Goals Performance Journals

[andersons]

I've never heard it stated before that the brain doesn't remember negatives.

Maybe it's related to visualization exercises for athletes that require them to focus on what they ARE doing rather than what they aren't. Or a coach correcting bad technique by telling the student to focus on something incompatible with the wrong technique. I'd be surprised if there were not some studies about this somewhere.

Yes, for goal setting for athletes, there is evidence that positive goals are effective and that negative coaching styles (constantly yelling at the athletes what not to do, especially children) can be ineffective. So there is nothing wrong with encouraging positive goals especially for sports and athletics.

But to say that the human brain doesn't remember or notice negatives as much as positives or even that all goals should be positive would be a gross overgeneralization of those specific observations about athletic performance. For example, what if someone wants to quit smoking? He could remind himself of his higher purpose of living a long, healthy life, but the direct, immediate goal is not to smoke. Many have set this goal and successfully reached it.

Even some GTD practitioners use negative goals successfully. How about Michael Hyatt's Stop Doing list? I personally have often set and achieved negative goals when the negative way of expressing them was the clearest and most direct way.

Scientifically, in terms of the brain itself, inhibition is a major brain mechanism that is inherently negative. Many neurons and neural networks inhibit something. For example, in motor control and learning, which is my research specialty, a lot of motor learning requires inhibition of something previously learned.

In attention and memory experiments, people can be directed to ignore or forget items and do so successfully. People can also ignore and forget positives just as well as negatives. In addition, avoidance behaviors can be learned extremely well. And in some social experiments, certain people tend to notice negatives more than they notice positives.

I'm actually glad to read that! It would be interesting to read a book that debunks a lot of the commonly accepted self-help "truths", written by a neuroscientist with research to back it up. I think this particular idea of keeping your mind focused on what you want with positively worded statements came from Psycho-Cybernetics, which in part begat NLP which begat Tony Robbins.

Here are a few other brain myths:
1) The Mozart effect. i.e, listening to Mozart makes you smarter, better at math, better in school, etc. This one came from a study but has nonetheless been shown to be false.
2) You only use 10% of your brain. Who knows where this one came from!
3) Right brain/left brain, i.e., the left side is logical, the right side is creative, and creative is better. Not true!
4) At the risk of great wrath on the forum, Tony Buzan does not appear to be an expert in neuroscience, and MindMaps do not magically "provide a universal key to unlock the potential of the brain" by "harness[ing] the full range of cortical skills. . .in a single, uniquely powerful manner." Whenever you hear such glowing and emphatic language, think marketing, not science.

 

[Gator Ash]

Here are a few other brain myths:
1) The Mozart effect. i.e, listening to Mozart makes you smarter, better at math, better in school, etc. This one came from a study but has nonetheless been shown to be false.
2) You only use 10% of your brain. Who knows where this one came from!
3) Right brain/left brain, i.e., the left side is logical, the right side is creative, and creative is better. Not true!
4) At the risk of great wrath on the forum, Tony Buzan does not appear to be an expert in neuroscience, and MindMaps do not magically "provide a universal key to unlock the potential of the brain" by "harness[ing] the full range of cortical skills. . .in a single, uniquely powerful manner." Whenever you hear such glowing and emphatic language, think marketing, not science.

Thanks for list Anderson! I'm no brain expert, but I have been reading about the 3D Brain Model by Dr. Ken Giuffre, author of "The Care and Feeding of the Brain". If I remember correctly, he said something like a person uses 100% of their brain all of the time, it's just that for certain processes some areas become more active than others.

 

[ProfDD]

Performance Record-Keeping

I've become obsessed with the idea of keeping a performance journal for some of my goals.

I'd like to read more about performance journalling and how one might use it in an NLP-like way to program the mind for success.

Anyone have any references they could point me to? Websites, books, tapes, etc?

Thanks!
--Karen

A non-NLP take on the subject is in the book "Quality is Personal". The book was used in corporate quality training to help people understand how measurement improved quality. It has plenty of quirky self-improvement examples.

 

[TesTeq]

Seminar.

Sorry, I was unplugged for two days, so I couldn't respond.

Just curious, what seminar was this? What are the seminar leader's qualifications in the area of cognitive or brain sciences?

I'm from Poland. It was a seminar by Polish influence guru Piotr Tymochowicz (http://www.greenpol.pl/index_en.htm) who stood behind the success of the Samoobrona Party in the 2001 election in Poland.

 

[andersons]

Sorry, I was unplugged for two days, so I couldn't respond.

No problem -- no deadlines, it's just a forum.

I'm from Poland. It was a seminar by Polish influence guru Piotr Tymochowicz (http://www.greenpol.pl/index_en.htm) who stood behind the success of the Samoobrona Party in the 2001 election in Poland.

I'm sure there are valuable things you can learn from him, though I obviously disagree with him about this as I posted while you were unplugged. And I think the "science" is overstated on his web site. If someone's material is based on the latest results from various fields of science, there should be references listed somewhere. If someone has written many scientific articles, his name as an author should turn up in a search of the main databases of the field.

Obviously it would be ridiculous to require scientific validation of every strategy one tries, like GTD for example. But it annoys me when people who have something to sell claim their product is "scientifically" based or superior, when such is not the case.

 

[TesTeq]

John was mixed up in some kind of crime.

I agree with you that Tymochowicz is a self-appointed scientist.

On the other hand it often doesn't matter if "John has stolen something" or "John was robbed". The message that remains in many human brains is that "John was mixed up in some kind of crime".

 

[Robyn]

Note for SABLOUWHO

Please see my (delayed) answer to your question re. the Mind Mapper's diary on my thread entitled MINDMAPPING WITH GTD).

 

[moises]

Negatively formulated goals

I was so pleased to learn from andersons, two years ago, that negations, contrary to NLP dogma, do work. That is, words like "no," "not," and their contractions--"won't," "don't," "can't"--are psychologically effective.

However, this past weekend, I heard on the radio a show called "On the Media" on NPR, where Washington Post reporter Shankar Vedantam cited research buttressing NLP's claims. In the Post article, Vedantam cites the published research of cognitive social psychologist Ruth Mayo. Mayo purports to have experimental evidence to support the conclusion that, for some people, negatives tend to be forgotten over time. So, if I claim that I did not beat my wife, the "not" becomes forgotten by some listeners and they remember that I did beat my wife.

It's not clear (it never is, that's why more research is always needed) to me exactly what constitutes negation. Is "avoid" a negative word? Is the goal "I avoid cigarettes" going to help me quit or will it cement a link between me and cigarettes? I don't know.

But there do seem to be a number of researchers supporting the idea that positively formulated statements are remembered better than negative ones.

Perhaps someone here has access to the journal articles cited in the Post and can assess how good this research is. Until then, I will try to formulate my goals, my requests to people, and my smear campaigns :mrgreen: in the positive.

 

[jknecht]

It's not clear (it never is, that's why more research is always needed) to me exactly what constitutes negation. Is "avoid" a negative word? Is the goal "I avoid cigarettes" going to help me quit or will it cement a link between me and cigarettes? I don't know.

My totally unscientific point of view on this is that it doesn't really matter whether you're attaching positive or negative connections to the object of the statement, what matters is the object of the statement.

So, take the example of "I avoid cigarettes"... Every time you say this to yourself, the word "cigarettes" is lodged in your brain. Whether you want to avoid them or consume them is not important, the simple fact is that you are thinking about them. If you were attracted to them before, the attraction will become greater; and if you were repulsed by them, the repulsion will lessen, perhaps even to the point of attraction.

Whether there's any scientific basis behind this is another matter, but I think that is the basic premise behind NLP.

 

[Brent]

I wonder how much this matters.

What works for you? Do negatives work? Do positives work?

I know that usually, positives work better for me and for the kids I work with than negatives.

 

[Cpu_Modern]

What works for me are usually the positives. GD helps here, too. What's the purpose? I have more success by concentrating on the picture of the positive purpose. It was never quitting smoking for me. How do you quit a cigarette anyway? It was always the joy of smelling good even in the evening and so on. "Don't eat cake!" is not a goal. "Feeling energized every single day (despite eating some sweets form time to time)!" is a goal.

 

[ArcCaster]

My personal experience says it is a question of visualizing and focusing.

If I visualize not eating a delicious chocolate chip muffin with a lump of cold sweet butter on it, the picture that comes to mind is a delicious chocolate chip muffin with a lump of cold sweet butter on it. I am apt to be attracted by that image

If I am an archer trying to hit a target with rocks in front and a swamp in back, and I am fearful of losing or destroying an expensive arrow, I better not focus on avoiding the rocks and the swamp. My only hope is to focus on the target -- in fact, if I can narrow my focus to the center of the target, that is even better.