The Path of At Least Some Resistance, Please
One of the familiar idioms in our language has to do with “finding the path of least resistance.” We use this phrase to describe the flow of currents – water, electricity, even people. It is sometimes applied to discussions about process and workflow design, and is occasionally even used to describe personality traits in people, as in “He’s the type that seeks the path of least resistance.” Even good-hearted, well-meaning friends, seeing us facing hard times, sometimes say “Why fight it? Take the path of least resistance!” That kind of advice certainly sounds reasonable on the face, doesn’t it? The path of least resistance sounds like an easy choice, and none of us is likely to be interested in making life harder for ourselves, particularly when economic, professional, and personal crises may be creating plenty of stress already. Why not ease up and take the path of least resistance? One good reason not to do it is that the path of least resistance isn’t really a path at all. It’s not a path, a road, a highway… it’s not even a trail. It has no target, no metrics, no direction, and no destination. The result of the path of least resistance is not to get anywhere or do anything – it’s just to find the easiest way to move somewhere else other than where you started. Worst of all, once you are on a path of minimal resistance, it seems to take even more effort to get focused again! Resistance isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In human muscles, resistance builds strength. In “project muscles,” resistance helps to ensure that forward motion is done purposefully and in ways that can be explained and defended. A certain degree of pushback is useful and can help keep audiences focused on the goal and the core reasons for achieving it. You can illustrate this for yourself. On a sheet of printer or copier paper, draw a large circle. Place the paper on the floor. Stand beside it and hold a business card over the target with your finger and thumb, positioned with a short, thin edge pointing straight down toward the target. You should be holding the card at about waist height. Drop the card over the target. Instead of hitting the target, the card will almost certainly flutter away and land nowhere near the target. It will often land without even touching the piece of paper! Try again with another card, but this time hold the card parallel to the ground, so that the card drops toward the target flat side first. Drop the card so that the printed side is aimed at the target. In this position, it will fall more or less straight downward. This is an unintuitive result. It would seem that in the edge-first position, the card would move more swiftly and slice through the air toward the target with little or no resistance. However, in that position it is most vulnerable to being knocked off course and it eventually tumbles out of control. When dropped in the face-first position, the steady air resistance actually allows the trajectory to be more accurately controlled. Apply this demonstration during your next team meeting or presentation by considering the following: Resistance to change in an organization is normal. It’s human nature. But are there certain types of resistance which are actually beneficial to reaching the ultimate goal? Without some resistance, a trajectory can be influenced by chaotic factors and spin out of control. With too much resistance, the target is never reached. How can you evaluate the kinds of resistance your team is facing and harness it to allow you to progress more effectively and accurately toward your goal? I’ve mentioned Martin Gardner in this column before. He was an amazing writer and thinker. He died just over a year ago, and when he crossed my mind recently I decided to give him another reverential nod in my blog. This “falling cards” demonstration appeared in his book Smart Science Tricks in 2004.
Foreground, Background, and Perspective
By looking at your combination of skills and occasionally putting emphasis on skills you might have left in the background, you are likely to find that the labels you have put on yourself are woefully insufficient to describe the true and expanding depth of your real capacity.
Impulse, Excellence, and Leaps of Faith
The experience of collaborating to create live performances at a high level of quality always affects the way you think about your own individual performance. The same is true for high achievers in any field or industry; they want to learn from others who achieve greatness. High achievers revel in the experience of excellence, and generally prefer to take an active role rather than being a passive observer.
The Value of a Backward Glance
Mining the value of the clients on last year’s calendar will never completely take the place of developing new business, but the profitability minded performer remembers that it takes less effort and fewer resources to do more work for an existing client than it does to create a new one. Cars have large windshields to make it easy to see the road ahead, but they also have mirrors for very good reasons. So here’s my warning: the value of that client in your mirror is greater than it appears!
How To Remember Names – The Memory Mojo! Way
At my performances and speaking engagements, one of the things people find most impressive is my apparently incredible memory for names. By the end of many of my presentations I can name just about everyone in the room. In one of my card tricks I have nearly two dozen people select cards from the deck, then I find all the cards and call each of the people by name. This feat frequently garners as much applause as the card trick itself. My Memory Mojo! presentation teaches about a range of mnemonic memory techniques which can be applied to name recall. However, my personal approach for remembering names differs somewhat from the standard mnemonic approach. My technique combines some of the memory tricks you may have heard before, plus a personal twist that helps me lock most names into place. The Memory Mojo! name memory system has three steps: Question, Repetition, and Visualization. Question I ask questions about people’s names. As my name is “Joe,” most names are more complex than mine and many lend themselves to some comment. I almost always ask about the spelling of the name; is it Michele or Michelle, Sean or Shawn? If I sense a derivation from another language, I’ll ask about it. I try to make a person’s name my first topic of conversation with him or her. The point of asking questions is to force yourself to pay attention in the first place. Most memory courses emphasize the importance of training oneself to attend to incoming information; this concept is called increasing primary awareness or initial awareness. Even without learning or using any of the other steps and techniques in a memory course, raising the initial awareness of information automatically improves a person’s recall. In short, the attempt automatically brings success. To increase the degree of success, I move to the second step. Repetition This is the one that most people have already heard, often many times. Most sales people or other people who have asked me about names have heard advice such as “use the person’s name immediately,” or “make sure to call them by name three times.” They’ve used this technique with varying results. There’s nothing wrong with the advice to repeat a name to yourself several times. Repetition is a key to learning new material, but taken by itself it’s not what I’d consider the most efficient path to retention. Learning anything by rote repetition generally takes longer than a structured repetition of something that has already been conceptually grasped. That’s why we question first, commenting on the spelling or derivation, and generally develop an understanding of the name and person, then repeat the name to yourself. After asking questions about the name, repeat the name in your head, then give yourself ten or fifteen seconds before using the person’s name in a statement back to them. Don’t keep a checklist of using it three or five times in the conversation; just use it at points where it can naturally fit the conversational flow. It’s the third step, though, where you really get the name fixed firmly in your mind. Visualization My Memory Mojo! course, like nearly all memory training courses, uses creative visualization and association as the basis of the techniques. The use of the imagination to create mental pictures to associate new information to old information is the fundamental building block of memory training. The classical mnemonic approach is to create a vibrant and exaggerated picture with the name and associate that with some outstanding feature of the person’s face, body, or perhaps clothing. For example, the name “Frank” might call to mind a hot dog or the Frankenstein monster, which could then be associated to something noticeable about the man’s face. Other images might be based on people you already know with the same name – relatives, friends, or colleagues. This is the most commonly taught technique and it can be extremely useful. Another visualization technique, though, is this personal approach which I developed a few years ago. This is my own approach and it has significantly improved my name memory. When I hear the name, I visualize myself writing the name, in longhand, with a fountain pen on good paper. I make this visualization as detailed as possible, almost feeling the ink flow from the pen as it scratches across the paper. I can feel the texture of the writing surface and even pick up the faint smell of the ink on the paper. In my mind, I can feel the weight of the pen in my hand and hear the scraping of the nib as I form the letters. My goal is to create a rich, detailed, multi-sensory experience of the name, albeit in my mind. I picture the swoop of the letters and try to see, hear, feel, and smell what is happening as I write the name. You might visualize something different – a chalkboard, a crayon, or a Sharpie – but the point is to engage multiple senses as you think of the name. This one technique has helped me lock in names with a high success rate. Some closing advice… Finally, give yourself permission to forget a name. Your self-talk has a lot to do with your capabilities, and most people have unfortunately convinced themselves that they “can remember faces, but have a bad memory for names.” They tell themselves they won’t remember, and they agonize over forgetting. Take the pressure off yourself. The goal is not a perfect name memory, but an improved name memory. You will help yourself succeed by learning to be comfortable in asking people to repeat their names when you forget. By dialing down the pressure and using the approaches described above, I have been successful in improving my name memory. It has helped my performances, my business interactions, and in my own personal life. I hope you find success using these techniques, too. Let me hear your success stories! (Fountain pen/paper image by Linda
Why Unreal Experiences Can Create Real Results
I hope your new year has started off with as much energy as mine has! January is filled with trips to San Antonio, TX; Natchez, MS; Tampa, FL; and of course many wonderful opportunities right here in Atlanta. Now that we’re well into the new year, we’ve reached the point where most of the resolutions have already been broken. Old habits, processes, and prejudices die hard. That’s certainly not to say that change doesn’t have a timeline; it certainly does. But effective change happens on meaningful timelines, not arbitrary ones. People do not achieve a new paradigm in their thinking simply because the date has rolled over on the calendar any more than they would because the mileage rolled over on the odometer. One familiar concept in change management circles is the “burning platform” model. This model presents the motivation to change as existing in tension with situation’s inertia using the imagery of a person standing on a platform in the ocean. If the platform catches fire, the person will start by holding out hope of either the fire going out or otherwise being rescued before ever considering the saving action of jumping into the water – because the long jump and cold water seem rather uncomfortable and frightening. Ultimately, the person only jumps when the fear of jumping is outweighed by the pain of staying on the burning platform. Thus, many organizational or even personal changes can be modeled to a degree by asking, “What’s the burning platform?” As with all models, hordes of consulting professionals have made good livings by extending and over-extending the metaphors. One reason the model may fail, for example, is if the people on the platform are genuinely unaware that the platform is actually on fire at all. Perhaps their prior experiences do not include fire, or perhaps they’ve only seen flames on candles and cakes, never on a large structure. To them, the fire isn’t an issue – it may not even seem real. The real situation is, in their eyes, an unreal experience. They are destined for change whether they wish it or not; however, if they do not develop a new way of looking at things, they will experience painful and disorderly change that could have been avoided. The flawed perception created by those preconceptions is one example of an unreal situation that will have real consequences. Here’s the other side of the coin. If the preconceptions within the mind represent an unreal experience with real consequences of a negative nature, can we use other types of unreal experiences to create real positive changes in perception and action? My experiences as a corporate magician and mentalist – as well as the results my clients have experienced at trade shows and conferences around the world – say that we can. Although what we call the experience of “magic” is created through the use of theatrical illusion techniques, that experience has a real psychological and emotional effect. Unusual, impossible experiences can force people to attend to information that they would otherwise have ignored. The real result is that the message penetrates the armor of indifference and prejudice, sticking to the memories of people who weren’t even planning to pay attention. Creating an unusual, fun experience, while delivering meaningful information in a way that sticks… this is the essence of the “Rethink the Impossible” keynote, as well as much of the customized sales and trade show presentation “magic” that I do. Getting people to look at their situations in a different way – helping them to to identify burning platforms and innovative solutions – this is the power of a presentation that interrupts not just the patterns people are used to seeing in their professions, but also the patterns that they are used to experiencing in their daily lives. Magic, when given a meaning, is an unforgettable learning tool. This year, let’s leverage the impact of impossible visual and psychological experiences to get the right messages across to your target audiences!
