Motivational Memos

The Antidote to Fear: Trust

I read an ancient Arabic story the other day about a merchant traveller with his caravan on his way to Baghdad. Half way to his destination the merchant encounters Pestilence who informs him that he too is on his way to Baghdad. Pestilence’s reason for travelling there is to kill five thousand people. Having delivered that piece of stunning news Pestilence disappears and the merchant continues his trip.

We next see the merchant returning from Baghdad where again he is intercepted by Pestilence. The merchant is angry.

“You lied to me,” he roars at Pestilence. “You told me you would kill five thousand people, but fifty thousand are dead.”

Pestilence patiently replies, “I told you no lie. I said I would kill five thousand people, and I have killed exactly five thousand people.” There is a pause and then he completes the information: “Fear killed the rest.”

Fear? Yes, fear – a word that is now synonymous with all that is problematic with being human. For some fear is the root disease behind all our maladies. It is fear that causes us to do wrong and hurt others as we seek to secure ourselves; fear that causes stress and leads to all sorts of illnesses; and fear that leads us to react to situations instead of being creative about them.

So what is the antidote to fear? The antidote is the same as it always has been: trust. First, trust in God. This is easy to say, but much more difficult to do. Can we accept the wisdom of the universe and rejoice in all our circumstances, not just the good or the fun bits?

Second, trust in others. Most people would agree that over the last fifty years there has been a serious deterioration in trust between peoples and communities. Yet our only real security – whose lack ignites fear – is with other people; if we cannot trust others we are destined to a life of fear, of always covering our back, of checking up on, of imagining the worst. How do we establish trust
between people?

Finally, trust in our Self – in our essence, or our soul. We need to enter our own souls and find there goodness and worth – and so the strength to face anything. Of course, the heart has traditionally been the seat of the soul, and that is why when we trust the in our Self we find courage. Courage, etymologically, derives from the heart. Trust in our Self, then, produces courage, which is also an
antidote to fear.

And why is this so important – because we are starting a new year with many new challenges. The economic meltdown could be cause enough to despair. Then again the situation in many areas of the world – North Korea at the moment and in some other states like Iran – leads one to fear the outbreak of a wider war. The fall in living standards, the chronic indebtedness of individuals, the scarcity of jobs and civil unrest, the general malaise of hopelessness partly originated by lack of any belief systems in the West, and if these weren’t enough on their own to inspire fear, there is the Mayan prophecy about the end of the world this coming December!

So, let us resist to the temptation to live in fear. Instead we must trust in God, learn to trust others, and most importantly find that trust of our Self within our Self, so that we can face 2012 with courage and confidence. And in doing so, prevail.

How Nothing Creates Performance and Beauty

I was with some friends the other day, including Ginny Richards, and she had just played the piano superbly well. We were discussing how it is that some people play the piano – or instrument or sing – so expressively, and others, who may be technically proficient, make it all sound so dead.

There is no easy answer, but my own focused on the space between the notes. Whether intuitively or not, the great instrumentalists play the notes but are more aware of the spaces between them. In fact these spaces frame the notes and are as important as the notes themselves; for it is in the contrast between a note sounding and its succeeding emptiness that the soul of the music resides.

Technically proficient performers tend to mechanise the notes and the spaces: they measure, precisely so, and thus no real feeling permeates the bridge between the sounds and its cessation. The expressive performers sense that note and its attendant silences – aching to speak through them indeed – are intimately connected; thus, in playing, they work to make the connection explicit.

Of course, this is also true in other disciplines. English poetry, for example, at its best and greatest, depends on rhythm and metre – the stressed syllable is framed by the unstressed ones, and in that contrast powerful emotions can be generated. And this is one reason why purely visual – or image-driven – poetry is less evocative. Certainly, the deliberate randomness of so much post-modern poetry completely fails to touch us at a deep level because there is no patterning of the sound effects, so the responses tend to be merely cerebral. In short people who like this stuff do so because it reflects their own view of the world, not because the poetry has entered the silence between the noise of words – and so driven to the surface the full force of the deep, chthonic gods of human emotion.

But perhaps most importantly of all is in the area of meditation which deploys the same principle. To wit, against the ‘something’ – the fullness – of life, the meditator enters the ‘nothing’ of meditation. As the Tao Te Ching puts it: ‘thirty spokes surround the hub: in their nothingness consists the carriage of effectiveness’. Breathing reflects this – the fullness of the breath in is followed by the emptiness of the breath out, but before the ‘out’ can happen there is a point of space, of turning, when the breath is neither in nor out, but suspended, as it were, on nothing.

When we meditate we deliberately try to empty our minds, and by doing so we return refreshed to the world of ‘things’. Further, it could be said that meditation on ‘nothing’ refreshes – cleanses – the doors of perception that have become so locked up for most of us.

I started by using words about playing the piano “superbly well” and singing so “expressively”, but really the one word, the most important word, that captures what happens when we pay attention to the spaces between the beats, the ‘nothings’ between the ‘somethings’, is the word ‘beauty’. We hear the beauty in the music and in the poetry; and arising from the meditation we see it – the beauty - in all that is natural, and sometimes even in what is not.

Thus, step by step, music, poetry, and meditation lead us eventually to the mystic realm where all is beautiful.

The Real Meaning of Christmas

I love Christmas, and I am especially looking forward to it this year because, as some readers of my articles may have deduced, I have been seriously ill and in hospital for three months. At one point it looked as if I wouldn’t make Christmas at all; and then as if I’d still be in hospital over Christmas. So to be out of hospital and at home with the prospect of Christmas before me seems truly wonderful.

 Of course, for some, Christmas is fundamentally flawed – it has been spoilt, commercialised, and all its true values have been destroyed. These people have a point; but what is the real meaning of Christmas?

 We will all doubtless have our own ideas, but for me Christmas can be expressed in five simple words extracted from the Nicene Creed. Personally, I am not a big believer in creeds as they tend to be divisive; so I use these five simple words and invite you to interpret them literally, mythologically or symbolically, or as you will.

 The five simple words are: ‘He came down from heaven’. The key word in the sentence is the middle one: ‘down’ – ‘He came down …’. You see this tells us about the direction of the godhead, of the divine. Human beings want ‘up’ – to ascend, to have more, to grow further, but the godhead comes down. Humans have enthroned themselves in the heaven of their own egos, exalted their own self-importance, and drawn immense satisfactions from promoting the works of their own hands. By contrast, the godhead comes down, and that is what we must recall.

 Before I fell ill in July of this year I was an extremely strong, self-confident individual who could anything I wanted to, or set my heart on achieving; I scarcely felt a sense of limitation. But as I lay there in the hospital bed, getting weaker and weaker, so my ego drained away and I began to see – to use a Biblical phrase – that my ‘own right arm could not save me’.

 And that was then, and this is now: some seven or so weeks after I left hospital, its memories get dimmer and more remote. The lessons learnt seem less important and we forget what we need to remember. Old habits return.

 So Christmas reminds me that God needs to come down – down – into my heart and mind and re-establish divine presence there. I pray then that that will be true for us all. And what does that mean?

 It means, perhaps, to become like the baby in the manger, like all babies in fact. Babies have no ego, they are open to all experience, and open to everyone. They are accepting – of all reality. If we could be more like that all the time how much better would this world be?

 May, then, the real meaning of Christmas come alive in your hearts and minds, as you reflect on that brilliant line from the Nicene Creed: ‘He came down from heaven.’

Pedagogy and Motivation

I was asked an interesting educational question recently about motivation and pedagogy: to wit, what pedagogy is used to create classroom strategies that each motivator prefers?

Pedagogy is a word that one doesn’t encounter as frequently as one did, say, in the Seventies; what does it mean? Pedagogy is the science of teaching, of instruction, of training. It answers the question of how people learn effectively. Just preaching to people may make the preacher feel good, but will the audience learn anything? An exceptional preacher, possibly, may well impart knowledge and information, even rouse people to take action; but in the real world if every teacher in the classroom used ‘preaching’ as their dominant pedagogy, there would be even more disaffected and bored youngsters than there are now.

To teach – or train - effectively we must understand how people learn effectively. This understanding then informs the way and ways we present, communicate and offer information, knowledge, concepts, ideas and even practical skills.

There is a definite correlation between Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and motivation itself; further, the nine motivators – as defined by Pink in his book  Drive, and by others in their work – are themselves grouped into three categories of three: some motivators, those relating to control, wealth and expertise, are predominantly about thinking. And this is obvious (if you think about it!): exercising control, creating wealth and developing expertise all have in common a planning element to them. They are the typical motivators of high achievers in the work place; they are also, to use NLP terminology, synonymous with the ‘visual’ – the what-you-see-is-what-you-get, with plans that are logical, coherent and highly visible.

By contrast, three other motivators are highly geared to feeling. These reflect the needs for security, belonging and recognition. Security is something that fundamentally we can only achieve through relationships; belonging is equally about relationships with others; and recognition can only come from others – and from positive relationships with them, usually. Relationships, then, are less about the NLP ‘visual’, and more about the NLP ‘auditory’; for it is in listening to others that the strongest relationships are built.

Finally, three motivators are related to knowing, which is intuitive and direct, rather than being logical and considered like thinking. These motivators are creativity, freedom and meaning. These motivators are at the peak of Maslow’s Hierarchy – they are self-actualisation motivators. And they are very direct. To take one example, creativity: everyone knows, or should know, that one doesn’t think one’s way to being creative, although much thought may precede the ‘creative’ moment. The universal testimony about creativity is that it comes in a flash – in poetry it is called the ‘muse’ – and immediately solves complex problems and produces outstanding works of art. It is instant, and invariably the creative, him or herself, knows they have been a conduit for inspiration. In NLP terms, then, this knowing corresponds with the ‘kinaesthetic’, because the creative moment goes through the body – it is felt, although that is not the same as being a specific feeling.

It should be clear from the foregoing that the pedagogy that motivation needs to use to create effective classroom strategies is NLP or the three modes of perception called Think-Feel-Know (TFK), and these two correspond. To take the latter, then, what are its characteristics?

Think-orientated people prefer detail, data, statistics, evidence, proof, references and generally lots of information. In complete contrast to this feel-orientated people like stories, examples, pictures, anecdotes, metaphors, analogies, graphs, diagrams and more generally and literally getting the picture! Finally, the know-orientated people like plain, simple facts – get to the executive summary as quickly as possible.

Each of us has all three modes of perception, but we tend to be dominant in one, and have a secondary backup. Thus classroom strategies need to reflect on how a balance of all three can be achieved; and better still, if the classroom and individuals can be profiled, then to weight the balance towards the dominant one or two tendencies. This is even more critical where special needs are involved.

And a curious thing also arises. It could be that the profile is done through a Think-Feel-Know or NLP test to establish which modes are dominant in any given student. But it can also be reversed engineered: namely, a motivational profile of the individual or class, based on the nine categories of motivation, and the three triads I mentioned, would give the teacher a clear idea of which of Think-Feel-Know modes of perception were most likely to be effective.

It can hardly be emphasised enough that an appropriate pedagogy for classroom strategies is essential, and equally, if don’t want to think about in that pedagogic way, presenting learning in a way that motivates students is core. Let’s learn, then, more about motivation.