Posts from — July 2009

Today Thinking Club welcomed guest, Suzy Reading.

A bit of background
Suzy recently returned to Australia after building a successful holistic wellness practice in London. She is challenged with re-creating its success in a new market and asked Thinking Club to work with her on developing a brand identity and promise that will appeal to Australian clientele.

Suzy’s business is a rich offering. She is a qualified psychologist, yoga teacher and fitness instructor. Suzy combines teachings in each of these modalities to deliver a personalised wellness plan for her clients. Yoga is the vehicle for delivering this.

However, where in London people were happy to pay well for one-on-one yoga, Suzy is finding that the local market prefers group sessions. To cater for this demand, Suzy offers her individual clients the opportunity to invite up to five additional guests. This still allows for a strong degree of personalisation yet helps with cost sharing among attendees.

Suzy is also running large group classes at established gym and yoga studios in order to build her profile within the local market. These serve as a light introduction to her teaching style and showcase some of her talents to prospective private clients.

Thinking it through
Using a common creative thinking technique – Opposites. made it easier for Suzy to define how her approach differed from many traditional fitness, yoga and psychology practices.

Where fitness trainers strive for continuos improvement, Suzy coaches acceptance. Where yoga often maintains that stillness and meditation is the only true yoga and that poses are merely a way to achieve this, Suzy embraces both its physicality and mental disciplines. Where psychologists traditionally have suit-wearing clients recline on couches, Suzy feels that an active environment allows hers to move through issues more easily.

Thinking forward
We then used a Ken Hudson exercise, ‘How to Create the Perfect Customer Experience’ to develop an understanding of how Suzy’s practice could translate across the Atlantic.

Envisaging the ‘Perfect Customer Experience’ as a one to five year goal allowed Suzy to open her business to new possibilities rather than remain trapped in practices that may have worked well overseas but may not do so well here.

Suzy saw this ideal future space as a private sanctuary. One that offered freedom to explore the reality of now and make peace with one’s current situation.

Some clarity of thought
Through our workshop Suzy realised her clear point of difference. In stark contrast to many personal trainers’ goal-setting techniques Suzy sees her practice as one of letting go of outcomes and enjoying an acceptance of what is.

While many of her clients attain lofty benchmarks, such as dropping 3 dress sizes, Suzy says this is more a by-product of the happiness her clients achieve through getting in touch with their bodies and minds. The clarity her clients attain, serves to deliver positive results in all areas of their lives especially where there have been blockages.

In summary
Its clear that Suzy has a fabulous offer. Her biggest challenge is getting the message out there. Once she does, there will be no stopping the new wellness revolution.

Welcome to Thinking Club guest, Jonathan Langrell of Our Manly, who proposed a compelling Thinking Club discussion.

How can we create an optimally super-abundant mind? A 24 hour day being that yields an 18 hour day (excluding human and machine external leverage)? Would we want to?

This sparked a vocal and spirited conversation among the group during which we unleashed an arsenal of Thinker Tools.

Thinker Rules
We began by insisting on a point of order – if we were to generate a worthy list of possibilities we needed to suspend any limitations on the discussion. So we dropped the exclusion of human and machine leverage and allowed any thought to exist.

We agreed that once every avenue had been explored and the list created, we could then re-insert the criteria to judge each suggestion on its merit. But during a session: Thinking Club rules clearly state, that suspension of disbelief and no judgements are pre-requisites.

The concept of time
And so we began. First an opening conversation around the concept of time. This was rounded out with input from Zimbardo and Boyd’s fascinating study, The Time Paradox, in which they present six major attitudes towards time and time perspective. Taken from cross-cultures and eons they suggest ways in which to manipulate time’s effects.

The relativity of time
We talked about time ‘relativity’ and how we frame our references of time. We discussed that simply by restating one’s idea of time – shifting our attitude toward it or ‘changing our lens’ (a Thinker Tool oft called upon) one could manipulate its effects.

Redefining our sleep patterns
This led to an exploration of time usage and an awareness of circadian rhythms and sleep management. We referenced famous success stories who live only by ‘cat-naps’ and spoke of how international pilots use the technique to manage their long-haul flights.

The point was raised that if we redefine our sleep patterns we have the possibility of creating more time in our day. This was not so much to ‘sleep less’ as one’s body reacts negatively if it is sleep deprived, but instead to approach sleep in shift patterns and boost productivity between each mini-sleep.

Mind-altering time
As we further explored the idea of altering our lens on time, other more impactful ways of mind-altering arose. We discussed how both mental illnesses and mind-altering drugs can have effects on the brain which change one’s perception of time. This could affect a feeling of productivity – but at what point does reality impact on belief systems. What if one simply felt productive but was in fact lying around ‘doing’ nothing.

Doing nothing is doing something
Conversation quickly sprung to the defense of ‘doing nothing’ and how freeing the mind from activity can sometimes allow it to become increasingly sharper, more creative and achieve significant break-throughs.

Lucid Dreaming then came up as a tool for being able to maneuver a situation into a positive outcome through having ‘practised it’ during stillness or meditation.

Such thoughts focused our thinking on physiology and training the body to continue operating at various levels of consciousness so that we never wasted one minute in ‘sleeping’. We talked of optimal ‘flow-states’ where one is in the right frame of mind to see and act upon any situation to one’s best advantage and how this would achieve extreme effectiveness. This is why super-successful people seem comparatively to achieve so much more than an average operator in their respective lifetimes.

Achieving super-success
Speaking of success turned to the ‘Four Hour a Day Working Week’. How outsourcing every menial task can buy back literally hours of one’s life and allow extreme focus on one core activity thereby gaining ultimate success. Malcolm Gladwell’s, Outliers, also cover this notion – that success is led by the repetition of a task for over 10000 hours and not merely by sheer natural-born talent.

Outsourcing time and relationships
We talked of how in mastering time – technology can be turned to our advantage. How automated voicemail, no face-to-face contact and standardised replies can increase productivity times over. However the group shunned the thought of becoming automotons in favour of efficiency.

So leveraging relationships became the ultimate multi-tasking opportunity. Having others do everything for you. Ultimately realising that to have total control one must completely relinquish it.

Tapping into primordial consciousness
This raised the notion of human spiritual connectivity and tapping into shared knowledge so that each individual member of society would not have to repeat the learnings of those prior. Many experts refer to the instinctual primordial brain and we saw this as an untapped resource.

Coming to a Time Vortex near you
The ideal scenario propose building a Time Vortex to which one could escape the march of time and be allowed free reign to explore while the rest of the world moved forward. The individual emerging from the Time Vortex could have experienced lifetimes yet seemingly not aged a bit.

Practical time-saving solutions
Everyone had a multitude of suggestions on what they would do with their time had they more of it. Our practical everyday solutions for wresting more of it back were to:

• create space

• allow time
• share ideas
• be selective in who/what we give our time to
• pinpoint and focus on developing select skills

In summary
Timeliness is not something we try and create, but simply allow. To increase our life and enjoy its moments, we must take the pressure off achieving.

Put simply:
Get out of life’s way and let it happen. Then, the optimal will naturally occur.

Australian author, Ken Hudson, delivers a very practical creative business book with, ‘The Idea Generator’. In it he suggests a stream of activities designed to build and develop ones business. He categorises these under six core goals:

1. Solving Problems
2. Creating Growth Opportunities
3. Improving Performance
4. Enhancing Team Performance
5. Selling with Impact
6. Breakthrough Leadership

Under ‘Creating Growth Opportunities’ he recommends as Tool #2

Design the Perfect Customer Experience

Rather than following than following the traditional practice of refining based on customer feedback, Hudson suggests taking time out to ‘imagine what the perfect customer experience feels like.’

Then, he says, ‘once you have created the perfect scenario you can compare and contrast the ideal one with the current situation. Where are the gaps and how can you address these?’