Are the most powerful questions that you generate sent back from the future but shaped out of your past?
Tags: Perspective; Exposure, Experience, Expertise; Cognitive Load Theory; Knowledge; Mental Models and Maps; OODA Loop; Perception Tunnel; Hot action and decision making
The ‘experiencing self’ – the version of ourselves that exists in the constant flow of the moment is fuelled by rich sensory inputs married with a diverse array of feedback and emotions. Is this ‘experiencing self’ a time traveler constantly jumping back in time, drawing upon and accessing an ever increasing bank of rich knowledge? Is this time travelling triggered instantaneously by similar or familiar challenges that we face, recognition of ever changing patterns from the world around us or strong emotional connections fused with vivid recollections? Can we intuitively or deliberately jump in to the future to help us in the present through anticipation or via planning and predicting and is our ability to do this strengthened by our diversity of experience and the time we devote to developing reflective and predictive skills?
Our reality is perceptually filtered by the contextual terrain we operate upon giving us unique, idiosyncratic perspective and experiences. To aid our time travelling self, should coaches and practitioners:
- Build a deep, diverse and rich experiential knowledge base and reinforce this with deliberate reflection
- Remind our experiencing self of our biases, sensitivity to emotion and our fallibility under stress whilst truly acknowledging the contextual terrain we are operating in.
- Build scenario planning and predicting skills to enable better anticipation and generate even more experience and knowledge to draw upon
Questions:
- How do we interpret and then commit experiences to memory? As coaches and practitioners, how do you value your experiential knowledge and is this a rich source of fuel for your expertise?
- Do we account for mood, relationship dynamics and context when we need to perform and when committing new experiences to memory, should we attempt to ‘code’ this information as well? Could deliberate reflection aid this?
- What do we tend to remember most vividly from our experience and does emotion/mood create a HALO that either taints or enhances our recollection? Does this create perceptual filters that might shape our personal interpretation of situations?
- Is our previous experience an important component of how we respond, act and perform in ‘the moment’? and
- How important is mood in shaping the reality of the experiencing self?
- How susceptible are we to perceptual filtering? Could this be an issue for ‘human performance’ and how could we account for it?
- How aware are coaches and practitioners of the ‘contextual terrain’ on which they operate? Would it be helpful to acknowledge and understand it?
- When recognising ‘patterns’ (behaviour/skill/feedback from the environment) are these ‘cues’ useful in the contextual terrain you are currently in? OR should we approach every situation as novel? What are the pros and cons?
- When is anticipation, intuition and prediction (built from previous experience) limiting on idea generation and alternative solutions?
- If we acknowledge that exposure in any contextual terrain is ‘novel, new or different’ then is there an argument that we should constantly seek out the new (or) different solution?
- Could this in turn add to a richer, deeper and greater breadth of ever evolving expertise?
- Are the most powerful questions you generate sent back from the future but built out of the past?