than what I expected given the review I received.  I was flabbergasted.  I was confused.  I was pissed.  I was disillusioned.  As a result, I decided to cut back, to not push myself so hard.  I cut back on my hours.  I stopped trying as hard.  I started being more of myself and less of the puppet that I had allowed myself to be.  A funny thing happened: in the process of freeing myself from the albatross of financial incentives, I found myself.  I found my voice as a leader.  I refined my style.  I figured out that the best “me” at work was the “me” that I was outside of work.  In essence, I stopped caring so much about the money and focused more on other stuff.

I’ll be damned if I didn’t get a higher rating the following year.  And do you know what?  I got a slightly higher percentage that next year.  And do you know what?  I was even more annoyed than I had been the year before.  It became clear to me that the SYSTEM was out of whack.  It was disconnected from what I actually did and how I actually did it.  It proved to be lazy.  It proved to be a shortcut.  Not only was there not a positive correlation between my sense of accomplishment and the attempt at motivation on behalf of the corporation, there wasn’t even a positive correlation between my actual performance and the subsequent increase in compensation!  Do you get it?  What the company said I was worth had nothing to do with how much I felt I was worth.  THAT is a potentially dangerous disconnect.  That’s how companies lose talented employees.  

What I would offer is this: make compensation about helping employees provide for their families.  Don’t make the yearly salary increase an event that is meant to reward someone’s performance for a year.  That’s a ridiculous idea.  It implies that the system can be gamed by someone who is sufficiently manipulative.  It lends itself to psychological phenomena like the recency effect in which a human observer tends to recall that which occurred most recently.  It also lends itself to the intensity effect in which an observer tends to recall more intense events over less intense events.  Or hierarchical effects in which a director or assistant vice president can “weigh in” on an evaluation of an employee and skew the final rating in favor of their personal opinion of the individual.  These are all very real phenomena, and they impact how these evaluations and subsequent increases in compensation can wind up.  

This isn’t necessarily an answer, but it’s a place to start.  I think the conversations need to take place, though…the ones that finally lessens the gap between what science knows and what business does.