The Yellow Bucket

Brainy

One of the amazing things we humans are born with is our analogue brain. Within that Innate hard wiring that is always with us YET we need to cultivate and utilise, is the power of connectivity; our ability to make connections in the area of “joined up-edness”; what at times can seem like creative alchemy.

There’s nothing particularly clever about this, and I mean clever in the sense of “a learning and then a using of that learning” within the intellect. It is very much more about cultivation and utilisation of what is innate, is in our nature, in order to tap into a deeper understanding that we have labelled Wisdom.

Wisdom

Now wisdom, too, is Innate. It has an intangible beyond-ness, in as much as we cannot specifically point to where it is or where it has come from. Yet, when it arrives in Mind we recognise it instantly. We might call it a light-bulb moment, and we might use a word to describe its arrival such as “Eureka!” And it is intertwined with our hard-wired ability to utilise the power of connectivity.

Another thing that sets wisdom apart from learning is that we cannot gain a Degree in Wisdom. Yet through applying our wisdom we might achieve degrees of profound conclusion far beyond anything we might have learned in the course of gaining our Degrees.

Metaphor

As a final part of this overture before I start to tell the intended story here, I’d like to shine a torch in the direction of metaphor. 

Essentially, metaphor is our ability to use – within our verbal language – the power of descriptive connectivity. Whilst I apologise for that bit of word play, it shows our brainy ability to describe something in terms of something else, and thereby be instrumental in making a connection.

Now metaphor is everywhere within our language, and because of the omnipresent nature of metaphor it has been sometimes referred to as being “How our unconscious communicates with our conscious Mind.” 

I see it as the vehicle that links knowledge with wisdom, moving around the hard wires in our brain – a vehicle powered by connectivity.

Coaching reflections

Reflecting on a recent busy day of cricket coaching, I noticed a number of revelations I was able to guide players towards. Some were technical, some tactical and some psychological – as is usually the way with this kind of working interaction.

I’ve described elsewhere what I call the 3 levels of Mastery of any performance skills as being Unconscious Competence, Consistency under Pressure and Conquering Ourselves.
Our ability in gaining these levels does not follow each other in a linear way, but they tend to run concurrently. And the real clue of joy in all of this progression of Mastery is that Number 3 – conquering ourselves – makes Numbers 1 and 2 so much more straightforward and accelerated.

We learn to get better at something far quicker when we get out of our own way. Or to put it another way, dare I say in a metaphorical sense, our gaining of Mastery is much simpler when we pay more attention to what we are doing than to what we are thinking.

I was talking with one of my players about Mindset in Performance; how our thinking can override our ability to direct our attention; and that getting familiar with how we are directing our attention in practice is how we can really get a handle on reshaping our Mindset for Performance.

Believing we can reshape our Mindset is just the start. The practice of directing our attention comes next. The putting aside of in-time self-monitoring and judgement is essential to this practice – for if we believe we need to keep checking-in with ourselves in the nature of “How am I doing?” and “How am I doing Now?”, then we will dilute our attention to task and increase our attention to judgemental thinking.

Our beliefs shape our Mindset for anything – they SET our Minds in stone. According to Linda Quiring, Sydney Banks said “If you seek via your own silly beliefs, you will never SEE or HEAR! You will hear only the echoes of your own mind.”

The Yellow Bucket

I must have spent well over an hour playing with my grandson, Arlo, who is two and a half. This was unfettered and unstructured play, directed by him and with me following. I was merely his playmate in all this, so wherever his Mind and his attention went ... there we would both be.

At one point he picked up a see-through bucket made of yellow plastic and put it over his head, and almost at once he started laughing.
“I can see everything yellow,” he said. “All my clothes look yellow.” He looked out of the window, “Ha ha! – the grass is all yellow! You have a look Grandpa!” And I did – and he was right. The grass was yellow. I gave him back the bucket and he looked at the table:
“The table’s yellow!” Then he saw the fruit bowl and really started laughing.
“Ha ha Grandpa – the oranges are yellow! Not orange!”
Then I asked him, “What about the bananas? What do they look like?” There was a slight pause and then he said,
“Oooh! They’re even MORE yellow now! Ha ha!!”

The laughter continued unabated as, something about everything being yellow, and oranges no longer being orange but becoming yellow, and bananas that were yellow anyway and now were even more yellow, just seemed to tickle Arlo all over!

Only Connect

So is there a link here between Arlo’s yellow bucket, my young cricketer’s Mindset and “Brainy – Wisdom – Metaphor” ... LIKE THAT?
Has my – and perhaps your – innate and hard wired ability been inducted with a little change in electric potential across the synapses?

Did Arlo’s excursion into the strange world-view of all yellow just become an amusing experience based upon curiosity rather than create a disturbingly jaundiced mindset, or challenge his beliefs about how he sees the world around him? Of course it did – especially since he is merely two and a half!
“Yes, Pete, but I’m older and wiser – and I know about beliefs and mindsets and how important they are. Arlo hasn’t learned anything about all that yet.”
To which I might just reply:
“And what will change for him when he does? Will it become better or worse? Simpler or increasingly more complex? Stay amusing and curious or become serious and worrying?”

PLUS – there’s another perhaps more suspicious question I would ask:

“WHO is going to teach Arlo about all that – about beliefs and mindsets or set minds? Has his innate and unsullied view of the world already collided with such things and created some curiosity, perhaps even confusion, within his growing conscious experience?

Conclusion

Arlo looked through the virtual reality bucket and just couldn’t stop laughing.

I wanted my young cricketer to realise that the virtual reality bucket of mindset and experience she was using was also not real – yet could be EQUALLY funny, once she lets go of those “silly beliefs” that Sydney Banks so described. 

And I knew that once I’d got her laughing every time I mentioned how much of an illusion she was operating from within, that she was starting to break up the tablets of stone upon which her Mindset and beliefs had been etched.

Happiness is Innate

Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right?

I’ve just seen an article headlined thus:-

Happiness is a realistic goal, but you have to plan for it

I have to admit right at the outset, that here is a statement that is one of the flying buttresses of the Outside-In perspective. It doesn’t just underpin that view of “REALITY” – it avers, in no uncertain terms, some of the true myths of such an illusion.
So here is my response, folks ...

Happiness is INNATE

It is within us; it is part of our Nature. We are not born UNHAPPY. It is up there with a whole raft of other stuff we are born with and that are part of our Nature – like Courage, Confidence, and Charisma.
We are born with them too; they are innate; part of our nature –

So making Happiness a goal seems to be something of a fruitless quest for me, when I come along – perspectively brimful with the Inside-Out nature of reality!
“Planned Happiness” – whatever is THAT? Why would I, indeed any of us, ever need to make Happiness a goal when we can choose to be Happy any time we like and, more particularly -
Right Here Right Now?

“I’ll be happy WHEN” seems a rather futile exercise that implies that we have to go through a whole load of UN-Happy in order to get there.
What for - Punishment? Perhaps we don’t deserve it? What sort of a Life is THAT?
“Oh I’ve got to EARN it, and nothing is worth it in Life if we don’t earn it the HARD way!” 

Who said so?
“THEY did.”
And, who told THEM?

Happiness is INNATE

Problemo

The problem with Life, and how and what we get led to believe, is that all the INNATE stuff we were born with tends to get overlaid with negatives. You can’t do this – Don’t do that – Be Careful – Be cautious and watch out for – Don’t be a show-off – You’re young and what can you know about – etc.

Older and Wiser – tend to ride hand in hand. Why? Because we are told so by the Olders.
Have you noticed that we are never ever told so by the Wisers. 

So perhaps, Old and Wise don’t go together after all – perhaps that is another one of those real myths we’ve heard about.

I know, from experience, that I’ve learnt a lot from people younger than me and especially from children. So I have arrived at the view that WISDOM is also INNATE – Learning and Knowledge, however, is NOT Wisdom. They are what we have acquired into our intellect.

Planning and Postulates

And perhaps now a final look at the postulate that set me off on this perspective-related Rant - Happiness is a realistic goal, but you have to plan for it – with some postulates of my own:

Planning populates our conscious-cognitive Being.
Planning is a strategy to obtain an Outcome.

Here there is No problemo – provided we Understand the Nature of the outcome.

I want to get better at my favourite sport, for example. So I PLAN to do some training, perhaps go to the gym to increase my fitness levels, join in with some others at practising our sport. This is a PLAN with the OUTCOME that I get better at – and therefore get more enjoyment from – my favourite sport.
Now, because it is my favourite sport, I guess you could say I LOVE playing. When I am playing, or practising, I am enjoying it – I am HAPPY.

Easy and simple so far?

SO what happens if I am NOT HAPPY with my progress of my PLAN – or my performance in the moment? Suddenly, both my practise and performance – my PLAYING – are not a pleasure any more.
I am putting my HAPPY as a consequence of HOW I am PLAYING. If I don’t play well, in my judgement, then I’m not HAPPY. I might look a little further and even be UNHAPPY with my PLAN as well.

YET – what might happen if instead of putting my HAPPY as a consequence of HOW I am PLAYING, I flip them around and put HOW I PLAY as a consequence of my HAPPY.

Here, NOW, I’m starting to get on the right track – for I know that when I am HAPPY I PLAY really well and there is nothing I enjoy more, through each and every moment.

And this is a reflection of the Inside-Out nature of Reality.

Inside I am Happy – and since our Happiness is Innate, I Understand I can always be Happy.
Outside I am Playing. And HOW I’m Playing cannot affect my Happy – unless I THINK it does AND I believe my Thinking.
Then I have flipped my perception of Reality back to Outside-In.
And once I notice I’m not Happy and realise that it is just my Thinking, then I can flip back to Inside-Out.

So why do our perceptions and perspectives keep flipping, like this?
It is, essentially, down to our Human frailty. And the level of our frailty bears a direct relationship with our level of groundedness.

More grounded = Less frail               
More frail = Less grounded

Conclusion

So, I’d invite you to open up to the Understanding that anything that is in our Nature, that we are born with, that is Innate, is always with us AND we don’t need to go looking for it.

We DO need to realise that – because of our Frailty – we will tend to hide ALL our Innate qualities and attributes from view – not from the view of others so much as from the view of OURSELVES!
We will believe our Thinking, and all those myths and beliefs that THEY told to us.

We have all got Courage, Charisma and Confidence in huge measure – once we get out of the way of our Thinking.

And with Grounded being at the other end of the scale to Frailty, we know that we all have the power, and the right to choose, to be Happy.

Happiness is INNATE

We Can't Do It All Ourselves

Ἰατρέ, θεράπευσον σεαυτόν

It may look like Greek to you, yet the phrase “Physician heal thyself” – from St Luke’s gospel, alludes to the readiness and ability of physicians to heal sickness in others while sometimes not being able or willing to heal themselves. This suggests something of “the cobbler always wears the worst shoes”, or the “taps are always dripping in the plumber’s house.” It also suggests that physicians, while often being able to help the sick, cannot always do so and, when sick themselves, are no better placed than anyone else. Certainly in the case of dentists, extracting one’s own teeth is well nigh impossible.

Of course there’s the assumption that in the case of doctors they should practice what they preach and, in the case of dentists, put their money where their mouth is.

And so it is, also, with colleagues in my own domain – Coaches. And in this regard I would place coaches of every hue from Life, Sport, Business, Leadership, Voice, Performance, Personal, Transpersonal, Transformative, Informative et al.

I know in the sporting arena that when I (in spite of perhaps being the oldest member of the side) take the field of play in a cricket match, my team mates expect something miraculous from me. I coach technique AND performance, so when I walk off having been bowled for a golden duck they feel, quite rightly, let down on both counts.

But of course Coaching doesn’t work like that, though non-coaches think it does. And in that whole domain lies the misunderstanding. “You seem to know all the answers for other people so why can’t you do it for yourself,” is the unspoken criticism – a criticism that seems to ignore the fact that we are all human. And as humans we are thoughtful creatures who rarely understand the Power of Thought, and have an inconsistent understanding of our relationship with our Thinking.

A lad who I was coaching once said to me – after I’d corrected some part of his technique – “Thanks, Pete that’s great! How is it you seem to know all the answers?”
“I don’t know all the answers,” I replied. “However, I do know pretty much all the questions – and that makes my providing the answers for YOU a lot easier.”

Coaches, most of the time, don’t know all the answers – yet they do know all the questions, in the general scheme of things. The same goes for doctors, dentists, cobblers and plumbers as well!
However – enshrined within all of that lies the very reason why none of us can “do it very well for ourselves.”

We don’t know all of OUR OWN answers.

Back last autumn I arranged to spend some time with a Personal Development Coach. I was faced with a load of imponderables in terms of my life going forward and, quite frankly, needed some advice in sorting out the wood from the trees. There were choices to make and I was unclear and, to a degree, overwhelmed. Some direction was required.
Could I have done this for myself? – after all I know a whole raft of stuff and this is also part of what I do for other people. Surely, s u r e l y ... I could “apply to self.”

Well, I remembered doing an impromptu session at an establishment where I once worked in a consultancy role. The client was not only a coach herself, but also a high-level trainer of coaches. She was far more qualified and experienced than I was and was certainly well placed to perform a “Heal Thyself” scenario, or so I thought.

She was approaching a crossroads regarding a business decision and was unsure as to which pathway to take when the time came. I spent just over an hour with her and took her through a process that she had not previously encountered in all of her professional life (curiously enough). Just over half way through she encountered an embodied sense of transformation – an Insight, a Light-Bulb Moment! She knew, I knew, and I knew she knew, that right then and there was the answer she had been looking for.
Could she have done this for herself?
Maybe – however she smiled at me and said, “Oooh! That was rather special – almost magical! You really are very good at what you do.” I smiled back, trying to hide the glow of satisfaction I felt inside. It was, for me also, a very special moment in my professional career. This was a moment of interpersonal connectivity over and above what she had been expecting. And this over and above, or above and beyond, was what she meant by “special, almost magical”. It is not written in the script, and doesn’t always happen either. And above all it will never happen if we “apply to self” because in that route only WE are involved.

SDL

SDL or Self-Directed Learning is described as where the individual takes the initiative and the responsibility for what occurs. Individuals select, manage, and assess their own learning activities, which can be pursued at any time, in any place, through any means, at any age. Although it is a process, it is more readily accepted and pursued by particular personality types. As a coach across a wide spectrum of learning, personal change, and performance, including therapeutic change-work, I’ve seen those people who expect everything to be “done to them” as well as those who have taken an active responsibility – in SDL terms – for their own change. We are all different – is my way of describing it.

In terms of the client in the story I have just related, she was without doubt a self-directed learner. Another feature of SDL types is that they recognise Insights when they appear in the mind. They notice when the light-bulbs shine, and they acknowledge the Wisdom that has arrived. They intuitively know and never question that knowing – they merely apply it to self from that moment on, and take over responsibility for how that application is directed.

Personal Change

So, given my own SDL and my experience with the client just described, I was confident, when I started to work with MY coach, that I was much better placed to have her guidance towards helping me sort my wood from my trees, than if I had done it myself. I would probably have still been wrestling with decisions and imponderables now, almost six months later – for this was decision guidance rather than directed learning!

And then, in a seemingly special and almost magical way, there started arriving a lot more things of an unscripted nature. Interpersonal connectivity, though already present, seemed to come much more alive. I can best describe it as if suddenly the bandwidth of communication between me and my coach had just got a whole load wider and superfast. As a result, I gained an enormous amount of Insight, vision and personal change that I hadn’t expected and at times I almost hadn’t bargained for. I wouldn’t have changed any of it, however, for it was life-changing. Along the way, my own SDL played an important part – needless to say – but the truth of the matter was that I could not have initiated ANY of the ways my changes unfolded by myself.

So who coaches the coaches? Other coaches! It is a partnership, a collaboration – that can, on occasions, be special and magical. It is exactly the same as the client-coach relationship.

And the key to it all, at the end of the day, is this –

We are all Human – And we are all Connected!

Juiciness

There are many ways of getting the juice from an orange. Rather like there are many ways of getting the juice out of life in general or out of everyday of our lives in particular. In fact, although they may not be the only fruit, oranges and their liquid contents are a useful metaphor for the way we are being.

Take the way we make more, or make the most out of our days.

If we are in a good state or quality of mind then our days progress much more smoothly and pleasurably than if we are feeling in a low mood, or at a low ebb. How we are being “colours” our day, affects our entire perspective this particular day. We may have an illness, some pain or dis-ease, that becomes the centre of our attention rather than out on the periphery. We might wake up feeling rough, look out of the window and the weather adds to our “roughness”. We’ve got something dull or unpleasant coming up on today’s calendar.

These are all things Outside of us that we are judging and drawing in and affecting how things are going on Inside of us. We seem powerless to stop how this affecting is taking place. Our life is predicated on an Outside-In perspective. This is familiar. We have been told since we were young – and have experiential references to back that up – that this is the way it is. “Better get used to it – life can be tough. Start learning now – some days you’re the dog, some days you’re the tree. This is the way it is.”

However, there is a phrase I hear more and more these days – “It is what it is.”

So is this different from “This is the way it is”?

Maybe, just maybe, these two phrases are completely different!
The way it is seems to refer to Life, whereas It is what it is seems to refer to circumstances.
And here is the difference –

Circumstances are (IS) what they are (IS), and they happen.
Life, all lives in general AND our lives in particular, are most definitely not always this way.
They are ALWAYS only ever this way, however, when we are living an Outside-In perspective – when we choose, fall into, or follow through a lack of Understanding, an Outside-In perspective.

Be More Juicy – from the Inside-Out!

There is a certain amount of juice in every orange – yet there is also peel, pulp and pith. Now if I choose to press each half orange in a hard driven, aggressive way on my hand juicer, then I notice that the peel of the orange begins to collapse very quickly under the force I am applying.

If I press the orange in a more sympathetic way then I get more juice, oddly enough.

Similarly, if I drop the orange on the kitchen floor a few times, then the peel loses resilience and cannot seem to keep the firmness of its shape. If I then decide to get the juice out then cutting the orange in two becomes a lot harder, and pressing it onto the juicer is a much messier affair –resulting, again, in less juice.
And if I throw it on the floor a few times the peel will crack and the juice will end up more on the floor than eventually in the juicer.

So, although I may sound a bit cheesy (sorry) here - in order to get more juice from the inside of the orange out into the juicer I need to treat my orange with love, respect, TLC, be sympathetic towards it, and Understand what best needs to happen for me to get an optimal amount of juice!

And in metaphorical terms, This is the Way it IS with Life too. When we live our lives from an Understanding of the Inside-Out perspective, we find that regardless of the circumstances (the Orange), we will always get the most juice out of it if we take the sympathetic, loving, respectful pathway.

So, the responsibility we choose for our life is about the way WE go about extracting the juice. With an Understanding of that way our lives become much more enriched, fulfilled, healthy, and we flourish – we bloom, we flower. Constant striving and over-trying become far less prevalent things in our lives and we see downsides, disappointments and “failures” for what they really are ... opportunities.

“Ok, Pete,” you might say. “What is this Inside-Out that you talk about? Tell me more. Is it easy?”

“Well, I would say it is simple rather than easy. Easy implies doing precious little ourselves, and taking no responsibility. Whereas, simple means it is not complex – it is straightforward. It requires an open mind, which for us –as humans – is not always easy. We have an intellect, a conscious ego that wants to be in control and run “the show”, drive the car – be in charge of the Juicing, if you like! And it is this part of us that is ONLY ever familiar with Outside-In, so that when IT is in charge, our lives go off-kilter and we feel at the mercy of circumstances, we are at effect rather than being responsible and at cause.”

“Ok, so it is simple rather than easy, and I need an open mind. What else?”

“You need to begin to gain an Understanding of the Power of Thought, and your relationship with your thinking. Once you ‘get it’ that everything you experience is only a creation of your perceptive filtering, your thinking let’s say, then that relationship changes. Once you get it that no matter how REAL things might be, feel or seem to you, they are only really your perceptive interpretations, then you are gaining an understanding of Inside-Out.”

And then Life begins to get so much more JUICY!

The Spirit of Romance

Flashback

One day I was working with my coach on examining various areas of my life, my perspectives, my “worldview” if you like, when I was overtaken by a short-lived moment of absent-mindedness. And in the suspended silence of that nanosecond of cosmic time my aural perception had not heard it said what the next topic of personal context would be.

“So, Peter,” I was asked, “What about romance?”

I returned to the here and now with an abrupt landing – it felt as if I had been face-slapped out of some distant reverie – shaken and, most definitely, stirred! And, after an almost endless pause, instead of launching into eloquent discourse concerning my views on romance or even some harboured wishes, perhaps desires, all I was able to say was,

“Oh.”

I’d always been an incurable romantic, yet for me romance was interlaced and intertwined with a connection at what I now would describe as being on an intuitive or even a spiritual level. In my youth, in spite of dreadful shyness, I’d be regularly seduced by the perfectionist notion of “when eyes meet” or “when she walked in the room.”

I blame Hollywood, popular song writers, the lyrical poets and Shakespeare for this far-sighted view of teen and twenteen romance and love. My Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels really were fairy tales – illusions on a grand scale – and I came a cropper on a regular basis back then as I gave my heart away, time after time, to nothing more than a perfectionist’s dream of ideal romance.

And perhaps my single utterance, “Oh,” was all I could muster as I was carried, by those wings in Jeffrey Osborne’s song, all the way back from my coach’s question to the lazy, hazy, crazy days of the summer of my youth.

I can remember thinking, “Blimey, do I really want to go through all that again – for the sake of supposedly wanting to fill an empty part of my life?” And I can remember saying something completely different - like, “I hadn’t really thought about it, to be honest,” which is, on the face of it, totally dishonest! I’m sure my body language gave me away in that fleeting, lying moment!

The Passage of Time

Of course Heraclitus reminds me that there is no chance of me “going through all THAT again” in his famous quote:

“No man ever steps into the same river twice – for he is not the same man, and it is not the same river.”

As someone else explains, other waters are ever flowing onto us. And it is true for me – from the days of my youth up to right now, a lot of waters have passed under my bridge. I’m not the person I was one, five, fifteen years ago – let alone in those days of callow youth.

So, what can I, as an incurable romantic, say about Romance ... as we are in February and the 14^th is upon us? Well, perhaps I was right all along about the whole notion of connecting with each other at a level beyond the everyday, the Temporal. Perhaps the Spiritual connection is the True Romance? The whole idea of always knowing someone on a non-corporeal level yet getting to know them in terms of their physical presence is a boundless joy – for each day is a new discovery about the other person. 

Perhaps, too, my romances are built on friendship – which means that my life in that area is not empty at all? Could be – Who knows? There’s something due any day, I will know right away, soon as it shows. It may even come cannon-balling down through the sky – and wake me up from yet another reverie!

This is a highly subjective world-view of course, based upon the connectivity of all humanity at the Spiritual level, the collective unconscious, the cosmic domain. You may scoff, laugh, chuckle, or even echo “bah humbug” if you wish – for we’re all different in our perspectives. And some of you – and some of me - may yet wonder if little old ME will ever again get to walk with someone, hand-in-hand on the beach after a Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshires as our golden retriever bounds into the waves or across the sands after a ball.

This is romantic imagery, though, isn’t it?

Well, in my case Heraclitus knows best! There was a time when I actually did fulfil that very same romantic image I’ve just conjured up. But that was a different ME and a different RIVER. I now am united with my version of the Spirit of Romance. There are no illusions, no clouds, no fairy tales, and no perfectionist’s dreams.

Postscript

So, now I’ve been seduced into considering things Temporal, I cannot let the moment pass without examining that most romantic of gestures – The Kiss.

Here are some interesting quotes:-

“A kiss is a secret told to the mouth instead of the ear; kisses are the messengers of love and tenderness.” ~ Ingrid Bergman

“How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.” ~ Victor Hugo

“A kiss is a rosy dot over the ‘i’ of loving.” ~ Cyrano de Bergerac

And I’ll leave it there ... can’t have too much of a good thing!   💋💋