watch tHe skies

I was coaching a guy the other day who came to me with a belief that he had a terrible lack of confidence. This was really affecting his ability to live the life he wanted to live, so of course I wanted to help him.

Now confidence, or lack of, is a gross generalisation… There have to be things that we are confident about or we would soon cease to exist, we wouldn’t have the confidence to eat something, or breathe.

And that’s why I love generalisations, when I hear them in conversation I look forward to challenging, because they just don’t stand up to even light scrutiny.

“No confidence? Not even when you are deciding what to eat?” stuff like that usually gets a response, because people don’t think of stuff like that as things that they are confident about. And this is the way, because what ever you do that you think is easy and doesn’t require any confidence, I guarantee that there are people out there wishing that they had as much confidence as you in making that decision.

So back to this guy. We identified some particular areas that were really limiting him, and I asked him a really simple question.

“Imagine you could go back in time to a time when you felt like that, and give yourself resources, that would have really helped you.”

Hindsight is 20:20, the cool thing is, if you know how, you can actually use hindsight to go back to the experience and modify it. The brain gets this really quick, and it will integrate the change in to future situations. (more…)

This last week or so I’ve been reading Tony Buzan’s “Use your memory”. Buzan, creator of the World Memory Championships, speed reading competitions and much, much more, shares many techniques on how to make best use of our brain’s amazing ability to remember stuff.

At a basic level, the theory for improving your memory is based on Gardner’s Theory of multiple intelligences. That is, to engage your imagination in the creation of a list. The more vivid the imagination, the easier it is to recall. The book gives a lovely example in the first couple of chapters which is so impressive, that to this date I can still remember a list of 10 shopping items in the book that are completely unremarkable. And that is without using any of the systems that are given later on.

This isn’t really a book to read cover to cover. This is because it is essentially a toolbox of memory techniques and exercises to move on to progressively as you master each one. The techniques are very powerful. After about a quarter of the book you will find remembering a list of 100 items fairly easy, and by halfway through the book a thousand is achievable. Moving on from that you can learn some cool tricks to memorise a pack of cards and pull off quite astounding feats of memory that could earn you good money in wagers at a BBQ this summer. (more…)