Leadership Motivation Melbourne - Efficiency.

I have the opportunity to often integrate juggling in to my workshops. I find it a really useful and novel medium to engage people with. You see what tends to happen when we are introducing ideas to people that they may have already heard before, there is resistance. There's almost this point where they go I have heard this before and in doing so its almost like they tune out. They certainly may hear you but they may not be engaged with you, tune in and understand and take anything away from the experience.

So by introducing something novel, we start to engage the mind in a different way. You see the mind or brain receives about 40 watts of energy a day. That is not a great a deal, so it works on this efficiency model, if it sees something it recognises and it can quickly find a match it will. So if i say something and they understand it and they say "oh I have experienced this before", they will move onto the next step and perhaps miss what the key message was overall.

So with the idea, the concept of efficiency, the constant accepting and rejecting of information, is the idea that we need to make sure that we engage who we are that we are talking to in a lets say very entertaining way, so that they do receive and hear the actual message.

In working with this principal of efficiency. You are not only learning but also in the area of communication. I recently had an experience where I was teaching somebody juggling. They said to me " I can't do it." In the next sentence they said "I am un-coordinated." This was easy for them to say, it was easier for them to say that than to actually experience the technique of juggling. They had just sat in an eight hour workshop and I was really, just finishing off the day, they had probably used up close to their 40 watts of energy. So what was happening was that they were deciding that they were just going to tune out.

I had to work fast and engage this person and i started them off with one ball. But it became apparent that they had actually juggled previously, and when they had two balls they just seemed to pass one ball from one hand to the other. They continued to use this pattern when three balls were introduced. And the reason for using that pattern….? It was more efficient.

So you often find that we continually do things the way we have always done them, habitually, unconsciously because its more efficient and we don't have to think about it. When you are thinking about efficiency in the area of communication just keep in mind, that often people even though they may have sat in the same room, and heard your message, may continue to use the same pattern the same process they have always used because its that path of least resistance. Think efficiency….at what cost?.