Chocolate chip or salted caramel? How to plan with the wisdom of hindsight.
When the children were little we’d often visit their grandmother on the south coast for the summer holidays - a quintessentially English affair of mocking sun, biting sea and grazing pebbles. But they loved every moment of it. One highlight that never disappointed was the old Italian ice cream parlour, overflowing with enticing offerings of every flavour and colour. So much so, that the children found it impossible to decide what to order. After much agonised deliberation, they’d leave with one flavour only to wish they’d ordered another just a few licks later. That is, until I used a some simple hypnosis to help them make the decision with hindsight….
We are all familiar with the wisdom of hindsight, the answer that seems obvious once seen, but remains hidden until after it’s needed. Wouldn’t it be great if we could harness this wisdom in advance, and find the hidden answers in time to help our clients?
The good news is, we can.
Here are three tools you can start using right now to expand your capacity to use hindsight wisdom in advance, with foresight.
First, keep a work journal.
Hindsight is really another word for experience: learning by doing. By keeping a work learning journal, we can note down important lessons, unpack them and reflect on them to help us in the future. By revisiting our notes, we embed the learning and continually adapt it to the future situations that we face.
Here are some simple questions you can use to structure your journal:
What was the event/ issue/ case?
What went well?
What went wrong/ not to plan/ caused a challenge?
What did you learn?
How will you spot the risk of this happening again?
What can you do differently next time?
All professionals should maintain a reflective practice. A journal is a great way of doing this. If this seems too much, try a short form. Just keep a running list of learning points somewhere you can access easily. I have a draft email with a list of lessons I add to each time I need to embed a lesson. Try wording it positively - what you need to do, rather than what you don’t want to do (e.g., instead of “Don’t ask too many questions” try instead “Stop when you have enough”).
Secondly, ask good questions well in advance.
Use questions that provoke a perspective of hindsight before the event.
For example:
What will keep you awake at night on the eve of the meeting/ negotiation/trial etc?
If it all goes wrong, what will you wish you’d done differently?
What would others say about what you’re planning to do?
Have you done this before? What did you learn?
Since hindsight and experience go hand in hand, asking colleagues or team members these questions will improve the quality of your planning, and theirs. These are good questions to help resource and prepare a team for tasks that lie ahead.
Thirdly, access the subconscious, intuitive parts of brain function to gain helpful insights. Here’s how to choose ice-cream well…..
Nearly everyone constructs some form of time-line in their imagination when they consider a future decision, or ponder some future outcome that they desire. But we vary in our ability to see clearly the future steps that we need to take in order to make good decisions, and the resources we’ll need to complete each step successfully. By physically mapping out our timeline in space (e.g. by using a line on the floor), and then walking mindfully over it from the present into the future, we can experience a sense of moving through time as we move along the time-line. When doing so, we can gain insights into the risks, and what we’ll need to progress successfully. We can do the same exercise in our imaginations, too.
Here’s how it worked with the ice cream. I’d ask my children to imagine a timeline running from the present to the future and to orientate themselves in relation to it. For example, some people feel that the future lies in front of them with the past behind them, others, that time runs from left to right. Once they’d orientated themselves, they’d close their eyes and I’d walk them slowly along their timeline into the future, telling them to imagine themselves travelling into the future as they moved, entering the parlour, then leaving, feeling their ice cream in hand, smiling happily and excited at the pleasure to come. I’d then get them to pause, turn back so they were facing along their timeline from the future towards the present, and ask the simple question: “What flavour is the ice cream?”. The answer would come immediately, without hesitation, every time. After a few visits the kids would say, “Baba, I can’t decide what flavour – can we do that time travel thing to find out?” If you have kids or can borrow someone else’s, try it for yourself.
This simple yet effective method can be used for any decision to help support the desired outcome. It makes more conscious a process that most of us engage in subconsciously.
Techniques like these are well established in solutions-focused coaching and NLP. They work by putting ourselves into the position where we have already taken the decision or step we are struggling with, and then allowing our subconscious to back-fill the missing information which direct enquiry cannot access. Because they use space, imagination and imagery, they engage different cognitive functions than mere logic and reason. They generate insights that are difficult to grasp with rational thought alone.
In a work setting you won’t be asking what flavour the ice cream is. But when standing in the future you might ask, “What do I need to get here?” “How does it feel when I’ve done X already?” “What’s missing?”
So there you have it: three tried and tested ways to use the wisdom of hindsight in your preparation and planning. One thing’s for sure: ordering ice cream will never be the same again.
PS: are you curious to learn tools from hypnosis that harness the subconscious for stronger communication? Then click here and come to our online workshop in July: communication, hypnosis and the subconscious mind.