Human Potential Blog

Dr.Dan Harrison will conduct a workshop in Hong Kong on May 5, 2009. This is one of those rare and unusual opportunities to meet with Dr.Harrison himself and discuss some of the current issues and impact of the Economic Downturn and things you can do to maximise the productivity of your team.

Click here to visit the workshop page and sign up.

“I was there!” – yes, it’s true – I was one of the first million people to see Susan Boyle dumbfound the prejudices of an audience of thousands!   By the time I’m posting this, three days after her debut, it’s 2 million, and rising rapidly … 

This is a story of having the courage to pursue your dream, regardless of your critics, a lesson for all of us, and that’s enough of an intro,   

       Watch her here now!

This is the full version 7 min 31 sec – worth watching especially if you’ve already seen one of the editted clips.  I predict we’ll be seeing a duet between Susan Boyle and Paul Potts before the dust settles.  

Dream your own dream.  

John 

It’s an unprecedented situation.  Nobody prepared us for it. Nobody COULD HAVE prepared us for it.  The strategies and skills that worked last year – and over the past decades – no longer apply.  Since the situation is new, and unfamiliar, nobody can know how to handle it most effectively.  

People with power and authority are dashing from one meeting to the next … making bold statements about what will and will not happen … and there’s a very strong chance the decisions they are making are deepening the crisis, as they slash staffing, cut production, and print more and more money.  For every person that says the crisis will be long, there’s another saying it’ll be short: we can’t even agree about that.  What can we do?  

One very effective strategy is to learn from others.  But who can we learn from when the current crisis is deeper than any in living memory?  Do we really have to make it up ourselves?  

Here’s a lifeline, a small one, but a small and legitimate one is much better than a guess.  

Now, I rarely promote other websites and am very selective, but this post by Ari Galper has outdone all of his previous work: he found a person who experienced the depression, and interviewed her.  Her comments are short, and very much to the point, with that unmistakeable ring of life experience.  And it’s published with unrestricted access (I love the Internet Age!!) …  

You can read it here, it’s quite short, and definitely merits reading more than once:- 

www.UnlockTheGame.com/blog

I’m not selling anything here, nor is Ari – check it out!  

John 

This is one I’ve really been looking forward to sharing!

In the series of interviews we did with Dr Dan Harrison recently, he talked just as much about coaching and development as he did about selection and hiring assessment.

Here is a selection where he’s talking specifically about how to help someone develop themselves.

He specifically addresses the issue of how the coaching intervention required can be the exact opposite, depending on whether the person is showing stress behaviour or preferred behaviour. The issue is that if you get it wrong, a coaching session can actually make the situation worse not better!

Using Paradox to understand their behaviour, it becomes very clear how you can help someone most effectively.

… a great video … totally authentic, Dan at his best, there’s even a bit where we think we finished, but he adds more clarification … watch it now!

This is a very important development, especially if you

• care about your health
• care about your quality of life, and want it to be a long and rewarding one, or
• care about other people
• want to know what you can do about your concerns

If you are in a hurry, skip this intro and just watch the 3rd video below – it will give you the most valuable conclusions, and stands well in its own right.

But I actually recommend you to watch the three videos in sequence.

They feature Bruce Lipton – a doctor who studied how cells function for decades, including cloning, genetic engineering, and other modern research.  He really knows his stuff.  What makes him different is he makes it understandable.  And he takes a holistic view, incorporating areas of science that medical science has not yet fully woken up to.

The first one – 3 minutes – sets the context for the rest of the knowledge, and answers the question “what can I use this specific knowledge for in the rest of my life?”

Here they are, first the 3 minute intro:

This second one is the first hour of a presentation, in which Bruce shares what he’s discovered about how cells work.  Amazingly, he does this in simple words, and makes something that I myself never really understood in school science lessons very simple and obviously relevant.  It is a bit dry at times though, so if you hate science go straight to the third video – nerds and geeks, watch this one also.  It’ll elevate your understanding!

Here is 64 minutes of how cells function, and the biggest fallacy in modern DNA research:

The third one gets practical.  He brings together a very wide-ranging set of discoveries, from physics, maths, biology, chemistry, and medicine, explaining how phenomena such as energy healing, spontaneous remission, and connectedness actually work. What are the implications?  What is the one thing that we can do to best help ourselves?

Finally 95 minutes of practical application, including where Darwin went wrong about Evolution and how that discovery helps you live a healthier and happier life, and avoid being abused by companies that have a vested interest in selling you more and more medicines:

You may be wondering what a posting about medical research is doing on the website of a Harrison Assessments Master Distributor?? Of course, there’s social contribution: you need to know this stuff.  But yes, there’s more … here’s why this is important to our work here:

Through HA it applies directly to our work in the workplace.  Harrison Assessments is designed to measure a person’s belief, and then give a reflection of how those beliefs are likely to result in work-related behaviour, and ultimately to predict success or failure at work.  Dr Lipton’s work throws new light on just how impactful our beliefs are, not just changing our behaviour and our results, but even changing the DNA in our bodies.

Look at it this way – work is the single most important survival activity humans do, and is the glue that creates our huge interconnected communities.  Our beliefs about work are as important to us as the relationship to your body is important to a cell in your body.

With HA you can get a precise measurement of the impact of your beliefs on your work and on your productivity.  With the beliefs Dr Lipton shares, you can change your beliefs, change your biology, and boost your performance at work.

With HA you can even get a view of the impact of ANOTHER PERSON’S beliefs on their work, helping them change their beliefs, and boosting their performance.

Do you need to know what HA shows you?  Well, I suppose you don’t need to. I mean, you can live the rest of your life not knowing how your beliefs shape your results.  Just like you can live without knowing how your body works and how it connect you with your community – your body knows how to do that and was doing it for you even before you had any awareness of it.

But Is it likely to be useful to you to know?  Absolutely.  Especially in the light of the understanding that Bruce has shared in these videos.

Enjoy. And please post your reactions below, whatever they are!!

John

PS a big thank-you to Barb, who put me onto these videos with a throw-away comment she made!

Here’s an interesting – and scary – quote from a recent news article:

“Iceland’s krona was yesterday essentially untradeable and its value was impossible to calculate.”

Wow!  An entire country’s economy, and everyone in it, completely cut off from the rest of the World.  Untradeable currency = untradeable goods = no services, support, or help either.  Something that as recently as 4 weeks ago was completely unimaginable.  In the modern world, we are more dependent on each other than every before.

What does this mean?

Well, I don’t believe we’re going to see too many examples like Iceland’s implosion.  At least, I sincerely hope not! And that’s the reason I’m optimistic: the decision-makers around the World are so afraid of the impact of a complete meltdown and subsequent disintegration, that they will move quickly to restore stability.  Of course, there will be winners and losers in the process, but I do believe that the situation is so serious that agreement will quickly be reached about what to do about it.  In a crisis, a fast decision is better than no decision, and as a result there will be fewer losers.

But it is a good time to reflect on how we can maximise our potential.  Today, more than ever, the answer to the question “who or what can I rely on?” is more clear than ever: focus on your strengths.  Your strengths include your own strengths, and they also include the relationships you have with other people’s strengths.

Clearly, interrelationships are important.  Equally clearly, relying too much on others to provide for us is a mistake, and being self-sufficient and fully aware of our own abilities is also important.

Someone just wrote in with a question that’s so important it’s worth sharing, and having a wider debate around it:-

“Dear John,

I am wondering if you have any suggestions or ideas how to pass HA successfully.  I mean, to have a way to get the best result in my HA evaluation.

My company uses HA results to promote employees.

Look forward to hearing from you soon.

xxxxx”

Here’s my answer:-

“Dear xxxxx,

actually yes, I do …

Have you been through the assessment yourself?  It sounds a bit like you’ve either been assessed, or are afraid you might be about to be assessed and failed.

That’s normal by the way.  I’ve done the HA questionnaire many times myself, about 6 times in 5 years just for my own interest, and I still have butterflies about the result every time I try it again!

I love it when I find people who know nothing about our work writing about Paradox.  In this one Mark Joyner shares about psychologists’ advice that he’s discovered.

“Let your Evil Twin come out and play for your heart’s sake.”

In a situation he didn’t like, Mark was surprised at the advice he got both from a superintendent with life experience and from a book about anger management.  Students of Harrison Assessments will immediately recognise Paradox Theory in action.  The best quote is that anger “only gets a bad rap partly because it is often erroneously associated with violence.”

It’s a short post – here it is!

Enjoy

John

I subscribe to quotes from Abraham-Hicks.com – and unlike many others I subscribe to, can recommend their material.   If you’ve watched one of the initial editions of The Secret, you’ll have seen Esther Hicks and will know that she originally articulated much of the law-of-attraction thinking the movie is based around.

Here’s a quote that I got from them today:-

“It is not your role to make others happy; it is your role to keep yourself in balance. When you pay  attention to how you feel and practice self-empowering thoughts that align with who you really are, you will offer an example of thriving that will be of tremendous value to those who have the  benefit of observing you.

“You cannot get poor enough to help poor people thrive or sick enough to help sick people get well. You only ever uplift from your position of strength and clarity and alignment.”

I particularly like that last bit – the bold emphasis is mine.

Stay in balance!!

I’ve not made a post in a while, but this one is worth sharing as it affects us all.  I just received the following question:-

“Do you have general wisdom on how to handle insecurities? I usually handle them with positive affirmations, but you are not so hot on those, so I was wondering. I’m fraught with them today.”

Here are my thoughts, which are part of an exchange of ideas I’ll be sharing here:-

Simple enough – insecurities are the mirror-image of confidence.

If you look at both sides of it you see that neither can exist without the other, and yes, that means that “confidence” cannot exist but for the presence of “insecurities”.  If there’s nothing to worry about, there’s equally nothing at all to be confident about.  From there you can see that insecurities are not just useful, but necessary.  You only have them now because there is something that you are actually confident about, now.  It may be something you’re not focusing on at this moment but sure as eggs is eggs it’s there somewhere.

In fact, insecurities are a big foundation for our experience of existence.  If you didn’t exist there would be nothing to be insecure about, right?  So as long as there is a “you” that is conscious of your existence, there are going to be things that “you” – or actually, just your mind – will worry about.

Which is all very well, but the question is not why they exist, but rather what’s an effective way to respond to them?

So here’s another take on it – have a look at the insecurities and see when they reside:  Past? Present? Future?

I’ll bet the majority (80%, 90%, possibly more) are connected either with things that happened in the past, or things that have not happened yet.  If so, this would be totally normal, as it’s much harder to be insecure about what’s happening right now than about imagined situations!

Sorry if that seems short and simple, hope you weren’t looking for a thesis.  The issue is actually a huge one – it’s just that the solution needs to be simple.  Simpler than thought.

The best place to start is right here and now.  What’s happening now?  Look around, and use all 5 of your senses.  In particular, look for anything that you might need to be insecure about.  To be sure, there might be something, like a bus heading straight at you or a nutcase with a weapon or something.  If there is you need to stop reading this and handle it right now   OK, you back now?  Here’s the thing: even in a real live threatening situation you will find that by focussing more and more on what’s happening right now, there is less and less to worry about.  It’s actually quite peaceful, right now.  Anytime.

From that position of peace, if you feel like it you can look at your insecurities and sort them out.  Memory?  Or worry?

If you find a feeling that’s associated with a memory, you can just let it be.  Whatever happened has already happened and is no longer happening now.  You may be remembering a hurt that was very real at the time, but since it’s only in your memory it’s nothing to worry about, nobody ever died of a memory.  BTW if you’re thinking about it happening again, that’s not a memory, it’s a worry!  Let the memories be.

Likewise, worries have a life of their own.  They exist in a space somewhere or other, but like clouds in the sky they can only actually impact us if something starts to happen here and now.  Until it does happen, we’re still free to do whatever we’re doing … here, and now.

Of course if focussing on the present or accepting your insecurities is a challenge any time, you can break it down further into smaller and smaller steps, but it’s still basically the same principle.  Regardless of whether it’s easy or challenging, it gets easier when you focus on breaking it down into what’s happening here and now and what’s not.

Practice makes perfect, and with practice it becomes automatic to face fears and difficulties by first focussing on what’s happening now and what you have now, and then working back out from there.

If you look behind the mental chatter about everything that might be going wrong, you can see an underlying belief that you deserve more … which comes from confidence in your own inner worth.  You see how one creates the other?

Much more useful is just to notice the pattern.  As soon as you’re conscious of a pattern that’s happening the pattern loses its grip on your actions.  In that moment you are free to make a new choice, or to continue the pattern, but do so consciously.

Notice that our underlying human nature doesn’t change – we still have the hormones, we still have mental chatter, we’re still reactive to fear / pain / guilt much more strongly than we are to joy / peace / confidence – all of that is still very real and very much going on.  But when we’re conscious of them doing the thing that they always do we have more chance of making a different choice.  When we do something differently the outcome is sometimes different.

Of course you CAN use affirmations – just notice that you don’t NEED to.  Affirmations are by definition out of balance.  They may themselves be part of a pattern of swings.  Nothing intrinsically wrong with that – you can ride the swings, and swings do tend to naturally follow each other.  If they’re working, use them, but watch and notice both sides of the equation.

By the way, if you’ve read this far and have any thoughts, please do post a comment!  Say whatever you are thinking of, the best thing to share is your own experience.