My Relationship with Money and the Three Laws of Performance

I don’t find it surprising that I have not written a single blog entry discussing my finances or issues relating to my income until now. What follows now is not a philosophy or s theory of people’s relationship with money or not even my personal philosophy of money. Here I am sharing my own relationship with money, the contexts through which I looked at money and how I transformed these contexts to generate new possibilities in the area of money using Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan’s Three Laws of Performance. Read my review of the book by clicking here.

No, I did not have any severe ‘problems’ regarding my income. As a university teacher working on a granted post, I have probably one of the most secure and one of the highest paying jobs in the country.  However, I still put off buying that new PC or more expensive model of the car or buying a bigger house. At the end of the month, I still have a feeling that I could have saved more than I have and invested this saving. Very often, I do not save at all, apart from what the deduction of General Provident Fund from my salary. I am also worried about my future. What if the Government decides to discontinue paying what it is paying now in future if it goes broke?  I am also worried about my habits of spending fearing what if my family and I have these habits but I won’t be earning as much as I do? What if something happens to me? Whatever little I have invested, I have invested- not surprisingly- in insurance. Besides, financial transactions occur to me as very boring and mundane. Therefore, I keep procrastinating going to banks or paying my insurance premiums.  I try to take interest in stock markets, buy books, but later abandon my interest in these things. I still leave bigger financial transactions like buying and selling house to my dad. I also feel a bit guilty about my lack of interest in these things and my ignorance regarding these things. What was my ‘Default Future’? In The Three Laws of Performance, the default future is the future, which was not inevitable, but that which is probable and almost certain to happen unless something dramatic and unexpected came along.  I would continue doing and being the same thing for long time to come in the future- I would be remaining worried, trying to adjust my needs according to my salary, struggling to save, remain fearful about being at the ‘mercy’ of the state and so on. 

Zaffron and Logan’s Three Laws of Performance provide a powerful technology for transforming the area where we feel challenged. It does not offer ‘strategies’ or ‘tips’ or even theories for boosting performance. It lays down laws, which govern our performance, and getting these laws provides an access for transforming our performance. The first law of performance is “People’s actions are correlated to how situations occur to them.” Our actions are correlated, not to the facts and reality of the situation, but to how this reality and facts occurs to us. The perception that everyone is relating to the same set of facts of the situation is what the authors of the book call ‘reality illusion’. 

So my fixed ways of beings (being detached, being scared, being bored and irritated, being weak and small, being irresponsible, being casual etc) and my ineffective actions (putting off buying things that I want, procrastinating financial transactions, struggling to save, not taking authentic interest in financial matters, inconsistent interest in the stock-market, etc.) are perfectly matched, in Zaffron and Logan’s words “in dance with” how the situation occurs to me. 

So how does the situation occur to me? Well, financial matters occur as ‘peripheral’ to my life, the inflow and the outflow of money in my life occurs as if it “happening on its own”. I am “forcing myself to take interest in the matters which occur as “mundane and tedious”, because I “have to”. I am struggling to ‘save’ money because I ‘have to’ in case the state discontinues paying what it is paying now or something happens to me. The situation occurs to me as ‘insecure’. I occur to myself as being at ‘mercy’ of the government and university authorities. 

The second law of performance says, “How situation occur to people arises in language”. How situation occurs to us arises in our conversations and verbalizing about the situation. These conversations usually comprise of the use of ‘descriptive use of language’. They are mostly made up of our ‘interpretations and stories of what happened in the past’, decisions about future, which we took in the past, our ‘already always’ internal dialogue consisting mainly of our opinions, evaluations and judgments,  and our persistent complaints. We do not ‘have’ these conversations, we ARE these conversations. They form the colored spectacles through which our perception of reality and facts is filtered. We cannot see these conversations, we can only see through them. These conversations are most of the time “‘unsaid and communicated without awareness”. These past-based conversations are the hidden and default contexts –our blind spots- in which situations occur to us. 

So what were my past-based hidden and default contexts in which my relationship with money showed up? “Thinking all the time about money and running after money is bad” ( I am making those who are financially better wrong),  “One should always be content with what one gets ( one is content usually during the first fortnight after the salary day ;) ) ”, “ Financial matters are ‘none of my business’?”, “ I am at the mercy of the government and authorities”, the transactions are ‘mundane and tedious” , “ I am dumb and not capable of minding my own finances”, “I am small and don’t deserve what I am getting ( earning around a lakh rupees a month for teaching Keats and Derrida? What are my students going to do with that?) , “I am a steno-typist’s son and I haven’t done all that badly (I making my dad small! I shared all this with him; by the way)”, “Business is not in our blood (as a Maharashtrian Brahmin blah blah blah) and so on were my conversational contexts. I was a “clearing” a space for scarcity and insecurity. My life was the life of adjustment and compromise. The default context on my financial life was the context of ‘surviving and fixing/changing”. Not that it was ‘wrong or bad’, but it was definitely disempowering very often. There was hardly sense of power, freedom, self-expression and peace of mind inside this context. 

After I uncovered all these interpretations, stories, complaints and opinions and distinguished them from facts and reality, extraordinary things started opening up. The third law of performance says, “Future-based language transforms the way a situation occurs to people”. The future-based language is the language of creating a future rather than living into the ‘already written/default future”. It is the language of declaration, promises and commitments. 

Earlier, I was not taking responsibility for the inflow and the outflow of money, I was not seeing myself as causing it, but after I put these conversations aside, I invented a possibility of being at the source, and being the cause in the matter of my financial life and not at its effect.  In fact, I could see that whatever financial life I was living was because of conversational contexts, which I had created.

Money is MY business now. I have invented the possibility of being confident and courageous. I can relate to my expenses as not something “wrong” to be reduced or to be fixed but as what they are as expenses. Instead of relating to the people who are wealthier than me as being basically’ corrupt and dishonest and hence to be kept a safe distance from’, I can relate to them as who they are – as possibilities. Instead of seeing money as ‘given and fixed number’, an inflexible box inside which I have to accommodate my needs, I see flow of money as something to be caused and created. I have also invented the possibility of being enthusiastic and interested in finance.  Hence, I am looking for various ways in which I can now cause and create money. Landmark Education Advanced Course says you win whatever game you play. I was playing the game of survival, fixing and changing and winning at it, now I am playing the game of creation and possibility. The games begin with a declaration ‘X is more important than Y’ (scoring more runs or goals is important than scoring less runs or goals). So the declaration I am making in the matters of finance is “the game of creation and possibility” is far more thrilling and enjoyable than the game of survival and fixing.  Zaffron and Logan talk about our lives as three act plays, where the first act is our past, the second act is our present and the third act is our future. However, they point out our first act has already written and shaped our third act, as we have put decisions and interpretations made in the past not into our past but into our future we are living into. Using Three Laws of Performance I am rewriting my third act. 

How Did I Become a Researcher? An Autobiographical Aside

When I look at my life as a researcher and how I ended up in the world of academic research, I can't help being surprised.I never saw myself as excelling in academics. I thought I was an average student whose percentage hovered around sixty most of the times. Had someone told me when I was doing my graduation that I would end up writing a PhD dissertation or research papers and hopping from one national conference to another international conference, I wouldn't have believed it. Nor would I have believed it if someone were to tell me that I would be teaching obscure literary theory and criticism to postgraduate classes and writing books on translation theory. In short, I never dreamed of being a research scholar or university teacher. 

What I dreamed of when I was a kid was to be a terrific cricketer. I used to play lots of gully cricket with a tennis ball or a rubber ball in my friend Tejas's cemented compound. However, I was scared of fast deliveries and used to get out very early most of the times. As a bowler, I am credited for giving away a couple of million runs and as a fielder I might have given away billions of runs. I ran slower than others, thanks to my weight, ill-health and probably, knock-knees. The more I failed more I fantasized of becoming a cricketer. I thought I will never be good enough for physical sports.

In my early teens, the eighties,  I decided that the only way to overcome my failures as cricket was to have lots of knowledge about the game.  I started keeping a diary and hoarding plenty of information about the game from magazines like '  Sports-star' and the newspapers -there was no Google in those days, friends- in Valsad library. I even learned how to bowl a googly from a book. I made a decision that the only way to excel in performance in a game was to acquire lots of knowledge about it. Knowledge acquisition became a habit, a habit that was formed in response to my perceived failure to be a sportsman. The habit consolidated when  the asthma became more and more chronic. By the time I was in my twelfth standard I discovered that even if I jogged for two hundred meters, I would not only be out of breath, but my lungs would hurt very badly too.

When I was in my teens, I had a series of one-sided crushes started with a one sided love for a girl in my school-bus in the seventh standard. I found myself on the wrong side of these ' one sided' travails. I said to myself that I am timid and can never express my feelings and emotions to the girl I loved and that I was a failure in love. When I fell in love at the age of thirteen, I did not know there was something like love and had I really gathered courage and spoke to the girl, I don't know what I would have said! I said to myself, I don't know what happens to me when I fall ill, I don't know what happens to me in such situations- I must try to understand what's wrong with me. 

And I tried to cope with or overcome my sense of failures with the drive for knowledge acquisition. I tried to 'understand' what was wrong with me and how could I fix it.I read voraciously on occultism in my twenties and thought that if I could have occult powers, I would be able to overcome all failures of my life. I read on Yoga and occultism and tried to actually practice it. I thought the best way to overcome the sense of failure and the idea that I was weak was to acquire more and more knowledge. What I actually gathered was a tremendous amount of absolutely useless information like what was the colour of agna-chakra or what is a chinaman or how is the Petrarchan sonnet different from the  English sonnet-or how Derridian 'differance'   undoes the architecture of western thought.The drive for knowledge acquisition became my habitual way of being. It has played a role in whatever success I have got till now, but even then, it was constituted to survive and fix what I thought was 'wrong' with me, and so more I went about gathering knowledge, more unfulfilled I was. It was a habitual way of being put in place to compensate for lack of power and effectiveness in my life and the more I practiced it the more powerless and ineffective I felt in life. So whenever, I perceive something is wrong, I bring out this habitual mode of being to deal with it- I try to 'understand', 'analyze' and 'research' that problem instead of taking actual actions needed to deal with it.

 So here it goes-I selected ' Translation of Narsinh Mehta's Poetry into English: With a Critical Appreciation' in order to' fix' what was wrong with my cultural identity- I saw myself as a 'rootless' person- having no real language or land of his own- a Maharashtrian born and brought up in Gujarat and teaching English literature to students who are neither interested in English nor in literature. I thought translation was a strategy to overcome my own cultural predicament and overcome my cultural alienation.  I thought writing poetry in Marathi would help me overcome this estrangement. Obviously, neither of the strategies worked.

This habitual mode of being that is more or less productive and that has given us some results in life is called a 'strong suit' in the language of Landmark Education. The strong suits are past-based and work in the default context of human life: survive and fix something seen as wrong or shouldn't be.It is our personal 'best practice' but it is incapable of giving us 'breakthrough' results in life where we are struck- had it been so capable it would have created breakthrough results by now. 

In fact, the strong-suits often result in misery. This drive for knowledge acquisition isolates me from friends and people in life who don't have such drives, I am estranged from them and I end up living in the world of loneliness and suffering.What actually was coming between me and my wife was my intellectual arrogance. It often has a negative influence on my performance. The Landmark Education points out how 'knowledge' doesn't necessarily lead to action- that there is no ' cause-effect' relation between knowledge and action ( Hamlet taught us something like this - but then Hamlet was all about 'literature' for a student of literature).  Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan in The Three Laws of Performance point out that the real source of our action is how situations or people 'occur' to us. Knowing how to control anger or fear or how to reduce weight does not necessarily lead us to taking actions- when the situation 'occurs' infuriating we are angry -no matter what formulas we have memorized or what knowledge of anger we have.

So how does one become a researcher? 

TOWARDS MASTERING ENGLISH

For Indians, probably along with sex, money and in-laws, English is associated with the greatest amount of misery and negativity. We envy those who speak English fluently, and we resent them for being snobbish and dominating. We feel neglected and inadequate in the presence of English. We feel ashamed of not knowing it. Often we hate English and blame it for destroying ‘our’ culture and languages. We deplore it for being the language of ex-rulers. We hate ourselves for wanting English and for being enslaved by the speakers of English. Yet the fact remains that along with sex and money, English is what we desire the most. Hence as a teacher of English, I would I would like to briefly share my views on how to master English.  My views are based on Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan’s powerful book Three Laws of Performance (2009).(Read my review of the book by clicking here) The ideas presented here may not be ‘new’, for there are hardly any ‘new’ ideas, but these ideas in my view are the most effective ones. The ideas aim at transforming our relation with English.

Zaffron and Logan argue that our performance is correlated not to how or what something or someone is, but how something, someone or some situation occurs to us and that how something, someone or a situation occurs to us is inside of what conversations we have about it with ourselves or with others. They point out that by altering these conversations about something, someone or a situation, we can alter how it occurs to us and there by alter our performance. Hence in order to alter our performance in English we have to look at how English occurs to us and inside of which conversations does it occurs to us. In short, let us look at what we keep telling ourselves and others about English.

Typically, we say English is not ‘our’ language; it is the language of outsiders. It is not our ‘mother tongue’, it is our ‘auntie tongue’ or it is ‘step-mother’ tongue. We say it is the language of slavery. We say it is the language that is destroying our languages and it contaminates our Glorious Indian Culture. We say it the language of the dominant and elite class, which is consequently ‘less Indian’ than us. We call this class neo-colonizers or colonial collaborators.

We also say it is too difficult and we will never learn it properly. We say English is all about speaking English fluently (look at the thriving ‘spoken English’ cottage industry in India). We say we want to ‘think’ in English. We say that by making mistakes in English would make us ‘look bad’ and that by speaking it fluently we will ‘look good’. We say that by learning grammar properly, we will learn English.

Consider that inside all these conversations, we have already ruled out any possibility of English being ‘our language’ or using it like our mother tongue, because we have already declared it to be ‘other tongue’ and our ‘second language’. When we call it a ‘foreign’ language, we can never make it our own.  Hence the possibility of being as fluent in English as one is in one’s own language is already ruled out, even before we start learning it seriously. Unless we stop telling others and ourselves these things, we can never use English as well as we use ‘our’ non-English languages. Surprisingly we say all these things when our nationalist leaders like Swami Vivekanand, Sri Aurobindo, Dr. Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru and even Mahatma Gandhi who opposed English in theory and who brought out an English newspaper, were highly accomplished in English and even the Constitution of India was drafted in English. Inside of these conversations of blame, we have already distanced ourselves from English and closed our access to the language.

Our complaint that English is the language of the upper class elite or the class of neo-colonizers/ colonial collaborators does not prevent us from desiring the language and from sending our own children to English medium schools. This means that though we resent that class and are envious of it, we want to be part of that class. This means that our complaint is nothing but hypocrisy and this hypocrisy takes on a different shade when the academics who should be teaching English and who themselves belong to this class start saying that the English is the language of upper class elite. These academics imply that they are ashamed of being who they are and hence want to prevent others from having English. This simply means they don’t want to do their jobs, although they don’t mind being paid for it. If we want English and we want to belong to the English speaking elite, it is honest to abandon this hypocrisy and blame games.

Now consider that inside of the conversations like ‘it is too difficult and we won’t be able to speak it properly’, we are again ruling out the possibility of mastering English and using it with proficiency for ourselves. Hence it is extremely important that we accept the responsibility of all these conversations and drop them every time they crop up in our heads or on our tongues because they are blocking all the possibilities of our getting English.

Once we drop all these dialogues which prevent us from acquiring proficiency in English, we should access the language through our listening. There is no other way of acquiring a language. We feel language is all about talking and we feel that the only way to learn speaking English is by speaking. However, listening is the only way we can reach the core of the language. Consider, for instance, among the dumb and deaf people, most of the people classified as 'dumb' actually unable to speak as they are deaf. The chief reason why most of the people remain 'dumb' in English are actually 'deaf' as far as English is concerned.

In my view, instead of having 'spoken English' classes, we should have classes which teaches us how to listen to English. If we pay close attention to how we listen, we realize that we hardly listen or listen only  through our thoughts continuously going on in our minds. We hardly remain present to someone or something as our mind wanders all over the place: through our opinions, day dreams, memories and various kinds of distractions inside our heads. We should develop awareness about these distractions and pay attention to what is being spoken, why it is being spoken, how  it is spoken and what all is going on behind what is being spoken. Paying this kind of attention dramatically improves not just our spoken English but also our relationship with people. Regularly listening attentively to just how English words are pronounced, enhances quality of our spoken English.

One can see that a lot depends on the attitude and mindset regarding English. What we need is the right spirit and the right spirit is all about treating it as a game.  We begin the game by declaring openly that you will master the language and  as Zaffron and Logan put it ‘play as if our life depended on it’. Declaration is significant, because when you openly declare your intention, people hold you accountable for it and which makes you work without giving up. The authors suggest ‘Play the game passionately, intensely, and fearlessly. But don’t make it significant. It’s just a game’. (2004)

We may have hundred reasons for not using English, we don’t have people who can speak it with us, we don’t have enough vocabulary, and our grammar is poor and so on. But the point is to play it anyway. Zaffron and Logan suggest, ‘if something occurs to you as an obstacle, you will push back by playing on the obstacle’s terms. Instead, make the obstacles, conditions of the game.’ (201). We have to remember that the distance between two set of stumps on the cricket pitch is twenty two yards is not an obstacle, but the condition of the game itself.

The most important thing is being in action with English. Though there is great desire for English, there is an inbuilt reluctance in using English. It is usually reluctance to take risk in using English. It is about fear of failure and one is reminded of an old joke where a person declares, ‘I won’t step into water, till I learn how to swim properly’. Unless you jump into the language and take risk of ‘looking bad’, you wont be able to use English at all.

Zaffron and Logan make a profound distinction between ‘taking about the game, from the stands’ and ‘playing the game on the court’. They give example of a football game where the conversations of people who stand in the stands is all about ‘judging, evaluating, assessing, making excuses about their teams, or saying what their teams did right, or rationalizing’ (199). The authors’ note that from the stands there is little at stake and the conversation has no impact on the action of the game. They suggest, ‘You leave the stands when you stop assessing and judging and instead put something at risk.’ No action, no result, no mastery.

Hence to attain mastery over English, it is essential to drop the conversation which actually block our access to the language and inside of which there are no possibilities of mastering it. It is essential to declare your intention of mastering it so that people around you, hold you accountable for your performance. Without this accountability, we won’t work to enhance our performance. Finally, leaving the stands and being in action on the court with English, taking risks and making all the obstacles, conditions of the game will lead to mastery over English. Obviously, performance cannot be a one time affair.  Playing this game of mastering English is a life long process, where we keep climbing ‘Mt. Neverest’, jumping from one peak of excellence, to another – till we are burned, buried or fed to birds……

Reference:

Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of your Organization and your Life, San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2009. Distributed in India by the Times Books, Rs. 395

Transforming our Performance: A Review of The Three Laws of Performance

Why did your father behave the way he did? Why do your mother or child or your spouse act the way they do? Why does your boss say and do the things the does? Why do you behave and act the way you do, even if you don’t want to act that way? Why do organization and corporation function in the way they do? Psychologist, management experts and philosophers have sought to explain human behaviour in innumerable ways. There are plenty of theories and systems of thought to explain and understand the way we and people around us act and do things. But the problem with these theories and concepts is precisely this: they explain and help us to understand but don’t allow us a concrete, hands-on access to alter the behaviour and action of people or us. They give us ‘tips and strategies’ to ‘fix’ the problems.

The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life by Zaffron and Logan is not a theoretical book or a book giving ‘tips and strategies or solutions’ to ‘problems’. Most of the times, Zaffron and Logan say, ‘the problem-solution’ mode of thinking doesn’t work. The reason they say lies in what they term ‘the problem-solution mass’ where the solution to a problem becomes an additional problem.  The example they give is a youngster who feels lonely and frustrated and thinks that marriage will ‘solve’ the ‘problem of loneliness’. However, after marriage, what really happens is that he has two problems on his hands: loneliness and marriage! He tries to ‘fix’ this by raising a family and how he has three problems on his hand: loneliness, marriage and children! He tries to ‘fix’ it by ‘divorce’ or an extramarital affair and now he has one more problem in his life! The answer lies in ‘transforming’ rather than finding solutions to the problems.

The laws are not ‘ideas, strategies, principles or theories’: they are ‘laws’ like the law of gravitation. Knowing these laws help not just to explain but also transform the performance of a person or an organization, that is, rewrite the future of that person or organization. That’s the incredible power of this book.   Let’s look at the three simple laws in brief.

The First Law: How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.

The law is very simple and yet we simply have no idea how deeply it affects our life and the life of the organization. The most important words here are ‘occur’ and ‘correlate’. The word ‘occur’ indicates that it is NOT what situation or a person really IS but how it OCCURS TO US that determines our behaviour. For instance, if we see a situation or person as threatening, our actions will be correlated to our perception of threat IRRESPECTIVE of the fact whether it IS threatening or not.  

Speaking from my own experience, my mother ‘occurred’ to me as a person who has treated my father badly and as a person who did not care for me at all. After I was able to distinguish that this is how my mother occurred to me and that was NOT how she WAS, great bitterness and anger towards her vanished. This realization transformed my behaviour towards her so much that I don’t fight with her at all after this. When this bitterness and anger and fights disappeared, there was unprecedented peace and affinity in my life. In fact, before this realization, when my psychotherapist had asked me to tell him ‘three good qualities’ of my mother I could not even tell him one!  So much was the anger and resentment I was carrying around.

How situations or person occur to us is closely dependent on Zaffron and Logan term as ‘default future’.  Default Future, according to the authors, is our future which we SEE as certainly coming unless something dramatic and unexpected happens. This ‘default future’ does not include the inevitable things like death or ageing. It includes the things like ‘how your evening will turn out’ or what you will be doing tomorrow, unless something unexpected happens for instance. We know this future at the gut level. If we know we are going to meet someone we love in the evening, our present becomes something else and if we know that she or he has changed the plan our present becomes something else. In fact, it is not our past that controls our life; it is our ‘default future’ which controls our life. Our present moment, our activities in the present are CORRELATED to how our FUTURE OCCURS to us this moment. That is, our present way of being and acting is a function of our ‘default future’. If we see in the morning when we wake up that it is going to be ‘the same routine day’ in our default future, our actions will be correlated to this perception. If we receive a phone call informing us of something totally unexpected, our morning changes for better or for worse. Imagine, a phone call informing us that we have won something by the sale scheme we got yesterday while shopping. Or imagine a call telling us about our application for something has been turned down. It changes our present way of being and acting.

What applies to us as individuals applies for the institutions and organization. The way people in the organization are working at present is correlated to their ‘default future’. If it is bleak and uninspiring, people’s activities will be correlated to this perception.

The question which comes to our mind now is HOW a situation (or a person) occurs to us the way it does?  What made my mother occur to me the way she did? This brings us to the second law of performance.

The Second Law: How a situation occurs arises in language.

Simple again. How my mother occurred to me was based on what I kept SAYING to myself over and over again in my mind to myself or to her openly. I kept on saying, ‘she does not care for me or for my father. She treats him badly’. Remember this saying was not always conscious, it was often at the ‘gut level’.  I ran this conversation repeatedly and every time I repeated it my anger went up exponentially. My feelings, expectations and beliefs are nothing but my conversations with myself and they determine how someone occurs to me. If I keep saying, as I did, that this is an ‘arranged marriage’ and there is no space for love in it, there wasn’t any.

Conversations are verbal and nothing is ‘just words’. Our feelings and emotions are correlated to our words.  The ‘default future’ is a conversation we have with ourselves at the gut level. If you look at the conversation I had about my mother ‘she does not care for me at all and she treats my father badly’, you will realize that it started in the PAST, and that it uses language to DESCRIBE what my mother IS. This is a past-based use of language and it is mostly ‘descriptive’.  In this use of language situation (or a person) ‘IS’ the way it is. When I describe something by saying it is the way it is, I m speaking from my past experience. For instance, if I say, as I have said often, ‘the most of the teachers in the colleges and universities are not really eligible for the job’, that is how I will see them, that is, this is how they will occur to me and how I behave with them is correlated to how they occur to me.

Zaffron and Logan call this ‘reality illusion’, the illusion that reality IS the way it OCCURS to us. It is the illusion that reality is ‘fixed’ and is independent of our conversations. . This is similar to what structuralists and poststructuralist philosophers (under influence of Heidegger) have been pointing out. That doesn’t mean, they point out, there is no ‘reality’ ‘out there’, but they emphasize that we cannot access it without language. My reality illusion was ‘this is how my mother is’. When we realize that there is no ‘fixed and stable’ reality existing independently of our conversation, reality becomes ‘malleable’ to us. We can now ‘rewrite’ our future.

Now if our performance is correlated to how situation occurs to us and how a situation occurs to us is due the language we use to talk about it to ourselves with others, how can we transform our performance? We can transform our performance by transforming our language (not ‘changing’ it mind you, this is not a book about ‘positive thinking’) and consequently transforming the way the situation occurs to us.

Most of our conversations are past based. Our complaints, our expectations, our intentions, our communication strategies that we use to get results all are based on our past.  There is nothing wrong with this, except for the fact that most of us put them into our future most of the time.  Zaffron and Logan call this ‘filing error’. The stuff that should go into the box file labeled ‘past’ should go into that file; however, it goes into the file labeled ‘future’.  My conversation,’ mine is an arranged marriage and there is no scope for love’ came from some past conversations; however, by putting it into my ‘default future’, it controls my present. I don’t see any scope for love to exist at present. The ‘filing error’ makes me see my marriage as a closed space. There is no possibility of love here. I can see a possibility only when I put my past based conversation to where it belongs to the file called past only then can I see some ‘space’ some possibility in my default future and hence in my present as my present. This practice of rectifying the ‘filing error’ by putting the files from my past back into my past instead of my default future is called ‘completion’. This completion opens up a blank space from which new possibility can be created. How can I create a new possibility?

The Third Law: Future-based language transforms how situation occur to people.

By declaring your commitment to create a new possibility and keeping your word, you can create new future from the cleared space in the ‘default future’. The future based speech acts like, ‘I will do………………’, ‘I will create’ or ‘I declare the possibility of being…………..’ actually can CREATE new future. If you don’t believe this, just look at your past. When I was a very young child I said to my self, ‘I am not wanted, I am unwanted’ and I became ‘unwanted’ in my eyes. People said they loved me but as I saw myself as ‘unwanted’, I did not believe them.  I thought they were manipulating me. Here was a classic ‘filing error’; I was putting my past based conversation into future. When I dropped this conversation, I no longer feel ‘unwanted’. I can sense that people want me and love me, in their own ways.

But the statement ‘ I am unwanted’ is actually nothing but a speech act. A verdict that I passed on myself: I was the judge, the jury, the advocate and the culprit at the same time. I BELIEVED in it, it was ‘TRUTH’ to me. If this decade old statement determined all my past, a speech act based in future can create my future.

The future based language, or what Zaffron and Logan call, ‘generative language’ is not an empty ‘ positive thinking’ as it comes from the space in default future cleared up by putting past into past, it comes out of a perception of possibility.  Most of the ‘positive thinking’ fails because one does not SEE POSSIBILITY in this thinking. If I SEE myself sitting in front of a hungry lion, no amount of positive thinking can actually CONVINCE me that I won’t be eaten, unless I see that it is actually chained to the tree.  No completion (rectifying the ‘filing error’), no possibility, no possibility, no new future.

Zaffron and Logan make a very interesting use of the term ‘integrity’, which is at heart of creating a future. According to Logan and Zaffron, ‘integrity’ has nothing to do with ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’ as it is commonly understood. It has nothing to do with right or wrong. It has everything to do with ‘workability’ in our life. Integrity, according to the authors, means keeping your word, honoring your word. If you don’t keep your word, the work cannot be done. If you cease to honour your word, people will be even quicker to cease to honour it. Integrity, according to Zaffron and Logan, is ‘being whole or complete’. A chair with one leg missing has no workability; a wheel with one spoke missing has no workability. Only when it is restored can there be any workability in life. A chair with a broken leg is not ‘bad or wrong’, a wheel with a broken spoke is not ‘bad or wrong’, it simply doesn’t WORK.  

The key to rewriting a new future is by using future based language and with integrity.

This is a book about results and not about ideas. This is a book which leads to action. Reflections and insights are usually dime a dozen. This is a book which is not concerned with ‘explanation’ or ‘understanding’, but with performance: as a leader, as a father, as a teacher, as a doctor, as a brother, as a daughter, as a friend, as an employee, as an employer, as a businessman and as anyone. The book, the authors tell us, can be our coach in this game of life. If we sit and argue with our coach about theoretical niceties, we won’t be on the court. So I recommend this book about anyone who wants to act effectively and powerfully so as to get the results one wants. So get hold of a copy and get on the playground!

Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of your Organization and your Life, San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2009

Distributed in India by the Times Books, Rs. 395