Tim Noyce Advies

One of the things David Allen says about thinking and focus, is that “it’s not about whether the information is available, it’s about whether you are available to the information”.  Forget the nutty, mystical stuff where people think that imagining their dream life will cause it to appear. This is all about what you notice, what opportunities you take and what you filter out.

We all do a lot of filtering. If you want to prove this to yourself just take a moment to think about books and then look around you for a few minutes. Anything remotely book-related will jump out at you. It you do this on your way to work you will see book shops and people reading, things you never noticed on any other day. This is also why you notice anybody driving the same make of car as you, things related to a sport or hobby you are keen on, anything about food when you are hungry!You can tune your perception to anything This is why you should be very careful about what you focus on: your perception will highlight it for you, even if it is unpleasant…  If you go into a meeting expecting everyone to be obstructive you will perceive all comments in that light and, by reacting to your negative image of the other participants, generate resistance you would otherwise not have met. In conversation and negotiation your preconception of how well things will go is crucial. It will communicate itself to others through your body language and in every word you use. See youself as a beggar at the table and you will get treated like one!

It goes further. I have a wicked, bad habit of riding my bicycle without hands. If I focus on how difficult balancing is, I end up doing a lot of balancing and start to wobble. If I focus on how smoothly I am going round the corners, I go, wait for it, smoothly round the corners. The less attention I pay to the fact that I am not using my hands, the better the ride. Holding an image of catching the ball, making the jump, balancing flawlessly are all crucial in sports. Top athletes of all kinds spend significant amounts of training time visualising the kind of race they will run, the line they will take down the course.

Of course, when I put like that it is hard to say when someone is “planning their approach” and when they are using imagery to guide their actions. But that is a false distinction. When I am planning a project, the most important part of planning is getting a clear image of what the sucessful outcome of the project will be.

Do a little exercise with this. Choose a guiding image, or if you prefer goal. Visualize a concrete success for tomorrow. Write it down and run it around your mind first thing in the morning and at regular intervals during the day and see what you notice and what difference that makes.

I am doing this exercise with you. I had a conversation recently in which one of my clients said, kindly and with concern, that he had found me rather too careful and reticent in a meeting. “I am used to you being a terrier”, he said. “You chase after people and get things done”. He was right. I had had a bad conflict with a colleague shortly before and it had closed me down a bit. But I was grateful for the positive image of me that he held and I shall spend tomorrow imagining that I am indeed a fierce, but gentle, terrier: determined to get to the bottom of things and chasing down every result we need… Let me know how your images serve you!