A guy I work with once said to me about a particularly awkward associate who is no longer with us “Why does everyone take an instant dislike to him… is it just to save time?” Aside from the gross generalisation and being very funny, that phrase has stuck with me for many years because it’s an extreme example of the old saying about first impressions usually being right.
This concept of first impressions took on more meaning for me when I began to learn the difference between the conscious and unconscious minds. The conscious mind is a relatively new development in our species, some say it’s only been around for the last 30,000 years or so. The unconscious mind has been around for millions, maybe tens of millions or so years and is so much more advanced. And it is the unconscious mind’s job to protect us - to keep us safe from predators by processing millions more bits of data at a time than our relatively feeble conscious minds could manage. The results of this unconscious processing is fed to our conscious minds in a form some describe as intuition - those feelings that we get. So when we meet someone and take an instant dislike (or like) to them, there is a lot more going on in that “instant” than you are consciously aware of, in fact a large proportion of that initial feeling about someone has been processed unconsciously by the part of you that is comparing the person to everybody you’ve ever met, reading micro-body language, tonality, facial expressions and much more in a fraction of a second, and converting that decision in to a set of analogue signals that you might consider intuition.
What a cool skill? Pity that it is likely underused by most of us. Indeed I am still learning to make better use of my intuition - to let go of the conscious processing and let the smarter part of me do lots of the work.
I saw this intuition demonstrated beautifully in Derren Brown’s latest show, Trick Or Treat on friday. This new spin on his old show has him each week offer someone a trick or a treat based on which card they pick. The subject this week was a lovely 75 year old lady who “fortunately” received a treat. Derren then proceeded to teach her Texas Holdem poker and train her to be able to enter an incredibly receptive state of mind that would allow her to take note of those intuitive signals, helping her to consciously determine bluffs. Derren then entered her in a world class poker game where she was 1 card away from winning, killing off 3 internationally recognised poker players in the process.
Now whatever you think of Mr Brown’s shows - I accept that everything is not what it seems on his programmes, I would say that these kind of feats are certainly possible, when the conscious mind is quietened enough to allow the unconscious to be heard, then we are taking advantage of the learning of millions of years of evolution and the body’s ability to process much much more than the 7 or so things that we can think about consciously.
So your challenge this week is to take notice of what signals your unconscious might be sending you this week and why. Tell your inner voice to be quiet and wonder what else there is to notice when the chattering monkey is ignored for a few seconds.
