Life is like a game of Bowls?

I was having a conversation with my wife this morning that got me thinking about Lawn Bowls, an old and rather civilised English game that can trace its history by to the 12^th century, and craved into English history when Francis Drake claimed he had time to finish his game of bowls and then defeat the Spanish Armada. For those who have never played, you roll a very heavy ball down a very smooth lawn to try and hit another smaller ball called the jack. The art of the game is compensating for the fact that the balls have a small off-centre weight inside them called a bias, which makes it impossible to roll them in a straight line. If you watch this game played by skilled practitioners, you will be amazed by their skill in using this bias.

That got me thinking about our own biases, which of course we all have. The lawn bowlers, are very familiar with the bias of their bowls, but we often keep ours hidden from everyone including ourselves. We are always fair and objective aren’t we? The things is you can’t start winning at bowls till you familiarise yourself with and compensate for your own bias. I wonder if Life isn’t a bit like that too. Until we understand where our biases are, and accept that we need to ‘bowl’ a curved line to compensate for them we keep landing wide of our mark.

There are people we don’t like, places we don’t feel safe, activities we find challenging and all of this may well be based on sound reasons, but those same judgements and stories divert the path of our thinking just as surely as the little weight in the bowl. Be honest with yourself about these things, own them and share them and you maybe surprised just how directly you get where you want to go…. Good luck!

“To know the true reality of yourself, you must be aware not only of your conscious thoughts, but also of your unconscious prejudices, bias and habits.”

“He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice” Anatole France

 

 

Tags: bias, Communication, judgement, prejudice

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 10:27 and is filed under Business Change, Communication, Personal Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.