Click below to listen to the Switch-Position exercise.

switch-position-super-power

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Sometimes, misunderstanding arises when we do not understand other people’s map of the world, or in other words, when we cannot put ourselves in their shoes.

Each person reacts to the other, the situation escalates, emotions intensify, and the chance of reaching a mutually beneficial agreement disappears in a puff of smoke.

Whether you’re preparing for a meeting, dealing with family members, selling, negotiating, coaching, or giving a presentation, the ability to put yourselves in other people’s shoes massively increases the likelihood of success.

When you are able to adopt a different point of view easily, you gain in your ability to detach from the immediate situation, and to keep your cool in challenging circumstances.

In a word.. you don’t go bananas!

Sounds good to me!

But not only that…

Your ability to look at things from a number of different perspective makes you more flexible, more adaptable, more able to see everything from a higher point of view, and therefore more likely to keep on the right track rather than get swallowed up in non-essential issues.

In a word, you make better choices and decisions.

Sounds really good to me!

The Background for the exercise

The idea is to adopt 3 different perspectives
1. Your own perspective (seeing through your own eyes, in NLP terms, it is called “Association”)
2. Another person’s perspective on the same situation (seeing through THEIR eyes)
3. The Fly on the Wall perspective (a totally detached, 3rd party perspective).

Now it’s important you actually DO IT! Understanding intellectually and experiencing and 2 VERY DIFFERENT THINGS! When you experience, you fix things at the unconscious level, and it is easy to get back into state.

The exercise

OK, so here’s how you do it. I’ll detail the process step by step below, read through it, and then go ahead!

So the first thing I’d like you to do is to recall an argument that you had with someone recently. Not necessarily a major argument, but chose something important enough that you can feel something when you recall the event.

Got that? Good!

OK, ready to go? Sit comfortably and close your eyes now.

1. See what happened through your own eyes, see the other person’s face, his/her facial expressions, what he/she looks like, how he/she moves, the gestures.

Hear the other person’s voice, the tone, the pitch, is it loud, is it soft?

And feel what you were feeling at that time.

Now, I’d like you to float up outside your body, and float down into the other person’s body. And when you do that

2. You see everything that person saw: he/she can see your face in front of him/her, so see your face right now, the facial expressions, the gestures, the body language.

And hear your voice as you are speaking to that person, the tone, the pitch, the volume.

Feel what that person is feeling at that time.

And now, float outside that person’s body, and go and adopt the 3rd party perspective, be the fly on the wall.

3. And see these 2 people there, see their gestures, their body language, their faces, the facial expressions.

Hear the voices, how they speak to each other, the volume of the voices, the different tones, the pitch.

Notice any feeling, or are they not there?

And now come back into your body and open your eyes.

Debrief

How was it, did you notice anything different as you were adopting different perceptual positions? How about your feelings?

What have you learned? What are your conclusions on that matter?

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A few days ago, I had an interesting conversation with a friend who “refused to believe” (his words) that someone could walk over red hot fire coals unharmed. “Prove to me that it is possible!” he said. The fact that I have seen people firewalking unharmed thousands of time, was not a proof. “It is impossible”.

So what is “impossible” really?

Over 2000 years ago, the philosopher Zeno of Greece proved mathematically that it is impossible to cross a river. The argument was as follow: “the distance between one bank of the river and the other is made of an infinite amount of points. It takes an infinite amount of time to cross an infinite amount of points. Therefore it is impossible to cross a river” (I guess most of you didn’t know that it is impossible to cross a river, did you?)

We had to wait 2000 years and the advent of Calculus to show mathematically that an infinite amount of points can be crossed in a finite amount of time. Suddenly, in a split second, the impossible became possible (phew!)

Professor Stephen Hawking, the father of several key scientific discoveries in the field of cosmology and physics said: “It does not mean it is impossible. Only that our understanding is incomplete”.

Conclusion 1 is a question: How can I translate this in my life?

Conclusion 2: As Paul Watzlawick used to say, emotional health comes from growth, not healing.

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Often, the solution to our problems lies in the ability to see things from a different point of view.

Something to contemplate (from the philosopher Wittgenstein):

We are tempted to think that because we know 1, we know 2 because 1 and 1 equal 2; but we forgot to look at the “and”. If you combine 1 litre of alcohol and 1 litre of water you do not get 2 litres (try it, you’ll see)!

Think! In people, when 1+1 equal more than 2, it is called synergy! When it is less, conflict!

In what ways can you make 1+1 more than 2, in your personal life, business, health?

Expand your point of view!

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Early 20th century scientific research on how the brain stores memories had shown that rats could still run a maze with a major part of their brain removed, which brought about the conclusion that memories were not stored in the brain, but throughout the whole body (the basis of the scientific proof of the mind-body connection).

Karl Pribram, in his pioneering work on the brain and the nervous system which led to the development of the holonomic model, shows that memories are stored, not in cells, but as wave patterns. His breakthrough discovery that the Human nervous system functions a hologram opened a whole new dimension to how we see the Mind and the nervous system (have you ever heard that we are only using 10% of the capacities of our brain?). A hologram is a light field resulting from the interference of two light beams (one of them going through an object) on a recording medium which appears as a 3D object. One of the interesting qualities of the hologram is that if you break the holographic plate, you get 2 whole pictures.

It is interesting to note that all the Fathers of Quantum Physics, as well as Einstein were familiar with Eastern Esoteric schools of thought and practices which focus on the underlying Oneness of consciousness pervading the multiplicity we see in the physical world, including ourselves. (See David Bohm’s conversation with Krishnamurti on Youtube).

Karl Pribram’s holonomic model leads to the question that mystics have been asking for centuries: if the human nervous system is a hologram, what it is a hologram of? Interestingly, the basic presupposition of the Indian Tantric school, as it appeared around the 6th century AD is: the Human being is a contracted form of the Supreme. The practice in Tantra is expansion. Indeed, what are we a hologram of?

“Consciousness is all there is” is the basis of Advaita Vedanta, a school founded in 800AD by Sri Shankaracharya, which takes it origins in Vedic times in the Upanishads. If we accept, as Modern Science has already started to demonstrate, that multiplicity and separation are an illusion, or that at least they are only real at a very gross level, then we have to completely reconstruct our model of the world AND of who we are and where we stand.

Indeed, we understand reality through the filters of our limited perceptions and give names to the forms we see in the physical world (“Namarupa”). The human nervous system however cannot fathom the vastness of infinity and wholeness, and needs to create duality (male/female, good/bad, black/white) in order to bring structure and understanding to daily life.

The practice of Advaita Vedanta is “Apavada” or deconstruction of the illusion of multiplicity.

“Consciousness is all there is”. Ramesh Balsekar is the most advanced proponent and teacher of Advaita Vedanta in the world today. Ramesh holds satsang at his home in Bombay every morning; he wrote numerous books, one of which is highly recommended as an introduction to Advaita Vedanta: “A personal religion of your own” (Zen Publication).

To Be Continued…

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