The four 'avec' skills

The following information is provided for participants in the avec esprit05 program. It is a useful overview of the four skills.

Introduction

I was talking to a friend of mine last week, He is an engineer, a senior manager in a big automotive company. He asked me what I was doing at the moment. I told him about the avec esprit VCAL program, about what skills we are attempting to develop. Mentioned the value of young people becoming more aware - of their thinking, of who they are and where they fit in the world; talked about the capacity to visualise things, of understanding and managing emotions; and developing creativity.

I didn’t get a response for a while, enough time for me to get ready for that change-of-subject line like “And how’s the family?” It didn’t come. Instead, he said:

“You know Merv, I watched a man lose a 9 million dollar contract last week. What you are teaching could have saved him a lot of money.”

Interesting isn’t it. I mentioned it in the hope it will make you feel that what we are setting out to do is important. This page is about me communicating a vision of what it is we are trying to develop together; why these things are worth developing; and how we can do it in ways that have the greatest chance of success. I am sure that when you build a better picture of the program, you will have the vision and the feeling that it is worth doing.

The avec skills

Let’s start by looking at the four skills that underpin the program - I call them the avec quartet of personal skills. While I talk about them individually, they overlap and are very much interrelated, as you will see.

Awareness - put simply is the skill of thinking about our thinking.

The brain has been described as a ‘self-organising system’, meaning we don’t have to think about when to breathe next or how we can recognise people we know, or find our way home. It picks up information through the senses, links it with a pattern already on file, and formulates an appropriate response. We don’t have to re-learn things we already know, the brain organises itself so we can simply ‘go through the motions’. Mostly appropriate, but not always.

One of the most significant events when I actually thought about my thinking was when my mum and dad came to live with us. Mum with Alzheimer's, dad with cancer, Robyn at home, me at work. I would come home and Robyn would just want to talk about her hassles of the day. My response was ‘I will have to do something about this’, and while she talked I would be looking for ‘solutions’ to the problem. Do you know what I did instead? I gradually became aware of the situation; aware of Robyn’s need to just talk about it not ‘fix’ it; aware of my male-typical: defender/challenger/fighter responses; and, best of all aware of a better approach.

There are some ways of thinking that are better than others, and some patterns of thinking that limit our performance. Sometimes we look at situations and see things that aren't there - awareness helps us recognise the times our mind plays tricks on us. By developing awareness, we can ask ourselves:

“Is this how it really is, or just the way I think it is?”

Visualisation - the skill of creating pictures in our mind of what we want to be and do.

We are born with pictures (sometimes called ‘templates’ or patterns) in our brain, and when we see something that matches this picture, it makes sense to us. A baby, for example, will look for something that matches a nipple, and immediately suck on it. They may put their thumb in their mouth, and ‘click’ this matches a pattern they were born with. They might keep sucking on it for a couple of years - it makes sense to them without even thinking about it.

I was employed in a primary school a few years ago, teaching science and technology, all year levels from preps to grade six. I do a lot of plastic forming, and we were making space objects like lunar buggies, rockets and satellites. One little girl had a pile of formed plastic on her table, and when I asked her what she was making, she just looked up at me and said “I don’t know yet”. There were many ‘UFO’s’ that didn’t fly made in that classroom.

Without a picture in their mind, what they made sort of just happened. Then they would ask me if it was okay. Of course I said it was, but knew there had to be a better way to get them to visualise the project and get a sense of ownership - a feel for what was happening. Later, we would all lie on the floor, get totally relaxed, and go on a ‘mental journey’ so they could ‘see and touch’ what they were going to make. The difference was amazing. Sometimes they would discard a project, simply because it did not correspond with the picture they had in their mind.

The skill of visualisation enables us to create certain pictures or templates that help us succeed and achieve. The skill is very useful in teaching and learning. When explaining something, we often say: “Well, it is like …”, and when the person we are talking to goes, “Ah ah” we know they have ‘got the picture’. In the avec esprit program, you will be encouraged to relax a little, and ask yourself this question:

“What would I look like if I were very successful at this task?”

Emotion Management - understanding where our emotions come from, and being able to manage them better.

Emotions or strong feelings come before thought and are designed for action not thinking.  As well as a picture from the past, changes in breathing, vision and language happen without us thinking about it. Emotions often shut out clear thinking and seeing the result of our actions. ‘Doing your block’ may feel like the best option, but if you have to fix up the damage later after you have actually thought about it, getting better emotion management skills makes a lot of sense.

All emotions are made up of two things - patterns, physiology (both pre-thought), and, coupled with language (the vehicle for thought) the emotion is communicated.

So, the basics of managing our emotions are recognising the factors involved, and understanding that changing one of them changes the emotion. One of the most limiting emotions is fear, and part of the avec esprit program is designed to assist in dealing with this. When young people are asked to make a presentation to a panel of strangers, or teach adults online learning skills, they mostly fear they will not be able to do it. One strategy to overcome this feeling is to ask ourselves:

“What can I change in myself to feel different?”

I should point out two important words in that question: in myself. The tendency in all of us is to look outside of ourselves for things to change in order to feel different. So often, the things we want to change are probably not going to change no matter what we do, so we get frustrated. However, realising that we have some control over how we feel gives us a great sense of control.

Creativity - is the skill that ties each of the other three together.

It is being prepared to try new ways of thinking, a sort of mental ‘freeing up’. Creativity, higher order thinking, thinking outside the square, each of these terms relate to the capacity to switch from automatic thinking to explorative thinking. And one way to stimulate this process is unfamiliar experiences - ‘walking over new ground’. The ‘self organised’ patterns will not work, so there is a chance a new one will be made. The operative question becomes:

“How can I think about this in a different way?”

Let me give you an example of the way creative thinking ties the three other parts of the quartet together. I manage four fairly large websites, I don’t say this to impress you - if you understood the haphazard way my brain works, you would not be impressed. I am very aware that I don’t have a systems administrator’s mind. It used to stress me out making changes and fixing problems. I realised that I had to think about it differently (awareness), and that I had to manage my emotion better, because getting worked up reduced my effectiveness. I asked myself: “What would I look like if I was completely successful at this task? How would I feel? What would I say? What posture would I have? This gave me a metaphor to work toward - I now had a pattern that would be looking for a match in the environment.

I usually do this work late at night because the transfer rates are better - and also nobody is around to see me using my ‘success’ metaphor. Part of my routine includes talking to myself: “Now this page is part of worksheets, so this goes here like this, now check that all the links work…YES…YES…woops, we will soon fix this little begger… let me see…image not found…” and so on. I can hardly believe the difference, instead of getting stressed, I almost look forward to it. You will notice it is emotion management - it has a pattern component, it uses language, and has a physiological dimension - the emotion will automatically match these, and even if things foul up on the site, I work through it without getting worked up.

I am not suggesting that these four personal skills fix every problem life throws at us. But what I can claim with some confidence is that they do give us a greater sense of control. Pretty empowering stuff, especially for people who don't feel they have much control over their lives. I have seen kids who didn’t want to be at school finance interstate trips and yacht charters by developing skills in online learning, and being paid to teach teachers. I attribute this success to the avec skills: taking them on mental journeys and getting them to see who they are (awareness); seeing what is possible (creativity); imagining what success looks like (visualisation); and getting the feeling of being in control (emotions) instead of victims of what happens.

So if I sound a bit passionate about this quartet of personal skills, it is because I have seen the way they can make a difference - ordinary people doing extraordinary things - and feeling better for it.

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