Last night, I was conversing with my colleague Andre and his wife about how to move our voice teaching practices from the “fun” and “barely happening” stage to “going concern” territory. As usual, I was full of ideas both practical and “creative”, looking for solutions, possibilities, excitement, etc. Andre, to the chagrin of his wife, was shooting down ideas as fast as I could articulate them which, with the help of some performance enhancing wine, was pretty fast. I began to grow frustrated and then, thankfully, reframed the situation by asking myself “what is Andre doing here that works to our benefit?”

The answer, of course, is that he was being an Owl.

Owl, you say? What the heck is an Owl? When I brought this pop psychology terminology up in the conversation, I naturally got a derisive snort from Andre, so I was committed to explaining myself in order to salvage my dignity.

I described an idea I read years ago in, I think, Robert Kiyosaki’s book, that describes how Walt Disney had an ingenious system for getting the most out of his people. He divided his troops into 3 groups who specialized in certain kinds of thinking:

1. Dreamers
2. Realists, and
3. Critics, the aforementioned Owl mindset.

Disney’s strategy was to move his projects through repeated cycles of these three modes of thinking: First the Dreamers would get to make wild and wacky nonsense and freely generate ideas from inspirational to ridiculous. Then the Realists would devise strategies for implementation. Next, the Critics would do their Owly thing and poke at it to uncover weaknesses, flaws and other disagreeable aspects. Then the project would go, limping and bleeding, back to the Dreamers for a new chance at life, and the cycle would repeat. After a number of iterations, the project would either survive or not. If it survived, it meant that the whole thing had evolved enough so the Owls couldn’t wreck it any more.

My point to Andre was that his Owl is very important, but that we don’t want it to short circuit the Dreamer or the Realist. If we start the process with Owl-ing, everybody gets discouraged, packs up and goes back to watching TV.

Which brings me to the subject of our next Boot session. Edward has prepared something about the elicitation and evocation of STATES, a logical extension of the work we’ve been doing lately. This will also help move us forward if we can evoke high learning states and then anchor them into our Boot sessions…

…and who knows, we might also play with evoking the classic Disney States. Everyone is, of course, capable of Dreaming, Strategizing and Owling. Segregating these states from each other can provide them with some freedom to do what they do best and, as I tell my singing students, functional independence of the parts enables them to become stronger and coordinate together more effectively.

So, please consider joining us for NLP Boot in Vancouver on Monday April 19 at 7pm. You can email me if you need directions to get there.

Ciao,
cabot@telus.net