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Two minute video to remind us of how much we assume.
Your point-of-view determines what you see and what you can ask.
See also Japanese addressing system in Wikipedia.
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When people undertake to control their minds while they are burdened by mental loads–such as distracters, stress, or time pressure–the result [will] often be the opposite of what they intend. …
Individuals following instructions to try to make themselves happy become sad, whereas those trying to make themselves sad actually experience buoyed mood.
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When people in these studies are encouraged to express their deepest thoughts and feelings in writing, they experience subsequent improvements in psychological and physical health. (See also Resistance is Futile on this blog.) Expressing oneself in this way involves relinquishing the pursuit of mental control, and so eliminates a key requirement for the production of ironic effects. After all, as suggested in other studies conducted in my lab with Julie Lane and Laura Smart, the motive to keep one’s thoughts and personal characteristics secret is strongly linked with mental control. Disclosing these things to others, or even in writing to oneself, is the first step toward abandoning what may be an overweening and futile quest to control one’s own thoughts and emotions.
When we relax the desire for the control of our minds, the seeds of our undoing may remain uncultivated, perhaps then to dry up and blow away.
The Seed of Our Undoing by Daniel M. Wegner
From Psychological Science Agenda
January/February, 1999, 10-11.
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This transcript of a conversation between theologians and est founder Werner Erhard may be incomprehensible to anyone not trained in ontological coaching. For those of us who are, Werner provides a thrilling demonstration of how to apply coaching distinctions. In this excerpt, Werner articulates one of the fundamental insights executive coaches bring to bear on their clients’ issues.
I’m not making an issue of the words you use. I’m making the system from which the words are derived the problem. Given the system, I can’t answer the question. You see, it’s not simply the words you’re using that are the problem.
What I want to convey to you is this: In the assumptions from which you are asking the question, you allow for no truthful answer to the question. The words you use reflect your assumptions accurately, and given your assumptions, there’s no solution to the problem. One cannot solve the problem in the system you are using. In fact, that system is the problem.
Now, I’m going to answer your question, because, you know, I came here and agreed to do that, but I want to tell you the truth before I answer the question. So I’m telling you that my answer will make no sense if you listen to the answer in that system from which you asked the question.
–Werner Erhard
in The Network Review
September 1983
See also, Never say, “It’s Just Semantics” on this blog.
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Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
–Walter Bagehot
Founding Editor of The Economist
in Physics and Politics, 1879
My job as a coach is to get you to do what you do not want to do, so you can be what you want to be.
–Attributed to Tom Landry
NFL head coach
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There is an important difference between coaching and advice.
• Coaching is listening to and standing for a person’s greatness and the expression of their possibility while inviting the client into new ways of being, seeing, and speaking that will support his or her intentions.
• Advice is telling someone to take an action consistent with the advice-giver’s worldview, paradigm, opinions, interpretation, assessment, standards, etc.
Each has its place, but are most valuable when clearly distinguished. For example, to say, “I have an opinion about what you should do in this situation,” is a responsible way to give advice.
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…chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating. … regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed.
Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be the better approach.
I call this a vicious circle.
–Nuno Sousa, MD PhD
Life and Health Sciences
Research Institute
But with only four weeks’ vacation in a supportive setting free of bullies and Tasers, the formerly stressed rats looked just like the controls, able to innovate, discriminate and lay off the bar. Atrophied synaptic connections in the decisive regions of the prefrontal cortex resprouted, while the overgrown dendritic vines of the habit-prone sensorimotor striatum retreated.
–Brain Is a Co-Conspirator
in a Vicious Stress Loop
NYTimes.com
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Tony Mayo, Top Executive Coach, is located in Reston, Virginia 20190
