What if everything you think you know…is wrong?
Some of you might know that my personal goal is to get back in shape and I have been working out 4 or 5 days a week for about 2 hours a day for the past 7 months. I have made progress. I have a way to go as well.
When I was younger I was pretty athletic. When I was in the 7th grade I started working out. I read all the books I could get out of the school library. In high school I was on the wrestling team and we trained every day. When I was in my early 20s I learned karate and went to class 4 or 5 times a week. I always belonged to a gym and worked out all the time up until my mid 30’s.
I thought I knew what working out was all about so I started by doing the same things I had learned over the years. Over the past few months I have been doing my workouts and watching what the personal trainers were doing.
What I saw was nuts.
Everything I have learned about working out is now wrong. It used to be that using your whole body to lift weighs was considered cheating. We were supposed to isolate muscles and work them independently. Now you have kettle ball training where you use your whole body to lift. Everything was using your full body.
At first I ignored what they were doing. I have been working out most of my life. I knew what worked for me. Plus I was dealing with some injuries that I have to work around. I did not see the value in what they were doing and well… I already knew what I wanted to do.
I could not have been more wrong.
About 8 weeks ago I changed what I was doing. I made everything I was doing involve rotation, angles of attack and complex movement based. I was sore in places I did not know existed. What a change this has been making and what a difference it has made. My goal was to get healthy again and I knew it would take a year. Now with just understanding a few new concepts I expect to exceed those expectations.
Question your certainty
I was talking to a guy today who wants to come to one of our trainings. He has been to many personal development seminars. As seems to happen all the time people get stuck on what they have already invested the time and energy in learning … even if it is not working. So much of what is presented is based in old knowledge. I still see people quoting studies from the 70s. Most of those have been disproved by current research. Yet the same statements get repeated as if they are true and never get questioned.
The way Kim and I have come up with so much new stuff is that we both questioned what we had accepted. This allowed us to come up with new kinds of seminars and new ways of doing things. Then we questioned what we came up with and made it even better. A simple skill like anchoring is easy to understand and perform if you learn a few simple tricks and open your mind to a new way of doing things.
How much of your brain?
Let me give you an example. How many of you have heard that we only use 10% of our brains? How many of you have stated it? The fact is there is no basis for this statement. It is often used by people to convince you that you need something else. “I can teach you to tap into the unused 90% of your brain!”
This fake fact has been used for decades to sell everything from super power books to psychic skills. If only you could tap the power of that 90% of unused potential then you could accomplish anything … right?
The real truth is that you use all of your brain all the time. Some better than others 🙂 Just imagine the complex amount of brain power needed to purposely walk across a room. Sensory input. Spacial awareness. Balance, sight, intent, decision making …. and more. Yet the same “fact” gets repeated in book after book.
If you really want to use your brain then take some time to question the things you have accepted as true. You might be surprised at what you learn.
I would have thought karate and wrestling would have trained you to do anything but isolate muscles, not that I’ve ever done either one of those. I make exercise just a part of life that you just have to do.. like eating and sleeping, whether you want to or not. 🙂
Now, if I could only get that mindset for persuasion skills. For some reason those seem harder. It’s harder because one needs to snap out of one’s self. Working out is getting into one’s self. It’s practically the opposite kind of training, and more pervasive.
-ds
Interesting point. While karate and wrestling are physical when it came to working out with weights is was a different story. In the weight room it was all about not cheating by using any other part of your body. Not it is all about using all parts of your body even in the weight room. Even now working out is not about getting into oneself for me. It is about letting go of my ego and busting my ass even though I was fat unhealthy 🙂
Because working out is a physical activity it is easy to define where and when to do it. Persuasion skills are a bit different. You have to actively interact with other people. You have to look for opportunities and take advantage of them when they happen. You can’t just go out and persuade.
At the same time just about everything I was originally taught about persuasion was wrong as well. The rapport hat was taught was a joke. Anchoring for persuasion did not even exist as a real world skill before we started teaching it. Calibration and reading people was mentioned but not explored.
I banged away at those skills as they were taught for years with little or no success. It was not until I realized that everything I was taught was for therapy and would not work in the real world that we began creating new processes. Even now 99% of people teaching these skills for persuasion are old dried up recycled therapy skills that don’t fit the real world. If you used them you would look like an idiot or worse.
I agree that persuasion does mean you have to make personal changes about what you believe is possible and how you connect with others. Without doing that you are just learning techniques that you will never apply.
Have fun
Tom Vizzini