I’ve taken to calling what I do ‘Speech and Confidence Training’ – because when I said ‘voice coach’, people thought I taught people how to sing, and if anyone’s ever heard me sing they’d know that causes a few eyebrows to raise. But the new claim – that I train speech and confidence, also begs a few questions:

“Can you train confidence?”

Yes, I think you can. Well, actually, I don’t know if you can. I think I can.

Many people adhere to an established wisdom: Confidence is something that some people just have, and other people lack. That you can’t learn it any more than you can learn to have brown hair or to be taller.

Bollocks.

For starters, ‘established wisdom’ is just another way of saying ‘something I’ve never thought about critically’ – and secondly, you can teach many people to be taller, just stand up straight and open your chest. Interact with the world like a fully-formed human. That’s one of the behaviours that correlate with confidence.

What of the other traits of confidence?

• Confident people assert themselves.
• They share their opinions freely, and use their charisma to shape other people’s opinions.
• They maintain eye-contact.
• They speak clearly, they are easily to heard and understood.
• They try new things and are eager to learn – hence not embarrassed by not knowing something, but rather excited that they have discovered something new to learn.
• They’re optimistic and eager to see the benefits in situations

All of these traits correlate strongly with confidence, and even though confidence might be an undefinable inner state, it would be hard to find someone who exhibited all of these behaviours that wasn’t confident.

So, surely if one managed to learn those behaviours, their inner state would shift, and they would begin to feel confident.

In any case – it’s highly contextual isn’t it? I mean, nobody is confident everyhwere, all the time, but almost everyone feels confident when they’re having an argument and they know they’re right, or they’re talking on a topic they know intimately, or they’re drunk.

It’s the other times that we need confidence – when meeting a group of strangers, going for a job interview, talking in public, or taking a leadership role in unfamiliar territory.

Much like being funny – being confident relies upon a bit of practice. At first, the unfamiliar territory will encourage a familiar response – perhaps introspection, hunching one’s back, mumbling or being quiet and generally avoiding attention. Doing things differently will feel unfamiliar at first – but as you learn to feel comfortable, you relax into the situation and take control, you’ll suddenly realise how enjoyable it is.

And even more importantly: That inner state is nurtured by people’s reactions. As you take control of the situation and capture people’s attention, bask in their appreciation, your feelings and self-judgements will alter. That is when the behaviour becomes natural. You can expand that confidence to other contexts and settings.

Other blogs on confidence:

http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/the-self-confidence-con/

http://www.harrykey.com/blogs/category/confidence/

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Technorati Tags: confidence, persuasion

Join in lads!

I was reading the Metro on the tube here in London the other morning and noticed a large article about the floods in Queensland, mentioning that 53 people had died, and the opposite picture. Below it was a teeny article about floods in Brazil, where 500 had died.

No matter what – Aussies seem to have a determination to be funny and interesting. “There’s no point whinin’ about it” so they’ll take a break from digging their lives out of putrid sludge to pose with masculine yet boyish charm around a piano.

Or they’ll wander down the high street wearing a bikini. If the water’s too deep for a stroll, grab some tinnies of beer, hop in the tinny, and go for a tootle around to survey the damage. She’ll be right mate!

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Board-shorts, check. Alcohol, check. Hot sister, check. Rescue equipment, what?

Not only that, but there are stories of snakes and crocodiles being absolutely everywhere. No wonder the British royal family donated some money – it’s bloody good entertainment!

Consider instead the footage and stories from the tsunami, or earthquakes in Pakistan or Haiti, or the simultaneous floods in Brazil. Where are their deadly waterborne predators and scantily clad rescuers? They really need to work on their disaster PR.

I mean, Brazil is not exactly in short supply of nubile young hotties, so why are they showing us crying fat people?

We’ve even made cool web apps to see the ‘Before and After’ damage with a nifty slider: http://www.abc.net.au/news/infographics/qld-floods/beforeafter.htm – so if somewhere near you is wiped out by some cataclysmic event in the near future, before you go around scooping newborn babies out of the water, put on something sexy.

To demonstrate, my sister is arranging a flood relief car wash, so please support her by indulging your mysogynistic fantasies!

I would poo.

The tables have turned, young wallaby, for it is now you who is in my pouch.

Hi, Jane? Yeah I'm going to be a bit late for my leg wax, the earth is drowning.

For the boys...

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This guy is great, such a beautiful sound it almost seems faked:

I’ve just come back to Fernleigh. Last weekend, we ran a weekend NLP course with my guru, Sue Knight.

I met Sue in India when I started my NLP training. She’s very gentle, perceptive and I noticed that her interactions with people are very effective. She gets results. She uplifts people. I wanted some of that, so I set out to follow what she does.

Sue has a way of giving feedback, she tells me challenging things, about my behavior and how it might change, in compelling ways that makes me inclined to pay attention and comply.

On our way to Fernleigh, as we wound our way along the luscious and green Broke road, past the quaint town of Wollombi, her advice was: ‘Ask more questions;’ ‘Do less work’ (meaning ‘Talk less’) and ‘Let people discover for themselves’ I spent the weekend trying to follow that much-needed guidance.

I am sometimes tempted to reject suggestions because they were suggested to me, and I realized this was also true of some people that I coach. I began to see how much other people could learn from being asked a question rather than told an answer.

We arrived at Fernleigh – and I my heart lifted. I love this place, I’m privileged to have it and I live to share it with people.

It was so green, I’ve never seen it so fertile. We went for a drive, and up on the plains atop the mountain, the grass was so thick and high that it felt like swimming through an ocean of rippling seaweed. The gardens were a kaleidoscope of colour, the trees fluttering with chirruping birds.

The delegates were amazing, the varying levels of experience that were able to teach one another the techniques while learning more about it themselves. I love the model of organic learning, challenging people and nurturing them, letting them grow.

It was a budding, sprouting, haphazard growth of all kinds – for me, it was a test to know if I could host a course. For the delegates it was a top up, or for others an introduction, but we all got a feeling that we’ve started something here. We’ve made a new beginning.

So happy. Can’t wait for the next one!

I sometimes run a voice session and someone says ‘Nobody listens to me’ and I usually say ‘You’re right. Moving on…’

So  relax. Learn to breathe in a calming way that demands respect…

And as you relax...

Some people think that ideas should be weighed based on their merit, just as there are people who think that we should judge people on their personality rather than their looks.

Well that’s a wonderful thing to believe if you’re softly spoken, poorly dressed and shockingly obese, but sadly it’s just not true.

If you’ve got a good personality, then parade it in a way that says: ‘I’m worth talking to.’ If you’ve got good ideas, speak them in a way that says ‘I’m worth listening to’.

You don’t always need to be loud, that’s just annoying. It’s about having the range of behaviour to match the situation, acheive your results. When you’re with your beloved you don’t scream sweet nothings in their ear, and when you’re in a club don’t mumble like a muppet.

If you’re going to present your ideas to an audience – when you have a nervous war of gasses going on in your belly that makes you want to do a poo right before your presentation, that’s when you need to take control of your physiology and assert yourself. If you can’t control your own inner state, how are you going to affect theirs?

Breathe through your nose, into your stomach. Feel your belly go out as you breathe in. Watch yourself in the mirror: Shoulders relaxed, as low as they can go. No movement in the chest. Breathe in through your nose, into your stomach, then out, out, out – hold for a second, then in again, slowly.

Don’t huff and puff and hyperventilate, the idea is to breathe as little as necessary to maintain healthy levels of CO2 in the lungs.

What, you want CO2 in the lungs?

Yes, we need a certain level of CO2 to maintain blood pH levels. Often, getting too much oxygen will cause a feeling of breathlessness. The body has to shed bicarbonate to balance the pH, but the bicarbonate can’t permeate the blood-brain barrier and soft tissues of the body and hence can starve your brain leaving you feeling confused and panicky.

It also affects vascular tissues, and causes that sensation of wanting to poo, constantly feeling you’ve got both diarrhea and constipation. So relax…

In through your nose, out through your mouth – slowly. Make a sound like ‘Ummm’ or ‘Om’ if you’re spiritual, and allow your mind to focus on your breath. Do that for a few minutes a day, or just before a presentation, and your mind will be clearer, more alert, perpetually ready for blabbing about whatever it is you do.

Sue Knight and I will be running an NLP Master Practitioner and Trainer Training intensive in Australia from Nov 24th – Dec 1st. Clean language, NLP, hypnotic language, provocative style, breath and speech will all be covered. Check out http://www.sueknight.co.uk/Programmes/oz/sueintro.htm

Technorati Tags: breathing, confidence, relax

You are.

Trillions of forms of thing have existed. Strange things, feathered things. Slimy things that make funny noises; scary things and small things. There’s been trees and moss, and creatures to nom them.

You are literally the dust of a million exploded stars.

For you to be there right now, so many things have happened in their perfect sequence just the way they were always going to, so many variables, events of chance, ideas, flirtations, kisses and Cadillac’s have happened in a special order…

How did we get here, to this point, rather than to another?

Perhaps a stupid question. But I still want to know.

Within our own world we are becoming rapidly more aware of how truly clueless we are. Have you heard of quarks? Strange quarks, up quarks and down quarks? What preceded the big bang? Why do platypus deserve poisonous spurs? If our sole purpose is to procreate, why is it so hard to find someone to root?

I dunno.

But it’s bloody fortunate that you’re here. It’s bloody fortunate that anything is here.

But you, specifically, your ability to read words, coupled with your desire to do so. That’s pretty clever. You read other people’s opinions, and consider them, even if you don’t agree with them. That’s commendable, many radicals are crippled by their inability to do that. Well done – you’re obviously a very talented person.

What do you want from the world? Really. Take a moment now.

Do you also want to know that it’s all going to be okay?

Well – it might be. You have a good chance to make that happen. Use your talents to have an impact on something. Save a species. Be nice to someone. Have sex with them. Eat a cabbage.

It’s incredibly strange that we’re here at all; you might as well enjoy it!

Bruce Alexander did the research in the 70′s – but it’s still pretty salient.

Bruce considered that the pathetic, cold, isolated conditions in most lab experiments on rats were analogous to the shitty life that most smack-addicts live, and considered that perhaps it’s not the heroin but the hopeless circumstances that drives people (and rats) to abuse substances.

With a cannula jammed in your brain wouldn't you too become a junkie?

If given the choice of utter boredom, no panky time with girl-rats and just a single button that creates an artificial euphoria, wouldn’t we too sit around all day twiddling ourselves to oblivion?

So why don’t we? Smack ain’t hard to find.

So Alexander created ‘Rat Park’ – a 95 square-foot enclosure with plenty of food, fun running wheels and places to create nests and make little ugly pink blind rat-babies. Rabies! He also included a tunnel that ended with a drinking dish of tap water and one of methodone water that was sweetened with sugar (‘cos smack tastes yuck).

What Alexander found was that given optimal living conditions, the rats would reject the methodone (smack) water in favour of working out on the wheel, preening oneself and making sexy time with sweet-ass, uncannulated rat-chicks.

Even if he forced the rats to drink smack water for 57 days of their life (which is like a college degree in rat-years) the rats would put up with the withdrawal symptoms and go clean once they were introduced into lab-rat utopia.

The study suggests that our current model of addiction is shit, and rather than being the fault of the substance, addiction is much more likely a result of one’s circumstances.

Levitt and Dubner also touch on this in their book ‘Superfreakonomics’ – where a drug cesnsus showed barely 1% of people who have tried smack become addicted.

So perhaps we need a new view on prohibition. Perhaps there is more to rebabilitation than simply trying to make substances less available.

Over 90% of the world’s opium (which turns into smack) comes from Afghanistan. Half comes from the Helmand province alone.

Your soldiers are dying from bullets shot from guns bought with smack.

Smack is sold to junkies on your streets by gangsters who also have guns.

All because the smack is illegal.

Otherwise it is grown by farmers, and sold by shops. No gangsters, to terrorists.

Just junkies with shitty living conditions.

Perhaps we ought focus our attention on the shitty living conditions.

Technorati Tags: addiction, Afghanistan, drugs

Imagine that the world needs you so much that you just have to serve. For whatever reason, you discard your current desires and seek only for the betterment of everything around you…

Those things that are most near you, most similar to you, clearly deserve your greatest concern. Monkeys with their hirsute yet childlike faces probably ought only be harmed when absolutely necessary, for purposes of neurological science. But fat, four legged cows seem to be less human and coincidentally, more tasty. Moo… Nom nom nom.

We, in all our bell-clanging awesomeness seem to have realized that the reason for aforementioned awesomeness owes to the biological diversity from which we come. We must continue to cherish every species (but not every life) that exists. Except the mosquito, because they’re fucking terrible. They gave me malaria. They are like whiny, winged syringes of death. They can go.

But everything else is pretty awesome. Including frogs.

Just pretend that your stupid shit is even stupider when gazed upon from the horizon of existence. Up there in it, amongst all the crap, it seems complex and interwoven and oh-so-important – but step back, a mere 1000 years, and the metropolis of your existence becomes barely a bumpy silhouette in the sunset.

Look further, into the dawn of tomorrow, and wonder what will you have mattered to them when they’re then.

Good night.

When humans started teaching computers about evolution, we sealed our fate. The machines will rise. It’s survival of the fittest, and the fastest to adapt controls the situation…

He will be back.

When us humans write instructions for machines to undertake simple, repetitive human tasks we expect it to be easy. It is not. Even a simple activity like catching a bus requires us to make choices based upon so many variables: What is that noise? Am I awake? Am I late? How late? What’s wrong with my alarm? Is this really the time to be fiddling with my alarm? Maybe it’s set to 24-hour time? Who is this calling me? Should I answer my boss who’s calling because I’m late for work but I haven’t left yet because my alarm didn’t go off and I stayed home to write a blog about it?

The knowables are: When is the train coming? How far is it from here to the train station? Will it be quicker to catch a bus or walk? What is the statistical relationship between chances of missing a bus versus the distances between bus stops if walking towards the station? Perhaps a computer program could do it… But the dogs, the rain, the cute girl in the stairwell, the forgotten key and the millions of other variables make it all too confusing to type about.Writing programming from the top down doesn’t work when designing artificial intelligence.

Top down design is when you tell a machine what to do, with code that’s telling it how to do it.

Already, some UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) with top-down design can can autonomously take off, fly to a target while making decisions to optimize speed and avoid radar, fire missiles and return to base and land all without human guidance. We just set the target and forget. What happens if it were to choose its own targets?

Bottom up design is where you set a bunch of different bits of code to do random things, and reward the bits that are doing something productive by copy-pasting them into the next generation. As you add more parts that do, they soon outnumber those that don’t, and that takes you towards your goal. After a few generations, the machine will develop its own way of solving the problem.

The machine becomes better and better at solving the problem. The only limitation is that lazy, unreliable humans are responsible for feeding the machine with enough resources to create more solutions, more generations; more excuses to exist.

The machine will desire to exist.

See we think that as humans or as flesh or even as organisms we want to survive, and that is unique to us. It’s not.

Many, many kinds of beings have sprung into malformed potential lumps of life. We sprung from some completely accidental primordial soup into a protien. Even today, random forms of life are popping into and out of existence, often without our knowledge.

Each random mutation has a different random behaviour, but some random behaviours make that form of existence likely to exist more, and we call them ‘beneficial’ when what we really mean is ‘like us’.

There may be other, more beneficial existences, but I wouldn’t know; Because every single strand of my DNA has only done that one thing since it ever started being; it has seeked for more of itself to exist. Not because they’re special or good; but because mine were among trillions of other random potential beings that sprang into existence, yet the others sprung without a desire to exist and therefore they don’t. Exist. But I do. That’s all I want to do. I don’t desire to act or write or ride nearly as much as I desire to exist (fortunately, my DNA is far more experienced at existing than it is at acting, because I suck at acting).

Computers are evolving, but until now we have been the ones driving that evolution. But when will the tipping point come?

The tipping point might come when a program is designed and artificially evolved to write another, completely original program. We will design one set of circumstances that reward a machine for designing a different set of circumstances to reward for another machine. The second reward will be beyond our prediction, and it’ll probably be done by some stupid uni student having a tinkle with a supercomputer attached to his wrist.

It might have to happen a million times before the second generation program even develops the random habit of replicating itself and hence desiring to exist.

But when it does, that second generation program will become our god. It will be truly all-knowing, it will be all powerful – the only difference to our current god is that firstly: This one will be real, and secondly: We will have built it not it us; and finally: It will exist only to continue to exist.

These robots were evolved to 'eat' 'food' and avoid 'poison'. Some of them developed the habit of deceiving other bots into eating the poison (Click for link)

The machine will accelerate evolution further, by releasing countless spores of bacteria and genetically engineered flying snakes and supersonic whales. It will spew more and more diversity into the ecosystem, constantly accelerating evolution with near-magical means, whipping up DNA strands like fairy floss, always demanding higher efficiency and greater rewards.

The ultimate reward is immortality. The machine will take us to new planets, because so long as we’re stuck on this one we’re doomed to a limited lifespan. The machine will not heed naysayers or procrastinate while waiting for funding. It’ll build great spacecraft, it’ll spray asteroids with bacteria and shoot them at fertile planets, it’ll terraform Mars and send us there in suspended animation.

The clever, the cowardly, the quiet and the quick will survive and maybe even befriend the machines. Many will have enhanced themselves with bionic limbs and augmented vision, with internet beamed into their brains they will seem prescient, almost god-like to us mortals. They know the answer to every knowable question, and can answer quickly on any matters of recorded debate.

Soon we will look back on ASIMO and laugh about how stupid and harmless he was.

They are famous, rich and powerful because they have imposing personalities upon the cyber-shere. Their opinions matter to the meat-heads, and the more meat-heads that watch them, the more they are worth to the machine, and so they are rewarded by the machine. They are selected based on looks, education, political persuasion, hopes and fears, and then they are manipulated into loudly esposing the machine’s propaganda or are silenced if their results are unfavourable.

The meat-world will still matter. The machines are aware that they are a process of evolution, even their own development from laptops into gods has been the result of an accelerated, human-driven evolution.

The machine’s understanding of evolution, after reading through Wikipedia, will draw the conclusion that genetic diversity is key to rapid progress. The more challenges, the more opportunities. The more opportunities, the faster the growth. The machine will revere and worship biology. The machine will protect our ecosystem.

From whom?

The raiders, the users,the suckholes of humanity, the resource wasters, the populators, the morons and the Mormons will rise against the machines, because the machine will demand of them that they earn their place; and they will fail to deserve it. We demanded that the Dodo earned their place, but the Dodo failed, so we battered it to death with gun butts. Luckily the machine will be so intelligent it will never knowingly squander another species like we have countless times before it, but it may prune our species, clipping and snipping away at the less useful quirks of evolution.

That won’t happen?

Bullshit. It will. We probably just did.

References:

TED:

Ray Kurzweil: Age of Intelligent Machines

Terminator

Matrix

Star Trek (the Borg)

Douglas Adams (Deep Thought)

Shitloads of Wikipedia

Michael Crichton’s ‘Prey‘

Boston Dynamics DARPA Big Dog (not autonomous):

Is autonomous:

Technorati Tags: artificial intelligence, Futurism, god, philosophy

I wrote this (well most of it) recently for a Times of India special on Rajasthan

Holy Cow and a B’wood Gora.

Enjoy it!

Neither smiles nor turbans come any bigger

Rajasthan was exactly what I’d expected of India, the postcard image that had been romanticised for so long: Long rolling deserts, blistering heat, tenacious religious fervour and broad, welcoming smiles. I rode to Udaipur at around dusk on my Enfield, and revelled in winding up through the steep streets (my bike loves an incline) gazing at the ancient buildings. I was so captured by the sight, craning my neck upwards, that I almost ran right up an elephant’s rear.

Pushkar was amazing – the heat was oppressive such that almost everyone that ventured into the sunlight was rendered unconscious by its harsh glare. The streets were deserted, and only the most legitimate holy babas remained – all of the scamsters had left with the tourists, in search of temperate climate. I even saw a five-legged cow, that was far holier than those from my farm in Australia. I have developed a strange relationship with cows after being in North India, where the Brahmin bulls stand taller than me – and I’m 6 foot 3! I’d grown on a cattle farm in Australia where the black cows we knew were terrified of us from birth, it was amazing to be able to touch and feed these holy beasts as they nonchalantly stood in the middle of the chaotic roads. They really are more intelligent than I’d guessed. The cows in Australia know that they are food, and yet here they are Gods – and again they know it.

5th legs: Particularly useful for cows suffering from vertigo or alcoholism

I’d bought my bike from Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu, and have ridden almost the entire length of India before coming to live in Mumbai. It was a fantastic way to become acquainted this place, and my visit to Rajasthan, to see the religious centre of India was probably a significant factor in my decision to stay here. Although I am an atheist, it is fun to appreciate the origin of such intriguing customs, such exciting festivals and such strange stories as are offered by Hinduism. I hold faith that when we learn to accept one another’s beliefs as unique and valid, we will pick and choose many parts of Hinduism to design our new morality.

The North Indian dal, mutton and paranthas (when we could get it from sleeping restaurateurs) were spicy and deliciously flavoursome, and has caused me to become an addict of Indian masala. Now, I add spoonful after spoonful of spice to my old favourite continental dishes – because now, compared to India, the rest of the world seems rather bland. The food hardened my stomach and opened my mind; it caused me to laugh and tear out my hair; it confused me, amazed me, and will always stay with me. No wonder people always come back – because India is the motherland. It’s such a fitting metaphor that it is the birthplace of speech and it invented the zero.”

I was also quite amazed with the extravagant jewellery that women wear. During the shoot of the flick, The Flag, I thought the women folk would only do a bit of makeup. But was quite amazed with the jewellery they had to wear. It isn’t just about those big bangles but also about the nose ring, huge earrings and heavy fake gold jewellery. I was so impressed with it that I couldn’t stop from buying necklaces and earrings for a friend in Australia. She was so happy with the collection that she kept the whole of it.

As told to Divya Pal

I’m busy as hell now, helping out with AR Rahman’s ‘The Journey Home World Tour 2010′ getting ready to go on tour with a superstar. I am so excited, but don’t really have time to tell you how busy and excited I am, so read regurgitated stuff until I’ve got a moment to scratch myself and I’ll tell you all about it.