In Search Of An Easy Life
Simplifying Complexity
Ever feel overwhelmed by complicated processes and information overload? This episode is your guide to breaking down complexity into simple, manageable steps. Join me as I share a transformative story about mind mapping and how it can make learning and remembering easier.
We’ll explore:
- The concept of mind mapping and how it simplifies learning.
- How to break down complicated information into simple, memorable steps.
- Why some people overcomplicate things and how to see through the complexity.
You’ll learn:
- How to use mind mapping for meetings, learning, and problem-solving.
- Ways to avoid being fooled by complexity and appreciate the genius in simplicity.
- Practical steps to integrate mind mapping into your daily life for better clarity and efficiency.
By the end of this episode, you’ll have the tools to clear out confusion, simplify your learning process, and achieve mastery in various aspects of your life. Ready to make life easier?
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Shine brightly
Paul
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And the transcript WARNING if you’re a lover of the written word this may make you frustrated, or angry – you have been warned – is it an ‘ism
Hey, my friends. The longer podcast and the title in search for an easy life. Don’t be fooled. It’s a bit abstract, isn’t it? You see, there’s a. I can remember way, way, way back, years ago. It is years ago. I remember going to this little workshop, little workshop here. It was in an evening. So that’s how it is. Like an hour’s workshop at, this little thing. I don’t know, can’t even remember what the organization was, but this guy stood up in front of us, and there’s only, say, 20 of us there. He stood up and told this story. But it wasn’t a story story. It was a story of. I can see the pictures in my mind, but I can’t remember what the story was about, but it was how something was produced, how it started, how it got to be made, then how it was transported, moved around and done that. And, after about ten minutes, he said, there you go, what did I tell you? And we go, well, you told us a story about making something. I remember something about carrots, that was weird because they were all very abstract, but I just didn’t get it. And he said, do you want to know how to remember things easier to be able to go through what I’ve told you in that story of mine, and to remember it without having to make masses of notes. So I said, well, I was there in my head, I’m with you, Mandez. So he went through this thing called mind mapping. And our mind mapping is not new. Well, it can’t be new, because it was years and years and years ago. And he showed us a way to break things down, or what appeared to be complicated things into simple little pictures and lines from a middle, from a middle circle of what the title was, and then broke each one down into little steps. And, even the steps had only a couple of words on, maybe keywords and, ah, a little picture. So he said, I’m telling you the story again. Let’s just make m those those pictures together. And, we did it. He said, go for a cup of coffee. And we had a coffee, a little break. He said, right blank. The board’s been blank. Now let’s go through the story again. And every one of us could go through that story just by remembering the pictures. We hadn’t even written an awful lot down, but we could remember the pictures in our head. We could remember the mind map in our head. And that blew me away, because if I could remember something that’s so abstract like that, just remembering it without actually writing it down, and when I found, when I wrote these things down in a, lovely. I love mind maps, but in a way that, just a word, a little symbol, a picture of something that just really represented that story, I found I could do anything with it. I could take notes at meetings, as when I was in business, I’d go to meetings and people would be furiously writing notes. And I just have this page of little pictures and lines and they go, can you remember this book? yeah, because you said this and that and this and that. And we go to there, then we’re going to do this. It’s amazing. Amazing. You see, remembering steps to follow can be complicated, can’t it? If you don’t know mind mapping and things like that. But, and it’s not, this is not just about mind mapping, by the way. That’s just, an example being how you can break down the complicated into simple steps. And when you, because you see, if you have too many steps, complicated steps, things disappear out your brain. Anything over five, between five and nine little steps, if you get directions to go somewhere after the fifth one, the first, second and third have disappeared out your brain. You get it a little bit longer than that. And the whole, you’re even thinking to yourself, oh, what a lovely holiday I had, because you just wandered away, you cannot remember a thing. And that is such a, a natural phenomenon to just let these things go because they just get totally confusing in your brain. We use it as a hypnotic process to overwhelm the conscious mind to allow us to go into the unconscious mind.
People love to make things complicated, but breaking things down into manageable steps works
And you see some people, I don’t know, I’m not going to say any names, but you see them all over the place in all the social medias, love to make things complicated. And, I wonder why, I really wonder why when things are so much easier, when you break things down into manageable, understandable steps. Now, I think I, know why. Because it makes them look bloody good in their mind, by the way, in their mind. When people have got this really complicated thing off pack because they’ve taken years to learn the bloody thing and make it more complicated, it just makes them look better than you. It’s their showreel. Behind the showreel, they’ve got nothing, doesn’t work. And so I now look for the simple steps amongst that, that B’s, because you can still find it even when people try to overcomplicate things. If you really look for those simple steps, and mind mapping is a great way to do it, you can find out anything. It’s how I learned the processes of hypnosis and NLP to using therapy to break what appeared to me initially, complicated processes into manageable steps that I could understand. And once I understood them, I could understand why the next step came along. There’s so many things I’ve modeled, from listening to people speak and be able to teach it, to share it. I remember a great thing where people were advertising the 101 in business and they were going on and on. It was so complicated. They were going to, they were selling a course, basically. But what they didn’t realize was if you listened and you could throw away the fluff, as it were, and get those simple steps. I modeled their whole course from what they were saying, and I’ve shared that with people in businesses, and it just makes sense and it works. And in things like processes of hypnosis, NLP therapy, especially therapy, people make things so bloody complicated there, too. They really do. And, in fact, there’s such a simple thing. It’s called present state, desired state. This is a state you don’t like because it’s present. The desired state is how you want to be. And all we’ve got to do is change the. And there’s a model called the tote model to help you with that. Tote. What’s that? Test, operate, test, exit. So the test is tell me what your present state is, how you do it. The t at the end is your desired state. Have we got there? This is what I want. The o is operate, do something that’s going to transfer or transform present state to desired state. Once you’ve got that desired state, exit, get out of it. Get out of your way. Do it. And you can break so many things down into a simple little tote. Test, operate, test, exit. Because if you do too many things, you don’t know which one worked, which ones didn’t work. But most people don’t start with their desired state or, their present state or their desired state. They’ve just got this big goal. They’re not looking at what they’ve got already. They just complicate things too, too much. And, that’s where I think I know. I quote Albert Einstein for in simplicity, there is genius. And I don’t know how that hooked up with me, because when, I started the, personal development unplugged podcast, it was all about getting so frustrated with people over complicated things. I wanted to break things down into simple ways that we can make fantastic changes, knowing what we’re doing, doing what we know, but be able to do it without that confusion.
Don’t let complicated things impress you, says Mark Devine
So let’s have a think. I know I’ve talked about mind mapping, and if you get into mind mapping, I will do it. I can remember one little story, one little side story. I was in my trainer’s training, and this guy beside me, we stayed in the same dormitory, as it were, and we sat pretty close together. But he was a mind mapping genius. His mind maps were a work of art. in fact, I went and paid for a photocopy of his mind maps because they were that good. And as I saw each one, I could follow each day, he did one for every day’s training, and they were brilliant. And he enjoyed doing it. I enjoyed watching him. It was a work of art, breaking down a whole day into one, a four sheet of paper that we could all follow. That’s how breaking the complicated into simple really just works. So, what’s the learning here? Well, don’t let complicated impress you. That’s one of these things for me. Don’t let people who complicate things. Well, this is so complicated, and they’re so good, and they’re so charismatic about it. Look for the bullshit. Are they just out there to impress you? Is it a mask to impress? And that mask just fails because you can’t do it. They just try to suck you in. But there’s a reverse of that. And the reverse is, don’t let simplicity fool you. Because sometimes you look at something and says, oh, that’s so simple. That is so simple. No, in simplicity, there is genius, as long as it’s not too simple and it misses the important points. But don’t let simplicity fool you. And I think that’s more important. So you get rid of the bullshit and look for simple, simple ways. But the thing is about things being simple doesn’t mean they’re easy. Oh, no, they’re easy to follow. Yes, you have easy to follow steps. They’re easy to understand. But the trouble with those bloody steps are they’re going to take effort, they’re going to take resilience, determination, intention. But those simple steps make it so doable. And you see, with simple steps and you take that confusion away and we do get confused now and again, by the way, because your unconscious mind will try to get to a point where it’s a little bit overloaded but don’t give up. Then that’s a side thing. But, you know, we get a little bit confused. But then you look at the next step and you go, ah. I’ve just integrated the learning so I can move on to, to the next little step. But you get success with every step. I understand it, I understand what I need to do. I’ve just got to keep practicing. I’ve got to have the determination to carry on, keep doing it. I’ve got the intention. I, know where we’re going and these steps are going to make it for me, because when I get it, you’re going to be a master of it. And that’s the thing, mastery. Knowing what you do and, doing what you know well, you’ll know it so easily, you’ll see it in your mind. I often wonder when people, Richard Baddley used to say, I see things, out there and I just read them to people or tell people, and I go, that’s ridiculous. Until I’ve done it myself. I can see my mind maps in my head and I just follow them. And the thing about this simplicity thing, I’ve got three little examples. Two of them are from my own family, and it’s not me. My youngest son, Joseph, has a program called mind mastery, where he looks to help people get rid of anxiety, unconfidence, all manner of problems by finding the root cause of their issue and then with simple steps to overcome it. And they are really simple steps, each one. And I always think it’s like a domino rally. Each simple step, it’s a little bit. Next one’s a bit bigger, and the next one’s a bit bigger. But as you tip the first one over, the second one gets easier, the third one gets easier. And by the end of that program, the changes people make are, amazing. It’s not magic, but it’s certainly magical to the people who get those changes. There’s another one, here’s another little example. There’s, a podcast and a book I’m just, just reading by a guy called Mark Devine. He is, Alex, Navy SeAl, and now he has a podcast, the Mark Devine show. And he’s written a book about being uncommon, and we love being, you know, that title, be an uncommon person in a group of uncommon people. That’s really m being who you really are, isn’t it? Because you’re unique. Be uncommon in that group.
Breaking anything down into simple steps can help you achieve anything
But he is giving you, in his book, five Mountains. He calls them five mountains, and they’re five different parts of your life to improve, building one upon the other, one step. And then as you get into that step, you move on to the next step, and with that, you begin to, as he puts it, really follow your north star, your passion, your purpose. But he’s broken it down into simple steps. Again, simple, easy to follow. Got to take effort, though. And the last one for the moment is my eldest son, Daniel, who is. He does that little podcast. He’s into his health, and he’s broken down what he considers being able to be healthy. And I think he’s broken it down to just seven areas of life. One of them is maybe just drinking water. Now you’re even drinking water, you go, oh, that’s so easy. Do it every day. Simple step, easy to understand, but to do it every day at a certain amount, but perfect health into seven steps. What an awesome thing to do. Because if you think you listen to other people about their health and how they’re going to guide you through it, they’re talking about all these complicated words, or they’re complicated processes with complicated words, all sorts of things I have to, when I listen to them, m I’ve got a bloody dictionary trying to work out what they’re doing. In fact, I’ve getting in touch with Daniel and say, what does that mean? What does this mean? But with, breaking anything down into a simple step means or steps, you are going to achieve things and you get more motivated, you get more confident in everything otherwise. I said confident like that. You get more confident. Confidence grows, especially when you have your intention. Confidence is there, and that confidence is then doubling with every step. So here’s a sort of thing to finish ish. If something appears simple, rejoice, say yay, and, look at it. Does it make sense? Does it really work? Will those simple steps get you from here to there? A, b, c, d, e, whatever. One, two, CDE, throw them around, mix them up a little bit. If it’s complicated or it may not be thought, thought through, just ask. This is, you know, if it’s important to you and you think this thing that is complicated in front of you, been explained to you is, is valuable, but just not being communicated in a way that it is easy to understand and follow. Maybe just ask yourself, how could I? Or what would make this simpler? What would this be like? If it was in simple steps, what would those simple steps be? You may even ask the question, if this was simple, what would it look like? What would it feel like? What would I hear? Get all the modalities going and get your unconscious mind to start searching for those simple ways. Or you could, if you wanted to ask, Cloughie. Yeah, ask me. Send me an email. Say, look, this process is a bit complicated. Can you break it down for us? Can we get it into a simple process that would work? Maybe into a hypnotic process as well, or certainly something I can visualize to make it happen. So that’s why I entitled this in search for an easy life. It’s to create a life easily, effortlessly, and enjoy it. See, life doesn’t have to be complicated. You just have to, you know, if you want to make it as complicated as you want, fine, but only make it as complicated as you need to. Which is a weird saying. But it doesn’t have to be complicated, does it? And the thing is, when you, you look for things within things, I think you’ll find them. So if something is complicated, break it down. Learn mind mapping. For me, that’s the easiest thing to do. Tony Buzan, I think, was the creator of, mind mapping. But you find, find it online, ideally. I mean, you see them, you can get them on the Internet now and they’re on your screen. But handwritten drawings are so much more personal. Again, you know, when you write things down, it’s coming from your brain. Not tippy tappy or just copying a bloody picture. But when you look for an answer, and this is what it really comes down to, it’s a little aha. Momentous when you look for the answer and you ask yourself a real question, how can I make this simple? How can I make it easier so I can succeed? If it was simple, what would it look like? You’ll find it. Your unconscious mind will find a way. It’ll find a way either to do itself, or it will find people who can do it for you. I said, send me an email, feedbackers um.com. or you’ll find things on YouTube or whatever. But you’ll look and, you’ll find it in a way that you weren’t necessarily searching for it. But it just comes up now. I always make a little note to myself. How do I want you to feel when you listen to all of this? And what I’d love you to feel. Maybe if I’ve done it, I’ve done my little thing and it’s curious. That’s all. That’s all. I want you to be curious. Is that possible? Cloughie? Could I just do that if I learnt a bit of mind mapping or if I just ask those questions? If I just thought, get a paper and pencil, by the way, you could make notes because as we said, you get over five steps. The 6th one comes in and the first one drops out your head. So make those notes, but just get curious of what you want to learn and then look to how you can model it and model it in a way that model it into simple steps. And why is this important? Why is this important at all? Well, if you could be motivated, and, I say you. I mean me as well, if you could be motivated by the little success you get in each step, you’re going to get the results you want. Not by being confused and overwhelmed by people making things more complicated than they need to be. I really hope, and I’ve rambled, hopefully. That story, that story has stuck with me for years. It’s been with me.
Paul Clough: Clarification is wonderful. I have my puzzle book
It comes away every time I look at my books on that and my notes. I have my puzzle book, by the way, just as an aside, just came to my head, my puzzle book, the one I work out. I sit and think about all bloody mind maps because I get a problem in the center. And then I look for simple steps to find a solution to the problem. And, maybe one mind map will meet to another mind map, but it just makes things so clear for me. Clarification is wonderful. Yes. Just as a reminder, sometimes we do get confused, but that confusion is just your unconscious mind integrating all the knowledge you’ve just picked up. And then in an hour or so, that little aha, moment comes. And it’s not really an aha moment, it’s just that clarity comes and you can see the next step. And it all starts with curiosity. And, for me, it was the magic of that guy giving me something that made me curious, made me feel, I’m gonna go for that. I’m gonna look for it, I’m gonna find it. And the things I have found and created all from that one guy, man, that was awesome. And the thing was, he wasn’t even selling anything. He just wanted to share what he’s learned. Now, if that’s selfless service in a t, if that’s the word, how you say it, in a t, add a t, who knows? Don’t care. But it was awesome. So I thank him from the bottom of my heart and the heart of my bottom. Anyway, shouldn’t have said that. It’s just a little uk joke. Anyway, please share this, to anybody you know, everyone you know, if you would press that bloomin old subscribe button, let’s don’t miss any of these. Because the thing is, not every episode will maybe hit it hit its mark. You’ll think, well, that’s not that interesting. But every now and again you’ll get that golden nugget. And that’s the important thing. That’s why I listen to so many other things. I’ll get golden nuggets. Sometimes you have to sift through a little bit, but hopefully here at, ah, personal development, unplugged, you’ll find hopefully it’s into simple steps. That’s my aim. To share with you simple things and for us all to grow and have a rich life. Have fun, joy, find love everywhere. So please do that. Please share and share your thoughts with me. And again, that personal, feedbackersonaldevelopmentunplugged.com email. Please share what you’ve learned. Please share your ex, your, the things that you’ve achieved, you’ve experienced, or if there’s anything that you feel I can improve upon or add to this. All welcome. All welcome. Thank you so much for your time. I, know time is valuable, but if we found one little thing, it’s been totally valuable. Until the next time, my friend. Have so much fun. More fun than you can stand. Bye bye. Time to fly. Warning. You are now leaving the unplugged mind of Paul Clough. It’s time to fly on your own. Be brave, my friend. Personal development, unplugged.