What is it that you want to learn? What level do you want to achieve in health, finances, relationships and/or presenting? If you’re serious about being the best or even better at anything, I believe you need to focus on filling up your wisdom grid.
What is a wisdom grid? Great question. This is a new concept I’m starting to teach, so please bear with me and provide feedback on this idea. In my quest to help people in their own development, often I get an abstract idea in my head and want to pass it on. I usually need to create visuals to get my point across. Let’s take this idea one step at a time. We need to have a basic understanding on the subconscious mind. There is a huge difference between being aware of a concept and living it as a habit.
Awareness happens at a conscious level. Habits, however, occur at a subconscious level. As a presenter or a student, there are two basic ways to get a concept into the subconscious mind. For example… Do you make New Year’s resolutions? Let’s say on January 1st, you make a resolution to eat healthier. On January 2nd, you walk into a restaurant and see and smell a glistening piece of layered chocolate cake. It calls to you. You think, “Don’t eat the cake, don’t eat the cake.” Then, after your meal, just before you walk out, you eat the cake. The idea of not eating the cake is in your conscious mind — but your ingrained habit in your subconscious mind is to… yes… eat the cake. Your subconscious rules your actions.
If that’s the case, how do we get ideas into the subconscious mind? Two simple ways: first, the mother of learning, repetition. This is why I listen to many of my mentors over and over again in audio programs. The more I listen, the more it becomes a part of my thinking and living. Ever hear something many times, then all of a sudden, bing! You “get it!” That “ah-ha” is the wisdom finally making it to your subconscious mind. The second way is a story well-told. I bet there are stories that you heard from teachers, coaches, even parents throughout the years that are still with you today. We’re trained as children to love stories and somehow they often slip right into the subconscious mind.
I believe if we act upon this wisdom, it is then reinforced and becomes a part of us. Many presenters know about the “pause.” Very few actually pause long enough for the audience to reflect on “you-focused” questions. The presenter is aware of the concept, but doesn’t actually pause as they should.
So, what is your wisdom grid?
Here’s how I see it. Let’s say, for example, you have a wisdom grid on your brain for each facet of life. You have one for relationships, finances, favorite hobbies and even presenting. It symbolizes wisdom you know and potential wisdom out in the universe you can acquire. Your brain is vast enough to accept huge amounts of wisdom on any topic. It starts collecting data and concepts as soon as you’re born. The more you focus on learning and applying a skill, the more it gets filled-in. When you’re first “aware” of an idea, it’s in your conscious mind. This is a good first step — but you need to keep seeking to understand and apply the concept at a deeper level so it becomes a part of who you are. That’s when you really become the best.
On occasion, we actually “fire” some of our customers who come to our Champ Camps. Yup, that’s right, we don’t allow them to come back even though they want to give us more money. We love having them and we appreciate the tuition. They come to Champ Camp after Champ Camp, yet never go out and speak in the real world. That’s where it matters. We need real life experience to understand concepts at a subconscious level. Don’t get me wrong, we want them to come back, but only after they have applied what they’ve learned to many situations.
Ever go back and listen to an old content-rich program and learn new ideas? That’s because if a program is content-rich, you cannot absorb it all at once. Many of our Mastery Members come back to our Champ Camps over and over again. They always leave with new ideas. The program allows them to attend again and again for free because we know they’re serious about mastery.
On this diagram, the yellow squares represent “awareness” of concepts at the subconscious level. The black represents concepts in the subconscious — the ones you now “get” and live by. People who are world-class have much more filled in than you and I. In fact, it may never be completely filled in.
In 2001, I thought I knew a lot about presenting. I had no idea how much more there was to learn. I erroneously believed my presentation “wisdom grid” was pretty much full. That all changed when Mark Brown, 1995 World Champ, created new awareness for me of world-class presentation concepts. He gave me a whole slew of new yellow squares that I had to then internalize. After winning the World Championship, I actually found even more to learn. Yikes!
No matter what area of your life you want to improve, ask yourself, “Who can bring me new concepts and how can I apply them to internalize?” Even true masters are never finished learning. This is what keeps even the wisdom they do have fresh and vibrant.
Having new information in your conscious mind is a great first step. Then, we need to go and apply these ideas in real-life. Which grid of wisdom do you need to work on?
This is a new concept I’m teaching. I’d love to have your feedback. Do you like it? Not understand it? Hate it?
Please post your comments below!
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Stage Time: Your Wisdom Grid
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I don’t understand what/how the categories along the side and top of the grid would be labeled. Would they be areas of needed improvement and a time line?
Would have loved to hear an example of a story that makes a concept move into the subconscious.
And there may be a problem with this sentence: “On this diagram, the yellow squares represent “awareness” of concepts at the subconscious (should this say conscious?) level.
I can’t get my head into the Wisdom Grid, because every grid I have ever used had a criterion for the vertical and a criterion for the horizontal. Where a particular attribute fell relative to those criteria determined which cell it went into. Maybe if awareness was the vertical criterion, wisdom was the horizontal criterion, and each idea was placed in the appropriate cell based on degree of each attribute it wold work for me. The goal would be to move upward and rightward to maximize both. Just a thought.
Maybe a bucket with awareness being heavier than wisdom and sinking to the bottom wold fit. Or a ladder where lower rungs are increasing levels of awareness that lead to upper rungs having increasing levels of wisdom that end at the top with success. Just more thoughts.
Darren
Thank you for sharing this new concept on how to apply what we learn and place them into our subconscious mind, i fully understand what you had shared. However i’m kind of confused by the diagram, is there anyway that i can understand your diagram better?
Kelvin
Hi Darren;
I too am wondering what catagories the side and top are. I feel the grid filling in sometimes… but I guess I come up with my own categories??? Or would I make a gride.. say for personal relationships… or say.. building listening skills… in “aha” moments” when I understand something new… How do you feel or think of it?
Joanne
Hi Darren,
the concept hit my hot spot because I’ve found when habit and intent clash with me, habit wins hand down every time. Anything that will help speed up that proses too me is mighty valuable.
I love pictures that tell a story yet found the grid a confusion, just as I did when doing a planning seminar with a “master planner, fellow speaker trainer” some 30 years ago. Eight of the thirty five people in his room got it immediately but twenty seven of us that didn’t went away with varying degrees of confusion. I for one was frustrated at my inability and questioned my intelligence.
Now aged 69 I’ve recognised that anyone gifted with a strong analytical mind grasps those concepts with ease, while the Driver, Promoter, or Supporter type personalities, struggle like hell.
It is a great beginning and you will find it works wonders with perhaps 20%, if you can turn it into a meaningful picture for us “thickos” you will be onto a world class winner, like I’ve found all of your other material to be.
Glad to see you are testing this one well, while I believe the concept is great it could damage your fantastic reputation for simplicity and clarity.
Cheers Neville
Darren, you are on the right track here. However, I hear from the comments that the visual of the grid is confusing some people, and I think is detracting from your main message. Your concept is very much along the lines of something we coaches call Triple Loop Learning. I use it all the time in my business coaching. I use the terms, DO, THINK, BE. Repetition & reinforcement (listening to your Dvd’s & practising what I’ve learned in the real world) enables me to assimilate the concepts and think differently about what I am doing. Eventually I AM different (better). I am 10x the speaker I was before I found you so I know this process works. I see it working with my coaching clients all the time as well. When they DO things differently, they begin to THINK differently and soon they ARE what they set out to become. Make sense?
Hi Darren,, I love the concept, but like the commentors above, I find the grid confusing. I don’t think you can place yellow squares anywhere in the grid, unless each column is labelled, and even then, there should only be one yellow and one black square in a column to show you have successfully internalized that issue.I feel that you should have a criterion on the vertical and horizontal to help orient people towards understanding the concept, even though I love the image of the “messy mind” that is so reflective of my own mind. As a tangential thinker I can think and connect all over the map (or grid) but as someone who has been trying to overlay a logic pattern over her thinking for 30 years, your image is to unstructured at the moment to be easily understood.
I describe my own mind as having an 8088 processing chip with limited RAM but unlimited ROM, sometimes needing “batch processing” even overnight (sleeping), with the bathroom mirror as my cathode ray monitor, which usually presents me my answer as I stagger in to the bathroom first thing in the morning. This is the process by which I solve problems or find answers in my “messy mind” when I can’t find the solution in my immediate internal or external network (RAM).
Finally, I agree with your teaching concept. I walked into a fabric store yesterday for two very specific items, but to get out I had to walk past bolts and bolts of fabric. All the way out, I chanted aloud, “You will not buy fabric! No fabric! You will not buy any fabric!” And it worked! ☺
It just goes to prove that you can learn & life can be exciting, no matter how old you get. There always will be blocks to fill in on that grid! You stop learning when you die, not one minute earlier &, as a result, there is always something to look forward to.
Dear Darren,
God bless your energy and your generous heart! I have been reading and rereading your online wisdom for months now. I forward your e-mails to friends, because you ask us to. I’m giving you feedback on your Wisdom Grid, because you asked for it. I am usually a visual learner, but I’m not ‘getting’ this one. I completely understand and know what you mean about the difference between knowing and doing/being. I find the grid confusing. I don’t know what the horizontal or vertical lines represent. I understand what you say, but the Grid doesn’t help reinforce it. Your stories do. A graph might help, if you label the vertical and horizontal lines. The black squares are filled in on the Expert grid, without any apparent pattern. Thanks for all you share with us. Mags