watch tHe skies

Whenever I decide to review a book I always have a quick google to see what others are saying about it. I don’t mean reading the reviews on Amazon - people who review on Amazon either love a book or hate a book, I rarely see objective reviews on there. That isn’t to say that my reviews are objective, in fact they are highly subjective. After all we all read for a reason, and my reason is very specific when I tackle a tome such as this. “What does this book tell me about being a better xxxxxx (customise to suit)”. In the case of this book I was interested in empathy. I was hoping to understand what makes some people “people persons” and other people not that people-friendly.  From that I wanted to know how I could improve my own people skills, and hence improve team performance, and make working with me in whatever role I adopt an enjoyable and rewarding experience. I digress. If you want to read an objective, in-depth review of this book, go here.

Back to my thoughts. Interestingly before I read the book, based on a primitive understanding and assumption of what emotional intelligence was, I believed myself to be fairly emotionally thick. Not a good characteristic for a coach.

Fortunately this book caused me to reassess my own view. The EQ concept argues that IQ, or conventional intelligence, is too narrow; that there are wider areas of emotional intelligence that dictate and enable how successful we are. Success requires more than IQ, which has tended to be the traditional measure of intelligence, ignoring eseential behavioural and character elements. We’ve all met people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially and inter-personally inept. And we know that despite possessing a high IQ rating, success does not automatically follow. The essential premise of EQ is: to be successful requires the effective awareness, control and management of one’s own emotions, and those of other people. (more…)

I’m currently listening to Brian Tracy’s Success Mastery Academy. Brian Tracy’s work is superb - littered with good humour and plenty of stories and examples, he is kind of the Success Yoda… if you want to be good at something, really good, such as being a master in your field, ot just plain earning money, I recommend you listen to Brian Tracy. He’s a straight down the line “been there, done it” guy with a lot of knowledge on what success is in its purest terms and how to achieve it.

And so far through this 10 hour programme, i’ve found it very useful. The first revelation for me was a new law. Sure I’ve heard of the Law of Attraction recently - who hasn’t? And that one for me doesn’t really ring true, I think it’s The Thinker and The Prover all wrapped up in a bunch of mystical poppycock.

And yet Brian Tracy quotes the Law of Correspondence. Hmm…

In the time of Abraham, the teacher Hermes Trismegistos asserted that all information about a man could be found within a single drop of his blood and that within a man was represented the entire universe. He formulated from this a principle which he called The Law of Correspondence which stated: “Whatever is above is like that which is below, and whatever is below is like that which is above“.

In the case of being successful, Tracy suggests that the Law of Correspondence means that your external world is representative of your internal world. And it’s one way - changing your external world, such as buying that hifi you can’t really afford, or giving your lounge a new coat of paint, doesn’t change who you are inside. He suggests that to make real change to your outside world, you must change your inner world, your mind.

And at this point i’m going to leave it there. I could (and usually do) continue to talk about the how. I’ll leave that for another post and let you wonder and wander about what this means to you.

Helping people to make change, lasting change that really improves the quality of their lives, requires a great deal of trust and rapport between client and coach. After all, much of the work is done at an unconscious level, even without hypnosis. So being able to develop that trust quickly is very important. (There’s more on rapport specifically here.) Trust also develops when the client believes the coach to be competent and experienced, and a great way to demonstrate that is to be able to tell the client things about themselves that imply a “seen this before” experience in the coach. This maybe the case, or it may be a generalisation, or it might actually be cold reading.

So what is cold reading? Well Ian Rowland in his book describes it thus, “Cold reading is a deceptive psychological strategy. Among other things, it can be used by someone who is not psychic to give what seem to be a very convincing psychic readings. Cold reading is neither one single technique, nor one single procedure. It is better to think of ‘cold reading’ as the collective term for a set of techniques which can be used in different contexts to achieve different goals.”

Effectively it is a method of using ambiguity based on high probability statistics combined with elaborate wording and plenty of bravado on the part of the cold reader to handle any objections that come his way during the process.

Now I’m not going to say that this is what Psychics use. I neither know the answer to that question or feel the need to pursue an answer. I can, however, say with some conviction that i’m not pyschic. So cold reading could come in handy for me, and for many of you out there who want to communicate more effectively, persuade, influence or whatever you want to call it.

And should you be so inclined, Ian Rowland’s book would be a good place to start. He provides numerous example tools and techniques that can be used to deliver convincing “psychic” readings that would have many people threatening to burn you at the stake. The information is delivered in a matter of fact way, with examples of what works and what doesn’t, and methods to elaborate and really go to town with this stuff. The tone of the book and his view on the ‘psychic’ aspect is explained neatly by this quote, “I am not remotely interested in trying to ‘explain things away’, and nor is any other sceptic I have ever met. For me, being sceptical boils down to one thing: I like to believe in things that are true, and to avoid believing in things which turn out to be complete rubbish.’

He goes on to explain the “Cream principle” - offering a little information to get a reaction, and then gradually upping the ante as the client reacts and provides valuable feeback, both verbally and non-verbally, to the skilled observer, as well as the beauty of being ambiguous with time - whether you have this skill or the potential to have it, etc., etc..

I was surprised (though I shouldn’t really have been) to read that the process of cold reading effectively mirrors that of a coaching scenario which can, of course be generalised in to good practice for any communication, from advertising to a sales call.

He then provides some transcripts of cold readings that he has done, which allow you to spot the various techniques and phrases in his book, within the wider context of an actual dialogue. This is followed by tactics to block the cold reader from working on you, and finishing with his views on the practical applications of cold reading in the real world, such as selling and romance.

All in all I found this to be a fascinating book with many applications. It’s not one to read cover to cover, but to flick through, to try stuff out and return to at some later date to learn something new.

And of course I couldn’t possibly post this without providing you with my own psychic reading for your pleasure. So keep reading if you would like me to tell you something about yourself, and I’d love to know how accurate it is! (more…)

I’m a suckerfor personality tests. Despite the likelihood that they are little more than cold reading (see future post for more on this), I love them. And I love them even more when they are free and online. So hence the latest one that tells you deep dark secrets about you from your choice of colours. Go figure. Anyway head over to the link below to find out how mad you are:

How correct for me? Hmm well yes definitely spot on in places. It does, as they do, get me thinking about stuff I hadn’t thought about. God bless double-loop learning I say. If you would like to read about my results, read on. (more…)

As we head deep in to Wedding season, the Hen nights and Stag dos are coming thick and fast. And so it was on Saturday when, following Live Earth, a well-intentioned mish-mash of artists who had flown around the world on private jets and driven to events in Humvees, and a watch of Jack Black’s silly but occasionally very funny Tenacious D in The Pick Of Destiny, I settled down to wait for Jen to return from a hen night.

Channel hopping, I happened across David Fincher’s genius movie Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. This is one of my all time favourite films, yet it is one I hadn’t seen for many years, particularly since I got really interested in some of the subjects that I waffle on about nowadays. Back then I was mostly occupied with doing my MBA, which meant I didn’t have time to philosophise, just learn lots of theories and hope that one day that I would understand accountancy.

So it was with a fresh eye that I watched the film, and found myself relating to it on a whole new level. The last time I watched it, I viewed Tyler Durden as an anarchist, spouting a lot of poppycock. Yet this time I understood, and sympathised with many of his views. Sure I don’t think it was necessary to commit acts of terror… I don’t feel the need to impose my views on others so forcefully. (more…)

There’s a very interesting article over at OneKindAct, considering the impact of making judgements on others. My view of judgement is that it’s near impossible to prevent making judgements on people (a lot of it is unconscious), and so I like to go with the flow of my neuro-physiology and make positive judgements, such as “I bet this person has lots of interesting stories to tell” or “I wonder what I can learn from this person today”, or even, if the ‘first impression’ (ie that unconscious dislike) is bad “I wonder how this person is going to prove to me that my first impression wasn’t quite right”.

Because I’m looking for the silver lining, I’m amazed how they become clear to me with alarming regularity.

Enjoy the article over at:

http://www.onekindact.com/2007/06/09/what-we-see-judging-others/

Whilst I read a couple of books on the subject, have a look at this introduction on youtube…

Head over to http://www.tapping.comto find out more! Pick a negative emotion, run through the demo and notice the effect.

So I had to watch Big Brother on friday just to see how they dealt with Jade when she was evicted to a wall of silence.

I feel a little sorry for her, because I don’t think that she’s racist, she’s just dim and a bully who would appear to believe her own hype (25th most influencial person in the world? What world would that be Jade?), and who has been villified in the papers to generate a moral panic and sell more copies.

It will certainly be interesting to see how she gets out of this one, when she came out of the house the first time, she was just dim, and us Brits like dim. This time she comes out a bully, and I don’t think that the public be quite so accepting of her in that capacity.

I wonder if the other two girls will get such a hard time? I’m sure that there will be a financial impact on both of them, as companies disassociate themselves in anticipation of a potential backlash. It seems to me from what limited footage I’ve seen, that a pack mentality developed in the alleged bullying, much like that which occured during the  Stanford Prison Experiment, a disastrous but highly enlightening study that predates Big Brother, but resulted in such bullying that it had to be abandoned. Check out my post on the subject here.

So episode 3 of Lost finally gives us some answers at last. The island is owned by the Hanso foundation
and some sort of testing is going on there. Locke and Jack see a training video that refers to psychological experiments, and name checks BF Skinner, a Behaviourist who pioneered the concept of operant conditioning.

Operant conditioning suggests that punishment does not prevent repetition of the deviant behaviour. He suggested that reinforcement, a change in the subject’s environment is the best way to alter behaviour.For example: you give your dog food every time it sits when you tell it to. If the dog becomes more likely to sit when told to, sitting is considered to have been reinforced by the administration of food contingent on it. Note that it is the behavior that is reinforced, not the dog. The food serves as a reinforcer, reinforcing or strengthening that behavior, only to the extent that sitting subsequently occurs more often or more quickly because of it.

So what is the relevence of name checking Skinner? Well entering the code in to the computer could be construed as a Skinner-esque experiment in reinforcement, or even a kind of Milgram experiment? So is the countdown actually to prevent armageddon or is it part of a huge psychological experiment? The training video carefully avoided explaining the consequence of not pushing the button, or the significance of the 108 minutes.

Another great episode and the plot thickens even more!

Derren Brown’s The Heist show the other night was most interesting because of it’s use of Milgram’s classic experiment. A famous scientific experiment of social psychology, many believe it to be unethical to perform nowadays given the potential for lasting psychological damage that could be inflicted on the test subjects. This brought me to recall other psychological experiments that could now be considered unethical. This is the first in an irregular series of articles on classic psychological experiments arguably considered unethical. First up - The Stanford Prison Experiment. (more…)