The Wand or The Baton

Overture

I’m an avid lover of all music, all styles and genres, from ancient to modern. Plus I’m an avid lover of language and, like with music, all the nuts and bolts of language.

Now the interesting thing about them both is that they are, essentially, a means of communication – pure and simple. On a micro and a macro level they are both human vehicles for expressing ourselves to the world – to our fellow humans. When the two are put together, through even the simplest of vehicles such as song for example, the potency of the message, the communication, is doubled. Words and music can have both a magical and an intellectual effect, they bring us meaning on both a sensual as well as a cognitive level. 

Driving  (Con moto)

I like to tell stories, to use metaphor in particular, to bring a broadened perspective to clients who are looking to change some things in certain areas of their lives.

We all use the narrative of our lives to help make sense of things – of the world, if you like – so we can move forwards along our various pathways. We generally like to seek the familiar and the comfortable – for we all know how to ‘manage’ the familiar, don’t we?
Sometimes the pathways we travel contain ruts and potholes – but if the road is familiar, then we know where they are and we can steer round them, avoid them. Even if we happen to drive over them and feel the ‘bump’, then we’ll assure ourselves that our vehicle is tough, our tyres are strong enough and though there may be a little collateral damage – that’s ok, because we’re still able to get from A to B.
Now, occasionally we’ll break down or get stuck – mainly because of the way we’ve driven our metaphorical vehicle, the way we’ve ‘conducted’ ourselves. We’ve suddenly gone ‘off-road’ through bad navigation or poor driving and we’ve wound up amongst some ‘familiar’ that is no longer familiar! It’s our driving, our narrative, our habits that have got us into this particular place, quagmire, quicksand ... you name it!

Now, anyone who has ever got a vehicle stuck in mud knows that trying to get out using the way of driving that got us in there in the first place, is only going to end up with the wheels spinning and the vehicle sinking even further in.

We need a helping hand to push us, or tow us, out of the issue.
Or ...
We need to change the nature of what’s happening between the tyres and the boggy surface. This will change the vehicle’s perspective about its interface with the world.

The Music of Our Lives

For each one of us, the course of our lives is backed by a soundtrack. There is a music to our lives that accompanies us every step of the way.

When our lives are in tune, and we are playing along to that music – then everything is as good as it can be. We are an amazing and accomplished orchestra, artfully, effortlessly, sensitively, joyfully, sympathetically and humbly playing the symphony of our lives.

Every small part of ourselves is a separate instrument, each playing its own section of the score – sometimes in solo, sometimes in ensemble. Sometimes playing SO well that there is no need to even look at the score – we are playing intuitively, playing from the heart.

However, things can happen to the score that we know – or we might be required to play some new and unfamiliar music. A breeze might blow the papers around; some of the instruments may go slightly out of tune. Now the music doesn’t quite feel the same, or sound as good.

Another thing that can happen is that one particular instrument or section of the orchestra may decide to play in a different way - to be more dominant, less sympathetic, to be ‘out of sync’ with the other instruments.

And so on ...

I think you can get the notion that how our own ‘personal’ orchestra plays the music of our lives can – as a performance – be measured from moment to moment, on the very broadest spectrum. It is a spectrum that ranges from the most profound and sublime, right through to total and utter discordant chaos; from agony to ecstasy; from heaven to hell.

Conducting or Magic

And, so it is, when their wheels are spinning and some of life’s music doesn’t sound so good, that people will seek out that ‘helping hand’ that I mentioned earlier.

And for some I am privileged to be – for a short period of time in their lives – the ‘helping hand’.
Now, although I work a lot with clients of all ages, and in a wide variety of contexts, I may be a helping hand – but I am certainly no magician.

For me, magic is in the eye of the beholder – rather like beauty.

Magicians perform their magic in the eyes of the beholders and, some might say, that certain hypnotic and changework processes are magic, also. The thing is that all that seems magic is mere process – it is the perception of the beholder or the recipient that pivots the processes into magic, usually seemlessly, depending upon the craft and artistry of the magician.

For my clients to change the sounds of their performance, to get out of their stuck situation, there are certain things that need to be in place in our relationship.
If my helping hand takes the form of towing them out of the muddy field, or of tuning their instruments for them – then very soon they will land up exactly back in the wrong place again. Doing it for them, applying Magic, gives them a solution that will be very short lived.

My helping hand needs to take a different form – and I need to be more in the nature of a conductor for their orchestra. I need to be the facilitator, the focal point, for their performance. They need to be ‘in sync’, which is my part in the process - and they need to be in tune which is their part. They have to be acutely aware of their own instrument so they can adjust it so that it sounds right at any time they need to.  That is their responsibility.

My part then remains the interface between their playing and their performing; I am their conductor until such time as they can see, hear and sense their own performance – and be happy with its quality and return to their best playing of the music of their lives.

The Wand or the Baton

There is a great deal of similarity to both the wand and the baton. – yet, when all is said and done, these are just diverse labels for identical artefacts.

Place the baton into the hand of a magician or a wand into the hand of a conductor and what happens to the meanings we have ascribed?

And will they, as holders, perform differently?

Chopsticks

My ethnicity is British – so, although I started out like all human babies by using my hands as utensils, I was taught to eat ‘properly’ with knife, fork and spoon. That methodology applied for all food, including oriental cuisine, so dexterity with chopsticks was a million miles away from my capabilities – and an experiential proven!
 

Capabilities

Alongside knowledge, expertise and dexterity, one of the things we also model and learn in childhood, is our ability NOT to be able to do things.
This starts with pre-supposed judgements, which we either hear other people saying, or we hear it said to or about others, or – most pernicious of all – we hear it said to and about US. These are phrases such as:-
“Girls can’t do those sorts of things,” or “That’s not the sort of thing Boys do,” also “YOU couldn’t possibly do anything like that,” and “That’s too difficult for you to accomplish.”

Now some of us are fortunate enough to grow up in an environment where anyone and everyone is capable of doing anything and everything – which is absolutely wonderful, of course. It is liberating for us, at a time in our lives when we have no idea what liberating means for us and our future. In many ways I would say I was one of those ‘fortunati’ – which included travelling and living in foreign places. This resulted in a degree of familiarity with foreign cuisine - however, my parents were still judgementally old school in terms of using chopsticks. I’m sure they viewed them as being strictly for the Orientals, who would have learnt how to use them from their childhood. The view that ordinary Westerners (such as us) could never master using such complicated “eating irons” prevailed, so we all stuck with the good old comfortable convention of knife-fork-spoon.

Attitudes

Alongside knowledge, expertise, dexterity and limited capabilities, another of the things we also model and learn in childhood, is our attitudes.
Whilst some of these are inherently and innately our own, most of them start with pre-supposed judgements, which we either hear other people saying, or we hear it said to or about others.

The child’s mind is a sponge for everything, as we know.
In my youth, one of the by-products of that timeworn phrase “children should be seen and not heard” was a heightened absorption of attitudes – and prejudices - from revered adults. Out of respect, nothing from those sources was EVER questioned.
Nowadays, the nature of the bombardment that same Mind Sponge undergoes is quite different. The attitudes are much broader based, and I would say – if anything – that the level of bombardment is far, far more extensive AND relentless.
In the midst of all this bombardment, and the acceptance of far more ideas and attitudes from outside of our close family circle, there is still that due reverence afforded to our greatest influencers.

Yet however reverently we might view those who have influenced our lives in some way, shape or form, there always comes that moment when our reverence and respect is severely tested.

When I first played club rugby I had the highest regard for our coach. Although his role with us was voluntary, he had coached some schoolboy internationals and was well known at that level. For him to be our coach was a real privilege and, to be honest, many of us would have jumped off a cliff for him. He was certainly a catalyst and a role model in my first becoming a coach.
However, he was old school, and had the view rugby and cricket (my two major sports) were definitely not sports for women and girls. When I discovered this recently I had quite a vehement and heated argument with him – as this view is totally out of keeping with my own.
I don’t think any less of him in terms of the inspiration he gave me – however, I was thankful I didn’t model his entire range of views.

 Accepting what’s on our plate

The whole idea of blindly accepting other people’s views, beliefs, prejudices and opinions seems an anathema to us as adults – and yet as children, teenagers and even young adults, we willingly accept many things we should dismiss or, at least, question.

I can remember talking to an extremely successful and high-flying businessman regarding his relationship with food – which was not working very well for him. He had some fairly strict ideas around what should properly happen “at table” – and one of these was to finish whatever was on his plate.  For him it wasn’t just bad manners, it was one of those forbiddens.
I asked him, “Do you make your children finish what’s on their plate, then?” He nodded, but when I added, “So do you feel you’re quite strict with them?” he said that he looked to his wife to run the discipline in those areas, as a rule.

I pursued this topic a little more and discovered that his own father HAD been a strict disciplinarian and that his own compulsion to always finish whatever was on his plate – in spite of who had put it there – was down to childhood efforts to not get into trouble with his Dad. When I asked what would have happened if he had stood his ground and left something on his plate, it was clear that compliance WAS the only option.
Of course, his ability – as an extremely successful businessman in his forties – to only eat as much from his plate as HE WANTED, was severely compromised by the continued childhood strategy to avoid incurring the wrath of his father.

In the normal course of events, we are never as adults obliged to do anything we do not want to do. Yet – we do such things all the time!

 

The CAN’T Range of Designer Inner Clothing

I often talk to clients about the couldn’t, shouldn’t and wouldn’t aspects of their lives, and from where, what and how these have been sourced. And it is here where I talk to them about Cant, Can’t and Mental Clothing!

The definition of Cant is hypocritical and sanctimonious talk.
The best way to divest cant of its clothing of credibility or respectability is to challenge it and question it. Cant often melts in the face of such a challenge – and if you have ever encountered purveyors of cant, then you’ll know how to undermine their sanctimony!

Similarly with Can’t, mental clothing and the whole designer range of Can’t Clothing that we assemble for ourselves - it is only real and present in our lives because we have never challenged or questioned any of it. And here I mean challenging in the style of:
“Why can’t I do that? What or who says I can’t? If I am capable of doing anything, then I’m certainly capable of doing THAT!”

So the mindset that we build around anything, especially in terms of our capabilities and attitudes, is really all about those childhood models that we’ve played out and carried forward into our adult lives.
“I want to do X, but I don’t think I’d be able to manage that,” deserves to be challenged with at least a WHY NOT? If we don’t do that then we’ll find ourselves carrying out the same strategic behaviour over and over again, in many areas of our lives. The clothing of can’t becomes very comfortable to wear, like a favourite shirt, or old shoes.

I’m a great believer in the notion that we are ALL capable of far, far more than we’ll probably ever allow ourselves to know. I’m also a firm believer that we are ALL capable of learning how to do things very quickly as well! I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve seen it in action.

The trouble is that if we have a lot of Can’t Clothing hanging in our wardrobe, then we obviously like to wear it. So we quickly cover up the nakedness of our capabilities with the Clothing of Can’t. And with Can’t here I’ll also add in “find it difficult” and “struggle to do that” – both which are timeworn phrases that we keep in our wardrobe of Can’t.

Chopsticks

My first eventual encounter with attempting to use chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant was typically comical and cack-handed. Before I’d reached a level of even childish competence, my food was chilling rapidly, and so I abandoned the chopsticks for fork and spoon and quickly gobbled the tepid contents of my plate.
Did I finish everything that was on my plate?
Well I was well brought up to respect the hungry and the starving, so I expect I finished what was on the plate, in spite of it having gone unpalatably cold.

Since then and up until last week I can honestly say that the number of encounters I’ve had with chopsticks usage, in my lifetime, have been less than on the fingers of one hand – and I’ll leave you to decide whether that was my left hand or the cack hand I used to hold the wooden implements!

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Early January:
It’s that time of year when people feel driven to make changes in their lives, setting themselves upon pathways of personal improvement armed with new resolve.

In terms of our capabilities and attitudes this is always a challenge – for we know that we will need to divest ourselves from our comfortable and reassuring Can’t Clothing. We are told we will need to draw upon Will Power, and will have to have inner resources in order to achieve what we want for ourselves.

Of course stripping off and showing our naked capabilities to the world can be a chastening experience, yet liberating also. Needless to say, in the ravages of the climate we live in, we will feel exposed in our nakedness ...

Until the very moment we accept that our new self is SO much better than before. For it is then that we discover that wearing this New Clothing is much better than all that Designer Can’t that we used to wear. This new clothing is what we might call the Emperor range!

Now, whilst the Hans Christian Andersen story is couched in a different metaphorical frame, I’d invite you to consider the idea that all personal change – whether via New Year’s Resolutions, or personal resolve at any point in our calendar – is merely about examining the contents of our inner wardrobe and dressing ourselves for life in a different way.

 

Pad Tidings of Great Joy

Last week I was visiting family, and on Saturday we went out to a Thai Restaurant.
Unbeknownst to me, at a conscious level anyway, I was wearing Emperor Clothing rather than Can’t. As a result I was about to surprise myself and fellow companions at this particular repast.

I ordered Pad Thai, and after a period of time it duly arrived – complete with chopsticks, for the use of. Without any thought or consideration whatever I picked them up and tucked in. After some minutes “Get you with the chopsticks” was remarked upon, which I acknowledged with a modicum of diffidence. I was genuinely surprised at my unrehearsed and apparent expertise – especially given my previous and few cack handed experiences with said implements.

Where did I - seemingly - learn how to use them?
How had I practiced to reach this level of competence?

Well, I’ve seen enough film footage over the years, of people using chopsticks – so there’s been an amount of visible modelling that has been absorbed at an unconscious level.
And does this need practice? Well clearly the answer here is ‘no’, although the usual answer would most times be in the affirmative.

So here is another illustration of:-

a)      how we can acquire skills without any conscious realisation we have acquired them – and
b)      how we can liberate the conscious limitations upon the unconscious capabilities we have, and even liberate the ones we don’t even know we’ve got.

This explains a number of extraordinary occurrences in Performance Phenomena, where the freedom of the Mind facilitates a freedom in the Body. The restrictions of the inner clothing that we wear can be easily put aside; more easily than we might consciously realise too!

At the end of the day, I’m more inclined to just describe my Pad Thai encounter as being uplifting, liberating, fascinating and a great joy!

The Presence of Must

There are, in my Chambers’ Dictionary, almost six definitions of must.

These range from its use to express compulsion, necessity or obligation - right through to musk; hair powder and the verb to powder.

Of course, the latter ones are of pretty obscure usage, and yet they relate to the sense of smell, of fragrance, rather like one of the other definitions of must – a smell of dampness or staleness; mustiness; mould.

Now I’ve mentioned these, in passing you might say, but the main bearing of what I want to convey here - the particular thrust of one particular must – is about the essential, the necessity, the thing that should not be missed or neglected.

Ticking Boxes

I was talking with some friends yesterday about Christmas time and we agreed that very many people go to huge amounts of effort to make it – for them, their family, friends and loved ones – as special a time as it can be.
Of course, for each and every one of us caught up in this frenzy (another kind of must as it happens), there are qualifying boxes that we have to tick. And the number that are ticked – or occasionally crossed – goes to make up our judgement of how good our Christmas is.

Now, with most of us, we tend to take whatever comes – accept things as they unfold – and yet we will all know people who are not so accepting. For them, Christmas has to be just so; Christmas has to be in line with their version for it to be deemed as good, proper or a disaster. For the extremists in this category – the zero-tolerant - any box not ticked tips the whole festive period into something equivalent to the last days of the Roman Empire, a cataclysm, a portent of doomsday.

And this is where the strong sense of MUST comes in.

At Christmas we all feel the compulsion, the need to oblige, in one or any number of the essential areas where the boxes are waiting to be ticked. Gifts, food and drink, decorations, all take pride of place; and because we all have so little time in our lives to devote to the simple things, we buy and spend to supplement that time.
Year by year this trading of time can become more and more elaborate until at some point this layering of elaboration covers over the intended simplicity. In the aftermath of the festive must, when the metaphorical falling of snow has filled in the dinted pathway of master and page, we get to judge, to sum it all up, in a January where the winter of our discontent – depending on the number of ticked or crossed boxes – can appear as stark as the great wastes of Siberia.

Devotion

One of the metaphors I often use with clients is the Japanese Tea Ceremony, especially from the perspective of the tea maker. For it is in the simple, yet elaborate, devotions of the entire ceremony where the true and selfless art of the maker brings the most to both themselves and to the guests.

Preparing tea in this ceremony means pouring all one's attention into the requisite and essential predefined movements. The whole process is not about drinking tea, but is about aesthetics, preparing a bowl of tea from one's heart.

This is where MUST, in a sense, has a real presence. With the predefined movements there are boxes to be ticked indeed, and these are a must. Yet because of the very simplicity of the process, of the entire ceremony, the must, or purpose of it, is about devotion and total absorption on the one hand and acceptance and gratitude on the other. Both of these commitments pivot around the simple ingredients of leaf and water.

The simplicity of our lives, and our Christmases, could mark the footsteps of the Tea Ceremony. The people in our lives are the leaf and the time through which we all move is the water. The musts are devotion, absorption, acceptance and gratitude. There is no power – especially of one over another – there is no possession, there is no hierarchy, there is no duty, there is no subjugation or exploitation.

Must

Although, essentially, life is about how we devote ourselves through time, we are beset – waylaid – by the pressures of MUST.

There are the musts of society, the musts of other people, the musts we adopt and make our own, the musts of the workplace, the musts of our family, and so on. Our entire lives are filled with the pervading scent – or perhaps the heavy atmosphere – of must.

Oh I agree some of these are rules, some are duties, some are the requisites of compliance, and yet there are many that we just accept.
“This is the way we run our lives – on a cold and frosty morning!”
Curiously when we take run, like that, and add I, it makes ruin.  

So, I’d invite you to take a long look at how much mustiness you have in your life – and what manifold and all pervading aromas, scents and fragrances makes up that mustiness. You’ll know the musts I mean because some will make you recoil as if they are smelling salts, whereas others will be as delicate as that of a Damask Rose.

Are you weighed down by musts; is your life heavily crammed full of musts that serve no purpose – especially those that are light years away from devotion, absorption, acceptance and gratitude?

Isolation

One of the key ingredients of Christmas, as I see it, is good fellowship. It is about people, and goodwill. It is an essential part of the real message that we are all in it together. It, of course, is life – and, from mirror neurons to the collective unconscious, we are all co-dependent minds, bodies and spirits.

One of the sadnesses more noticeable at Christmas is isolation. In Scrooge’s visitations by the ghost of Jacob Marley, Dickens highlighted the poignancy and fear of isolation at a time of year when our musts should be examined and called to account. For the longer our list of musts, the more isolated we become.
This doesn’t mean to say that the lonely at Christmas are being punished for having too many musts in their lives, per se – but the point Charles Dickens wanted to make was that the devotion of Scrooge and Marley to riches, profit, wealth and exploitation without the acceptance and gratitude that should have accompanied their absorption, eventually came to haunt them in various ways.
Needs Must when the Devil drives or is it The Devil Needs when Must Drives.

The isolated and lonely at Christmas are also that at all the other times of the year, and yet although there is a degree of compliance in the withdrawal from human fellowship, it is invariably borne out of a fear of the world that their fellow humans have signed up to by their own creation.
One of the homeless men who joined the birthday breakfast celebration of Pope Francis recently was asked about whether this would change his being on the streets. He averred that it was his choice to be part of the homeless community, so that was not likely to change. They key word in his comment however was community – and that is still a fellowship.

New Year’s Resolutions

Many of us have things in our lives that we would happily change, dispel, remove and alter. The wish to live within a lighter and better functioning frame; the need to dispel the must of certain compulsions, cravings and addictions; the hope for more self-assurance and positivity in our lives – these are all amongst the leading topics of resolve as the old year folds itself away into the safe-keeping of our memory.

Interestingly, all these solutions are very familiar. Indeed, for some they are as familiar as the personas they occupy, as they endeavour to re-solve the problems they thought they had solved last year.

Real change comes from tackling all the musts we feel obliged to draw into our lives. We carry these obligations around with us wherever we go, each one with its own particular musty odour and fragrance.

Resolutions fall into two categories – Wants and Don’t Wants. There’s the Wants or Wanting more of something; and the Don’t Want any more of something (which is Wanting Less, or Wanting No More, of course). Behind these Wants are Musts. All the things we want more of, or less of, are linked to their own particular set of musts, their familiar obligations.
 

When the health and fitness desirants sign up to the gym they become obliged to follow certain musts, for their programme to be successful; likewise, to quit smoking requires another set of obligations; and even the 

journey to more self-assurance has its own particular musts.

However, as time goes on there is often a war campaign of perhaps many battles, between the old musts and the new ones. Why is it always so difficult a time, and a perennial conflict with ourselves?
 

Well, the Tea Ceremony seems to hold some of the answers, so let’s return to what I said earlier:

Because of the very simplicity of the process, of the entire ceremony, the must, or purpose of it, is about devotion and total absorption on the one hand and acceptance and gratitude on the other. Both of these commitments pivot around the simple ingredients of leaf and water.

Now remember the resolutions are a contract between ourselves and ourselves – and so we need to buy into both the Devotion and Absorption of the Maker, and also into the Acceptance and Gratitude of the Guest. Remember too that we are the leaf and time is the water.

Taking our New Year’s Resolutions seriously is not enough, until we understand what that serious entails. We need to be Devoted to and totally Absorbed in the process of change – AND – we need to fully Accept that change and show Gratitude to ourselves for making the effort in change. We also need to allow time for the process to work.

Sounds really simple doesn’t it?! – Not necessarily easy, however, but simple nonetheless. 

So, whatever petals of Damask Rose may be strewn on your road of resolution – take all the time you need to notice the fragrance of the new musts in your life.

Words that match the pattern ...

One of the bits of our extended memory in the faculty of language is the dictionary - plus, if we are a bit of a crossword buff or geek, a thesaurus. With the arrival of computers and the interweb of course, came the super-extend dictionary facility – where we can put in wildcards to get a variety of answers and then use our brains for the rest.
Our brains are geared to pattern recognition anyway and it is this plus our connective and perceptive ability that still keeps us out in front of even the most sophisticated computers.
However, I do sometimes indulge in this post-modernist method of crossword solving – which is less absorbed fun, but more solution and, therefore, goal-oriented. This is where the credo is “I solve therefore I am.” Or, in self development terms, Attract more crossword solving abundance into your life and build your self-esteem for a bigger, brighter, bolder YOU!

Now, getting away from cross words slightly - these days written and auditory vituperations are two-a-penny, whereas back in the day I hadn’t been long at boarding school when someone mentioned Isaiah 36:12 and we all hurried to have a look and learn. Of course today, when I put in

 “f???ing ?h?t”

into my online dictionary – just for fun – I knew exactly where I was coming from. And yet there was still a felt moment of anticipated youth revisited, as I looked at the screen:-

Words that match the pattern ...

So, what - apart from the obvious - came up in my latter-day trip to Isaiah and the Old Testament?

Forcing Shot

Here was something familiar to me as a cricket coach! It was all beginning to fall into place! Here was an online dictionary so brilliant that it could not only serve me a variety of answers from wildcards, but could also read my Mind and know the best possible contextual language through which to present those answers personally to me!
Sport – uncanny; Cricket - brilliant!

So I followed the online link to find out what else my “extended brain” could tell me about Forcing Shot. Finding what else I might discover in knowledge terms, could be useful to me at some point further down my time line, after all!

Shock, horror!
Sadly, it seems that the world, according to Sports Definitions dotcom, is not the same as mybrain.org. Forcing shot, apparently, is a snooker term meaning a shot that is considerably above medium pace.

No cricket mentioned at all. I felt crestfallen – and in the act of falling from my crest I got a definite sense of the way I was now feeling;   ?*@t.

 

Doppler Shift

In a recent rugby training session I took the players back to the basics of running, passing, catching.
Basics, in both life and sport, are always very good to revisit from time to time, because we layer up our lives in general, and our sporting lives in particular, to such a degree, to such an extent, that we fail to see the wood for the trees. Mostly we do this metaphorically and yet – as the players discovered – we can also do this physically!

One of our drills involved two players – A and B – running on the ‘outer’ side of two lines of poles. The lines of poles are about 8m width apart and the poles are spaced roughly 2m apart lengthways.  The players each run along a straight line path as shown, passing across the grid to each other – with the route of the ball as per the dotted lines.

This is a perspective and a focus exercise – where we release a pass, whilst moving, to a target that is also moving. We need to make sure the ball avoids hitting the poles, which are static.

The basics here are – how perfect can we, as players, do this - if there were no poles.

 

There are parallels in other parts of our lives for such a drill, such an exercise. Such as public speaking, asking someone for a date, taking a driving test – in fact, the doing of anything under pressure – where the pressure seems to be all  becoming from the poles.

After varying degrees of success and failure I paused for some player feedback. One perceptive guy wondered “why are we getting so hung up on some tubes of metal only an inch in diameter?”
This is a very good question, especially in terms of where the focus is and where the attention is being taken.

This is a classic case of where we can just get in our own way. Of course, when we do it and fail, by the ball hitting the poles, we have actually made the poles much bigger than one inch in diameter – in our Minds. We’ve made them so big, in our perception, that hitting them regularly is an easy thing to do!
So – as you read on – Don’t Think of a Black Cat!

Paradox or Secret

I want to do something that involves not doing X. And I’ll qualify X as avoiding hitting poles with the ball, in this instance. So I’m going to try and NOT hit the poles. And if I go very slowly I can get it right.
But I’m required here to go a little bit faster, there are speed demands and time constraints – so I speed up and, no matter how hard I try, I can’t help but hit the poles.
However, I’m a smart chap because I know we all get what we focus on; so if I focus on something else, just change what I’m focussing on, then all will be well. Won’t it? I just need to try and be positive. Don’t I?

Well as I see it, the secret is this:-
You need to consider HOW you are focussing rather more than on WHAT you are focussing. If you can’t see the wood for the trees, then focussing on the wood instead just changes the focal content and not the focal nature. Remember, too, that trying is all part of that focus.

 

?*@t

Throughout the session, I would know when the players had success or failure – even with my eyes closed. In fact, I would know, especially with my eyes closed – because of their language.
When players try and fail, especially with things they THINK they should be able to do ‘properly’ – there is always auditory feedback. Occasionally there is accompanying action, but there is always feedback. They all have what I’ve come to describe as “?*@t” moments.

Now there’s an interesting statistical correlation between the level and consistency of failure and the number of “?*@t” utterances. Sometimes players will grow the vehemence of their utterances in both severity and volume. And the trouble with “?*@t” like that, is that it is never good
“?*@t”; it is always bad “?*@t”.

Conclusion

So if we ARE going to use words that match the pattern, we need to be aware of the pernicious effect our language can have upon our performance, whether that be just in practice, or in “the real thing.”

Even something simple like stubbing our toe, can elicit a number of different responses – from a simple “ouch” right up to words that match the pattern. Now, the person who always chooses the latter will focus purely on a world populated by those particular trees – the trees of “?*@t” shall we say!

His (or her) world will always be a battleground, a world of failure, a world of nothing goes right, a not very nice world where things and people are always against us.

If we want to do well and operate smoothly as we pass through the days of our life, there is a secret and simple little bit of metaphorical patterning we can apply to shape our view of the world:-

The poles will always be there, come what may. It is ourselves who can turn their size from one inch in diameter into something else. The words we use will always match a pattern. It is ourselves who choose to either play a Forcing Shot, or something else.