Living The Dream

Haircut

I paid a visit to my regular barber’s last week and, like most of his genre, he is a chatty and – to my mind at least – a witty fellow to boot.

Whilst his assistant dispensed my coupe de cheveux with her usual aplomb, we both chuckled as he (the Barber) used the phrase “Living The Dream” at least four times in as many minutes. This was either in reply to incoming clients who had asked him how he was or, his own observation of one particular punter who was clearly a friend rather than just a client.

“How are you, Mate?” he said to this chap (I’d describe him as a Dude in the old-fashioned style of a city slicker in a rural location, to paraphrase Wikipedia.)
“You look like you’re living the dream.”

I looked at the Dude in the mirror, as my own hairdresser also turned to take a look. “So what does a Dude who is living the dream look like,” I thought.
His face never registered any response as his serious countenance remained undisturbed, almost like a mask. He then gave a bluff reply to the question,

“Yea I suppose you could say such a thing.”

At that moment, I realised who the Dude reminded me of – even though he was probably in his early thirties and had a dark beard. It was the voice and the tenor of the remark that was the biggest clue – it was Trigger. *

My witty Barber continued with his banter, clearly hoping to draw some more remarks from the Dude as the rest of us choked back our laughter. And in this unscripted and spontaneous episode of high - yet deadpan - comedy I understood why it was that he used the “Living The Dream” phrase just SO much.

For my Barber, plying his trade in this small corner of England, The Dream is not about being famous, or living The High Life, or having a fancy car, a flash pad, or any of that kind of stuff. His Dream is all about serving his clients and enjoying a laugh along the way. He may be very astute and deft with the scissors and clippers, but his real art is as an influential communicator, an entertainer almost, a connector of people with what he sees as what best makes the world go around. And for this I salute him – and his attitude to his business, which is refreshingly simple.

Happy Talk

So what about your Dream?

Have you got one? If not, why not?
And if you have, are you living it in the style of my Barber?

The song “Happy Talk” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, puts it really quite simply – so simply in fact it is hard to see why having a dream and living it wouldn’t be something that everyone on the planet might have. 

The chorus closes with these words:-

You gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?

So take a fresh look at the simple message of Happy Talk in terms of your life.

And how difficult might it be for you to have a dream or, to make your dream come true? How long is the catalogue of shockingly realistic difficult reasons?

And if you have one - what needs to happen for you to make your dream come true? How many are external to you? Once again, how long is the catalogue of “what ifs” and “if onlies.”

And, most of all, what needs to happen inside of you to make that dream come true?

For here’s the thing:-
When my Barber set out to be a barber he knew he probably needed to get good at being a barber – as a pre-requisite. He may have started out as an apprentice, then working as a barber for someone else, and then eventually having his own business. 

He may have had that ambition, but in order to stick at it he needed more than just ambition. Quite simply - He needed to love cutting hair and being himself. These would sustain him through the duller moments, and the tougher times. If, say, his dream had been to make loads of money, or become a famous barber, then would fame and fortune have enabled him to express his authentic self? They may be the trappings of success, yet there's a lot of truth in the saying that money can't buy love, health or happiness.

And so the thing that really allows him to genuinely say, “Yea Mate – I’m Living The Dream,” is his love of just cutting people’s hair, balanced with his ability to express his authentic self.

Perhaps the greatest dream in Life has to be this -

For when we are expressing our authentic self AND we are doing what we love then there is nothing better.

* The character Trigger, played by the late Roger Lloyd Pack, was featured in the BBC TV Comedy Only Fools and Horses

Nothing but the Kitchen Stink!

Getting egged on

Last evening I posted on social media “Never let a pan of boiled eggs burn dry – what a sulphurous stink!”

After putting a couple of eggs on to hard boil slowly in a pan on a low heat, I had walked away from the kitchen to get on with something else. I then became aware, sometime later, of a foul stench pervading the air around the house.

Now modern living and our approach to life in the 21^st century, involves us in a lot of multi-tasking. We are required, by society it seems, to be able to do a number of things at once. Our level of adroitness, how adept we are, gains us points on the ‘cleverness’ scale. How effortless our physical or mental dexterity IS or is perceived or judged, when performing this array of tasks, also gains us kudos on that self-same scale. 

We even have a word for it – artistry.

Finesse

In ski-jumping, style marks are awarded to a jumper’s score – because in this event it isn’t just about coming down the ramp at 50mph, executing a perfectly timed take off, optimally controlling the body in flight and then landing as far away from the end of the ramp as possible though now is it?

With entertainment programmes like Masterchef and Strictly Come Dancing, the audience are invited, over weeks, to witness the competitors’ growing levels of multi-ability, of artistry, of sustained and increasingly effortless finesse.

Yet, as I admire, marvel at and even egg on my various favourite performers – what is the common thread between what goes on in their metaphorical “kitchens” and my own real live one?

A tension, or attention?

We often set up actions in our lives that should remain part of our undivided attention. These are things we should be “in the present moment” with – yet for various reasons and excuses we aren’t. In terms of performance, this is where we get in our own way and – at some unspecified present moment later – discover we have messed up big time.

If we are performing ANY kind of action - when we divide our attention we are sowing seeds of failure. These may germinate and grow into little failures, medium failures or big failures.

I’d define “failure” here as not doing something as well as we possibly could do, given our level of skills. If we are attempting something beyond those levels of skills then there is NO failure. There is an outcome, a result – yes. And sometimes that outcome will open a door to increasing and progressing our skills levels.

Failure – if it occurs – is down to a dilution or a distraction of our absorbed attention, from its maximum of 100%.

“Oh, he’s not on form today.”
Reason – he’s paying less than 100% absorbed attention to what he’s doing. He’s not suddenly become a poor player, or a less than capable player. Nothing has changed there. He’s just not bringing 100% attention to what he’s doing.
“My mind was not in the right place,” he might say in the post-match interview, which rather suggests that his mind moves around from one place to another. A wacky notion if ever there was one!

Often, when we divide up our attention, tension creeps in to fill the void. We might not necessarily be aware of this – until the moment we do, of course. And when there’s tension in mind (as it moves from place to place!) we’ll react to it, in varying degrees. That reaction can take the form of panic, anxiety, a degradation of motor or cognitive skills, all the way down to a minor adjustment or perhaps nothing at all.

The Quick and the Dead

I was making my way down the High Street in my home town yesterday and observed a man walk out from behind a bus into the path of an oncoming car. I knew the car was there as I’d seen it a few seconds earlier. The man hadn’t because the bus had blocked his visibility. 

What happened next – as I tensed up, preparing myself to witness an RTA? 

Well both the man and the driver reacted with minor adjustments – man increased his walking speed and driver slowed down. They were both “lucky” in the sense that neither carried any tension, and they were both attentively “on task” in the moment they saw each other.

Of course a faster moving car and a slower moving man would have changed the dynamics of the potential RTA – yet, still, the key “lucky” component here was their collective levels both of attention and tension. 

Change the man for an old lady, anxious about crossing the road, and the attentive driver for one who was talking on his mobile phone – and now there is another dynamic.

As it was, I was able to admire the artistry of the man as he smoothly lengthened his stride to reach the pavement opposite with aplomb, whilst at the same time marvelling at the driver’s effortless application of the brake without even batting an eyelid.

Task Management

So what’s my advice via this 21^st century parable – both to you, the reader, and also to myself?     

•           Multi-tasking is possible through task management
•       However, multi-attention is not possible

We can only attend to one thing at a time. 
You may consider this not to be the case because you cannot yet see the difference between multi-tasking and multi-attention. It will help you with that realisation if you divide the time-frames of attention into moment-by-moment ones.

If I leave the kitchen in the frame where I know I’m multi-tasking, then my task management will help me remember I’ve left eggs in a pan of boiling water. However, if I leave the kitchen in the frame of switching my attention over to doing something else, then I’ll ALWAYS stink the house out, and maybe even burn it down! Unless I’m “lucky” of course – or someone else points out my lack of attention.

Yea But, No But, Yea But

But – I hear you cry – what about the pianist, or the touch typist? Or the Grandma, knitting whilst reading a book AND listening to music on the radio; or the airline pilot, or grand-prix driver, or even the ordinary driver? 

Aren’t they doing what they’re doing in multi-attention?

Nope, they are multi-tasking. Some tasks seemingly run on “autopilot” – and these need very little moments of attention in terms of execution.

Grandma doesn’t need to stop knitting so she can read or listen. She may need to pause her knitting to turn the page, or change the radio programme – yet her knitting artistry may be such that she can knit with one hand! Ergo she CAN knit and turn the page of the book at the same time! 
The thing with clever Grandma is that there’s a lot of knitting she can do via kinaesthetic attention, reading by visual attention and listening via auditory attention!

We can get very, very clever in our artistry and seemingly turn what was once multi-attentional into multi-tasking. Compare your own learning-to-drive experience with how it is once it has become an “unconscious competence.”

I had a client who wanted to learn to drive yet he had an excessive anxiety, which he characterised as a phobia, about driving. He constantly struggled to reach 100% absorbed attention when driving – and this inhibited his ability to learn all the competences and advance his skills. His lack of absorbed attention was replaced by a considerably large amount of tension.

Similarly, we can be doing one task, one action, and have an awareness of other things – yet that awareness does not divert our attention from the task ... until the very moment that it does. In that precise moment our attention to the task drops from 100%.

And those precise here and now moments are pivotal ones in terms of our choosing. 
We may seem powerless – yet we can be extremely powerful and redirect our lives, our actions, our tasks, our attentions back to where we want, simply by keeping tensions out of those pivotal moments.

The comparison between the performance of Brazil v Germany at the 2014 FIFA World Cup and what happened here to Christian Zacharias in a concert at Gothenburg may seem poles apart. However, what happened in both instances was a loss of attention followed by the aforementioned pivotal moments.

Conclusion

Things, events, distractions, will happen in performance - whether that is a sporting contest, a concert, or right down to the boiling of some eggs. How we manage attention, tasks and those crucial pivotal moments is a key factor in whether we succeed or fail, crash and burn or perform well, or – in my case, enjoy some egg sandwiches or stink the place out!

It's All a Matter of Choice

I met an old friend last week and, in the course of our conversation, he told me he no longer drives because he ended up hating it. When behind the wheel of a car, he would get too stressed out by other road users, so he extricated himself from the equation.

Subject

It is a conversational thing, I know, yet have you ever noticed when a person has described an event where they were “subjected to” something in particular, or someone in particular. Of course the meaning they wished to convey was that this “subjection” was perpetrated upon them and was out of their control. Their patience and tolerance throughout this “subjection” was sorely tried and tested. Other people may not have found this quite such an irksome and taxing experience, yet - for the relater of this happening at least – it was a decidedly aggravating burden to have to endure.

Of course this all boils down to cause and effect.

When we are “at effect”, then we are often “subjected to” a whole range of things outside of us. This subjection feels almost like subjugation, because we buy into being utterly convinced by the undeniable reality of it all.

Object

At some point along the timeline of this draining of tolerance people will begin to object to what they are being subjected to.
“I object to that,” they might say. “It should be halted in order to allay my objections.” Or, to put it in a much shorter form, “Just stop it will you?!”

In the very act of objecting we seem to lose our grasp upon the almost yin and yang nature of the inside-out versus the outside-in world. This is a world where we cannot embrace what is happening, we can only brace ourselves against it – a world where we often end up feeling powerless victims. It is a world where the thing we are objecting to being subjected to is inversely proportional to our power to stop it, in the moment.

The more power we lose, the bigger the subjection becomes and the greater our objection to it

Predicate

Often, as a result of our mounting objection, we might be driven to act. We might change our behaviour in a particular way so as to convey our sense of objection.

Our behaviour becomes predicated on the level of subjection we are affected by – or is it the level of effect we are subjected to. Our decreasing sense of objectivity also reflects this, and we end up getting the whole thing completely out of proportion.

Sentence

Now the way I have described all of this might sound like it was derived from a students’ lesson in English language, all about the construction of a sentence. ­­­­­

However, there is another sentence running parallel with the outer, verbal and semantic elements here. And this ‘other’ is a sentence that we find our inner selves running in our own unique inner language – the Language of our Self.

Identifying with Ourselves

We all have our own unique language, the language of our identity, if you like.

As we grow and learn verbal language, we gain the ability to express our inner sense of identity. We call it “I” – or we might label it as our “Ego”. Yet, before we have even learned the means of communicating one verbal word, we are already personalising our world, by using and developing our own unique inner language. The older we get, we realise that this too has a word – a particular label in verbal language. We call it our Personality, or our Character.

Of course, we are who we are – aren’t we? 

Yet all the while that inner language of Self is changing, adapting, bending, shaping, growing. We might convince ourselves that, at some point early in our lives, character-wise we are starting to become “set in stone” – yet this is not entirely true. The nature of our nature is transient not permanent.

However, the supporting of this myth by our verbal language takes place far too easily – and on a daily basis. 

“We are who we are” should really morph into “We become who we become” – yet we get exceedingly adept at setting our Selfs in stone. We hand over some of our power for change to the power of the language we have learned to use.    

Meaning

The meaning of every sentence we serve ourselves is conveyed via our own unique inner language.

If we place our Self as being the subject of every sentence, then our view of the World, our place in it, and our relationship with every part of it, will be formed from having taken that perspective. We will feel subjected to everything.

Life, from that perspective, can often collide with our subjective sense of Self. We may feel the need to control those collisions in order to make our lives run smoother. Our Worldview then comes into conflict with the Worldviews of others and certain forces of nature – for we will not always be able to control everything we want to control.

We are then told we are “learning about the way life is the hard way,” and our sense of Self – expressed via our inner language – changes, morphs, adapts, and consequently we also learn more about ourselves.

For us the formula is simple – the less we adapt and learn, the longer the collisions and conflicts continue, and the harder Life becomes.

Perspectives

Now when we examine a particular sentence and remove our Self from being the subject of that sentence, then not only does the meaning of the sentence change for us – but there is a chance that our entire perspective changes for other sentences as well. Our behaviours are no longer predicated on the premise that we are the subject.

We are no longer subjected to the things the world in general might throw at us, or serve up for us. We no longer take things so much to heart; we no longer over-personalise things too much. Events, remarks, opinions etc are like water to our “ducks back”.

An esteemed colleague once described how he overcame the sense of personal violation felt as a result of a burglary. A burglary is a highly subjective experience, we would all agree – and can leave a damaging psychological legacy, referentially supported by our natural tendency to place ourselves as the subject of the act (or sentence).

By changing the perspective and placing the burglar as the subject, he already felt different, By describing the act of burglary as being “a different business model” to that of someone else entering the house for perhaps a more legitimate purpose, yet another perspective was taken – this time of the subject’s predicative behaviour. This perspective further dissociated his sense of Self from the sentence! As a result he felt completely detached from being “the victim.”

Choosing

The choice of how much we “subjectify” events in our World is entirely ours. When we deny this fact, we are investing some of our identity in those events. We say they “matter” to us. We amplify our placing ourselves as the subject with emotion, as a convincer to ourselves that this is important to us – further investing our identity.

So if we don’t want to serve out the sentences we pass on ourselves, the simple rule of thumb is to deconstruct the sentence and just check out who is the subject.

We might use the Four Cartesian Questions to help with this:

What will happen if I am the Subject?
What won’t happen if I am the Subject?
What will happen if I am not the Subject?
What won’t happen if I am not the Subject?

And if you still hear that voice from within saying “Yes, but ...” then consider whether or not it is just only about not being the Subject though isn’t it? For then there is never the need to go down the route of having to object to anything.

That way, we can maintain the integrity of our identity.

Navigating The Ship of You ... The Concluding Page

One of the crucial things we need to remember about Life is that ALL of our roads lead not to Rome – but to our Final Resting Place.

As a result, all the roads and all the journeys then become of THE most paramount importance to us – and that importance then filters out to those we love and those we influence. 

The more roads travelled and the more journeys undertaken – the fuller and richer all our lives will be as a result.

We often hear of the rueful catalogues of regrets and missed opportunities from people at the end of their lives. All the “I wish I hads ...” and the things they would have done differently, are testament to the relevance of perhaps how they could’ve been contenders; how they could’ve been better at Navigating their Ship of You.

By the same token, the lists of “Fifty things to do before I die” that abound, also are a reminder that we forever dream to lift our noses from the grindstone and put some self-directed perspective into our lives – Before it is too late!

We were never born with that grindstone, but we looked at it and were told it was our salvation – and then, in true Faustian manner, we have sold our souls to it.

Would it not be a better thing to dare, for –as we know -  Who Dares Wins?

"So, allow your soul to dare,
to sail out toward the unknown region.
To venture across where there is
neither ground for the feet nor any path to follow."







"Navigating The Ship of You" will be available as an eVersion on Kindle from 30th September, 2014 - and can be pre-ordered here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Navigating-Ship-You-Peter-Wright-ebook/dp/B00MVW6X42

and my previous blog "No Excuses" gives some further details on the nature and scope of the book.