How Peace and War fits with My Playbook Series

So, in my Playbook Series we talk about beliefs that are acquired from life and may not be conscious choice. Our premise is that it may serve us to challenge those beliefs and try on alternative beliefs. I also give several examples in the first (What We Know Can Hurt Us) Workshop. I lead the group down a certain path and ask them to seek an answer that lies outside the ‘box’ or path down which we have gone. Invariably, it is difficult for most people to step out of a path we start down together.

For example, Myrna gave me this one:
Do you understand Roman Numerals?
How do you create the number 10?
Answer: X
How can I add a single line and make it the number 9?
Answer: IX
Now, can you to add one more line and turn the number 9 in to the number 6.
This becomes extremely difficult for most of us because I have us going down two paths that don’t contain the answer. The first one is that we are thinking Roman Numerals. The second is that the line they added to 10 to make it a 9 was a straight line (I).

It takes someone really willing to step outside of the group think to come up with the right answer. The line that we add to 9 to create 6 is:

‘S’ ---------> SIX!

Hopefully, you understand the concept of Confirmation Bias (we only allow in to our senses those things that confirm our current beliefs). So, we played a game, which I won’t share with it, but to say that it started with this same mindset of thinking we knew what was said and acting upon it. We had a period of time to make a series of decisions in the two groups that we were put in to and achieve an ultimate goal.

Most of us made assumptions about being ‘us and them’ and acted accordingly. We started out the game trying to win at others expense. We all got in to auto pilot and did competition very well. There was also some victim stuff, some blaming and justification, etc.

Part way through the game Christine led her group to re-evaluate the direction they were going and have a Pow Wow with our group. It had never dawned on the rest of us to talk like that. We had the rules re-read to us and became clearing aware that we were not optimizing our efforts; that the rules never divided us in to an us and them for creating points.

After talking, we decided to trust each other and agree to work co-operative through the rest of the game. It was neat, and a sign of the quality of our coaching class that when we recognized where we had gone versus where we could have gone, we simply forgot the past, committed to the future and finished out the game with the maximum number of points that we could have earned from there out.

We were all sad and disappointed at our reactions and choices in the first part, but celebrated the second half when we recognized where we were and chose another path. Having said that, it was still a little shocking, to most of us, how quickly we went to war based on what we believed we were to do. There was even a little resistance to the suggestion that how we played the game was how we played life, but it quickly melted and we were able to apply the lesson to our lives and take away some pretty incredible insights.

Especially, given what I have been teaching, I was surprised at how quickly I went down the road I was led down, but was also proud of how quickly I recognized the path and sought another (the solution that I teach for confirmation bias). Neat way to play at an incredibly important message and get it in to my soul.