Reverse Thinking

How to make that breakthrough

My good friend and collaborator Mark McGuinness recently alerted me to a stimulating new book by Steven Pressfield called Do The Work which is about a subject dear to my heart: how to overcome Headmind when it is messing your life up.

I was doubly intrigued because Steven Pressfield once wrote a powerful historical novel about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae called Gates of Fire - one of the very few books of that kind which had me (and my wife) in tears by the end.

Taking time off from writing fiction Steven's new, very short, book is about how to achieve your goals when you don't think you can.

The premise is simple: whenever you work on a project that is really important to you, but which is going to take time, hard work, and personal sacrifice then you are going to hit a wave of resistance. And that resistance comes not from outside but from within;  your own personal version of Headmind in fact: doubts, excuses, distractions, worries, whinges, procrastination, or so-called 'low self-esteem' - in which Headmind keeps on repeating the mantra that there is no point in your doing anything very much because it is bound to end in failure.

The solution is also simple: just do it. Once you have decided that the project really is important to you then you ignore Headmind when it is trying to do you down and sabotage your goals. Specifically, you ignore the Chatterbox. Or just tell it to shut the fuck up while you get on with things.

Here are some examples from the world of Therapy:

You are working on your recovery from Depression and you have decided to get out more. The Inner Voice says 'what's the point?'. Your response: go ahead and call a friend and make that date regardless.

You are working on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and you have decided to increase your morning exercise routine to 10 minutes. Your Internal Saboteur says: 'you'll make yourself ill'. Your response: increase it to 15 minutes.

You are working on Anxiety. Your Internal Control Freak says: 'I worry that you won't be able to stop worrying because you have been a worrier all your life....'. Your response: you focus your attention on a non-worrisome activity for the next few hours.

One difference between using Steven's method on creative work, and using it on personal problems is this: in creative work you just get on with the project (for example: your next novel, or work idea, house redesign, etc.). In that way you force Headmind to get on with doing something useful.

Whereas if you are depressed, anxious, obsessional, etc., you may need to give Headmind some substitute activities to do. A good example relates to giving up drug/alcohol/cigarette/ gambling addictions. Whenever the Internal Saboteur twitters on about needing a fix/drink/fag/bet then you just do a 180 degree attention turn and go off and do something more worthwhile. My experience with my clients is that when they do this repeatedly, then over the ensuing weeks that Internal Voice will gradually dwindle away to a whisper.

There is an excellent interview with Steven Pressfield, in which he discusses the approach, on the Lateral Action site, which you can read here.

 

Image by permission of Fuyoh

Do you control your mind - or does it control you?

This is yet another addition to the lenghthening list of articles on controlling Headmind that have appeared on this blog.

It seems to be the one problem most people struggle with in therapy and in life:

• Eliminating negative thoughts
• Ignoring the Chatterbox
• Laughing off worries
• Heading off panic attacks
• Forgetting guilt
• Putting the brakes on obsessions
• Doing the dirty on perfectionism
• Postponing procrastination

So I am continually being asked for more techniques on how to control what some people like to call 'Rational Mind' when it is doing dumb, stupid, things. And I agree that it helps to have a variety of techniques on offer so that if one does not work something else will. So I am going to share one of my recent discoveries with you.

It came about when I was looking up one of my favourite works - The Wasteland - by T.S. Eliot and I was reminded that Eliot had, in fact, had a nervous breakdown shortly before completing the poem.

(If you would like to benefit from a nervous breakdown yourself then read my prior article on this).

I then learnt that Eliot recovered from his breakdown in a sanatorium in Lausanne during the summer of 1922 while under the supervision of Dr Roger Vittoz, who treated anxiety problems by teaching his patients how to control Headmind with the aid of specific techniques devised by him.

His premise is that anxious people have lost control of their own minds and are paying attention to garbage. When they learn how to edit out negative words, objects, images and statements and replace it with their own content they get back control. Many of his exercises seem quite trivial at first but if you practice doing them every day for, say, a few weeks, the accumulative effect is that one is back in charge. And I can vouch from personal observation that some of the exercises work very quickly indeed. 

One of them works like this.

Write out a worry statement. For example:

I CAN'T COPE WITH OTHER PEOPLE

Now imagine that you are flashing up each letter on a screen, one by one, until you have the complete statement.

Now delete each letter of the statement one-by-one, working backwards.

Next, you replace the first statement with something more empowering. For example:

I AM LEARNING HOW TO COPE BETTER

And then you 'flash' each letter of that statement up on the screen until it is complete. Look at the statement for a few moments, and then decide on one thing you can do in order to act on it.

Like all Vittoz's techniques, it works on repetition. So use it every time you catch Headmind giving you a hard time with that particular worry.

If you would like to get a free copy of the English translation of Vittoz's book on mind control  - How to Control Your Brain at Will then you can download it from here.

 

How to be unique

This is a continuation of my series on becoming the person you were always meant to be. The last article in the series was How to be strange. And the one before that was Why it's ok to be a bit weird.

A second way to be strange, weird or unique is to be an incontrovertible expert in something. Or in two things. Or in three, four, five things. To become an authority on them in fact.

Now it helps if you choose subjects that a lot of other people are fascinated by. But it isn't strictly necessary. For example, if you choose to become an expert on Palmistry or reading the Tarot then I can guarantee you a ready audience from personal experience for the simple reason that most people are fascinated by the occult, even when they pooh-pooh it. But if you decide to become, instead, an expert on Egyptian hieroglyphics the fact that you know a lot about something practically nobody knows anything about will give you a certain cachet - which is a source of pride to you, even if you happen never to speak about it. For the simple reason that Knowledge equals Power.

Another, very good, choice is to become an expert in solving problems that everybody struggles with. For example: money management, child care, dealing with difficult people, employment law, maintaining a house, etc. Knowing a lot about those things will usually mean that you end up becoming an advisor of some kind - that, too, is a great way to exploring your personal power. 

One word of warning, however. Whatever project you choose, it helps to be guided by your Personal Genius.

 

 

 

How to be strange

I once read a statistic - and I can't remember the exact figures that were quoted to me - that the odds are several trillion-to-one that someone could be born with the same genetic code as yours. Which, effectively, means that you are absolutely unique. There will never be another person with your temperament, character, experiences and personal gifts until God goes to sleep for good. 

However humdrum or unhappy your life might be at the moment you are a special person. You have unique experiences and perceptions that no one else will ever have. And it doesn't matter whether you have a humdrum life, or whether you suffer from the delusion that you are a failure. Nor does it matter if other people fail to appreciate just how different you really are. Just get on with the task of becoming the person you were always meant to be. Or, as I advised in my last article - cultivate your weirdness.

One way to do that is to start following what your personal genius wants you to do. Another is to break free of your personality. But there are other ways, and I shall write about each of them:

• Be playful with the truth.
• Become an expert at least one thing.
• Break away from slavery.

 Be playful with the truth

I don't mean play with the truth (meaning: tell lies). I mean: telling the truth so straightforwardly that you make people laugh. Even telling the raw truth, just as you see it, is often amusing, as well as fascinating. As a rule, saying shocking things about yourself works best, but you can do the same for life, god, other people, or about anything else you like. As Bernard Shaw once said, telling the raw truth will be taken by most people as an outrageously witty thing to do.

Some examples:

1. Abraham Lincoln was once heckled at a rally and accused of being 'two-faced'. Lincoln (who was famously ugly) replied: 'If I had two faces do you think I would be wearing this one?'

2. Oscar Wilde was once listening to a rather vain artist who was complaining that the critics never wrote about him and that there must be 'a conspiracy of silence' against him. 'What should I do, Oscar?' he asked. 'Join it' said Wilde. 

3. I once met a woman at a party who told me that her husband was so depressed that he had given up his job and spent most of the day in bed. I also learnt that she had gone back to work to pay all the bills while at the same time looking after their four children, running the home, and dealing with his moods. When I asked: 'Don't you get depressed too?' She replied, satirically: 'Me? Oh I don't have time to get depressed."

Einstein is a pretty good example of how an 'ordinary' person came to seem more and more interesting to others. Although it took him a long time to get there. He was a failure at school and dropped out when he was 16. One of his teachers even wrote on his school report that he was probably retarded. From thereon he lead a dreamy, secluded, life as a University academic, his theories and himself more or less unknown to most people until he was 41, when he suddenly became famous. Therafter, his eccentricities and sayings became the stuff of legend. Here is one of my favourite stories about him: one that illustrates his personal humility, and his sense of mischief, as well as his playfulness with the truth.

One day, while Einstein was on a speaking tour, his chauffeur, who often sat at the back of the hall during his lectures waiting to take him home, remarked that he could probably give the lecture himself, having heard it so many times. Thinking it over, Einstein decided to give it the test and switched places with him. As he suspected would happen, no one knew who he was or what he looked like, and the chauffeur went on to give a flawless lecture on Relativity. Things only went wrong near the end when he was asked a question he couldn't answer. The driver pointed to Einstein, sitting at the back of the hall, and said:

'The answer to that question is so simple even my driver could answer it."

 

 

Why it's ok to be a bit weird

When I was a teenager one of my recurring worries was whether I would ever be normal. In the 1970s being 'normal' seemed to mean the exact opposite of what I was doing at the time: living on my own (and liking it that way), being on the dole, writing poetry, reading philosopy, worrying about the meaning of life, and consuming too many drugs.

Normal people, I was told, were contented with life, unlike me. They were also good at making their minds up early what job they wanted to do and sticking at it until they made lots of money. In fact, being normal, as far as I could tell, meant spending lots of time thinking about money, making it, and then spending lots more time thinking about how to spend it. So all the people I secretly admired were skilled shoppers, and bang-on-the-mark about the right clothes to wear, the best car to buy and the newest restaurants to book.

Back in 1976 when I was having this weird phase which still hasn't come to an end yet, that meant wearing baggy high-waisted trousers, platform shoes, and flowery shirts with big collars worn with a safari-jacket. To go with the moustache, huge side-burns and and big sunglasses that were de rigueur for normals. Which fitted neatly with the Ford Capris parked outside the Lee Ho Fook at the less grubby end of Croydon High Street. 

I could, just about, cope with the fact that I was a drop-out who didn't have any money and not the least idea how to spend it and make myself look normal. But (and I am being quite truthful here) what was more disturbing to my sanity was the fact that all the well-adjusted 20-somethings I knew were getting far more sex than I was, and were planning to get wed to one of their sexual partners, buy a two-bedroomed house, and make some more money. But the thought of having endless sex on demand made normality sound quite attractive. It was only later I discovered that many normals don't, in fact, do good sex.

But weddings were a turn off because weirdos like me aren't very good at settling down to live in the same house, with the same person, doing the same job all the time. And the thought of living in New Malden for the rest of my life sounded like a prison sentence.

So being a bit weird gave me a more interesting life than might otherwise have been the case.

Next up, I will be writing about how you can cultivate the strangeness in you - and become still more interesting than you are now.

How to regain control over your mind

Here is a fascinating article sent to me by the Guru of Creative Thinking Mark McGuinness.

Here is that article. You might wish to read it first before you read the rest of my comments.

That misery called meditation - What seven days of silence did to my head

It's about a journalist who goes on a 7-day Buddhist silent meditation retreat which does his head in. After just one day he thought he was going insane. Symptoms: intense boredom, aching, agitation, restlessness, escapism. All the signs, in fact, of a Headmind that was about to explode with frustration.

Interestingly, his Headmind adopted a very familiar tactic in such situations: which was to chatter about what other people on the retreat might be doing: making up fantasies about who was sleeping with who on the retreat. Everything you would expect, in fact, from a Headmind which would do anything at all to escape from living in the now.

But after the fourth day Bodymind takes over once more and he ends up in a much better place.

Reminds me a lot of the Teachings of Gurdjieff, on which I have written before in this blog. That, in turn, advocated that we human beings need to do a lot of work on escaping our enslavement to Headmind. But that can be difficult to do because Headmind is crafty in feeding the idea that what it thinks is 'reality'. And then feeding the further idea that escape from that is impossible...

To remind you, Headmind hates:

Silence

Living in the present moment

Being ignored

Raw emotion

The desert (nothing to worry about or do there! - which is why Christ so frequently visited it).

But, as the article demonstrates, when you force Headmind to give up what it habitually likes to do: watch TV, read newspapers, crawl the internet, worry, fantasize, make up stories about the past, chatter about the future, then eventually it just shuts the fuck up.

And then you end up in a very nice place indeed, a place of 'mindless salvation', on which I have also described before, right here. A place of overwhelming peace, happiness and fascination with the world we live in; just as if you were seeing it (again) for the very first time.

Are you a Cynic?

Last week I went out with a very good friend of mine (whom I shall call 'M') and we started to talk about a mutual acquaintance of ours: a highly successful artist whom I shall call 'A'. As it happens, 'A' is somewhat naive, although not in a bad way. He compliments people extravagantly for minor achievements, goes over the top when talking about new people he has met (all of whom are invariably 'wonderful', 'stunning', 'beautiful') and discusses plays and concerts he has been to as if they had given him an orgasm of some kind.

'There you are' said M, 'that's you being cynical.' You just love knocking people down. If they have a dark side you mock them and if they are good people you tease them. It really is a very unattractive side of you and you should do more to control it. It makes you sound resentful, bitter - like you need to be one-up on the rest of us.

M was quite angry with me and, after I had recovered from the shock of hearing the truth, I saw that she had a point. I tease my friends way too often and I have also developed a party-trick of caricaturing other people in order to get a laugh. 

I have always denied that I am a cynic. Me - cynical? No - I like people, I have respect for them. I am not a snob. I always try to see the best in them. I don't automatically assume that people are motivated by money, sex or status. So I reasoned. 

'You're always saying it's not what people think in their heads that matters' said M, but what they do. And what you do is put people down. Think about it."

Previously I always thought of cynics as coarse, miserable, sneering, low-minded, scoffers. Rather like Scrooge in fact. But people like Scrooge just hate the human race. Which I do not. 

So now M is forcing me to see through the danger of words. My Headmind conveniently thinks I am not a cynic because I am 'not like Scrooge'. But it slides over the power-play it practices on others.

I have found this an uncomfortable post to write and I hope my readers will at least respect my honesty.

In the next two blogs I want to write more about the curse of cynicism and what we can do about it.

But please let me have your own thoughts and stories if you have any.

The secret to making powerful decisions

I have been writing, on and off, about emotional intelligence for 15 years - here's one of my books here: Communicate with Emotional Intelligence - and it never ceases to intrigue me just how sophisticated Bodymind actually is. 

Let me remind my  readers that emotional intelligence relates to the ability to recognise, and act upon, Bodymind communication to you, and the twin ability to intuit what other peoples' Bodyminds are communicating to them, as you engage.

What is fascinating is that Bodymind uses  a wide variety of means to guide you towards making the decisions that are right for you, and for those you lead. You may be a leader at work, or you may be a leader in your family, in your circle of friends, or for those you teach. Your Bodymind is continually cueing you to exercise your Personal Genius, using emotions, intuitions, gut-feels and sudden inspirations, while you make decisions.

Brain research shows that individuals who have incurred brain injuries which disconnect the frontal lobes (Headmind) from the limbic system (Bodymind) tend to be poor at decision-making. For the simple reason that their thoughts have no emotional back-up and it is difficult for these people to tell the difference between daft ideas and wise ones. 

There is a really good interview on emotionally-biased decision-making with Jonah Lehrer (author of "How We Decide') on this link here: Passions of the Brain.

The secret to making powerful decisions is to be able to recognise, and work with, the emotional cues your body creates in order to guide you towards the best decision available (although, sometimes, Bodymind will tell you to wait, or do nothing).

Crudely speaking, your Body will use an emotional reaction to tell you to take one of the following options in relation to your decisions:

1. Go for it now! This is too good to resist.

2. Go for it, but be careful and take your time.

3. Go for it - but get some more information, or get some help, before you take the first step.

4. Do nothing - for now. Wait for a better opportunity.

5. Do nothing. The idea needs substantial revision.

6. Do nothing - ever. This option is not good for you, or for the other people in your charge.

Generally speaking, good decisions will  be backed up by strong, enthusiastic feeliings, while dubious ones will be accompanied by weak, lacklustre, uneasy, uncomfortable reactions.

In my own, personal, experience my emotional reactions, for each grade of Bodymind decision, are as follows"

1. Excited, joyful, feeling. My heart races and my head 'swims' a little. I am impatient and want to get started right away. I am full or energy. (Example: developing Reverse Therapy).

2. Less excited state, tempered with nervousness.  My upper body fills with desire but I remain clear-headed. I focus on dealing with the problems and pitfalls in the hope that I can eventually get what I want. (Example: Negotiating to buy the house I live in now, five years ago).

3. More scared than excited (I notice fear particularly in my stomach area). I really feel like I want to take things slowly and keep looking around, as if I were in a dark lane that I don't know very well. (Example: dealing with the aftermath of my wife's redundancy last year).

4. A sad, slightly heavy, feeling I notice mostly in my chest. Feels like I have lost an opportunity, as I really want to do something about this, but circumstances are preventing me. (Example: having to give up a planned holiday to the Maldives last year, when my wife lost her job).

5. A tense, slightly angry feeling in my upper chest, throat and jaw that seems to shout 'No!'. (Example: receiving a letter notifying me of a rent increase on my London office premises a few months ago).
 
6. Same as No. 5 but even stronger, and my anger seems more intense. This reaction usually comes when someone tries to take advantage of me, or those close to me. (Example: I find out that my son is in danger of being ripped off by an second-hand car salesman). 

What are your emotional experiences around making decisions? Please email me with those and I will feature them in a future article on practical decision-making.

Reducing your comfort zone

This is the fourth in a series of articles on the Enneagram. To read my previous posts on The Enneagram click here.

Gurdjieff, who first introduced the Enneagram into the West, taught that work on oneself was essential if people were not to fall into ego-sleep. The way into sleep is easy: identification with Headmind, self-satisfaction, habit, routine, an acceptance of 'the way things are', and then a kind of mechanical death in which you grow old very quickly.

Work on oneself entails moving out of your personal comfort zone, developing Personal Genius and moving away from personal slavery: the sum total of routines, attitudes, bananas, worries, habits, addictions and Headmind ideas that  keep you stuck in as a fully paid-up member of the herd.

Gurdjieff believed that friction was necessary for personal growth. By 'friction' he meant interactions with people and situations which challenged your comfort zone, your ego, or your fixed personality. There is a story about Gurdjieff that illustrates this pretty well. During the 1920s he managed a school in Fontainebleau-Avon, near Paris, in which pupils warred against sleep and worked on personal development. But one 'pupil' - a Russian - was widely resented. He did little work, continually moaned about other pupils and was scathing about Gurdjieff himself, whom he described as a 'con-man'. When a deputation went eventually to Gurdjieff to demand his removal from the school; they were surprised to learn that Gurdjieff was actually paying the man to stay there and wind people up - in order to create opportunities for personal growth for the 'real' students. 

The Enneagram describes the nine most common comfort zones for each of the types. When reading them, please bear in mind that, irrespective of  your personal Enneagram number right now, all of us are tempted, or can be tempted, to indulge in these comfort zones, at any time.
 
The One: takes comfort in judging others. Avoids discomfort by finding reasons why s/he is better, or more talented, or cleverer, or more moral than the rest of us (instead of empathizing with their mistakes). The one type is common amongst teachers. 

The Two: takes comfort in fussing over others. Avoids discomfort by lambasting people for being ungrateful, selfish, unappreciative (instead of empathizing with their need for self-protection). The Two type is common amongst care-givers.

The Three: takes comfort in workaholism. Avoids discomfort by criticising others for being lazy, inefficient and disobedient (instead of empathizing with their need for leisure). The Three type is common amongst managers and go-getters.

The Four: takes comfort in exhibitionism. Avoids discomfort by mocking people for being ordinary, 'part of the crowd', or 'conformists' (instead of empathizing with their need for lifestyle balance) - and by ignoring their own mediocrity. The Four type is common amongst adolescents of all ages.

The Five: takes comfort in being in control. Avoids discomfort by avoiding other people, or by silently criticising others for their 'superficiality', 'gross behaviour', or 'lack of understanding' (instead of empathizing with their need to live in the moment). The Five type is common amongst loners.

The Six: takes comfort in acceptance by others. Avoids discomfort through obedience, and by suppressing self-assertion. Criticizes others for being 'selfish', 'deviant', 'team-wreckers'  (instead of empathizing with their need to think for themselves). The Six type is common amongst conformists of all types.

The Seven: takes comfort in pleasure: sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Avoids discomfort through addictions, and, also, fanatasies about a happier life in the future. The Seven criticizes others for being 'boring', 'dead', or 'lacking in drive' (rather than empathizing with their need for self-preservation). The  Seven is probably the second-most common Enneagram type right now, after the Nine.

The Eight: takes comfort in power, arguments, control, bullying. Avoids discomfort through fighting, conflict, sex and arguments. The Eight is common amongst politicians, industrialists, and therapists. Criticizes others for being 'weak', 'sheep', or 'victims' (instead of empathizing with their love for other people).

The Nine: takes comfort in 'chilling out' and doing nothing. Avoids discomfort by steering clear of honest opinions, confrontation, hard work, stress, or engagement with people with different  opinions. Criticizes others for being 'argumentative', 'trouble-makers', or for 'stirring things up' (instead of empathizing with their need for change. The Nine is the most common Enneagram ego-type. (Note: Homer Simpson is a classic Nine).

Connecting to the genius in you

This is the third in a series of articles on the Enneagram. To read the first two articles click here.

In the last article I wrote about Enneagram weaknesses: how we develop a false personality by getting fixated on the way we appear to other people.

Today I want to write about Enneagram strengths. Specifically, how each of the Nine types, when the person is at a highly developed stage and is free of the ego, can be an expression of your Personal Genius.

In previous articles on Personal Genius I have described how your Genius is an expression of the divine in you. Your Genius drives you on to become the best you can be and fulfil your personal mission. It cares nothing for the approval of others; it is only concerned with making the world a better place.

My experience is that most of us are naturally drawn towards becoming one of the NIne types. Some of us make the mistake of getting hung up on approval from others, so we end  up with weaknesses rather than strengths. Some of us mistakenly identify with a lower type (usually out of  cowardice) and lose our divine mission altogether. But some of us go for one of the types, in a healthy way, because that type resonates most with our personal mission, how we see our selves impacting on the world.

Here is how each of the Enneagram types, in their original, untainted, glory seeks to express Personal Genius:

The One is a Reformer. Wants to help people  become better, purer and more honest. Ones are often Teachers, Writers, Preachers. Many great religious leaders are Ones. Example: Leo Tolstoy.

The Two is a Nurturer. Wants to help people be more loving and forgiving. The  developed  Two  tries to set an example through self-sacrificing compassion for others. Example: Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

The Three is a Manager. Seeks to make things more efficient for the common good. At their  best they make great managers, leaders and (respected) politicians. Example: Barack Obama.

The Four is an Artist. They can be artists with words, images, fabrics, sounds - or  even artists of life. They want to bring out the playful, creative, and original in people. They may be designers, writers and artists; or they may come across as intensely fascinating and original people in their own right. Example: Van Gogh.

The Five is concerned with Knowledge. They are  clear-thinking, objective, often brilliant - experts in at least one field. They make great teachers, scientists and philosophers. On a smaller scale they make good advisors: consultants, therapists and coaches. Example: Albert Einstein.

The Six is a Helper. They want to  make the world a friendlier place. They  sacrifice themselves for the good of the community. They prefer to work behind the scenes, keeping the family together, building up the team at work, or helping in community schemes and  organisations. Example: Princess Diana.

The Seven wants to help people become more intensely alive. They are extroverts who are fun to be with, and who bring out the best in people.  They like to entertain and make great comedians, musicians and stage performers. Or they may just  be the life and soul of the party. Example: Mick Jagger.

The Eight wants to  protect others. This  drives them on to be leaders in some way. They may  fight  for the rights of an oppressed minority, or they may want to rescue people who are in trouble.  They are natural fighters who will champion any cause they have taken to heart. Example: Martin Luther King.

The Nine is a Harmonizer. They  try to see the world through other peoples eyes and understand  how each person sees things differently. Then they  seek to bring people together and promote mutual understanding and forgiveness.

Many Enneagram teachers (including me) believe that becoming a developed Nine who is able to become any of the other 8 types, in an impersonal way, is our ultimate goal. Unlike all the other types, the Nine is not drawn to any particular vocation. Example: William Shakespeare.