Our interaction with information is context driven.Woven into this experience is a basic truth with broad application. If you want to use more of your brain, if you want to increase your understanding of something, then give yourself a reason to do so – a reason such as solving a problem or teaching others a better way of doing something. The following chapters present you with hundreds of ideas. Your understanding of these ideas will depend on the context you create in which to apply them.
Anthony Robbins teaches that clarity is power, and Stephen Covey encourages us to begin activities with the end in mind. This is great advice for the following reason:
Having a clear idea about where you want to end up forms the basis for communicating direction to your subconscious mind, which is the seat of action and the ultimate information filter.If you study nature, you will notice that the amazing diversity of life on Earth is made possible by each species adapting itself to a particular niche in an ecosystem. Each species specializes in solving a particular problem upon which its life depends. Building such specialized capacity for effective action is also essential for success in business, and is the third key issue explored in this chapter.
"We operate in an economy that rewards specialization." – Bill GatesSolving problems builds capacity for effective action. When we change what we can do, we change what we notice and what we aspire to do. "When your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail," wrote Abraham Maslow. When you expand your tool set of effective problem-solving capacities, you expand the scope and nature of problems that come into your awareness.
"People don't see the world as it is. They see it as they are." – Stephen CoveyThese are the basic ideas discussed in this chapter, and they form the foundation for the rest of the book.
THE ULTIMATE INFORMATION FILTER
We are immersed in a vast sea of information. We survive by directing our awareness to a small fraction of the total information available to us at any given moment. How do we determine which fraction to notice? Subconsciously. The subconscious mind is the ultimate information filter. Have you ever purchased a new car, and then begun to notice cars like it everywhere you went? When this happened, were you consciously looking for these cars, or did you just seem to notice them unexpectedly? That was your sub
conscious directing your awareness to information it thought you wanted to know based on recent events.
The following diagram shows up frequently in my self-development research:
Figure 2.1. Relative mental capacities.
The large circle supposedly represents the mental capacity of the subconscious mind, and the small dot the relative capacity of the conscious mind. The diagram is actually wrong because the dot representing the conscious mind is far too big.
"The conscious mind is brilliant and the unconscious mind is a hell of a lot smarter." – Milton EricksonI've never seen any proof that this diagram is true. This is probably because we are talking about something intangible. Just as there are two aspects to computers: hardware and software, there are two aspects to our thinking: brain and mind. The subconscious mind is part of the mental software that runs our brain. You can't point to it, but there are many common experiences, like the "new car" example mentioned earlier, that validate its role in our lives. Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and noticed that your mind was cranking away on a work-related issue? This happened because the subconscious mind doesn't rest while we sleep: it continues to process or incubate issues it thinks we want resolved.
Why do Olympic athletes visualize their performances? They do it because:
The subconscious mind is the seat of action.Subconscious mental processes govern every action we take. At this point in my seminars, I start juggling three tennis balls. While I consciously decide to juggle, subconscious mental processes govern the movement of my arms and hands. Timing, flow of blood and muscle contractions are all being regulated outside of conscious awareness. At the neuro-physiological level, every action is amazingly complex. How can you apply this distinction?
Use the conscious mind to define and clarify the target ("What") and the subconscious mind to guide your actions in order hit the target or carry out the action ("How").I once heard a story of a photographer who understood this instinctively. He wanted to take a small number of photographs that depicted the essence of an unusual Indian horse race. Upon arriving at the scene, rather than just starting to take pictures, he spent a day surveying the situation. That evening, he listed the journalistic points he wanted to make, and the images that must appear in the pictures to accurately represent this culture. Then he imagined potential photographs that would contain as many of these elements as possible. He wanted to take photos that would do double or triple-duty, so that the reader would see a rather small set of photos that said it all. Over the next few days, he began taking photographs while keeping these images in his mind. While doing this, he remained completely open to whatever he might find along the way, including new dimensions to the story he'd missed on the first day. He didn't get all of the points or all of the photographs, but he got a lot of them. He also too k and used photographs that he hadn't imagined.