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EFFECTIVENESS
By
Bill Harvey
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“Effectiveness”
is a
word that is coming into increasing use in the advertising
business - where it means a shift from relatively superstitious
or "soft" measures of performance, to down-to-earth ones such
as sales. In my profession as a media researcher I have come
to frequently use measures of effectiveness as part of media
optimization work. This has also in moments of reflection
given me cause to think more broadly about "effectiveness"
from the point of view of my earlier academic training which
was in philosophy.
That
led me to apply the idea of effectiveness to my experience
as a self. From my use of computers during my day job I fell
somewhat predictably into the "lens" of looking at my own
consciousness as a software system - for example with programs
that I might have created so long ago I don't remember creating
them.
Through
this lens I watched what the character Bill Harvey did. I
noticed performances I liked and others I didn't. I reprogrammed
my biocomputer by means of the standard vows and intentions.
I noticed that this did not work particularly well most of
the time but sometimes it did. I strove to detect what catalyst
had been present and was always present at such moments when
things worked inside me the way I had hoped. As I proceeded
in this way I began to notice more and more layers of such
catalytic conditions conducive to higher effectiveness.
Studying
the shifts and patterns in my own personal effectiveness from
moment to moment, and what interventions - often cascaded
by "trigger words" - worked to actually tangibly improve effectiveness,
I wrote a book, which led me to consult for the U.S. Army
on the subject of maximizing the effectiveness of individual
soldiers. The book appears to function as a "detraining" stimulus,
that is, it seems to de-train the mind from following its
well-worn streambed. This of course opens the door for new,
by definition more creative approaches to the same or new
situations. The user gains powers of self-observation that
improve the function of the automatic feedback loop to notice
areas of improvement potential and the most utterly realistic
means to install such improvements.
The
central function of the book I hypothesize is that it facilitates
the consciousness being refocused out of the "Defender Syndrome"
into the "Observer State". This eliminates the need for mental
effort to support motivations of which one is ashamed of having
in the first place such as the need for the approval of others.
Mental concepts are manipulated without the need to form words
in the mind and so the intellect moves forward at an accelerated
rate. The book however spends very little time discussing
how it might work and instead focuses on being a stimulus
set designed to evoke higher effectiveness.
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