Ashby's Law

I am successfully blogging today because nothing could stop me. Let me explain. My outcome is to blog every day, even if its a short paragraph, the outcome is to blog every week. I want to do this because I believe that in writing, we understand ourselves better and we process information optimally as it gives it more symantec. I understand that this will take a few hours a week so I'm prepared to forego the accumulation of the little time wasters like sporratic email checking, facebook checking, and other such unscheduled activities. I understand that I have a very busy and demanding routine day to day and much of what I do at work is unplanned and pops up very last minute - so here's where I had to be very critical about the plan and ask myself a battery of questions like:

1. What if I get an urgent phone call

2. What if I get too many emails from work?

3. What about my Dentists appointment?

4. What if i feel tired?

5. What If I cant think of what to write?

And so on and so on. I prepare my mind for the environmental variables of my familiar day to day routine so now when they happen I have this little response inside saying "I prepared for this, I know what to do", and such self dialogue keeps me in control of the "system"

In the book "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Dr. William Ross Ashby, you will find The Law of Requisite Variety, which also came to be known as "Ashby's Law", and while technical in its application, it later came to be an aid in many other applications like Biology and Psychology, and in fact could be viewed as truth in any context really. This law basically states that in any given "system" the "controller" must be prepared to handle more variety than the envoronment can throw at it, or else its not in control. Jerry Richardson draws a wonderful parrallell to this concept with the concept of building rapport in his book "The Magic of Rapport" - where he asserts that being more prepared for the variety you will encounter in conversations, the better you are able to maintain control.

I look at this concept as being so incredibly relevant to personal development and change. If you could take an inventory of all of the "responses" that your life has programmed into your subconscious to deal with change, I believe the insight into oneself would be unparrallelled. And that right there is another fundemental structure of NLP - reverse engineering the subject's "perceptions" so as to understand how they will percieve their environment. When you have decided on a given outcome for yourself, or a goal, it means that the problem in between current state and desired state will contain a lot of the same environments you have been used to, but you now have a responsibility to program new responses to those environments in order to arrive at that lasting outcome. A crucial part in the strategy to change is to take a critical inventory of the "ifs" and "thens", and insure the "thens" are conducive to the outcome. If you dont take the time to briefly "live" these variety's and envision the new response you will introduce, you risk giving the control back to the environment or stimulus, and before long - abandoning the journey as you retreat to the logical excuses of your subconscious - which will put up a compelling argument to get you back to familiar patterns.

More on Asby's Law soon....

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."
— Friedrich Nietzsche

Set the goals - discover the values

I certainly don't intend the random thoughts that are about to fill this blog spot to go in any particular order, but what do you know - my first epiphany happens to be centred around the foundation of any effective coaching program - GOAL SETTING! Specifically, the values within the goal setting. As I said - any worthwhile coaching system includes goal setting, not rocket science really, i know - but the truly effective coaching systems will also put a big ol' spotlight on identifying your values - such as "The Great Discovery' - A six sigma coaching approach created recently by Mikel J. Harry.

When I completed the Great discovery workshop, I felt myself still somewhat confused at this step - which was defined in step 1. - Clarify Core Values. I wanted to understand how exactly do you become aware of your values? What if you pick the wrong values? What if you overlook the right ones? Heck...what are values..really? Then today I was listening to the audio book "The Virtue of Selfishness" by Ayn Rand and it sorta hit me. Let me explain, but first let me also explain that I don't necessarily subscribe wholly to the controversial egoist Ayn Rand. She's got spunk, passion and an undeniably brilliant and frankly intimidating stance no doubt, but I find you need to sift through her incredible philosophical intellect to find the gold and shed the obvious angst she has for anyone who cares for an occasional crazy evening doing something evil and blatantly unproductive like...wait for it...Dancing! Anyway, I took my nuggets, and my lumps - thanks Ayn - but the nugget with the biggest light above it shed light on my previous questions I had about defining core values. The magical combination of the two gave me a series of epiphanies that not only explained some of my own personal successes but, paradoxically, - it shed some light on my failures, and gave me some "why" insight. And I freaking love finding the why's in life.

So..what are values? And why do we need them? Here's a dry dictionary definition to get us thinking:

"beliefs of a person or social group in which they have an emotional investment (either for or against something); "he has very conservatives values"

So, basically - the good and evil we decide takes place in our existence. The messed up thing is, we're the only species that is burdened with figuring this stuff out. Sort of. Animals do live by a single value: "stay alive!". Alive is good. Dead is bad. Oh they pass on some tools to make this stuff happen to their young ens - this is how to run - those are what you eat, those are what will eat you, its too hot over their, that's water - we like water, etc. Basic stuff, but its all about staying alive. Not like they need to pass on what grandpa elephant did 200 years ago during the draught - why would they give a hoot? - they're geared to live....that's it. Then there's us.... the poor buggers who want to live too, but we gotta dress it up with drama, pride, beauty, song, dance, yaddy yaddy. Which brings me to my first random musing: You are born. like animals, with one singular goal...."Stay alive"... which breaks down into a simple value: Alive is good. Dead is bad. Then you start to figure out more goals. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Ok I'm beating on mankind here, being human is fun, its GREAT, - IF you figure out the best way to do it and don't let yourself grow old with still having only ever having full filled the goal of "Staying alive!" - No not like John Travolta, I mean a ripe old man who did nothing but work to buy food to nourish his body somewhat until he was 90, only to expire with no love, life or legacy.

This opens a whole can of worms but I only want to look at one little worm: Values occur when goals are set. That sounds easy but trust me its not. You cant just decide after reading this that your goal is now to be healthy and expect that by tomorrow you are living the associated values of "Eat this not that!". You have to be not only ready, but cognisant of the unlearning you will need to do and the room you will have to make from the other overpowering facets you have lived and adapted to. I want to explore more of what happens when you live a facet of life with no goal at all, not a clear one anyway. You still live that facet, chances are you HAVE to - so what then becomes of your values? Take a look at your life.. lets say we break it down to some of life's many facets - Health, Career, Family, Social, Love life, Education, etc. Does one stand out as your strength? Why? Think of what we are talking about. Does one suck? Why? Again, think...

Lets say you are a workaholic. I bet you can tell me where you plan to be in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years hell maybe even know the day you plan to retire and how much of the corporate world you will own by then. So what values have occurred within you because of all these years of a clear definition of your work life? What values have become so incredibly strong because of this life of CLEAR goal setting in your career life? Now here comes the part that sucks... Lets say you chose "Love life" as your "suck". Do you see where I'm going? Have you ever had clear goals about your love life? Do you know where you want to be in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years? Have you visualized it? In this case, no you haven't. But the more permanent fixtures / values in your head sound more like : Work hard! Work long hours if you have to! Be the best you can be! Never let your boss down! Never let your team down! And other such languages of the workaholic. In this case... If this was a client of mine who was coming for coaching in relationships - I'd need to know if they were even ready to take on such associated goals, because even the most basic values that would achieve them would be almost non existent. We'd certainly have to start small... conversely this client would be ideal to take on higher level goal setting in the career environment.

We are human though, and we have a great diversity of fundamental needs from an early age. Early in life we may identify a facet we are good at, and we want to keep feeding it, and through a series of events known as life or our upbringing, we ultimately begin to identify ourselves by these strong facets, and we begin to perceive the rest of our world through the values created by these strengths and goals within them. So what about the other facets of life that we're not so good at? Wouldn't it be great to set the goals of excellence in all of them? Oh but if life were so easy. So, again, what about the facets that we've left by the wayside, but inevitably we will have to face at some point or another? What about the social butterfly who suddenly becomes a mother? Being a mother was never a goal! So how are values then created now that this facet must be lived? What if she continues to strengthen goals within her learned expertise but flies by the seat of her pants? What values are then created as a result? Well - left to our own physiological automations - we tend to fall back on that first goal.."Stay alive..."

How many people have achieved success yet allowed important parts of their lives fall victim to outside control?

I present quite the headache here because I certainly don't know any individual who is a major corporation CEO, excellent father, social savant, romeo extraordinaire, intellectual giant, prime athlete etc. I can certainly conjure up some examples of hard working actors who couldn't hold a family together to save their nuts, pro athletes who think monogamy is a type of wood, ceo's that die alone, and brilliant scientists who are probably still virgins though...

Live with as many purposes as you can fit! You can't make it all perfect and when you set your sights high in all things you only invite defeat. One thing at a time, be smart, make it measurable, attainable, realistic and time sensitive. Create milestones that will tell you you are on your way! You can set realistic goals in a hierarchical order in your life - even if the weakest facet has a simple to achieve goal at the sake of your brilliance having more room to shine. But don't leave any part of your life to the primordial instinct of "stay alive" - fight or flight, this is the arena of being a product of your environment, as opposed to your environment being a product of YOU. Its when you create values that you can begin to live the facets with your thoughts, actions and words becoming congruent. And as Ghandi put it so beautifully " Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony."