(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:27 am)
I’ve been reading Alvin Soon’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) 101 series over on Life Coaches Blog. One of the underlying premises of NLP is that mind, language, and perception create a “subjective reality”; NLP itself is a set of methods and tools to explore those connections, if I am understanding Wikipedia correctly. I’m very interested in how people perceive reality, as that ties into a lot of the design work I do.
NLP aside, there is an article in Alvin’s series, So Dark the Con of NLP, that quoted this story:
There’s a famous story in the school of martial arts that I do. Once, an unsuspecting student asked the grandmaster of my school about politics in the martial arts. The grandmaster looked at him; and bestowed these golden words of wisdom: ‘Shut up and train!’
Ah, yes! Those are words I needed to hear!
I spend an awful lot of time trying to figure out how things connect together, what motivates people, and what the meaning of everything is. Sometimes that isn’t the point; you need to train to build capability and strength, so your skill is available when you need it. If you do not practice this, you’re just fooling yourself into thinking you’re prepared. I suspect a lot of my motivational issues would go away if I accepted that the pain of being UNproductive and UNcreative go away if I think of it as training, not production. There’s a big difference.
If you aren’t the type of person that responds well to Sensei busting your chops, another approach is play. However, you have to play a lot if you want to acheive some kind of mastery. It’s just a fact of repetition and reinforcement. It doesn’t take much, and it adds up rapidly if you make a concerted effort.
There’s something to be said for structured practice like training, but I think in the initial stages just finding some reason to practice those reps is enough. Take the burden of responsibility away from yourself, and stack up those repetitions because by doing it, you’re living what you want to do. This is a lesson that I didn’t understand when I was younger; it’s only now that it’s starting to sink in.
12 Comments
Hi Dave!
Wow, thanks for the mention :)
Interestingly enough, the grandmaster in the story also likes to say these 3 words at the end of every technique he demos; ‘understand?’, ‘good!’, and…‘play!’
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My son (12 yrs old) and I have recently become lacrosse-aholics and he is going to several camps this summer. He’s an intelligent kid and this is the first sport that he has gone out for, so he doesn’t have different sports type skills that would serve him well. In watching him, he spends critical time considering optimal paths and the “right” thing to do. This leads to him getting burned or losing a great opportunity and is detrimental to his overall performance. I can see that it gets a little frustrating for him. After careful thought, I figured out the path that he needed to take. He needs to just shut off his brain and react immediately. If he sees the ball, its his and he should go hell bent for leather for it, even if it means plowing into one of his own players. Yes he will make mistakes, but the intuition will come and reduce the mistake rate. His new target is to “affect the game” whether that be in a good or bad way.
He also has been well trained to be a polite kid. Consequently when he is doing defensive work, his stick checks (whacking the opponents stick or arm with the stick) are wayyy to polite. It doesn’t seem to matter that they have excellent protective gear for it to not hurt. Again, its time to shut off his mind and let them have it. This mantra here is “really get his attention”.
Also, being an intelligent kid, he conserves his energy throughout the game, which causes him to get beat at times. Again, he needs to shut off his mind and go 100% and rest when he needs to, rather than never getting to peak. I told him, if you are going to run, run 100% EVERY time. No throttle, just an on-off switch. It turns out that much work is avoided by a well-placed sudden burst of energy.
My message for him is always “100 100”, which means work 100% and go 100%. He’s getting there and its really helping his performance and building his love for the game through incremental successes.
There are certainly parallels in real life. I will undoubtedly wish I hadn’t taught him to shut off his mind, like when he starts dating or gets his drivers license. But for now its just a good idea.
Hey, cool Dave – I like the practice and play approaches to training. There’s a quote, “Discipline leads to freedom.” Your post reminds me of that.
Dean, I liked reading about your turning-the-mind-off idea during sports. Some refer to that idea as flow – just being in the moment.
Thanks, Dave.
My son had some scrimmages again today and I observed an interesting thing. He was almost completely backwards. He was thinking when he shouldn’t be (previously mentioned), and not thinking when he should be (ie. keep a spatial sense of opponents on the field). He was hustling pretty well tho. It just drives me nuts because I played hockey for several years as a kid and floor hockey intramurally in college, so my body “knows” naturally where to be without consciously engaging my brain. He, on the other hand, just doesn’t have that. I can’t fault him for that, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to scream. At the end he was getting frustrated and pissy, so I let it drop. We went and did some shopping and cooling down and then we had “the talk” about how he did. I don’t sugar coat, but try and remain positive. My assessment was “flashes of brilliance in a sea of mediocrity”. I went on to enumerate the two states and where he wasn’t doing things we went over before, like choking up on the stick at specific and critical times. I reiterate that I realize that he’s only been playing for a coupla months, but that I am critical so that he can be as good that I know he is, rather than blankly saying “you did just fine dear”. He was actually very upbeat about it and we will go over the stuff again tommorrow. I thought it was gonna be a pissing match, but apparently a nice bit of rest, some air conditioning, and a cold soda helped his attitude. I see my payday when his community ed lacrosse camps start happening and his skills get shown off, rather than the skills blending in with the above average players at the professional camps. The pain and agony will be worth it for him at that point.
That’s very cool. Being a dad sounds actually kind of neat. I used to think Uncle might have been the cool relation to have—-you get to just borrow the kids every once in a while—-but I imagine watching your own kids sprout up into something must be pretty darn cool.
Being the uncle is, by far, the best position to be in. You get to be the good guy and never the bad guy. Plus you get to give them bad habits and don’t suffer the consequences. You get to “pull the pin and run”, which is a luxury a Dad doesn’t get (atleast often). The uncle is also good because you get to advise, without the burden of the father-son relationship issues (ie. balance of power). A really nice aspect of my son participating in lacrosse is that he’s around a lot of other kids. It gives me many more data points to work with. When I deal mostly only with him, my other data point is me, which he can’t hope to live up to, due to selective or nostalgic memory. Compared to a 42 yr old college educated man, my 12 yr old looks like a complete idiot. In the context of kids around his age, he’s a friggin genius. Also with him playing with other kids, I get to use my enthusiasm on other kids too. At one indoor portion of a camp there was a little guy, probably like second grade, that was kinda lacksidasically throwing the ball against the boards. When I made a face at him, from the safety of being behind the glass, the suddenly got animated and throwing hard and increasingly accurately. He would throw it and I would react as if I had been hit. He was laughing and could have done it all day. Later in the day one of the other parents mentioned that she admired my interaction with my younger son, which puzzled me greatly, since we only have one kid. She explained what she had seen and I told her that I didn’t even know the kid. She was even more admiring at my kid skillz. Benefits of being a child at heart!
Dave, you should try and be an uncle as much as possible. Have inordinate amounts of silly fun. Depending on the age of your nieces and nephews, you can have a lot of fun and rattle your siblings just a bit. I have a great idea, presuming that your nieces and nephews are >7. Have a movie night at your place. Take them to the blockbuster and have them pick whatever they want. Now for the key. Go get a box of swisher sweets cigars at the local gas station. After you start the movies and eat stuff, hand out the cigars to the nieces and nephews. Don’t discriminate and expect the nieces to do it too. Don’t have them even unwrap them from their cellophane, just have them clench them in their teeth and watch the movie. Its such a novel and mature thing for them to do, it’ll be cool off the scale. Of course your sibling will have a stroke, but its not like they smoked them. From then on you will be the cool uncle, without contributing to their delinquency. The story of the coolest movie night ever will circulate through the nieces and nephew grapevine in no time. Really think outside of the box.
That’s a cool idea. Unfortunately, I don’t have any nieces or nephews. I did invite some of my younger cousins over for a summer and this did end up being a good time. We did all kinds of things. I think they had a good time.
Same idea holds for most any smaller kids. Course you will need to have a good relationship with the parents to pull really fun stuff. The difference between “Great Uncle” and “Creepy Uncle” does have a clear border.
I never thought of the difference between great / creepy before! The axis I think of is “talks to me like a real person” vs “talks at me like an adult”… trying to think of some moments of creepiness as an example. I think kids can generally smell the stench of the disinterested or self-serving adult from a zillion miles away…is that the creepy?
The uncle that teaches the kids the time-tested art of flaming shit-bags has navigated his way into creepydom. Sometimes the parents of the kids have no sense of humor or won’t have an appreciation for your particular brand of humor. That’ll sometimes get you into trouble. Thankfully I don’t have any terminally uptight relatives who have kids that I would likely teach the tools of the trade. At the very least you can teach them such time-honored treasures as “pull my finger”. Its not something that their parents might have in their curriculum goals.
Oh, that didn’t even cross my mind, teaching kids how to be scumbags. I must be slipping in my old age. I did once enlighten some kids about the utility of crab apples. They had collected a whole bunch of them, and came to show me. I was probably like 24 or 25, and commented, “hey, you could throw those at your DAD!” I haven’t been forgiven for that (I don’t think…I should ask :-)
As a virtual uncle you now need to teach the crabapple kids about slingshots. ;-)
Speaking of virtual uncles, I have a funny story about dealing with kids. my son and I went on a scouting outing to northern WI. We were staying at a cabin of one of the adult leaders. In the backyard, right next to the lake they had a pine tree that was dropping small cones all over the place. Of course the kids gravitated to them as excellent projectiles. The owner of the cabin was always yelling at the kids to not throw them in the water or spread them around the yard because it caused problems with the mower. It was a continuous battle against the kids natural tendencies. The last night we were out there we had a nice fire going, not too far from the fire. The owner told the kids that they could throw the pine cones into the fire, but he didn’t get many takes. Being the cleverly deceitful guy that I am, I told the kids “you know if you put a whole pile of pine cones in at once, it will make a loud popping sound”. Ever the skeptical types, they asked why. “Well, it has to do with the sap in the cones. If you get enough in one place, it rapidly ignites, causing the explosion”. Satisfied, the 9 kids went into high gear picking up every pine cone that they could find in the darkness. Probably ended up with nearly a bushel of them to put in the fire, which they did with great relish. Of course it nicely flared up and eventually there was a big crack, for whatever reason, and they were happy and thinking me an awesome guy. The owner of the cabin looked at me in awe, after surveying his remarkably clean backyard, or atleast as much as he could see in the darkness. He hadn’t thought outside the box.