There is an old Psychology task that simply asks for us to read the following paragraph and count how many times the letter F appears in the paragraph. You have probably done this many times before, but give it another go.
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF MANY YEARS
How many did you count?
Of course, the letter F appears 6 times in the paragraph. If you missed some, look again.
If you keep missing some, then pay particular attention to how many times the word ‘of’ appears.
Most people miss reading an ‘OF’ or two (or three!). The explanation is that we read the word OF phonetically as OV and miss the visual OF. It is referred to as a scotoma of thought – a mental blind spot. If we re-read the paragraph with a strict editor’s mind we will examine it letter by letter (or read it backwards) and see all six of the letter F.
The F Factors
Sometimes we miss seeing the F Factors in life and they might just be the most important F’s of all:
Focus Frame and Flow.
Focus
There is an old Indian wisdom that says ‘When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are the pockets.’
- How we focus
- What we focus on
- What we miss if our focus is too pinpointed
- What we miss if our focus is only a wide are vital for us in how we go about life and learning.
Nobel Prize laureate, Psychologist Herbert Simon, warned us in 1977 that
the coming information rich world would ‘create a wealth of information that would create a poverty of attention.’
To focus we need a good aperture: a mental operation like a camera. One we can use to zoom in and focus on detail and zoom out to focus on the bigger picture. Over focussing (only seeing the pockets of the saint) and under focussing (not reading the medium print, let alone the fine) can limit our mental capacity.
Perhaps the story of our time, the focal point we need to return to, is what we can learn from The Three Bears story: too hot, too cold, just right. (Too hard, too soft, just right.) To find the ‘just right’ in any situation we need to utilise our mental and emotional aperture.
Students (in deed learners at all levels) will benefit from the ability to be adept at the aperture. We all need to have attention flexibility: the ability and agility to expand and contract our focus.
Schools will also need the ability to create environments of shared focus – a mindfulness of the tasks ahead and a mindfulness of the shared values that help power the group’s attention.
In deed the author of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, describes focus – our aperture ability – as the driver of excellence.
Frame
Our mental aperture helps us to zoom in and zoom out and thereby help us to see things from different perspectives:
- Long range
- Mid range
- Close up
The photo we take of life also requires us to choose the angle we take the shot from and the way we interpret the ‘shot’ (the event, the meeting, the outcome, the porridge we’ve just eaten, the bed we have made for ourselves). Choosing our angles, deciding our interpretations, is how we Frame.
Our ability to interpret things from different points of view – our ability to see things from different angles – is our ability to Frame.
Get the frame wrong and it can be limiting, even dangerous.
Gotta love an old gag:
A wife rings her husband who is driving to work. ‘Be careful honey’ she says ‘I’ve just heard on the news that there is some maniac driving the wrong way on the freeway’. ‘One maniac’ he replies ‘there are hundreds of them.’
We design a better product or system when we see things from the:
- Customer’s point of view
- Artist’s point of view
- Salesperson’s point of view
- User’s point of view
- Factory worker’s point of view…
We become better teachers when we understand things from the:
- Student’s point of view
- Dyslexic student’s point of view • Employer’s point of view
- Scientist’s point of view
- Artist’s point of view…
When we face a ‘problem’ in our life how we see it becomes vital. It can be:
- An insurmountable tragedy
- An opportunity
- A chance to learn and grow
- A hurdle
- A wall
- A doorway
- A pain in the bum
- A pain in the neck
- A pain in the brain
- A game for the brain
- A gain for the brain
My wife Lindy and I lived for some years in a small studio apartment. It seemed to be a law at the time that every third apartment must house a little white dog. Two units away we had our little white dog – it liked to bark whenever anyone walked passed its front door. Lindy likes dogs but doesn’t like little, white, barking dogs that live two units away.
As we walked passed one day, the dog started its yelping and I said,”Ah, there goes Ronnie again.” Lindy had been married to me long enough to roll her eyes and ask, “So, why do you call it Ronnie?”
“Ronnie,” I replied, “Ronnie Barker.” Now perhaps it is not my finest moment of comedy gold but Lindy loved the old comic Ronnie Barker as she used to watch the television show The Two Ronnies (Barker and Corbett) with her Dad.
From then on the little yelping dog became known as Ronnie and we would joke, “Oh there goes Ronnie again.” Somehow, framing the dog as Ronnie helped us accept the yelps.
Flow
When we are humming, when we are at our very best, we are in flow.
Our abilities to focus, defocus, refocus; our abilities to frame, un-frame and reframe are important ingredients in getting us to flow.
Flow is a mix, a brew. The research behind it comes from Psychologist Mihayli Csikzentmihalyi who I had the good fortune to first encounter in the late 1980s. Flow can occur when the following ingredients are in the brew:
- When people are doing what they are excellent at doing
- When people are engaged in what really engages them
- When people are engaged in something that engages their ethics and
- When people are working on what they believe matters
Richard Florida, author of The Creative Class, says that “the dollar will attract a person but it won’t keep them.” People will stay when they love what they do – working with good and exciting people on good and exciting tasks.
However, there is more to flow than this too. Some people are not working on seemingly exciting tasks and may not be working with good and exciting people, yet they somehow bring flow to what they do.
There is an old Crowded House song that says ‘everywhere you go, you take the weather with you’. It’s the same for some folk and flow. Whatever they do, they bring flow to it. They do this by being:
- Interested and passionate about learning
- Interested and passionate about getting better all the time
- Interested and passionate about upping the challenge and
- Interested and passionate about upping their skill levels… constantly
In many ways flow is a foundation for a good organisation, a good school and a good team. Folk with a shared passion and shared values doing their very best and being absorbed. When a leader, principal, teacher, student or worker… is fully absorbed, they feel good and pleasure is the emotional marker for flow.
Failing Forwards
I’m sure there are many other F words you can think of (or at least one) but for me ‘F’ just doesn’t stand for Fail – it stands for how we pass by keeping on learning and how well we live for the good of self, others and the planet.
The best of folk have not always been a singular success story. The best of folk have.
- Tried often
- Failed much
- Got back on board and
- Kept on learning
- Been excited about applying their learning
To be in flow they have been the kind of folk who:
- Fail forwards
- Improve the skill of their apertures
- Become agile with their framing and
- Love the adventure
Focus, frame, flow… freedom!