Conscious/Subconscious

The term "subconscious mind" is used to refer to all thoughts that go on outside of conscious awareness. Consider the following common experiences:

• After buying a new car, people often begin noticing similar cars everywhere they go.
• People often wake up in the middle of the night and notice that their mind is cranking away on a work-related issue.
• Olympic athletes can often be seen visualizing their performances before carrying them out.

We see cars like the one we just purchased because the subconscious mind continually filters information patterns into our awareness that it thinks we want to know about. We wake up in the middle of the night thinking about various issues because the subconscious mind does not rest when we sleep. It continues to process or "incubate" issues it thinks we want resolved. And Olympic athletes visualize their performances because the subconscious mind is the seat of action. Visualizing sends directional messages to the subconscious as to how we want to perform, and our actions are guided accordingly.

Anthony Robbins teaches that clarity is power, and Stephen Covey encourages us to begin with the end in mind. The usefulness of these statements is based on the fact that having a clear idea about where you want to end up forms the basis for communicating direction to your subconscious mind. You know you are "self-communicating" effectively when your actions are moving you closer to your desired outcome. Alan Kay sums this up beautifully with the quote, "It's not what the vision is, it's what the vision does."

If you are visualizing a goal, but you don't seem to be making any progress, then consider changing the way you are visualizing, affirming, meditating, or metaphorically representing the goal in your mind. Effective self-communication produces effective action. The field of Neuro Linguistic Programming, developed primarily by Richard Bandler, offers excellent suggestions for refining your visualizations.

Standup Hallway Meetings

The second major Brain Dancing strategy for working smarter comes from brainstorming with others. Napoleon Hill introduced the "mastermind" concept in his classic book, Think and Grow Rich. The bottomline is that when we "think together" with others, we have access to ideas not available to us when thinking alone, and that these ideas seem to come from beyond the awareness of the brainstorming participants. What I emphasize in Brain Dancing is that every conversation has the potential to benefit from this mastermind effect. A one minute standup hallway meeting is often all it takes. In his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey teaches an excellent strategy for centering ourselves on fundamental principles, in order to maximize our openness to the new ideas in dialogue. In his book, The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield teaches how to manage the energy dynamics of a conversation for maximum creative results.

To do a standup hallway meeting, find someone who cares about the issue you are working on and ask them if they have a minute to brainstorm an issue. State the issue and begin explaining the approaches you have been considering for resolving it. Pay attention to the flow of ideas into your head as you speak. Learn to sense when it is the right time to let the other person speak, as the flow of meaning begins to evolve in the conversation. Oftentimes, the solution will hit you right between the eyes before the other person even gets a word out.

Right-Brain/Left-Brain Thinking

The third major strategy involves various techniques for enhancing individual creativity by oscillating between left and right brain thinking, and exertion and rest. The major emphasis is on Mind Mapping, invented by Tony Buzan. Buzan's books, Use Both Sides of Your Brain, and The Mind Map Book, are the definitive works on this subject. I summarize Buzan's ideas and describe ways I've applied them while working for companies such as Boeing and Microsoft.

A simple distinction you can apply immediately is to think about issues from various places at various times of the day while using different physiologies. Start your creative problem solving or writing efforts with a ten minute brainstorming session. Then do something else for ten minutes. After the break, take your notes to the cafeteria or kitchen table, and give it another ten to thirty minutes before setting the issue aside for a day or two. These first two sessions will send directional messages to your subconscious information filtering (new car) mechanisms. It's often amazing how many fresh perspectives bubble up to consciousness after our subconscious mind has had some time to incubate an issue.

MetaLearning: Learning How to Learn

The final major strategy can be thought of as metalearning, or learning how to learn. It is one thing to read a book on a specific topic, like yoga or science, and quite another to read a book that improves the effectiveness with which you extract useful information from every book you read from that point forward. Brain Dancing was inspired by Tony Buzan's book, Use Both Sides of Your Brain. It took me from reading 50 books every two years, to extracting useful ideas from 50 books every two months. Buzan did this by teaching me how to read more selectively using a layered approach, how to optimize the way my eyes are used while reading, how to transfer more information from short term to long term memory in order to minimize re-reading, and how to map the ideas I read so that I understand the structural aspects of the material.

Here's a simple example of the kind of distinction Buzan teaches: Hold up a book in front of someone and ask them to read so that you can watch their eyes. Are they moving smoothly across the page, or is it more like move-stop-read, move-stop-read? It turns out that our eyes can only take in information when they are stopped. Fast readers adjust the focus of their eyes in order to read multiple words at each eye stop. If you are looking at three words at each eye stop, there is no way you can subvocalize them (say them in your mind). Most people can't say three words at the same time. It may be that you want to read some material in big gulps (such as 1/3 a paragraph at a time), other material in small gulps (3-5 words), and other material one word at a time. They point is that using a variety of reading strategies allows you to be highly selective about which material you read slowly, and by using "high-speed scan" as your default mode, you can dramatically increase the quality of material that you end up reading.

Conclusion

I've discussed four ways you can use better information to work smarter. Please share this with others if you find it helpful. The great thing about information is that it doesn't get used up when one person applies it. This is just the tip of the iceberg for curious readers. The above books are loaded with useful distinctions like these. As you read them, ask yourself, "What am I going to do differently as a result of reading this?" Emphasize usefulness over merely interesting. I'll conclude with one of my favorite questions: What can I do to increase the rate at which I am ready for new balanced growth and learning?

Copyright © 1997 by Patrick Magee

Mind Maps® is a registered trademark of the Buzan Organization

Begin With the End in Mind® is a registered trademark of the Covey Leadership Center

Neuro Linguistic Programming is the property of Richard Bandler