Improve your thinking and work performance

Tim Roberts explains how workers need to relax to perform; relaxation is good for the organisation. He says we are intellectually bound; we judge, evaluate and try to dominate through intellectual competition to help our work but it does the opposite. Intuition is excellent at spotting patterns and making connections that normal consciousness can’t grasp – something police officers know so well, that gut feeling that points to a train of inquiry that turns up trumps

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Currently, I am enjoying a wonderful and musical
midlife crisis. Yet it is a midlife crisis with a message. I’ve just started hand-drum lessons. Hand drums are drums that are played directly with the hand, not with sticks.

Let me paint a picture for you. I was recently at a typical Kiwi dinner party. It was the first time I had met the majority of the people at the party.

It was in a lovely house with what real-estate agents here call a good flow. That means that people could wander around the open-plan house socialising. The house had a large deck outside, a pool, a large lounge area and a spacious kitchen.

When we arrived I found all the men, not just some of the men at the party but every single one, crowded around the fridge in the kitchen. And they stayed here all night! They were all middle-aged and seemed to be
guarding a fridge that was stuffed to the gunnels with beer.

I have since learned that this is often what happens here in New Zealand, men and women divide at parties and the men stack the fridge with slabs of beer and then protect it territorially. It was great fun – except for the conversations. I felt as though I was on a different wavelength.

These guys were really friendly and generous. They
drank beer after beer with the regularity of a metronome. On the other hand, I sipped one glass of red wine. It was fun but the conversations left me standing. We talked about rugby, and I could keep up with that, just.

The conversations then moved to the mechanical realm. They spoke excitedly and in depth about restoring 4x4 vehicles, about racing 4x4 vehicles and about crashing said vehicles, which gave them the excuse to restore them again! They spoke with a manic glee in their eyes.

Then they talked about doing the same to tanks – some were in the army and some used to be so they seemed to know what they were talking about. They
described the deep joy of being shot at and reversing their tank at nearly 60 kilometres per hour.

They then talked about Harley Davidsons and other
manly pursuits like dirt biking, hunting and restoring an old Indian. Apparently this isn’t a form of human regeneration but an ancient motorcycle that many
people worship.

This went on for hours. It was great to listen to but I lack the chromosome that allows me to appreciate engines, weaponry, stalking and shooting prey while
staring it into cold-blooded submission. I struggle with basic DIY and don’t know the engine size of my car.

What fires your engines?
Finally, one of the Kiwis turned to me and said: “Tim, you’re a bit quiet. We’ve been talking about the things that bring us alive. Tell us what fires your engines?” All
eyes turned to me. There was an expectant silence.

“Well,” I began feebly. “I um…I’ve just started hand drumming.” “Hand drumming!” said one large Kiwi. “Is that a form of self abuse?” There was loud laughter. “Shut up and let him finish,” said another, whom no
one seemed to argue with.

Perhaps that’s because he gets dropped by helicopter onto inaccessible snow-covered mountain ridges in the South Island. He survives alone for two weeks at a time, hunting and sleeping in snow holes.

Rather hesitantly, I explained that hand drumming is amazing. It’s almost primeval. I asked if they had ever been in a group, pounding a synchronised set of
rhythms with their bear hands.

The floor shakes, the air around you seems to pulse, and after a while you stop hearing the rhythm, you start to feel it in your chest and then you suddenly
become it! The spaciousness that this brings fills up your entire mind and all stress disappears.

The refreshment is amazing and the sense of bonding with others is equally powerful. Drumming crosses all cultural boundaries and language barriers.

There was an embarrassing silence. After a long pause, one of the men said: “Yeah, I’ve been once, it was cool. I always meant to go back.”

Another said: “I’ve never been hand drumming but my
brother went walking on the hills and ran into a group of guys who were sitting in a semicircle overlooking
the ocean and thumping these huge drums with their
palms. He said it was as exhilarating as drag racing. He
watched them for a good hour.”

With that mechanical note approval, they were all diving into the conversation with questions like: “What drums do you use?” “Do you use goat skins on your drums?” “Do you prefer djembe or conga drums? “What
about bongos?” The snow-ridgesurvival guy wondered if he could corner the market in deerskins as drum skins.

Revitalising
For me, hand drumming is one of my newest pleasures. I had heard that drumming could revitalise our inner sense of who we are.

It connects us once more to our bodies and unleashes deep bodily wisdom that has been denied us since we became locked into our heads, as the western world tends to be. More than anything, I heard it was fun and I need more fun in my life.

I decided to go to a music shop. I walked over to the percussion section and there were several different styles of hand drums, all lined up like sentries. I gave them all a bash to see what would happen.

As I neared the end of the selection I noticed two tall Gon Bop congas. They looked beautiful and when I tapped them it was a dull and disappointing slap-thud-slap. I left disappointed.

I don’t like to give up so I enrolled at a local hand-drumming group workshop. This was probably the last excruciating learning experience of my adult life. I have not felt such a failure since my high-school maths lessons.

In one hour I did not manage even one basic rhythm. My inner critic sabotaged everything I did. I would try to concentrate on the rhythm and the most essential
part of a rhythm, the downbeat. But could I hit it? Not once. My mind would seize up.

At once I felt like crying in frustration and laughing at my foolishness. A child of ten was in the group and he was amazing. The rest were about my age or older and were fast and happy. They clearly felt sorry for me. I felt embarrassed.

Still, I don’t like to give up so I booked a couple of one-to-one lessons. The lessons were a little better than the group experience but not much. Several weeks passed with me tapping on everything I could find just to try to get my sense of rhythm to spring into life. No luck.

I gave up. I consoled myself with the thought that it is good for me to fail because now when I work with people who feel themselves to be failures I will have a higher degree of empathy.

Forget yourself
The days passed and I continued to think about the drums. Then one evening, without realising, I caught myself tapping along to a TV theme song; then another. When I tried to do it consciously I would tense up and miss the beats. When I forgot myself, I could do it easily.

I was in the library when I saw, quite by chance, a book called Drumming The Spirit to Life by Russell Buddy Helm. Buddy describes how to set yourself alive with hand drumming. He has a Google Video that is worth watching.

The bit I like best in the book is when Buddy is asked to teach drumming to one of the world’s leading martial artists, who used to work with Bruce Lee.

The martial artist has reflexes like a cat but can’t drum. He can’t get his hands to move fast enough. Buddy coaxed him to relax because only when we relax
and forget ourselves can our hands move to the rhythm at speed.

The martial artist finally understood and said: “Bruce Lee said the same thing to me! He told me that I was intellectually bound.” Apparently, in addition to being a great martial artist, Bruce Lee was also the cha-cha
champion of Hong Kong and was relaxed even when fighting.

When I read this I went back to the music shop. I approached the two tall conga drums, rather like Arthur approaching the sword in the stone.

This was the test. I took a deep breath, relaxed and struck the larger of the two drums. I hit it gently and with relaxation but the ring that came from the drum skin was pure and loud and true.

That was some time ago but the memory still excites me. I know drums don’t technically ring – but this one felt like it did. It was one of the most beautiful sounds. I played a relaxed rhythm and the sense of satisfaction from this very basic rhythm was huge.

Now these are my drums and I am slowly but happily making progress. My drumming is a personal journey for me but it echoes a movement that we as a Western society are making.

Intelligence
As a society, we are intellectually bound. We are frozen into our heads. We judge, evaluate and try to dominate through intellectual competition. We assume
that this helps our work but it does the opposite.

Edward De Bono said: “The critical use of intelligence is always more immediately satisfying than its constructive use.

“To prove someone else wrong gives you instant achievement and superiority. To agree, makes you seem superfluous and a sycophant. To put forward an
idea puts you at the mercy on whom you depend for evaluation of the idea.”

As a result, we are tense and anxious and waiting to be shamed. Sir John Whitmore, one of the leading business coaches, authors and educators of leaders,
says that three things hamper our performance at work:

● Fear
● A lack of time
● The bottom line (for public servants this translates into cost-effectiveness).

Whitmore claims that living in such fear is totally against the rules of good performance. To perform well at anything, whether in yachting or motor sport (both of which Whitmore competed at international level)
or work, we need to be relaxed in order to respond with all our resources.

In his seminal book, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind: Why
Intelligence Increases When You Think Less, Professor Guy Claxton says that it is our style of thinking that is at fault.

Claxton describes the thinking style in question as D mode, which stands for deductive mode.

D mode has a particular purpose, that of judging and comparing, and it is vital for disciplines like legal advocacy, economics or maths, but is wholly out of place when dealing with human emotions and relationships, yet we seem trapped in it.

Claxton says that D mode believes that the primary goal of human labour and thought is efficiency, not fun or meaning.

In such a culture as ours, time spent exploring a question is only justified to the extent that it clearly leads towards a solution to the problem. To spend time dwelling on a question to see if it may lead to a deeper question seems inefficient, self-indulgent or perverse.

Problems to fit solutions
D mode looks for problems to fit solutions to, it values facts above experiences and theories and models above observations and subtle knowing. Our organisations prize D-mode-thinking above all else.

D mode is vital in the right place but can be destructive if misused because it can be perceived
as critical, divisive and shaming. D mode causes anxiety and entrenchment; awareness is constricted and focused on avoidance of threat.

D mode is effective for devising technical and operational solutions to known events but cannot deal adequately with complexity and with subtlety and
nuance.

D mode rarely motivates people – it produces fear and withholding. People only innovate and harness their intuition when they feel safe.

D mode fuels competitiveness and when this tears halfbaked ideas to shreds, people learn to protect themselves by waiting until they have a position that is watertight. This delay often means that their position is overly cautious or out of date.

When managers become panicked by escalating complexity they typically attempt to control it through D mode and enter an urgency mindset. The pressure this creates leads them to adopt one shallow nostrum or fashionable idea after another, putting them and the organisation at risk.

Claxton goes on to explain that there are many other ways of knowing, which contemporary Western society needs more than ever yet are not valued.

Drummers, Olympic fencers and concert pianists use kinds of thinking that stem from the unconscious recognition of patterns. D mode is simply not fast enough for them. Their development deliberately harnesses what Claxton calls the “undermind” (non-conscious or unconscious).

Claxton explains that intuition is excellent at spotting patterns and making connections of a degree of subtlety that normal consciousness can’t grasp. This
is something successful operational police officers know so well, that gut feeling that points to a train of inquiry that eventually turns up trumps.

Sophisticated insights
Claxton’s research repeatedly shows that slower ways of knowing can usher in sophisticated insights. The slow way of knowing will not deliver its delicate
produce when the mind is hurried… Yet thinking slowly, paradoxically, does not have to take time.

In organisations now, there is a need to deal with complexity and this calls for slowness, playfulness,
imagination, learning by osmosis and learning faster than our ability to articulate (incidentally, most people’s confidence is linked to their ability to articulate what they know than the knowing itself).

We need to move away from D mode’s repression to a more spacious way of thinking and knowing. That is exactly what I get from drumming.

If you find yourself tense, frustrated, troubled, stressed or fearful, consider something that takes you out of your mind and attunes you to a slower, wider
and more balanced sense of awareness. Try hand drumming. There are groups everywhere and you don’t need lessons, as Buddy Helm explains.

Last but not least, there has been a profound shift in working values in the last 20 years. One of the things that workers value most highly now is relaxation. This is possibly a result of endless emails, skipping meals, overbearing managerialism and pressure.

Workers need to relax to perform. It is both healthy and good for the organisation. Perhaps there will come a time when workplaces have a drum room alongside the gym. Try it because it is cheap to set up and you have everything to gain.

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