Initially this post is going to seem like a bit of a diversion. I’m not going to write about drawing your goals, your resilience or your comfort zone. In fact I’m not going to write about drawing anything at all really. Drawing is the tool, the process, the mechanism, the facilitator, the means that I have been suggesting we all could benefit from in order to get our brain working just a little bit differently, just a little bit more effectively to solve a problem or attain a goal or brainstorm an idea. But what are problems, goals and ideas? It all starts with a thought doesn’t it? When it comes to problem-solving, goal-setting, brainstorming or any other ‘thing’ you are doing which involves getting from some ‘stuck’ position A to some ‘unstuck’ position B, it first involves a thought. The thought that you don’t want to be where you are right now but someplace else instead.
Thoughts come by other names too. Ideas. Visions. Dreams. This week I’ve been thinking a lot about visions and dreams. It’s been just over a week now since Nelson Mandela died. A truly inspirational man. A freedom fighter who at one time was considered a terrorist by some but whose memorial service was attended by heads of state and leaders from around the globe including David Cameron and President Obama. What Mandela had was a vision. He had a vision of what his country would one day be like. He had a vision of what his people’s lives would one day be like. And he had a vision so strong and so vivid that he held it throughout his imprisonment and was able to start taking action towards making that vision a reality the moment he took the first steps of his infamous walk to freedom.
Many people have had a vision so strong and vivid, which they were completely committed to, that they were able to make it happen. These visions come in all shapes and sizes but there is something different about those people that make their visions and dreams a reality. The most important thing seems to be that they had a crystal clear vision in the first place and what these inspirational people seem to have in common is their unwavering commitment to that vision.
So today I’m asking ‘what’s your vision?’ And ‘how committed are you?’
Do images help?
This week I was introduced to this motivational video on dreams which seems to have inspired even Richard Branson.
It is a great motivational speech on pursuing your dreams but for me the video footage that accompanies it invokes an even greater emotional response in me than would the speech alone. I was also introduced to the latest Brené Brown blog post which shows an RSA animation of a speech she gave on empathy in London. I simply love listening to Brené speak because I enjoy the way she delivers her stories so much. But her speech is made even more powerful by the amazing animation that RSA created to accompany it.
And something completely different – I recently came across this article from the College of Occupational Therapists on how they used visual goal-setting to help people with learning disabilities set personal goals for their treatment and care pathways.
So whatever we want to change about our ‘world’, whatever we want to achieve, it starts with a vision and commitment to that vision. If creating a drawing, a model, an animation or a video strengthens that vision then why not give it a go.
What’s your vision?
In the last couple of posts I talked about vulnerability, taking risks and resistance to change and how the root of these is fear. If we can overcome the fear we can make ourselves at least a little vulnerable, take risks, overcome our resistance to change and take those actions steps. One way of overcoming the fear is to identify just how resilient we are. Another is to recognise when we are in our comfort zone and slowly move out of it.
How can we use visual images to move out of our comfort zone?
It can be quite hard to identify when we are in our comfort zone. We know what it feels like but don’t necessarily know what it looks like. Our comfort zone is like the protective bubble we keep ourselves in. We don’t like going outside the bubble and we don’t like anything from outside the bubble coming in. The worst thing that can happen is when we feel our bubble has burst. So let’s use this image of a bubble to draw our comfort zone. Your comfort zone at the time you are drawing the image will be relative to the purpose of the exercise, project, problem or goal. As an example let’s say I have an action to make a video of myself facilitating a meeting using drawing techniques. I am quite comfortable in meetings and I am pretty comfortable giving presentations. I am comfortable if I know my subject – but not if I don’t. I am comfortable with giving a presentation to a room full of people, but not a theater or large conference facility. But I am horribly uncomfortable being videoed. For many people their comfort zones will be flipped the other way around (they might be comfortable being videoed but not giving a presentation) and for some they will be uncomfortable doing either. In my picture I have drawn me inside the bubble doing what I am comfortable with, leaving all the other activities outside the bubble. Once you have drawn your ‘comfort bubble’, pick something outside the bubble to work on. So I’ll pick the web cam. This is the smallest step for me to get used to being in front of a video camera. At this stage I havn’t even drawn on Vimeo or YouTube although I could have done. The aim is to work on one of the elements outside your comfort zone over a period of perhaps a week, then redraw it once you have mastered that step. Over the period of a few weeks you will be able to see how far you have come and how your comfort zone has expanded. You could even drawn the bubble in pencil and simply rub it out each week and redraw it around the elements you have accomplished. This exercise is a great confidence booster and can really help you move outside your comfort zone and get you taking action towards your goals. Let me know what is and isn’t in your comfort zone……….
In my previous post I talked about resistance to change and vulnerability, primarily caused by fear, as obstacles to taking action in pursuit of our goals and solutions. This post shows a simple visual technique for building your resilience against failure, criticism, ridicule and knock-back. Remember we cannot prevent these things from happening – they are part of life. We can invest a lot of energy trying to prevent them when our energies may be better invested in building our resilience to them.
What is resilience and how do we gain it? Resilience is defined as the ability to overcome difficulty – to spring back. Actually most of us are far more resilient than we think. We just need to recognise our skills and strengths. It’s easy to forget them when we experience a set-back. It’s easy to beat ourselves up or join in with those on the outside already doing a great job of that for us!
Imagine you are a fighter pilot. You’re jet is shot at and starts to go into a spin. What is your first tool from your resilience toolbox? The ejector seat? Well that’s a pretty good one! But the first tool is your skill as a pilot. You might be able to bring the aircraft back under control. We often forget that our inner strengths, innate talents and learned skills are available to us, choosing to turn to external resources first. In this instance bringing the aircraft back under control isn’t possible. You and your Navigator have to eject. However your own skills and strengths are still at play because you, as the pilot, are the only only that can press the eject button (in some training aircraft the pilot is in the back and has to shout ‘eject, eject, eject’ to the training pilot so he knows when to press it). You have to keep your cool to undertake that task. So you’ve ejected from the aircraft and at this point you are using two external resources – the ejection seat and the parachute. First obstacle overcome. You land in the sea at night, in strong winds and heavy rain. Now you have to survive until you are rescued. The tools in your resilience toolbox are made up of both external and internal resources. External resources include the life-raft, your life jacket, whistle and flare, the survival pack in the life-raft and eventually the search and rescue helicopter that is going to find you and winch you up to safety. However you are very much dependent on your inner resources to make it that far. They might include remaining clear-headed, your ability to swim, problem-solving skills, good memory from the training exercise, teamwork, intelligence, tenacity and even humour. Take a look at the picture below:
The ‘Survival’ picture shows all the external problems and obstacles and both the external and internal resources. You can draw the same picture for your current goal or solution in order to help you take action instead of remaining stuck, paralysed with fear. In place of the wind, rain and waves add the obstacles, fears and problems to the picture. This picture works particularly well for businesses. So the wind, rain and waves might be finance, regulations, lack of customers. Why not throw in some sharks for good measure – I missed them off my picture but they are a great one to represent external critics! The whistle, life-raft, life jacket, survival pack, flare and helicopter might be colleagues, savings, local business support organisation, etc. But the most important element to add to your picture are the internal strengths and skills. List absolutely everything you can possibly think of. The important thing is to make sure there are more internal skills and strengths than external ones and problems/obstacles. You should end up with a picture that clearly shows at the bottom a raft (no pun intended) of inner skills and strengths combined with a handful of external resources that clearly outweigh your fears, problems and obstacles. Keep this picture in mind at all times or display it somewhere prominent to remind you that you have enough resilience make yourself vulnerable enough to take the risks required to move forward and take those actions steps that support your goal.
In his book ‘The Inner Game of Stress’, Timothy Gallway uses the concept of the Tree of stability to help identify our resources to help us retain stability against stressors. The same idea can be applied to resilience against fear of vulnerability and change. The roots of the tree are the external and internal resources that keep the tree stable when faced with stressors (in our case obstacles, fears and problems) represented by wind, rain, lightening and tornadoes. I think the Tree of Stability works particularly well for personal goals and Timothy Gallway lists around 30 inner resources we each have available to us from imagination and humour, to empathy and compassion.
Tim uses the analogy of the story of the The Three Little Pigs. Only the house of bricks withstands the wolf’s attempts to huff and puff and blow the house down. This is another image you can try. Again, draw on the fears, problems and obstacles as perhaps, wind, rain and lightning and the resources, represented by strong foundations, a solid roof, keeping it well-maintained, etc. as the external and internal resources you have available. Draw them underneath the house where the foundations would be. Would you rather have this house
Or this one?
Using one of these images (‘Survival’, Gallway’s ‘Tree of stability’ or ‘Strong Foundations’) or one of your own works very effectively to help you keep in mind the resources you have available to you to remain resilient in the face of failure, criticism or knock-back. Once you realise just how resilient you are there is nothing stopping you from taking that step, putting yourself out there, making that presentation, approaching that person or proposing that solution. You can be confident in your abilities and confident that in the event of a set-back you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and carry on.
Let me know how resilient you are.
Yesterday, on another forum, I invited people to have a go at visual goal-setting/problem-solving using the video I put together and posted on YouTube. One person got back to me and shared her reservation about setting goals. She loved the idea of working in a visual format but hated setting goals. More specifically she hated the pressure of deadlines. Conversely another person suggested I add a step to my video about putting the action steps in the diary. So I have a dilemma.
How important is it to set deadlines in goal-setting? If you are trying to solve a problem the chances are there is a deadline which may have been yesterday! Are deadlines good or bad? Should I include that step in my visual goal-setting method? In an earlier post I talked about how I prefer to think of visual goal-setting as designing my reality rather than my future because the future is always ‘out there’ giving a sense of it being unattainable. That may be fine in our personal lives but surely in some facets of life (such as in business or academic study) deadlines are absolutely essential right?
A small company called Coudmaniac Labs have banned deadlines from their organisation with the aim of encouraging the creative process. They claim that productivity has improved as a result and that “It turns out when employees are less stressed, they do better work, faster”.
In contrast many writers claim that they simply would not get their writing activities completed if it wasn’t for the deadlines set by publishers and editors.
How useful are deadlines to me? Well they are imperative to academic or professional study. I can base this on two very simple facts. When I have had to hand in assignments or projects by a particular deadline, or study for an exam I have completed the work on time and to a high standard. No matter how much I enjoyed the subject I’m not sure I would have got my head down without the deadline. I surmise this from the fact that I have twice signed up and paid for courses with no deadline so that you could complete them in your own time. I didn’t complete either of them. The first I never even sent off an assignment; the second I sent off the first assignment but never completed another one. Clearly the fact that I have paid for something is not the deciding factor, although if you have spent hundreds or thousands on a course (these were each around £200) that might provide a greater motivation for completion. Is it just the deadline? Other factors might include the reward or accolade at the end. Might we be more motivated to complete a goal if the end result is a recognised qualification such as a degree, a promotion or a pay rise? I can’t answer regarding promotions or pay rises since every promotion I have ever had has been as a result of moving jobs (I’m not sure if that says something about me or the organisations I have worked for!). I do know that I have worked for an organisation that had performance related pay and neither this aspect nor the deadline was much incentive for me completing the goal. The incentive was mostly just wanting to do a good job. Producing something of good quality has always been more important to me than just producing. I have never been afraid to say to a manager or a customer ‘look I’m running behind, I could give you what I have but I’d rather finish the job properly. It will be with you a couple of days later’. It’s not like I’m the kind of person that always runs behind. I’m not. but quality is important to me.
However am I right to focus on producing quality rather than producing something? Perhaps it depends on the situation. Aren’t there Hard deadlines and Soft deadlines? Are Soft deadlines targets? Should targets have penalties if they are not met or just bonuses if they are?
Recently I came across James Clear’s blog post advocating scheduling over deadlines. A lot of it makes sense to me. He suggests that scheduling in set time to work towards our goals is more productive than setting deadlines. Last year I completed the very successful Beachbody Power 90 and P90X workout programmes. I printed off the workout schedules for the 90 days. One of my favourite Tony Horton sayings is ‘do your best and forget the rest’. He advocates modifying when you need to as long as you turn up. This really worked for me. Yes I had a goal weight and there was a 90 day deadline but the two were not inextricably linked. As long as I was improving over the 90 days I was working towards my goal. I completed the workout programmes and lost weight but the real sense of achievement was the improvements to my fitness slowly and surely over the 90 days. Without scheduling in the workouts and ‘turning up’ I quite simply would not have kept it up. Some days I almost walked my way through the workouts and others I made huge breakthroughs like the day I realised I could do proper push ups rather than doing them from my knees. As long as I turned up I was bound to make progress. Does this apply to other kinds of goals? You often hear successful writers talking about how they sit down and write every day. Just this week I was listening to John Grisham being interviewed on Radio 2. Apparently he sits down to write every day between 7 am and 11 am. So is scheduling more important than setting deadlines for your goals?
Perhaps when we are setting ourselves goals we need to think about whether the goal or indeed the person requires a deadline (some people after all thrive on deadlines), whether that deadline should be Hard or Soft, whether there should be reward for meeting the deadline (I’m a fan of rewards not punishments by the way) and whether scheduling is appropriate (and if so for how long and when). Perhaps these are questions I need to factor into any visual goal-setting method I develop.
So taking the 10 steps I included on my video lets add a couple more:
11. Set a deadline if required
12. Schedule in time to work on your actions
Now making the most of the time you schedule in is a whole other topic for consideration……….
As a starter for 10 (literally!) I have created this short video on how to have a go at visual goal-setting in 10 easy steps.
It runs through a little fast (there is a 10s limit on how long each slide can be displayed for) so I suggest you watch it all the way through then if you want to have a go use the pause button and follow each step one at a time, pausing the video on each step. Enjoy!
I found myself thinking about the purpose of this blog. What am I really aiming to do? Indeed what is my goal! So after a quick visual goal-setting session it became clear that I want to develop the optimum method for establishing, setting and achieving desired goals and for solving all manner of problems. In thinking long and hard, drawing lots of images and reading various books on the subject I found myself going back to mind-mapping. When you Google visual goal-setting it’s websites that offer mind-mapping tools and processes that are most frequently returned. But mind-mapping isn’t really what I’m talking about. As I stated in my previous post, I’m a huge fan of mind maps. I’ve been using them for about 14 years since my academic supervisor introduced me to the them to help with my research. I most often use them these days to create documents and for the past four years creating essay plans – I plan it all out on my mind maps and then flesh it out in Word. So I found myself this week returning to the work of Tony Buzan, the man credited with creating the the modern mind map. In doing so I came across the following clip on YouTube in which he makes some great points on the importance of the mind map being free flowing and the importance of images and colour, aspects which I think have been distilled in many modern mind map approaches.
However, as a qualified and experienced engineer who has also studied for a Psychology degree for the past four years I have some reservations about the mind mapping technique or perhaps the claims made about it – and I know others have too. Our understanding of the brain has come on in astronomical leaps and bounds since Buzan’s original television work that first introduced mind maps some 30 years ago. My own experience also leads me to disagree with one thing he says in this clip. I am not convinced about the layout of mind maps with a central node and off shoots coming from the centre – at least not for me and not for all purposes. Here are my reasons why:
1. I see time as being from left to right so if there is a time element to my goal setting it is intuitive to me for it to span from left to right. Different people and notably different cultures see time in their mind’s eye differently. Some see it bottom to top or even right to left. So it feels to me like any goal-setting, problem-solving solution might need to take that into account.
2. After four years of revising for exams I have noticed that I remembered things on the right hand side of my notes or a book much more easily than the left. Advertisers often charge more to advertise on the right hand side of a publication. Does this have any impact on how I draw my goals? Don’t I want the images I walk around with in my mind, the most prominent ones to be my goals or solutions rather than current ‘stuck’ state? So should I draw solutions and goals on the right?
3. I have absolutely no idea why but when I pick up a magazine I often start at the back and work my way forward. In my younger days I often bought newspapers solely for the sports pages at the back. Is it just a habit then? The trouble is my sister, who has zero interest in anything sporting, apparently does the same thing….. and neither of us has ever lived in Japan!
Other goal-setting visual methods out there use either left to right or bottom to top approaches but I want to have a clearer idea on which is better, or should we start in the middle and work our way outwards like a mind map? Does it depend on the individual or the purpose of the activity? Further investigation required I think but I would love to know your thoughts so please drop me a comment……
Draw your future
A few months ago I came across Patti Dobrowolski’s Ted Talk “Draw your future” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zESeeaFDVSw#t=13). I do quite a lot of work on strategy and setting goals and objectives in my job as an Executive in a FTSE 100 company but this was a whole new take on setting goals! Patti advocates drawing out your current state on one side of a piece of paper then your desired new reality on the other. I thought the talk was so good I immediately ordered her book “Drawing solutions: how visual goal-setting will change your life” from Amazon. I had a fidgety couple of days waiting for the book to arrive. Apparently I have got a little too used to the instant gratification of downloading my books straight onto my tablet via the Kindle app!
Why does visual goal-setting appeal to me?
I’m an engineer by profession. In my world if you have a problem the optimal way to fix it is to design a solution. Designing the solution in before production saves money. It is a lot cheaper to change a design than change the product itself, especially if that product is a multi-million pound submarine, ship or fast-jet aircraft. There might be a whole load of engineering plans and processes, figures and calculations that accompany a design but in its most basic format the design is a drawing. So I like the idea of designing solutions. And I like the idea of designing my life. The expression ‘go back to the drawing board’ is used in everyday language when we want to start again or find a solution to a problem. This expression comes from the industry I have worked in for the past twenty years – it was first used by WWII aircraft designers when a concept or even whole design proved to be unworkable and had to be started all over again.
So the idea of designing or more specifically drawing our goals, vision or strategy seems like a natural thing to do to me. In the past seventeen years I have had to endure more than my fair share of Corporate mission statements, visions and strategies. They are usually ‘rolled out’ via some punchy video starring the CEO and documented on the company website. In all my years there is only one strategy/vision/mission briefing I can remember and that was the year it was drawn out semi-cartoon style on massive posters plastered round the organisation. It was colourful, thought-provoking and even controversial. It got employees scrutinizing it and talking about it. I can even remember the overall message. So there must be something to this visual goal-setting thing.
About seven years ago I went to see a life coach. I was attending a routine osteopathy appointment and in the waiting room I was scouring the leaflets advertising the various other therapies available at the centre when I came across the life coaching leaflet. At the time I had my own consultancy business but was dissatisfied with my work and was considering a career change. I’d never really heard of life coaching but it sounded like just what I needed. A few sessions in my coach had me do a timeline of my life for the next five years. Only I didn’t just write how I envisioned my life on the timeline – I drew pictures too. I had gone to the life coach wanting to clarify my career goals but on my very visual timeline the most prominent image was in fact me with a child. Over the next three of four weeks I worked on ideas for growing my business and investigated a course I was interested in. Then two days before my final session I was overjoyed to discover that I was pregnant. About ten or eleven months later I remember standing in my house holding my new baby and having the startling realisation that the very thing I was doing, right there, right then was the exact image I had seen in my mind’s eye and drawn on paper that day. The strongest visual goal on my timeline was the goal that I had achieved.
Designing my reality
I actually prefer to think of visual goal-setting as ‘designing my reality’ and I toyed with a blog of that name before settling on this one. It’s a mind-set thing really:
Why design?
To design is create something. Some people use the term ‘mapping’ which is fine. I’m a big fan of mind maps myself and use them all the time. But I prefer designing to mapping because maps usually outline a path that already exists, showing you the way. Now that has some merits because often we feel a bit lost and that is exactly what we need – someone or something to show us the way. But it can also feel a little predetermined. I want to be able to create my life for myself and want others to feel the same. I want you to feel in control and be responsible and accountable for making the reality you desire happen.
Why ‘my’?
Only ‘me’ or ‘I’ can change my perceptions and my reality. No-one else can do it for me. No-one else can do it for you. I cannot design your reality, only my own. This is about taking ownership.
Why ‘reality’?
Goal-setting tends to be all about the future and most good goal-setting processes and techniques talk about the importance of setting deadlines, however the concept of the future still has a sense of being ‘out there’ somewhere. Unattainable. The future is, by its very nature, a moving target. It’s always out there because once it’s here it becomes the present, soon to become the past. Reality though is about past, present and future. It is not something out there, to put off or postpone. Reality is about your perception of events as you experience them. Your desired reality is something you can change……starting right now.
I had hoped to write a longer post today perhaps exploring some of the ways visual goal-setting is being used but as happens sometimes it’s been an unexpectedly busy day. The boiler broke, someone from the council has been round to resolve a dispute with a neighbouring school and before I knew it the day was gone.
I have been doing visual goal-setting and problem-solving in my own haphazard way for quite some time, unawares that anyone was making a living out of it, offering it to large corporations or writing books on it. It was only recently when I saw Patti Dobrowolski’s TED Talk that I realised the real potential of this thing I did for myself all the time that could be applied in a wider capacity. More on Patti’s work in the next post but those TED talks have done it again. Sparked my interest and caught my attention. I got an email today about their latest venture in collaboration with a Brazilian magazine Superinteressante. Each month, the magazine’s editors take a classic TED Talk and give it a visual whirl. It isn’t visual goal setting or problem solving as such but does show the power of visual
images to capture ideas and information. Check an example out for yourself here:
Hopefully the boiler will be fixed tomorrow and I’ll have time to write my next post with a real introduction to the power of visual goal-setting (and with a bit of luck I won’t need to wear gloves, hat and scarf to do it!).
Yesterday I promised that there would be more to come on why visual images work so effectively for goal-setting and problem solving. They are more effective but first and foremost let’s not forget it is so much more fun! Drawing pictures is, for most people, even if you think you can barely draw a stick man, much more fun than writing.
We all think in pictures. The majority of us think in pictures all of the time and all of us think in pictures at least some of the time. For example, I know I am a very visual person. I love reading, writing and listening to audio-books but I’m still incredibly visual. I tend to imagine things quite vividly, I doodle all the time on my notebook at work, I immediately grasp for a pen if I’m trying to explain something to someone and twenty years ago I would fall asleep in lectures that didn’t have enough graphics (ditto meetings today!). If I’m thinking about time in terms of dates, I picture a calendar in my head with Monday on the left going through to Saturday and Sunday on the right (Saturday and Sunday are a different colour). So as long as I know the day of the week for just one date in the month I can figure out when any date will be by picturing the imaginary calendar in my head.
A more extreme example of how we are dominated in our thinking by visual imagery is seen in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Patients with PTSD experience intrusive flashback memories of the traumatic events. These intrusive memories are image-based and very often take the form of visual snapshots or ‘film-clips’, much to the distress of the sufferer.
Psychological and neuropsychological* evidence has suggested that our working memory (the kind we use to plan a shopping trip or read a newspaper) utilises a separate visual store to remember verbal information. That is, if someone reads out a string of digits to you such as a telephone number, as well as a verbal store in your brain, you also use a visual or spatial store to help you remember and subsequently recall the phone number.
There’s lots more science from the fields of psychology and neuroscience to support the suggestion that visual imagery is a great way to learn, remember, plan and problem-solve. The examples above provide just a taster to persuade you that as well as being fun, there is some evidence to suggest it’s a good idea.
There is also some evidence from Quantum Physics to do with how we perceive reality and not-so-scientific philosophies such as the Law of Attraction but I like a little bit of the regular science stuff myself. It gives me the excuse to draw pictures in pursuit of a more serious outcome. I get to say, ‘Hey, the science says it’s good to doodle!’.
* For us layfolk, neuropsychology is is the study of patients with damage to areas of the brain, for example through accident or stroke, which utilises techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).
Welcome to Think Draw Live – the blog where I will be exploring the possibilities for visual goal-setting and solutioneering.
What is visual goal-setting?
Visual goal-setting and solutioneering is the process of drawing your problem, ideas, dreams or goals out on paper to help clarify what you want to achieve and help you achieve it.
Why visual?
More on this to come, but basically your brain prefers pictures.
Do I need to be good at drawing?
‘But I can’t draw!’
No! You just need to be able to think (and not too deeply either) and hold a pen (that can be in your hand, mouth or foot) or operate some other device for creating an image (such as a mouse, voice activated software or stylus). Really, anyone can do this.
I promise.
Think Draw Live 