Unfurling into 2022
New, fresh and courageous?
Do you want to move into 2022 the best and most expansive version of you?Do you have a framework to hang your experience on that supports and sustains you?
Are you showing up the way you want to be experienced?
Are you working on leading yourself daily?
Let's do it! Now is the perfect time to look towards the future and begin to explore who you want to be in 2022. We have learned some valuable lessons the last couple of years and learning brings growth. Is it just me or does there feel like there is a collective sigh of relief emerging? I say we harness this energy and create something new and different for ourselves.
Often we reach the end of a year and launch ourselves headlong into imaginings of how we are going to be different, do different the next year. We use the momentum of the season and the prospect of a new year to make the oft times impossible possible . . . but how long does it last?
Change takes time. It is not always easy and certainly not predictable. This is the work I love. Let's make 2022 your most expansive ever. Not just another version of you but a version that transcends and includes all previous versions.
Over the next few weeks we will set in motion a framework that allows you to observe and process how you make meaning, how you construct your reality and how you can jump in and play with some of these levers to create new behaviours and new meanings. It is a great place to start our journey.
So let's begin at the beginning by slicing and dicing our experience . . . think of it as a stocktake of sorts. Let's lift the lid and see what is really going on inside of you. How you let the world in.
Why do two people experience the same event but remember it differently?
Why do we have problems communicating with others?
Why is it so difficult to understand how others think and behave?
I was once asked why do two people experience the same event but remember it differently? Have you ever wondered that yourself?
Because we are all operating from our subjective distillation of reality.
Firstly, imagine two or more people experience the same external event, say a car crash, immediately their focus narrows and they begin to scan and filter their environment. They slice and dice the same experience differently. Did you know the more intense our emotional reaction the more we commit to memory not only the event but also what happened in the lead up to it. It’s an evolutionary thing.
Thoughts happen thousands of times a day, that is a lot of processing for our tiny brains!
“A thought, says the study, is generally viewed by researchers as a mental state, a “transient cognitive or emotional state of the organism.”
We have thoughts about feelings and feelings about behaviours and on and on it goes. That's why our clever brain and body create short cuts and automatic processing. It also explains how things slip past our awareness.
Of course, this only becomes a problem if you want to change your thoughts or behaviours. That is why change is a process not a single event when creating new behaviours. So let's take a closer look at how we absorb life.
Senses and sensory perceptions
Taking in life through our nervous system we predominantly decode through our senses visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory. We usually have a preferred reference for example, a visual person will remember what they saw when the accident happened rather than what they heard or felt or thought. For others it may be how you felt or what you heard.
Filtering through personality structures
Essentially these are particular personality structures and ways of being that we default to for example, you may be a best case scenario person or a worse case, are you options driven or procedural, are you a detail person or a big picture. There are many types of personality profiling (a topic for another day) but for this purpose just know that many of our behaviours and sorting patterns are happening outside of our awareness.
Past experiences, values, beliefs
Once we have distilled the event through our automatic programs running outside of our awareness the experience is further filtered by our values and beliefs; what we hold to be truths, our memories and past experiences. We time code such that in our example of the car crash time went more slowly than it normally would.
Deletions distortions & generalisations
Ah the big three, otherwise known as the God filters. Our brain makes things fit with our world view. What we know for a fact. Some things we genuinely do not see, hear, feel experience even though others around us may. Cognitively we are not aware of them.
Have you ever left small pieces of information out, massaged elements of reality and/or generalised statements or beliefs when you are trying to influence yourself or someone else to make it fit with the desired outcome? Of course we all have whether intentional or not.
Movie making
Now we create a movie about what just happened. We refer back to this movie many times because we believe it to be the truth, in fact we can hold on to this movie for years. Can you begin to see why your movie might be very different to someone else’s? Mathematician, engineer and philosopher and founder of the field of general semantics, Alfred Korzibski made the famous argument "The map is not the territory". Our movie is an abstraction of reality, not reality.
State creation and behaviour
Everything gets pulled in to our state our movie and our body (interoception). We draw on our movie - top down and; our internal representation; or internal environment is showing us - bottom up. We are meaning making machines and remember our nervous system consists of both the brain and the body. This culmination creates how we feel and what action we decide to take.
“The relationships between our thoughts, our biology, the world around us, and our health and wellbeing are complex.”
So now you understand why your model of the world, your movie, your map is different to that of others. We are experiencing a snap shot of the event our version of reality, not necessarily the actual event. So too is everyone else.
How can this awareness help you when you are in communication with friends, family or clients?
Your subjective distillation is attempting to communicate with their subjective distillation. Neither is the territory (reality) both are unique abstractions, maps. Now you know this you can better approach a conversation or situation by asking yourself is my distillation completely accurate or do I need to update my map? Is theirs? What can we both connect on and then expand from there? Or learn to communicate through your filters in a way that will be absorbed by their filters.
As we look toward the future we need to do a stocktake and find out what is really true for us and what is inherited or outdated. If we are using our values, beliefs and history to create the rest of our lives and make life changing decisions surely we owe it to ourselves to find out the truth; the reality of who we really are.
Find out what programs are “running you”. Do a little housekeeping on yourself. Refine your reality. Then you can start to make plans that drive you in your desired direction. This is the first step on our journey to a more expanded and fulfilled you.
“I can do nothing for you but work on myself. You can do nothing for me but work on yourself”
If you are interested in this topic or any areas of your own personal culture or team culture please contact me to organise a free 15 minute chat or reach out on my socials and don't forget to sign up for my newsletter where I will be pursuing these and more topics, providing worksheets & e-books supporting you to include, transcend and expand your way to 2022.
Always moving forward x
Sandra
Rabbit Holes & Resources
Andrew Huberman - Huberman Lab everything you can find, youtube, podcast - Neurobiologist and Opthamologist started a free weekly podcast this year
Dr John Grinder - Defines NLP modelling of brilliance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYU7dkG6DtA
Alfred Korizbski - https://www.generalsemantics.org/the-general-semantics-learning-center/alfred-korzybski/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-7zYBKgzfs
NLP Communication video explanation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY8aWgAj5ZY