Inform Yourself

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

Intuition: knowledge from within; instinctive knowledge or feeling without the use of rational processes” Oxford English Dictionary

One of the first questions people ask when they start trying to become authentic is, “how do I learn to rely on my own talents better?” My answer is that there are two things they can do. The first is very easy and requires nothing more than your own attention. That answer is, “just listen.” You see, these voices in your head never stop speaking to you and even though you may have become quite adept at ignoring them, they are still there. These voices in your head are talking to you all the time - you just don’t realize it much of the time. They are seen on the surface as what some call intuition and this is what you have got to learn to listen to better.

Intuition is not about extrasensory perception (ESP), a sixth sense or anything mystical or super metaphysical. It is about data, gathered by our five senses, which is being recognized by our subconscious mind, instead of our conscious mind. Carl Jung noted, “intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.” Dr. R. Rowan describes intuition as, “being able to bring to bear on a situation everything that you have seen, felt, tasted and experienced.”

Intuition is about instinctive or subconscious awareness. When I talk with people about the difference between using their conscious and subconscious minds I use the words reasoning and reacting. Reasoning is the result of logical, rational thought driven by your conscious mind. Reacting is the result of following your intuitive, subconscious mind.

Some people call it their “gut”, a “hunch”, a “funny feeling”, ”an inkling” and there are a hundred other euphemisms in as many cultures. The subconscious mind misses nothing and is aware of everything around us – always – so whenever we have a feeling about something that we can’t explain, it is more often than not just the fact that we can’t explain it based on what our conscious mind is aware of. We are not alone in our decision-making. There are two minds at work (or play) here. Instead of dismissing intuition as an unfounded and irrational impulse, reaching the 5th level requires that you learn to accept and respect this voice as it is your natural talents talking to you. In that frame of reference, learn to give that voice the benefit of the doubt and trust in it. The higher your levels of ability in a given dimension or class of talents (Head, Hand or Heart), the more intuitive you are about that dimension.

This is easier said than done, though. Just as we are not taught to trust our subconscious mind as much as our conscious mind, so too are we taught to go with what we know, not what we feel - stick with what you can prove, not some hunch.

"Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next" Dr. Jonas Salk

Of mammals, humans are the only ones who discourage listening to intuition, but there is a lot of research that proves that in reality intuition actually plays a larger role in decision-making than most conventional teachings would lead us to believe.

• Research into the decision-making of consumers shows that as much as 95% of the decision to purchase something is subconscious (Harvard-Zaltman, 2003)
• Research on Fire Fighters showed that 80% of their decisions were subconscious and intuitive rather than logical and rational (Klein et all, 2003)
• Research on Naval Commanders showed that 95% of decisions were based on intuition and “gut” rather than actually analyzing and comparing options (Klein et all, 1996)
• Yet another study of commercial airline aircrews in 1991 found that more than 95% of decisions were what was termed “snap judgments”, which are those based on intuition, not rationale (Mosier, 1991)
• In a study of offshore oilfield managers, one study showed similarly that 90% of decisions were not of the conscious rational type, rather they were snap judgments and intuitive (Flin, 1996)

Great athletes too are often quoted as saying “if you have to think about it, it’s too late.” Even those people that most of us would assume must be very logical and rational turn out to be very much driven by their intuitions. Physicist Albert Einstein’s genius for conceptual thinking was much more a feeling for him than a rationalization of the facts.

So intuitive and pure was this talent that he only vaguely understood it and rarely attempted to use words or logic to define it. In his work, Principles of Research, Einstein said, “There is no logical path to [truth]. Only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach it.”

This is not unusual for any of the modern-day geniuses we studied as well. Most had a very hard time attempting to explain their decisions in a literal sense, they just knew how they felt and what things they saw clearly and those they did not. Their level of intuition and willingness to trust their guts is extreme. Painter Pablo Picasso once told a friend, “I don’t know in advance what I am going to put on the canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colors I am going to use. Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall land on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the effect of my work.” What Picasso is saying here is that he follows his genius where it leads. He is not trying to control it, he is just trusting his gut and going with the flow. Only after he has created something might he then try to rationally explain or analyze it. Poet Robert Frost spoke about his process for writing poetry as one of, “carrying out some intention more felt than thought.”

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." ~ Albert Einstein

I said that I gave two answers to the earlier question of how someone can learn to hear their own voices better. The first answer is simply “learn to listen to them.” The second answer is to use some method of actually measuring them. Subjective introspection (i.e., listening to what your inner voices are saying) is a good start, but it can only take you so far. Another way to help you to develop superior self-awareness is to employ some objective scientific tool that will actually measure and quantify those talents within. With my own clients I use a battery of different assessments, but the profile we used for the Genius Project was customized from its original design specifically for our purposes, so it is another great way of understanding your talents, your voices, your masters.

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

Masters and Blinds Spots

A very common perception for most people is that we all see the same reality. We tend to be fooled into thinking that everyone sees things as we do. Surely everyone notices the fatal flaw in this strategy way down the road, don’t they? Surely the others sitting at this table appreciate the impact that this decision is going to have on all the workers, right? Of course the rest of the team understands the importance in taking action right now.

The truth is, no one sees reality in exactly the same way you do, and your unique neural networks play a significant part in explaining why. While your emotions, your experiences, and your knowledge all play a large role in explaining why your view on reality differs from others, your mental filters and the unique combination of data they allow in is also an important part of it. Since your neural networks are unique, so too is the information that is filtered into your decisions or blocked out. When your neural networks are robust high-speed connections, they filter information into you at tremendous rates and you see that one aspect of reality very clearly. If, however, these networks filter information out then you may be completely unaware of certain aspects of a reality.

Just as not all neural networks are created equally, so too not all voices are equal either. The more robust the network, the louder the voice associated with it and the clearer you see that aspect of reality. The less developed the network, the softer that voice will be and the more ambiguous that aspect of reality will seem to you. It is different for each person. One person’s mind might be biased towards the factual aspect of a situation and blind to the humanistic aspects, so while they make sure action is taken, they are blind to the fact that in so doing they have irritated a lot of people. Another person might be so focused on the humanistic aspects of the situation that they completely ignore the big picture, so even though the bus is indeed driving off a bridge that is out, at least everyone on the bus is feeling valued and understood.

Jay Niblick describes the strong networks as masters and the less developed ones, if they are less developed enough, as blind spots. Master dimensions are so loud that they over ride the others and demand more attention, while blind spot dimensions are not as dominant and you may sometimes ignore this aspect of reality in favor of the louder voices of your masters.

Just as we all have physiological blind spots in how we see; we can each have neurological blind spots in how we think as well. Your mental blind spots can cause you to miss key aspects of a situation and as a result your decision might not be as accurate When you create a score for each of these three dimensions or classes of talent, you can plot those scores and create patterns, which is the easier way to understand how they all play together. When we do this, we come up with seven unique patterns (or Master Patterns).

The seven Master patterns are:
1. The Balanced Pattern – Masters: Head, Hand & Heart. Blind Spot: none
2. The Social Pattern – Masters: Hand & Heart. Blind Spot: Head
3. The Director Pattern – Masters: Head & Heart. Blind Spot: Hand
4. The Efficient Pattern – Masters: Head & Hand. Blind Spot: Heart
5. The Supportive Pattern – Master: Heart. Blind Spots: Hand & Head
6. The Practical Pattern – Master: Hand. Blind Spots: Head & Heart
7. The Systematic Pattern – Master: Head. Blind Spots: Heart & Hand

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

Voices in Your Head

The root of Dr. Hartman’s (Father of the Genius Project) discovery was in his identification of three distinct dimensions of value (i.e., different ways of judging or valuing things). Each of these dimensions could be associated with it’s own neural network if you will, and all of the natural talents you have for how we think and make decisions fit into one of these three categories or classes of talent. Hartman assigned the following titles and descriptions to these three ways of perceiving reality:

• The Systemic dimension: The dimension of formal concepts. Ideas of how things should be. This dimension is one of definitions or ideals, goals, structured thinking, policies, procedures, rules, laws, and “oughts” and “shoulds”.

• The Extrinsic dimension: The dimension of comparisons, relative and practical thinking, “real” results (as opposed to theoretical results in the Systemic dimension). It includes the elements of the real, material world, comparisons of good/better/best, and seeing things as they compare with other things in their class.

• The Intrinsic dimension: The dimension of uniqueness, of persons or things as they exist in themselves. The dimension that focuses on the essence or being of the object. This is the valuing of an object or person with an eye toward its singularity, uniqueness, or spirituality.

Dr. Hartman’s work on Formal Axiology has filled volumes so we won’t get into a deep discussion on the specifics of the science. What we do want to take from Hartman’s work, however, is that since all of our natural talents fall into one of these three classes of talents if we can understand and measure our abilities in each then we can learn where our genius lives.

My only problem with Dr. Hartman’s work is with his titles. I’ve found that my corporate clients think they are too scientific so I’ve given them new titles and definitions that are a little easier to understand:

• The Head (Hartman’s Systemic): the class of talents that deals with intellectual or conceptual thinking, creating order and structure, long-range planning, problem solving and big-picture or strategic thinking. Thinking

• The Hand (Hartman’s Extrinsic): the class of talents that deals with practical thinking, real-world action orientation, details, results and tangible or tactical thinking. Doing

• The Heart (Hartman’s Intrinsic): the class of talents that deals with people, empathy, sensitivity and understanding for others and emotional or humanistic thinking. Feeling

While all of us possess some level of ability in all three of these classes, they are not all equal. All of that creating and pruning of neural networks that we do causes us to develop our own unique level of ability and preference for each. Some people have a natural talent for the Head dimension, and as such they possess superior talents for intellectualizing, theorizing, solving problems and thinking strategically. Some people have more robust networks for dealing with the Hand dimension and find they have natural talents for understand how things work, catching the smallest details, being able to stay locked onto the end goal without distraction, being pragmatic and thinking tactically. Still others find their greatest set of talents live in the Heart dimension and they are naturally gifted when it comes to understanding others, being aware of their thoughts and emotions, communicating with them, perceiving their motivations and connecting with them.

These three classes are like voices in your head. Since they are subconscious filters, determining which information you see clearly and which you don’t, they speak to you all day long, telling you which stimuli to notice and which to ignore. As such they shape or create your perception of reality. If the neural network supporting the class of talents called the Head is well developed than this voice talks to you clearly about all the structure and order in your environment. If your Hand dimensions is built on a robust neural network, it shares with you all of the data coming in concerning your physical or tangible reality, and if the Heart dimension is refined and well developed it talks to you about the emotions and feelings of those around you.

While it’s possible to have equal talents for all three of these dimensions, and therefore equal levels of natural talents in each, most people develop stronger networks for just one or two and it is this combination that makes each of us unique.

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

Subconscious Mind Exercise

Here’s another little demonstration of the fact that even though you forget it, your subconscious mind is always working behind the scenes to influence or even control what you do in the real world. While seated, take your dominant leg and raise it off the seat but keep your foot hanging down free and loose. Now start to rotate your foot in a clockwise circle. Nothing too grand, just say a 12-inch circle. Now, at the same time, take your dominant hand and place it in the air in front of you like you were writing on an invisible black board. While continuing to rotate your foot in the same clockwise direction, use your finger to draw a 12-inch letter “S” on the invisible board in front of you.

What happened with your foot when you drew the S? For the vast majority of you, your foot started following your hand and began to move counter clockwise. Why? You didn’t consciously tell your leg to start going in the opposite direction did you? It happened
because your subconscious mind has developed such a strong habit for thinking that the direction of an S is counter clockwise, and your conscious mind was overridden and both limbs listened to your subconscious mind.

You may have trouble actually hearing your subconscious mind, but it is there. Your body heard it even if your conscious mind did not. The problem with the subconscious mind, however, is that we don’t trust it, we’re suspicious of it. We live in a world that assumes that the quality of the decisions we make are directly related to the time and effort we put into them. As doctors treat all their patients they put lots of conscious effort into each decision – don’t they? When good managers make decisions, they take time to carefully weigh the entire set of variables before they act – don’t they? And what are we taught about making decisions?

Haste makes waste, look before you leap, Stop and Think. Don’t judge a book by its cover. We are taught that the more information you gather, and the more carefully you deliberate, the more accurate the decision will be. This view assumes that when we are at our decision-making best, we are the pride and joy of Plato, Descartes and Kant (all of
whom argue that rational reasoning and logic rule the best decisions). Formal logic will, by itself, get us to the best available solution for any problem – or so we are taught. The subconscious mind, however, has much more to do with controlling our decisions than we give it credit for.

One of the reasons experts think the subconscious even exists is because consciousness has a very limited capacity. To survive in the world people must be able to process a great deal of information, more than we can consciously juggle at one time. It all comes down to efficiency. When you consider that, thanks to our five senses, we are being bombarded by that tremendous amount of 11,000,000 bits of data every second of our lives, we simply can’t process that much information at one time. According to Dr. Timothy Wilson, “Scientists have tried to determine how many of these signals can be processed consciously at any given point in time, by looking at such things as how quickly people can read, consciously detect differences in flashes of lights and tell apart different kinds of smells. The most liberal estimate is that people can process consciously about 40 pieces of information every second. Think about it; we can take in 11,000,000 pieces of information a second, but can only process 40 of them consciously. What happened to the other 10,999,960? It would be terribly wasteful to design a system with such incredible sensory acuity but very little capacity to use the incoming information. Fortunately, we do make use of a great deal of this information outside of conscious awareness”

Our subconscious mind tends to get more involved in the smaller decisions than the larger ones. Deciding to close down an entire division is not only a decision that will most likely be made using conscious thought, but also one that will probably be better served as a result. My focus in this book, however, is on the thousands, or tens of thousands, of small decisions you make every day. These have a much more significant impact on your personal performance than do the few and infrequent big decisions you make.

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

One Brain-Two Minds

We may only have one brain, but it contains two different minds. The first mind, the one we are most aware of and familiar with, is the conscious mind. This is the logical, rational mind that we all consider when we think of the mind, because this is the mind we control. Intent is a key word for this mind because the results of the decisions we make with our conscious minds are intentional. The second mind, however, operates well below the surface or our awareness, making much more intuitive, quicker, decisions, without the justification or rationalizations seen in conscious thought. This is the mind that operates without our conscious intent. This is the mind we are more concerned with when we talk about self-awareness and this is the mind we are most interested in when it comes to improving your individual performance.

Even though this second mind (i.e., your subconscious mind) operates below the surface, that doesn’t mean its effects are irrelevant or inconsequential. Quite the opposite, the effects on your life from your subconscious mind are remarkable. The jumbled paragraph below is a great example of how our subconscious mind can deliver results that are visible on the surface, even though not intentional.

Read the following paragraph as quickly as you can and see how easily it makes sense.

THE PAONMHNEHAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde
Uinervtisy, it deosn”t mttaer in what order the ltteers in a word are, the only
iprmoatnt thing is that the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can
be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit porbelm. This is bcuseae the human
mind deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe.

Could you read the words above? It was pretty easy wasn’t it? Actually, the faster you read the easier it probably was. That’s because the faster you read, the more you relied on your subconscious mind. You weren’t consciously working to rearrange the letters of each word, but your subconscious mind registered these words coming in anyway, and processed them appropriately. If you tried to use your conscious mind to do this, it would take you much longer (go ahead and see what I mean with just the first line). Our subconscious minds can detect and pick up information up to 800 times faster than our conscious minds.

It is this subconscious mind that holds the greatest potential for increasing your individual success because this is the mind that influences, and sometimes even controls, the majority of the decisions you make every day. Just as it took surprisingly little effort to understand this jumbled paragraph, so too does using your natural talents require surprisingly less effort. That’s the whole key to reaching the 5th level of performance and becoming a genius at something. When you learn to trust your subconscious mind, and manage to create a role where most if not all that you do relies on how your subconsciously tend to think (i.e., your natural talents), the results you get out will be efficient and accurate, even though they require less effort.

While we can override that control and use our conscious mind to make decisions, something we tend to do with larger decisions, the vast majority of smaller decisions are subconsciously driven. In other words, we can think about thinking, when the situation is urgent enough or we are forced to, but whenever we forget to think about thinking control reverts back to our subconscious mind. Becoming a Genius means creating a life where you align what you are trying to do with the way your subconscious mind likes to think. The less you have to think about thinking, the more effective you will be.