solving the mind

Holding Contradicting Thoughts

Contradictory thoughts appear to be cul-de-sacs, promising nothing of value. Counter-intuitively, the introduction of doubt is a key ingredient in evolving outcomes that are beyond simply predictable. Design thinkers are often encouraged to shift or overturn values in order to explore new outcomes*.

This weekend’s Startup Leadership class involved a discussion with Manoj Kothari of Onio Design. He touched upon this important point and highlighted how the mind is a natural synthesizer. Being with contradictory thought allows for the resolution of conflict with time. Time here could be anything from a single night’s sleep, a couple of days or more.

The key is recognizing the cessation of the background, mental ping-pong process on hitting a contradictory thought. At that point, motivation to investigate the thread further, to place your thoughts in a constructive framework, or to seek out additional stimulant is on the low end.

Take the intuitive definition of the word “problem”. It can vary dramatically depending on the specific outlook, or attitude at that given point of time.

In recent customer trials for a product I’m working on, I interviewed parents of students from local private schools that employ English as a medium of instruction. Interviews with two parents of overachievers nudged me towards a discovery. Before the interviews, it never occurred to me that overachievers might have a problem. My predominant thoughts stayed with the visual of class laggards struggling to keep up.

It turns out overachievers do have problems as well and might be more inclined to address them.

My interviews culminated in the following problem statement around second-language acquisition, a well-researched problem:

We acquire our first language by learning from our environment. During that time we’re literally exposed to over a million new words thanks to our parents and caretakers. Acquiring a second language is left to schools that can at best provide an abstract learning environment. For instance, learning to speak the word “water”, or “mother” wouldn’t be valuable if there wasn’t a recognizable, real reward attached. Overachievers who hunger for this same environment are bound to discover richer rewards through participation in debate and other social events in that second language.

* Creativity in Design Thinking, Charles Burnette PhD:

Good designers typically seek satisfaction beyond that required by stakeholders in the problematic situation being addressed. By applying values or criteria not usually applied to a situation or experience, designers may find an unanticipated outcome. By shifting values, even contradicting those they might normally apply in a situation, designers can sometimes arrive at totally unanticipated and creative outcomes. Being highly independent in their judgment creative designers are not usually responsive to group standards and control; they often suspend or override judgment in their search for originality.

Meaning Meaningless

“What’s happening?” Have you ever had anyone ask you that?

As a beginner in meditation, I’ve often struggled with both sides of the question. At times, I’ve felt that my practice has resulted in a whole lot. From deep insight to even the occasional hallucination. At other times, its nothing at all. Perhaps reality is somewhere in between? You are just sitting down, watching the mind. And then again, there might just be something happening. Like a glacier scraping down a mountain side, its fingerprints are everywhere and its easy to miss recognizing what’s changing the landscape.

Three years down the road, I’m only now getting to a stage where I can occasionally turn my attention to the physiological state of the body to sense how far along I’ve come in a meditation session. In the beginning, the mind is stormy, tumultuous and ragged. Twenty minutes in, I discover the body is at peace, stable, quiet. Needless to say the mind follows.

And then there’s the pace of technology.

When I first saw the Muse headset at Le Web, I was blown away as it had the potential to marry metrics (a favorite subject) with the mind (another favorite subject).

I wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines. The team of Mindfulness Inc. saw that too and have recently shared their invention with the Kickstarter Community. I learned about it through a friend who tweeted it out. A lotus that blossoms with changes in you brain waves. Wow?! Talk about great design. That was way better than I’d imagined it.

The Lotus is a great idea for someone starting out like me. This is what meditation actually does and you can see it happen better this way than any other inorganic method. Meditating with the Lotus can realistically improve your chances of staying on the wagon. Although I do wish it were to come with a warning. If you’ve come so far as to start a practice in a search for answers, I’d share that getting past that mindset instantly is exactly what this is all about. The earlier you deal with this question, that much better for your practice.

As a Zen master once referred to the mystery of meaning,

“If we are looking at something, it can vanish from our sight, but if we do not try to see it, that something cannot vanish. Because you are watching it, it can disappear, but if no one is watching, how is it possible for anything to disappear? If someone is watching you, you can escape from him, but if no one is watching, you cannot escape from yourself.”

– Shunryu Suzuki.

Old Habits don’t have to Die Hard

On my way back from work last week, I paused my car at an T-shaped intersection. As I waited for the heavy traffic to thin out, another car drove around me from the right and aggressively attempted merge. Not having much space to maneuver, the driver’s turning radius got tighter and he merged only after scraping my front fender. I’d been stationary all this time and his move took me by surprise. After a short pursuit, I caught up with him, tried to make my case and he had the cheek to deny scraping me at all. Having failed to secure his insurance information, I left.

That incident didn’t leave my thoughts for some time after that. Thoughts perpetuating themselves have always been a common situation for me. I imagine more so than for others, as I still think of myself as obsessive by nature. Sure, I felt the injustice and lack of civility in the event, but it was over and I had no business furthering my agenda mentally. Something had to be done!

Much like the driver I’d had the bad fortune of meeting, some old habits give you little room to maneuver and work out different, better responses. They perpetuate mediocre, or even less desirable outcomes until the point where you’ll find yourself thinking in exasperation “How did this happen?” Our goal would then be to deny following the habit, get a better feel for what’s going on and respond differently.

To show you how difficult this can be, I was part of a small experiment where the speaker would call out a color. The idea of the experiment is to not think of the color called out. Most participants found it hard to not imagine the color popping up in their minds every time the speaker called out that color and its variants. I’d encourage you to try this out with someone else calling out the color.

Other tests with a similar principle are the selective attention test, and the attentional blink test. What these tests show is that on constructing a complete idea, the conscious mind loses its capacity to process new stimuli and reevaluate the evolving state of everything, including your own internal state from where intuition originates*. If habitual responses are really complete ideas stemming from the compression of the stimuli-response gap to negligible time, then what we need to do is grow that gap. We’ll need to cue ourselves. Put another way, we’ll need to devise a new habit to disrupt the old one.

This isn’t knowledge relegated to meditation practitioners. Digital marketers also employ cues to drive desirable behaviors and develop habits at the subliminal level**. So, if you want to break an old habit, start with a self-cue. A face with an attention-grabbing expression, say a lovely smile will work well. You might want to experiment with this a bit, think face-piles if you must. Now all you need to do is practice raising that image when faced with the trigger situation.

There’s no lengths to which you can take this. I’ve experienced it work well with starting something new and dealing with procrastination. I’ve been seeking professional opportunities in my industry and I’ve known myself to be tempted by the first opportunity that comes my way without paying enough attention to first determining if it meets the objectives I want to uphold. This usually leads onto hesitation when making hearty commitments and much disappointment at having let myself down. To help grasp the bigger picture, I push myself to ask- is the opportunity *the* blue sky I’ve always imagined? If not, then what would make it so? This is a process that takes time to perfect, and the inquiry can take days. On the flip side, it has helped me make firm commitments when I know they’re closer to where I’m headed.

* These ideas are explained in depth in Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan, one of Google’s earliest engineers and personal growth pioneer. Meng uses a happiness, science-driven stance and offers methods for enhancing mindfulness and emotional intelligence in everything you do. You can get the book with Flipkart, India, or from Amazon on your kindle.
** Skinner Marketing- We’re the Rats and Facebook Likes are the Reward. Our internet handlers are using operant conditioning to modify our behavior.