On Receptive Visualization
William Wordsworth Understood the Power of Visualization
In William Wordsworth’s poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” he describes a beautiful scene by a lake with daffodils dancing in the breeze; tossing their heads in sprightly dance. In the last stanza (below), he describes revisiting the scene in his mind’s eye and how his mood was immediately uplifted by this imagery.
Would you like to learn more about how to uplift your mood with mental imagery…or bring together seemingly unrelated ideas to create original solutions…or improve performance in some specific area? The power of visualization is right there for you, waiting to be tapped.
Visualization for Change: 5 Basic Steps
Muhammad Ali Made Powerful Use of Visualization
Did You Know That Communication Consists of Only 7% Verbal Content?
According to research, the verbal content of human communication is only 7% of what people pay attention to when we talk. The rest consists of 38% non-verbal cues (meaning the tone of voice, inflection, modulation, speed, volume, etc.), and 55% body language. And body language consists of posture, hand gestures, shaking of a leg or tapping on a desk, etc. Can you think of someone who consistently folds his or her hands tightly across the chest? What does that communicate to you? Most likely it does not communicate openness and receptivity.
What this means is that all three components of communication can be communicating something different. And when there is a lack of congruency between these three elements, verbal content, non-verbal cues and body language, the components with the highest percentage of attention paid deliver the message.
If someone tells you that they like your idea, but their tone of voice says otherwise, which response do you believe, their verbal content or the tone of voice that sends the message that they have reservations about your idea?
Hence, one of the fundamentals of effective communication is that all three components—verbal content, non-verbal cues, and body language—should in alignment.
Pay Attention to What You Are Paying Attention To When Someone Speaks; It May Not Be What You Expect.
People are often surprised to learn that the least amount of attention is paid to the SUBJECT MATTER when listening to someone speak. That’s right. Research indicates that only 7% of attention is paid to the verbal content. SPEAKING VOICE—such as tone of voice, pace, volume and pitch—grabs another 38% of attention. And the remaining 55% of attention is given over to BODY LANGUAGE.
So, you can imagine how easy it is to distract from your message when speaking voice or body language are either incongruent with the message (i.e., subject matter) or in some way distracting. Conversely, powerful speakers either have been trained to use all three elements of communication synergistically, each one supporting and enhancing the others, or have come by this ability naturally.
Is this a topic on which you would like more information that you can apply in your own personal and career life?
Communication: It’s the Emotional Undercurrents that Can Put a Ceiling on Creative Problem Solving
Management practices have advanced enormously over the past few decades. Yet, one area that remains hidden from public view is the emotional undercurrent that accompanies communication, which can be negative and destructive to performance. There is a long history of corporate culture to overcome, which has worked to keep negative emotions from seeing the light of day.
While pure expression of anger, sadness, hurt and fear is of little constructive value, leaders need to be aware of how emotions get in the way of creativity and identifying solutions to challenging problems.
One important issue to understand is that the meaning extracted from one person communicating with another does not come in the message content. Meaning is ascribed by the receiver of communication based on that individual’s life experience, spanning all the way back to childhood.
We each have a bank of memories that has led us to draw conclusions about ourselves and the world we live in, including the corporation. And these conclusions have crystalized into beliefs (e.g., I am creative and smart, I am not good enough, the world is a safe place, I have no control of these situations, I am defective, I have to try harder than others). The beliefs we hold act as filters for the information we take in, and sometimes an interaction in the present triggers an old experience, and we become angry or frightened, for example, for reasons we may not even be consciously aware of. Conversely, the memory banks of employees contain a wealth of positive, solution-oriented material that can be tapped for creativity and innovation.
Leaders who understand that each employee has their own mental map of the world through which they interpret communication and events can use this knowledge to improve outcomes in meetings, enable groups to generate more creative solutions and, overall, enable employees to feel comfortable enough to make use of their total self. Each and every employee has been solving problems throughout life and effective leaders know how to tap into the creativity of all.
So there are tremendous individual differences between the mental maps of employees, which serve to filter all of the data they take in through their five senses (i.e., vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell). That’s one critical level. But another is the commonalities. When employees gather in problem-solving groups, there is a natural tendency for members to habitually find the flaws in ideas shared by others (e.g., We tried that before and it didn’t work; That won’t work because…, etc.). And when an idea is shot down, the team member who share it definitely has an emotional reaction. That person is likely to feel defensive, angry or frustrated, resulting in a high likelihood that he or she will shut down. And do you think they are likely to listen to the next idea raised by the person who shut their idea down? Probably not.
Even very self-confident people come into meetings with a need to be heard, and to have their ideas received with ‘open-ears.’ Without training in areas of listening and constructive response, companies all over the world are shutting down creative, original thinking before germs of great ideas can be built, through teamwork, into great innovations and solutions to problems.
One easy place to start is to build in a communication process that shapes team behavior to give positive feedback to an idea that has been expressed before citing concerns or perceived limitations (e.g., What I like about that idea is…,I like that idea because…). And when constructive criticism is given, it can be followed with a question about how the team could work to resolve the challenge (e.g., Can we work together to find a solution to this obstacle?) Training people to build on the ideas of others—instead of reverting to what is frequently the old habit of picking out the holes or flaws first—is smart business. Over time, employees will engage in more risk taking around sharing their ideas and experience greater work satisfaction. And the company will benefit from greatly enhanced creativity.
Cultivating Excellence in Sales Performance
Businesses rely on the strengths of people. And sales has its own specific demands related to the confidence, motivation, communication, relationship-building, and business acumen. Salespeople draw upon a broad spectrum of competencies to bring in the business. And while business, product and service knowledge, along with experience are critical success factors, a tremendous amount of what top-tier sales professionals bring to the job has to do with personality factors such as self-esteem, innate drive, and emotional balance and strength.
As a professional with deep experience in business and psychotherapy (and, very importantly, hypnotherapy), I can tell you that, just like others from across the spectrum of business functions, salespeople have emotional strengths and weaknesses that both enhance their success and block or constrain it. Wouldn’t you like to ensure that the blocking and constraining issues are removed and strengths are maximized?
Changeformation services enable you to assess the personal development needs of individual sales people, and to rapidly transformation them for performance improvement. We can do this because we work not only with the conscious mind, which is the mere tip of the iceberg, but with the deep inner mind—the unconscious mind—where all self-defeating habits, beliefs and vulnerabilities are stored, along with all of the character strengths, abilities and successes that we can leverage and build upon. We offer proven methods to enable salespeople to maximize and build on their strengths, while eliminating their weaknesses.
The human mind is powerful, and we know how to leverage it’s full breadth and depth for the personal and professional satisfaction of the salesperson and the overall success of the business. And of course there is a vast array of metrics available today to measure sales performance improvement that, in turn, validate the service offerings of Changeformation. Please contact us for more information: 312-399-3464.
#2 of 4: Four Core Brain Networks that Leaders Should Know About
The second core brain network discussed by Waytz and Mason in their HBR article is the Reward Network. This network should be understood by organizational development professionals, marketers, and anyone who manages and leads people. (Please note that you can find discussion of all 4 Brain Networks discussed by Waytz and Mason in a recent HBR article under the category of “The Brain Terrain” on this blog.)
This Reward Network is activated whenever one experiences pleasure in life. When this brain network receives a ‘rewarding’ stimulus, such as when eating a favorite food, it sends a signal for activation of a part of the midbrain known as the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA), where dopamine is produced, and we feel pleasure. Dopamine transmits the sensation of pleasure and this experience encourages us to want to repeat the behavior—in this case eating a favorite food—in the future. So, for executives and leaders with responsibility for generating good feelings among employees about a workplace, loyalty and optimal conditions for top performance, this particular network is worthy of attention. Likewise, marketers and brand managers who seek to create trial, repeat purchasing and loyalty among their customers are greatly benefited by knowing what types of products and experiences engage and activate reward networks of customers.
Prior to the late 20th century, the level of scientific understanding was that the body’s reward system was activated when primary survival needs were met, such as eating, drinking much needed fluids, and having sex (i.e., survival of the species). According the Waytz and Mason, research has now demonstrated that the reward network in the brain is also sensitive to secondary rewards, including money. And with further research, ‘immaterial rewards’ were added into the mix of what activates the reward center, including status, social approval and anticipation of learning. Curiosity is central to human nature and, for most people, learning is very rewarding.
Delving deeper into the applied realm, a body of Reward Network research has focused on discovering the types of experiences that motivate employees, which Waytz and Mason outline in their HBR article. If a company conducts a survey, they may or may not get honest answers, but direct observation of activation or deactivation of the reward center, through the use of brain scanning technologies, always tells the truth. Waytk and Mason describe research by Jamil Zaki of Stanford and Jason Mitchell of Harvard, that demonstrates that ‘fairness’ is critically important in motivating people, even those who are part of the “privileged few.” When research subjects were assigned the task of dividing up small amounts of money between themselves and others, findings indicated that the reward centers of their brains were much more activated when they made “generous, equitable choices.” Hence, one among many suggestions made by Waytz and Mason is that “companies that maintain a reasonable level of internal pay equity would do well to publicize that information among employees. A workplace deemed to be fair is a happy workplace that garners respect and loyalty.
Conversely, unfairness, in all of its expressions, demotivates and deactivates the reward center. This ‘unfairness,’ say Waytk and Mason, includes experiences such as being left out of strategy meetings when one is fully qualified to be there, withholding information from employees, and skyrocketing executive pay. All of this knowledge provides a wealth of information about how to structure cultures that motivate and engage employees, and promote job satisfaction, company loyalty and high performance.
Confidence in the Wrong Things Constrains Performance – What You Can Do About It.
As the late, great Gil Boyne described it, one of the critical factors that puts a ceiling on performance and keeps people from reaching their full potential is confidence in the wrong things (i.e., “I am confident that I will not succeed at….”) Essentially, this is a negative belief about self. If you tell yourself: i always find a way to sabotage myself, I am just no good at public speaking, my organizational skills are terrible, I am not good at networking, I can’t speak up in meetings, or any other negative idea, you are highly likely to manifest just that: the negative outcome that you are thinking about and believing. And that is unfortunate, because most negative beliefs about self are not facts at all; they are just ideas that have been acquired somewhere along the path of life that inhibit performance.
Perhaps you had a classroom experience in grade school in which you stood in front of the room to present some information and you forgot what you were going to say…and the whole class laughed at you. You blushed, felt deeply embarrassed, and slunk back to your desk. From this one experience alone, you may have developed the ‘confidence’ that you will not succeed at presentations and public speaking. The neurology of the brain has absorbed the painful experience as a memory, laden with negative emotion and, from this point forward, you think to yourself, “when I stand up in front of a group to speak, I am going to do something stupid and everyone is going to laugh at me.” The negative experience and belief may not even be consciously accessible to you, but they are tucked away, down deep within the unconscious mind. And so, on you go, speaking in public, getting in your own way, time after time, and reinforcing your negative belief with each unsuccessful public speaking experience. And perhaps you find yourself avoiding speaking in public at all. You may have great, ‘positive’ confidence in other areas of your life and career, but in this one string of memories about bad experiences with public speaking, you have ‘negative’ confidence, or negative belief about self.
The good news is that you do have the capacity to recondition your mind in a positive way, choosing and reinforcing beliefs that support your successes. Over the past few decades, with the evolution of technologies that can look in on brain activity, it has been discovered that, contrary to what was previously understood about the brain, this amazing structure is constantly changing and developing new neural networks.
The brain is now described to be ‘neuroplastic,’ meaning that it is continually reshaping and restructuring with each new experience. For example, when you meet someone for the first time, your brain gets immediately busy creating a new configuration of neurons that will enable you to recognize that person the next time you see him or her. And neuroplasticity is great news for all of us because it means that people can take charge of reshaping and restructuring beliefs and thoughts in ways they may have never imagined. You can introduce your mind to positive beliefs through methods including autosuggestion and imagery, and condition your mind in the direction of your choosing!
The brain uses the same neural mechanisms to imagine something in the mind as are used when having a new experience in the world. So internal imagination and external experience are extremely close relatives. What is imagined is real to the unconscious part of mind. So give your mind positive images and internal experiences and, by doing so, log good memories in mind that support your goals and successes.
When we were very young, we did not have control over what messages and ideas were downloaded into the brain. But as we mature, we have far more control over what beliefs and thoughts are invited into our own mental homes, and what negative ideas we throw out on the scrap heap. Shouldn’t this be taught in schools? Shouldn’t this be taught in corporations? People are the masters of their own minds. It’s just that sometimes they are not aware of this empowerment, and they allow whatever wants to meander through the mind to enter and set up shop in neural networks. But you will not allow that to happen, right?