12 Aug Have More Fun and Increase Your Profits — Part 1 of 3
Cut the Crap and Close the Gap—between words and experience.
Over time I’ve come to define fun in a business context: A state when you’re moving forward in an unrestricted way, making measureable progress and enjoying yourself. It’s downright fun to accomplish what we want, build great working relationships and love what we’re doing. Who doesn’t want to have that kind of fun when it unfolds naturally or when we structure the conditions that enable for it? When we’re NOT having any fun, it’s usually when we’re mired in obstacles and feeling that we’re not making any progress — but struggling. Profit on the other hand, requires no explanation, and profit generally means you’re moving forward. Generally speaking, both profit as well as fun are good for business.
So what does “Cut the crap and close the gap – between words and experience†have to do with fun and profit?
The “Gap†I’m referring to is the gap between words and reality – between accuracy and BS; what we say and what we do – and then how we interpret that. It’s the gap between intention and action, promise and delivery; between potential and actualization… you know – lightweight stuff.
Let’s take a step back to establish a seemingly obvious premise:
Living an experience and thinking about an experience are not the same thing. They are different overlapping realms of experience – inseparable but unequal! While thinking is a huge, integral and completely essential component of living, the far greater realm of LIVING is vastly larger than thinking. Living includes all thinking + all feeling + action and behavior + all experience + all of reality outside our thinking. According to world-renowned neuroanatomist (brain scientist) and author, Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, human beings “are not thinking creatures that feel, but biologically feeling creatures that think.†This fact seems either largely unknown or not appreciated in most companies. As a result, interesting problems, and then patterns of problems, arise when we confuse living with thinking.
Most of us think 40,000 to 80,000 thoughts per day, and most of them are unconscious; we’re not aware of them per se. They’re going on in the background, and not on our screens of conscious awareness – very much like computers and monitors. Some of thoughts are in words because language is fundamental to high functioning. Most of our daily thinking tends to be either in language (words, sentences, etc.) or in images (pictures and movies of some kind) though other kinds of intelligence, like mathematical, spacial, musical, physical and social allows us to think in melodies, numbers, movement or energy as well. The point is: Sometimes our thinking starts to dominate our LIVING. When our mental processes (our egos) take over – take us over and we start living in our heads, we then default to rationalizing, justifying, explaining, arguing – almost as though some force has taken control of our mental faculties.