I was having an interesting conversation with someone I met at a persuasion meetup last night and I was inspired to discuss something that has been rolling round my mind for a week or two, so I thought I’d write just a short post about how and when we adopt or discard some new skill or technique.
Whenever we learn or are taught something new, we often try it out and indeed most any form of training will have you do exercises to practice the new skill. What I find interesting is that, as someone who does a lot of self-learning, I am often testing out things I learn or theories I concoct in real life and I have to be extremely careful when I consider something a success or something a failure.
Most of us, at one time or another, have tried something new and we’ve fallen at the first hurdle, thrown our hands in the air and scoffed at the so-called experts who were clearly wrong as it demonstrably doesn’t work! I watch my daughter do this regularly and it is both challenging to encourage her to have another go and delightful to watch her eventially achieve it (normally after walking off and only coming back when she thinks I’m not watching).
As adults while we are aware of the concept of perseverance and not judging a book by its cover, I still regularly see both clients and myself making these same mistakes. What is also fascinating is that we also do this in reverse:
We give something a go and when it works first time: pronounce it incredible success and champion whatever it is to any and all who will listen.
So when we fail at something, we have learnt by now that we should give it a few more goes before writing it off, but do we do the same when we succeed?
I wonder how many times we have succeeded the first time we tried something new, pronounced success and then had a series of failures and rather than criticise the new thing, we assume that we are doing something else wrong and embark upon some detailed analysis of everything except the new thing? After all: you clearly demonstrated that it works… didn’t you?
Food for thought and it certainly made my conversation companion go “hmmmm” yesterday.
Watching a few excellent educational videos on TED.com, I came across this and thought it might appeal…
What I like is how, by changing the shape, colour and dosage of a placebo you make it more effective. Of course any kind of change work will be affected in the same way by things like experience of the therapist, certifications, professional membership, insurance etc. whatever the patient believes is important.
One of the things that I’ve noticed that contributes heavily to the effectiveness of a session is the discussion on how the technique works before and after the actual change works. If the client understands logically how it will work, then it is more effective. I just shows that actually it is possible to make unconscious changes through conscious, logical discussion.
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