Thought Vault

After a looohhnng hiatus, I have decided to capture my impressions so I can revisit them years from now and feel all nostalgic.. also a simpler reason is - I feel a strong need to save nuggets of widom from great thinkers that I come across in the books I read. So here goes the first one...

Dan and Chip Heath, I bow to you!!  I read the first chapter of  SWITCH  and  found this nugget. It is succinct (my Rider got the message), appealed to my Elephant and offers a 'Path' and actually got me to want to save it.

The Heath brothers offer an interesting insight into the inner workings of 'Change' and offer a lovely 3-pronged framework for effecting change.  They have drawn an analogy to human psyche by breaking it into the Analytical (Rider) part and the Emotional (Elephant) part. Then they offer that to effect a change in someone appealing to their Rider is not sufficient and will not last. So here is their finding:

• Direct the Rider. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction. ('Some' is not a number, 'Soon' is not a time)
• Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. from having to forcibly change. The Rider can't get his way by force for very long. So it's critical that you engage people's emotional side—get their Elephants on the path and cooperative. (Appealing to people's emotions is way more powerful than convincing them analytically.)

• Shape the Path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. We call the situation (including the surrounding environment) the "Path." When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what's happening with the Rider and Elephant. (Offer smaller portions if you want people to eat less..)

I am blessed with two 'subjects' that I can apply this wisdom on. My subjects come with what looks like a lifetime supply of situations that will challenge me both emotionally and analytically and then some.
Bring them on girls! I just learned the formula..

I am subscribed to TED and occasionally watch/listen to talks by the big and famous. Once a year about 1000 people from around the world gather at TED conferences to exchange ideas. Today I watched Steven Pinkerv. He is a professorDepartment of Psychology at Harvard University, and used to teach in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition and this particular talk was about Steve's book from 2005 called "The Stuff of Thought".

He explains the nuances of communicating thoughts in a particular way and the subconscious characteristics that cause humans to choose one form of expression over the other.
I often wonder about communication problems between individuals. Some people seem to read between the lines quite OK, some don't get it, some get it wrong!! I just reached the conclusion that communicating a thought ought to depend on the recipient. You change the way you say comething based on who you are talking to. In fact this is one of our faourite open discussions in my house. Dh feels 2+2 is 4 no matter who you are communicating to. I agree and disagree in that the way you communicate 2+2 is 4 makes all the difference.

Part of my job is to be able to 'understand' what one party intends to do and communicate that intent to the other party ( without loss in translation, of course!) . On the face of it, it is really no big deal, but when I started researching it,I discovered among other things, Steven Pinker and the whole science behind language, articulation, perception, communication and conceptualization. Really 'Thought'-provoking stuff :)

I came across this piece of profound philosophy by Kahlil Gibran a while ago and chanced upon it again this morning. Its a strange motivator, but I wanted to save it in a personal space and that's how I got started here.. so here goes..


Somehow, the idea of being a bow that needs to bend backwards while being stable is so deep and true, it's almost scary..