Originally, I was planning to write about how we filter for information that suits our purpose, and how this disposition can be used by us to be more influential with our communication, but that will need to wait until blogpost #4 because of a movie I just watched.
Best Sellers is a movie about a reclusive and bad-tempered one-time author (played by Michael Caine) and Lucy played by Aubrey Plaza, the heiress of a publishing house that is steadily going out of business.
Caine drives an old 1970’s model Jaguar, very similar to the car my grandmother drove in Scotland when I was a boy. He insists that Lucy drives his car for a book tour across the US however, his car is originally from the UK so the steering wheel is on the right, not on the left as is usual in the US. Lucy constantly walks to the wrong side of the car when approaching it – an action I am very familiar with!
This gave me a flashback that I have had ever since I crashed and wrote of my first car, a 1977 Ford Escort Mark II at the age of 18. I was driving in a country road near Ripon in North Yorkshire following a friend who knew the road better than I did. I took a corner a little too quickly, not realising that there was a double S-bend ahead. I cleared the first bend but met a dry-stone wall on the second which tipped my car onto its left side.
As I skidded along the road to a halt, an imprint of myself hanging in mid-air seated parallel to the road was etched into my unconscious mind. Over the past 35 years, I have had this flashback literally thousands of times. When I’m in a new country and need to remind myself which side to drive on, I see myself hanging in the air on the righthand side of my old Ford Escort!
This is an example of ‘Pavlovian conditioning’ also known as ‘behavioural conditioning’. It can happen in an instant and last your whole life, or it can build over a period of time when we are exposed to a repeat event.
Conditioning tends to be most impactful when linked to a ‘vivid standout event’ (‘VSE’). I use the words ‘vivid’ and ‘standout’ very deliberately.
‘Vivid’ because for conditioning to be effective we need to experience it personally, not through a third party, and ‘standout’ to highlight that a VSE can be either positive or negative. My car incident was traumatic and not the type of VSE we want to collect. Positive VSE’s of success, friendship, love, achievement, happiness etc. are empowering and provide internal resource to help us deal with life’s challenges.
And this brings me to the point of this blog; When we experience a positive VSE it becomes a positive resource within us that we can draw on IF we are conditioned by it.
Children for example learn best when they feel success, not when they are struggling to understand, so in order to increase the chances that conditioning occurs, we should look to ‘anchor’ positive VSE’s by focusing attention on the feelings present immediately following the VSE itself.
This principle applies equally in the workplace. For example; research has shown that the process of giving effective feedback, a hotly debated topic in the corporate world, is most impactful when team leaders focus on what a team member has done right, building conscious awareness of the actions that resulted in success, rather than telling them what they did wrong or what they should do.
I appreciate that I may have opened a can of worms here as a short blog cannot possibly cover such important topics as behavioural conditioning, how to anchor or giving feedback. I hope however that this commentary has given you some food for thought.
If you would like to hear more detail about any of these principles leave a comment in the notes and I’ll be sure to return to this subject in a future blog.
Any just fyi, Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2 was playing on the car stereo.