Kiron is a vivacious girl from a good family. She is articulate, hard working and even well mannered. She fared well in her MBA class. Yet when it comes to eating, Kiron can’t control her hand. She agrees that exercise will do her a lot of good, but exercise never got beyond minor training in dance. She can’t get married because her plump figure can get her only the boys who do not fit her notions of a good match. Her vivacious nature pulls her to chit-chat with people every few minutes even on the day when she has work that would benefit from quiet concentration.
Aniket is a quiet, soft, meditative MBA boy who clearly comes across as one of the brightest in his batch on one to one exposure. However, his shyness shows up in his subdued presentations. He often carries his meditative mood into social interactions and doesn’t manage to light up the eyes of the girls he likes.
Anamika stood in the top few (!) in her MBA batch. She is introverted and writes very well. However, seniors keep feeling that quantum of her output is a far cry from her true potential. She is easy to get hurt and disappointments, embarrassing hurting incidences from the past, keep dancing in her mind as she sits to work. They tire, make her sour from deep inside. Actually she hasn’t had any difficult childhood or family life.
Anamika works on any project right from its minute details upwards without any clear picture of where all that would end up to. Often, a lot of her work on several of the details, does not contribute to the end result.
Kiron, Aniket and Anamika are no ordinary people. MBAs from good schools, they are engaged in consultancy (!) type of work in a reputed multinational! Their schools equipped them with a whole lot of functional knowledge. However, ‘brain management’ was never taught, let alone practiced!
Way back, Gandhiji had discovered a fundamental truth. He said everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in the real world. A leading cricketer once said that the game of cricket is nothing but psychological. It is the mind that propels everything that we do. Naturally, the one who has learnt to manage his mind better is more effective in the world.
Managing the mind for not only increased and incremental effectiveness, but even for magic like results was discovered, practiced, written about and taught by Milton Erickson, John Grinder, Richard Bandler and others. Their writings come under names such as NLP, Time-line Therapy and Hypnosis.
For example, when any stimulus is unchanging, our nerves become used to it and even stop sending its signals to the brain. This was necessary in evolution. Otherwise, we would have remained consciously aware of our bodies in the sleep, or while sitting to think meditatively or for that matter in the middle of any activity that requires complete absorption. To keep a feeling alive, we have to keep circulating the same inside us. That’s why some people say things like ‘anger entered my head’ or ‘his heart was saddened more and more as he thought of the incident’. With just a little practice, we can become aware of the loop like path that some of the prominent feelings follow in our body. Aniket in the example above will benefit if kindles an upbeat mood by remembering even a small success he may have had in this area in the past and then spinning the emotion faster and faster. He can then stay as effective on his table as he is and soon thereafter be as ready for lively social interactions as he would like.
You can easily think of situations where you will benefit tremendously by getting the mind deeper into tranquility, romance, ‘a go getter mood’ or even anger, if required. All this is similar to the process that a well working couple soon learns. Each knows the triggers (anchors) that put the partner in the right state of arousal and each allows the feeling to circulate faster and faster thus reaching new heights of that feeling.
As we grow up, we all learn to respond to stimuli with pre-determined responses. Sometimes, the responses become ‘automatic’. For example, we become angered by bad names. However, some of the conditioning can be unproductive. One or two bad experiences in the past start triggering fear of public speaking in the minds several people. Actually, an infant has very few fears. Most of them are learnt as we grow. Anamika in the example above needs to unlearn the response of hurt to every criticism. She needs to dissociate her self esteem, self worth and good moods from external praise or criticism. Further, a small procedure in NLP will help her in removing the entire sting in unpleasant memories. Depleted of their sting, those memories will stop their usual dance in her mind when she sits down to concentrate.
Studies have revealed that only about 20% of the Americans thought top-down or in other words achieved clarity in the overall large picture before getting down to details. They were also the ones who made it more easily to senior positions. 60% did some bottoms-up and some top-down thinking. The rest 20% primarily thought of details every time they confronted a situation. These people had problems managing deadlines and giving out enough output.
Once your meta-program or an overall subconscious way of thinking is understood, you have the choice to change it. Michael Hall and Bob Bodenhamer have detailed 51 such content free filters in their book ‘Figuring Out People’. An instruction in ‘Brain Management’ is helping Anamika in acquiring a more productive meta-program.
The eating disorder of Kiron and her weak resolve to exercise have their own remedies in these disciplines. In fact, our unconscious mind is readily processing 2 million bits of information every second. It filters, summarizes and offers only 134 bits to the conscious mind every second. Its ‘always on’, ‘acutely sensitive’ nature is easily evident from the experience that if somebody utters your name even softly in a crowded party room, your head will turn even if you were in the middle of some other conversation. You can decide consciously to go to a particular place. However, you won’t ever reach that place without your unconscious mind very easily adjusting muscular tensions and bodyweight for optimal movement. Language is a wonderful example of a skill that we learn consciously, but practice enough to make it an unconscious process. Otherwise, just imagine the inconvenience of consciously locating every letter, every word and their required arrangement right in the middle of a communication process. It is the unconscious mind that hastens the heartbeats as you walk faster. For that matter it is controlling every single body process of every single cell.
The most magical and sweeping results of ‘body-mind management’, ‘brain management’ come about by establishing communication with the unconscious. Kiron will benefit tremendously if she can do that. Analogously, so will thousands of corporate managers who suffer from blood pressure, acidity, ulcerous tendency on account of ‘fear of failure’ and ‘stress’.
Management schools are doing a great job of handing over ‘gate pass’ to aspiring young boys and girls for their entry into the corporate world. However, as yet, they are leaving the job of ‘honing up body-mind’ for maximum effectiveness to the youngsters themselves.
Magic has happened once. The young India has thrown away psychological bounds and barriers that had proliferated unchecked. Today, we have a never before ‘josh’ in us. It is a spirit that has blossomed without destroying the rock-bed of our core values. In fact, it is well founded on them. I am hopeful that if we rediscover several of these mind-management principles that we had ourselves given to the world in the ancient times, we won’t just surprise the world. We will stun it!
American bestseller, ‘The Culture Code’ is precisely a book on such deeper levels of motivation behind our consumption decisions. It has a lucid, easy to read, story-like way of taking us through such a profound subject. Several ‘Fortune 500’ companies have benefited from his perspective in connecting with their stake-holders at towards an enduring bond. Even if you aren’t directly into sales or marketing, the book is an interesting and useful read for that deeper level of bonding that you may wish to achieve with whoever is important in your scheme of things. Through several small real-life accounts, the book tells the most interesting story of all, the story of ‘real life’.
