Pressure

Rapid

Learning

Rapid Learning invites you to skip most of your pre-planning efforts and start immediately with trying something. That is why STEP 1 in Rapid Learning is Go!

Think about what often happens to your carefully-made plans the moment you actually take an action… Right! Your plans no longer apply! This is because whatever tiny first action you make changes the circumstances in ways that cannot be predicted during the planning stages.

Your extravagant planning efforts may, in fact, be a stalling maneuver. It could be that trying to plan out everything wastes both time and energy, and pushes your nervous system towards depression and burnout because you try not to be where you are: at a place where it is time to take action even if you have no plans. Trying not to be where you are contributes to burnout by making efforts that do not correspond to reality. It’s like using a lever inside of your house to try to move a rock that is outside in the woods. Instead of making an effort to jump into life you hold back trying to figure everything out beforehand. Can anyone ever figure everything out perfectly? (No.) As Isaac Asimov asserted, “To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.”⁰⁰⁵

By explaining all this I am NOT saying, “Don’t plan.”

I am merely saying, “Consider that your efforts to plan may be neurotic fear-driven procrastination in disguise… trying to make something safe that cannot possibly be made safe. Action is inherently evolutionary because doing anything changes everything. Instead of surrounding yourself with followers who expect you to tell them what to do to follow your plan correctly, surround yourself with inspired edgeworkers who do experiments and share mistakes as valuable intellectual capital.”

You can’t navigate the future until you are in the future, so what about just making the moves that need to be made now? Each move creates new circumstances that inform the wisdom of your next move.

Did you ever plan to Go!, read books about how to Go!, wish to Go!, feel jealous about others who Go!, make up really good explanations for why you are not Go!ing… but you don’t Go!? This is called being stuck at Go!

Were you ever stuck at Go!? (Yes.)

Being stuck at Go! is your soul hiding out.

In other words, “Depression is hibernating spirit.”⁰⁰⁴

This takes you to STEP 3 in Rapid Learning Through Pressure: Shift!

Shift! means to move your ‘point-of-origin’ – the place from which you are perceiving and deciding things. Shift your interpretations, your plan, your criteria for success, your posture, your focus of attention, your purpose, your velocity of delivery, your intention, your attitude, your intention, your tone of voice...

Shift! something! Anything! Try something completely different.

Here is a fascinating thoughtware upgrade to replace the old thoughtware you might still be implementing from your school days.

STANDARD THOUGHTWARE: A Beep! is an embarrassing sign of stupidity.

UPGRADED THOUGHTWARE: A Beep! is a strategy redesign proposal.

Your Shift! brings you back to Go! where you immediately implement your new behavior in your next try.

This is Rapid Learning.

Go!

Get your Feedback.

If the Feedback is Go! say, “Thanks for the feedback,” and keep Go!ing.

If the Feedback is Beep! say, “Thanks for the feedback,” and use the Beep! to Shift! your starting point, your style, your rules about how to behave.

Be sure to Shift! both inside (attitude, old conclusion, story, opinion) as well as outside (timing, tone, gesture, focus, etc.).

Then Go! again.

Go! Feedback! Shift! Go! You will be using this simple powerful learning procedure for the rest of this book – perhaps the rest of your life!

By the way, saying, “Thanks for the feedback,” when you get a Go! with the same level of sincerity as when you say, “Thanks for the feedback,” when you receive a Beep! makes you reliable to receive positive feedback. If you receive positive feedback as a compliment or as praise, then people must avoid giving you positive feedback for fear you will merely use it to feed your ego rather than using it to confirm your creativity. Positive feedback is also just feedback, useful info.

Did you ever Go! and get Beep!ed, and Go! again and get Beep!ed again, and then Go! again and you keep getting the same Beep!s? (Yes.) This is simply because you forgot STEP 3 of Rapid Learning: Shift!

You gotta Shift! baby! Shift! Try something else! Anything else!

Unless you try something different you will stay stuck in a rut, duplicating what already isn’t working! As you may have heard: the only difference between a rut and a grave is their length. Rather than behaving as creatively as a corpse you might want to Shift! and Go!

The magnificent value of Rapid Learning Through Pressure is that it derives maximum benefit from the intelligences of whoever is on your formal or informal feedback team. This does not have to be people you like. It is simply people who notice what you are doing and have ideas about it. By bringing immediate, direct, ruthlessly-honest feedback and coaching into your team’s context, you create the option of choosing to radically rely on feedback and coaching. Then, when you want to accomplish something – anything – all you have to do is Go! while keeping one ear open listening for feedback and coaching from your Rapid Learning team.

If you live in gameworlds that have feedback and coaching woven into their context, IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT YOU TRY. As soon as you are in motion your team will more-or-less impartially see how you are doing compared to your stated objectives and will immediately provide you with course-correction details. This is a service you can ongoingly provide for each other to optimize group intelligence. By radically relying on the Beep!s and Go!s from an empowered feedback-and-coaching team there is nowhere you can’t go.

Certainly, some of the feedback you receive may be projections, jealousy, competition, misunderstandings, fear-based arrogance, revenge, or manipulation. But if you estimate that 80% of the feedback you receive is pure gold, you can let the other 20% roll past you like water off the back of a duck.

Suddenly you stop avoiding people’s feedback and coaching. Instead there arises a deep longing to be connected in to a greater wisdom and you find yourself approaching people, maybe even strangers, maybe even your enemies… and saying, “Could you please give me feedback about _________.” You may have heard that two heads are better than one! But wait until you try thirteen heads!

Your team’s feedback may not give you the shortest path to your goal because they are not perfectly-wise Beings. But they don’t have to be… and besides, there aren’t any perfectly wise Beings. The feedback and coaching simply needs to be safe-enough-to-try and good-enough-for-now. If your project is something that has never been done before (which is quite likely these days…) the optimal path to a valuable outcome is unknown. So just start and rapidly learn as you go.

If anyone ever asked you to give them feedback and coaching, you know from your own experience of giving feedback and coaching that your own support team is not bored. When you ask them for feedback and coaching, each person’s full-band-width intelligence is thoroughly called into action through ‘parallel play’ – everyone creating value at the same time. Each coach invents and communicates original clarity and possibilities for you, which keeps them in a state of ecstasy, because 5 Body-creating often feels like being in love!

For now, when providing feedback and coaching, you stay at the same level of practice and context as your client is.

Your proposals for them is to keep practicing what they can already do (to some degree) so that they can do it more precisely, more elegantly, more powerfully. A new possibility is to shift orientation completely towards New Territory of Learning instead. You job becomes then to open the door to and paint the next level of practice in a territory that they don't know they don't know exist.

Rapid Learning is about the Learning Spiral: You can do something? Great! We clap for 15 seconds, and... Here is the next challenge.

This is a practice that also applies to participants asking Questions. The practice is to never answer a direct question directly, this defeat the purpose of going on discovery journeys, but to point over there to the next level down in the Context, the sideways door for the next discovery journey.

You make your coaching personal, for example, "It worked for me." "I lost connection to you then." or "I was hungry to hear your Dragon".

Sometimes this type of coaching is necessary because you involve yourself.

Here is another option for different results: Take yourself out of the equation. Make it about them choosing what they want to give, how they want to give it.

Bringing yourself in the coaching can be a subtle but powerful way for people to give their center away to you because " 'the authority figure' says, and I want to please her".

The way to make it their choice of behaviour is to provide crystal Clarity about the difference in result of different behaviour.

"If you do this, this happens."

"If you do this, this happens."

Now, you choose. (Do not add this last sentence in the coaching, it is implied that it is their choice).

Your "feedback" will come from a different place in you than your personal connection with what is happening, your coaching will come from a bigger place: your Context, your Bright Principles, your Archetypal Lineage, your Quest. At the same, using these forces to provide feedback and coaching calls forth their Context, their Bright Principles, their Archetypal Lineage, their Quest. The space of work and discovery becomes a lot bigger to play in.

Shift from coaching people about what they are feeling or not feelings to coach about their Context, Purpose and Possibility.

How is it built inside of them that the result of their communication would be this?

What are they trying to avoid? What are they trying to show? Why? How hiding or showing this part of themselves makes sense in their work?

Coaching Feelings and Emotions can quickly become micro-managing people's experience. People will feel Fear or Sadness when they feel express or use their Anger. In my experience, coaching about Feelings stigmatise them such as 'I should not feel fear or sadness when I feel anger.'

If they have mixed Emotions, these are details that get 'cleaned up' in Emotional Healing Processes on the Path of Evolution.

Instead, use your Clarity to bring distinctions to their Inner Experience so they can use the new distinctions for their own Inner Navigation, and get Clarity about their Purpose, and open the door to new Possibility!

You might notice that in my writing, I do not use the words 'feedback' or 'coaching' in references to the offered Possibility. I make proposals, invitations, offers with distinctions about how these new Possibility would be more interesting or exciting than what they have created before. Others tools that I use are negotiating intimacy, making Pirate agreements, using Vacuum Rapid Learning, Committing to Their Commitment at 100%, and many more.