Beyond the new relationship – What happens when things get quieter?
New Developments to look forward to “1”
It’s been a couple of years since I felt that I had successfully reengineered my relationship with my Monkey. The changes have been significant and remain effective to this day.
However, the process has begun to give me more than ‘just’ a quieter head or an internal team that work together on the same goals and outcomes, and I suspect it’s worth sharing.
As some of you know, when your head gets quieter, when you sit with your Monkey looking at internal and external stuff it’s like the mist clears.
Him and I both see causative relations and patterns that we have not noticed before. Perhaps it was the noise or the emotion that used to keep all this hidden but as me and him have sat watching, we now see other things that are worthy of our consideration as a pair.
Just a quick note my Monkey is a him, Vanessa’s Monkey is a her – please translate my ‘him’ into whatever is right for you.
Things that help us understand why we are the way we are and perhaps more importantly, what my job as leader is.
Some of you may have come across Fred Harteis. He ran a multi million dollar network marketing group, one thing he kept saying to his team was “You are the driver of the dozer”.
Imagine you, your body and all that we think of as you, are a bull dozer. Someone has to drive. If not it carers about following lines of easy resistance or smashing down things that don’t need to be smashed down.
There is no apparent rhyme or reason to the movement of a driverless bull dozer.
His point was that someone has to drive if you want it to achieve something less random.
And that someone is you
New stuff
Why in the past would he bring me thoughts?
If you’ve followed the program and completed the exercises you will understand sometimes an isolated monkey just has to tell us stuff ………… NOW!!
As we become partners, they are more able and more likely to tailor, what they say and do to our real mutually understood needs.
This works in terms of both their chosen content and their chosen timing.
You will be getting the same changes appearing as you complete the challenge and, the more we progress things the more it makes sense that our partners, the Monkey, will use our agreed futures (think exercise 12) to make better choices of what they bring to our attention and when they bring it.
As the space and the quiet grows we begin to see more of what is going on.
We begin to notice the Monkey is more like a representative than an originator of thoughts. Old experiences would see my Monkey arguing one way then when I would finally agree arguing for the opposite point of view. As the space grew it became obvious the Monkey as passing on a message from something or somewhere else..
Where does the content come from?
Do we see the Monkey really as the source of all this content they bring to our attention?
Do they really know everything ?
How come we can ask them almost any question and somehow they have an answer for us.
Where do they get their information from ?
Perhaps we could see them acting like a ‘librarian’ who has access to all our records, experiences, memories and learning?
As we explore this role with them we may also realise that they seem to have access to other sources. Information, knowledge, things ‘we’ can’t or don’t have the history to ‘know’ about or even ‘of’?
The point is that once the relationship is established it becomes increasingly clear that our Monkeys know or remember things that we don’t know about.
They seem to have access to stuff that we can use to help us define and live our best life.
Stuff we may not be able to access on our own.
There was not a one day moment when I began to realise the idea of librarian or even safety deposit box was not the right model of how my Monkey works now we have a deal. Something caused me to consider that they weren’t the librarian but they were an interface between me and something or somethings else.
As your head space gets quieter we see more of what is really going on.
My Monkey is not ‘just’ a librarian, he is a researcher who can access records and knowledge I don’t have conscious access to. More than this, he also has incoming and appears to be subject to approaches or ‘petitions’ from interested parties which he vets and interrogates before bothering me.
In future posts I’ll talk more about the idea of the Monkey as a researcher. Able to find out or source information and ideas solutions and options that go beyond our normal understanding.
You know how it works and you have probably read about the examples – think Crick and Watson, Thomas Edison, Dick Sutphen.
The method is easy think about what you need, your problem or your query and create and ask a good, elegant question. Leave the question hanging or ask your Monkey directly to find a solution and wait just watch what happens next.
If you do this enough it becomes clear that not only do you find good new answers and options but that many of these new answers use content or ideas that we didn’t really have in our experience before asking the question –
In today’s post I want to cover how far I have moved in my understanding with regard to my Monkey being ‘petitioned’ and how that works. The asking for help stuff is exciting and amazing but the realisation that accompanies the petitioned role really helps sort out any number of underlying issues you may struggle with.
Monkey as the recipient of petitions
You may remember when you used to sit in silence and be bombarded with thoughts and urges? It happens a lot less now the relationship is stronger but for those ongoing issues it helps to understand a some about where they might come from and how our Monkey is helping its deal with them.
The big picture us that we you and I are the result of millions of years of development. Our ancestors have learnt how to survive and how to procreate thats why we are still here. All this wisdom is stored and it fires up when we are in situations when experience tells us that it might be useful – save us ….
We can trace the development of this learning and its retention in our physiology :
The human brain – Basic ‘evolution’
What do we know?
It’s evolved over time. As it evolved we have developed what Psychologists call more ‘advanced capability’.
From an original urge to move away from discomfort (heat cold pain of some sort)
We have moved on to understand that:
Some stimuli although uncomfortable are not dangerous
Some stimuli are dangerous and we need to act quickly – our trusted fight or flight reactions
We are not slaves to this anymore.
We can consciously get into cold water or remain in an uncomfortable position without running away or hitting any one.
How do we this?
The short answer seems to be their is a well honed hierarchy where ‘older’ or [perhaps what we might rudely call ‘more primitive” mechanisms are overridden by thoughts from different, newer brain developments, bits we might describe as more ‘modern’, ‘advanced’ or even more ‘superior’.
If we jump forward a few thousand years we now know that at some point later in our development process we have developed and now ‘enjoy’ the benefits of what some call cortex activity.
We now have a capability that allows us to override some of the lower functions in some circumstances. Those who have experienced road rage know that this is not always true!
Some people (like Wim Hoff) would say we can do this far more than we currently accept.
We just don’t always know it’s happening or that we have a choice.
Although many scientists and Psychologists seem to act and think as though we know all the answers – I go with Bill Bryson and work on the basis that 50 years on we see we were wrong and as an extension – any one who is certain of anything is probably going to be proved wrong soon.
This doesn’t mean that simple half truths cannot help us –
It also means we don’t need all the detail to use the idea….
That interesting book Fast and Slow thinking is based on what we all recognise as some of what goes on inside our head space – the debate that occurs between different parts of our internal processing system.The different way different parts of us process situations and our choices and the way they interact differently in different situations.
We can use what we know about our inheritance, our choices and our preferences to start playing with a few ideas to help us in our experience of a lovely life.
Different evolutional brain stages – so what?
Seeing clearly from a distanced perspective allows us to see what is going on more clearly. The more I do this with my Monkey the more I begin to suspect that at moments of stress the ‘voices’ of different parts of our brain can have more impact, more voice or are given more priority than under ‘normal’ or less stressful circumstances.
As a kid I threw water on a burning fat fire, part of me knew this was suicide but the primitive urge to put water on it override everything – If it happened now I would override the urge.
Most of us are living in what we call a civilised world. We recognise the red mist and the urge to fight still happens but we don’t resort to violence. Sometimes we feel the sick discomfort in our guts that makes us want to escape, to run away or go to sleep and remove ourselves from the situation. The reactions of older parts of the brain to external stimuli are still there. They are not to be denied and after all is said and done in praise of the ‘higher functions’ these lower functions have kept us alive as a species when we were immersed in our struggle for a place on earth.
In our modern world we usually manage to ignore this input and modify it with alternate behaviours that are more ‘acceptable’. The more modern thrive responses may conflict or even oppose the older core survive behaviours. In our modern world we have to override old urges and approaches if we are to fit in to a modern society and so we favour those that help us thrive in the world we find ourselves in today. Overriding them through force or strength of will can make us more stressed or sick.
Many of these older responses are about personal survival avoiding threat but once these are minimised by our new situation the overwhelming drive seems to be to belong to a group.
This overriding need to fit in or belong underpins most of what we have learnt over millennia about survival.
Ask an antelope – there’s more chance of not being eaten by a lion in the middle of a big herd.
Newer thrive behaviours may cause us more stress if they result in a prolonged override of a ‘core’ survival system. Understanding what they demand and resolving it through our Monkey helps us pacify older drives that we can no longer honour in today’s world.
For those of us striving for success most actions and choices lie outside the norm, outside the comfort zone behaviours that generate average performances. Many of us feel obliged to get the life we want by operating outside our comfort zone, away from the herd, away from comfort , safety and acceptance. Like a Jonathan Livingstone we must risk ostracism to achieve our own dreams and when we see this in the context of the response from our learned inheritance we realise the nature of the obstacles an untrained or unaligned Monkey generates.
This idea has let us enjoy books like The Courage to be Disliked – it’s a big thing almost as big as accepting we are not right or that we need help.
Overcoming some of these learned drives, drives responsible for survival or safety is what can make the contemplation or achieving of our success in our own ways so problematic.
As we build space with an onside Monkey, the noise clears a little and we can see patterns more clearly as our partnership gets going. We can look not only at the thought and its nature but also at the root of the thought – where it came from and from there it’s only a short step to examine its original purpose.
Once we see the purpose is no longer applicable there is no arguments no debates and a choice is easy to make and apply.
Maybe it’s me?
I have begun to see patterns between the different stages of my brain evolution and the nature and make up of the internal thought streams clamour.
I feel now that many of the underlying ‘arguments’ or conflicts that go on inside me are between what seem to be the inputs from different brain stages which were previously fielded evaluated and then presented to me by my Monkey.
I can now label these if they arise with respect to their sources eloper their purpose and override them far more easily than ever before. Done with care and love, it also helps me and the Monkey begin to educate the older learning into our new current reality.
This approach gives me
- Root causes I could not see before.
- Labels I could not use before.
It seems that my Monkey has known all along. Part of his previous role was to sort between these inputs and prepare a thought or ‘proposal’ for me to consider.This as ever is based on what he thinks my ideas of who I am and what I want are.
I say this quickly but you may remember those stages of relationship that can characterise a Monkey relationship that we spelt out in the book.
I can now notice how far I have moved from my original situation, considering originally that my thoughts were mine or actually me.
Of course we could say they are mine if its my primitive brain or my cortex but that is to forget I am the driver of the dozer I am not the engine the clutch the fuel tank or the tyres – I may use their input via any gauges I have but all or any parts of the dozer is not me. I find the new labels this process has revealed provide a new and useful addition to our labelling armoury.
In the book we said :
To know now that these thoughts are suggestions from a concerned friend that require me as driver to make choices, decisions or simply ignore them, is a game changer.
As we continue to work together it has become clear that my Monkey works to sort the various inputs from these internal sources to give me a précis and a recommendation for my decision process.
It makes even more sense now that I appreciate he has been like a night club bouncer, helping to sort the internal inputs out before passing some on to me.
His choice is based on what he knows we are doing – in the past his choice was based on his best guess or worse what he thought we should have been doing. Now we are aligned he can more easily and effectively choose what to bring up for me.
It feels like he is continually approached to represent this or that view and take it forward for my attention.
I did not consciously understand the nature and complexity of his role or the pressure he was under from these thought sources who genuinely felt it was a question of life and death to get their message across.
Given that some of these thought sources have long felt themselves to be key to our survival as a species let alone for me as an individual, it’s likely they have been tough to ignore and hard to dissuade.
My help to clarify they purpose , their relevance and to use mutually agreed labels to challenge them when and if they appear has made his job easier. It should also not be underestimated how far this has gone to aiding and abetting our partnership. It feels more than ever like we are a team defining and delivering our best life.
Conclusions
If you have moved to the point where you have more space to safely watch internal thought currents all the way back to their sources thats a huge jump it was for me!
Try holding on to the idea of a link between thoughts, urges, gut feels and the ideas we have on brain development path – with different parts of our brain system perhaps including the Gut and the Heart as a potential source for some of these conflicting thoughts.
It makes sense as most parts of our brain stem however old, still remain active.
They controlled us in the past and, unfettered, are likely to continue to do what they do to keep us safe.
If there’s enough interest, I’ll capture some ideas on the types of thoughts that seem too emanate from these different brain parts.
I have found there to be some links which can help us to label persistent demanding or destructive thinking and as usual
Labelling enables us to detach ourselves from the situation more easily and effectively.
Example
In Sales Academy we came across many examples of the internal conflict and resultant stress that conflicted thought streams and subsequent action choices could cause. It can help with a more peaceful experience by helping us to understand more about sources of thought streams. Where they come from, why they are there and how we can peacefully choose to run with them or ignore them today.
As one sales manager said to us on a coaching course “It’s hard to remember the rules for good coaching when you just want to shake the living shit out of someone”.
- Understanding it’s a primitive input helps in the short term, we can distance and see it what is happening in the context of sources.
- Understanding it’s a primitive input that still needs release or honouring helps long term. The sales manager concerned used a boxing class twice a week to satisfy some of the urges he could not use to inform his every day behaviour if he wanted to succeed at work.
It’s also worth remembering our role is to ignore, to choose or to decide and, if we don’t do this actively we are not the one who is driving the Dozer.
For a discussion on who drives what take a look at Joe’s Cliff
It’s all about Authors stories and who is writing yours
Find it here
Next
There’s some work in the land or our NLP friends that some call parts therapy that also addresses a similar thing
There are a lot of parallels here and if there’s some interest I’ll put some more out about that
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