After a couple of decades being delighted with the ‘pressure form’ of Rapid Learning we started noticing “Beeps!” often being given or received by the ‘Gremlin’ part of a person.

What you need to know about 'Gremlin' right now is that we all have ‘parts’ – isolated triggerable components to our personality that we are seduced to be identified with – and one of these parts is a feisty impulse to defend our survival-oriented worldview with tooth and nail.

This part will do anything to make our belief system ‘right’ so that we continue to survive, even if we are being ‘right’ about being ‘wrong’, ‘worthless’, ‘betrayed’, or ‘left out’. In Possibility Management we have come to call this active part of our psychological defense strategy the Gremlin.

If your Gremlin is hungry for a little ‘snack’ of intrigue or conflict, but you are a professional – so you can’t be so obvious about delivering an insult or a juicy 'victim' story – your Gremlin might cleverly wrap its thermo-nuclear device in the guise of ‘feedback’, and then deliver it with such an irritating tone of voice at the most inappropriate time that your Gremlin’s righteous glorified superiority shines like a neon Bar sign.

On the other hand, if it is your Gremlin part who receives a Beep!, regardless of how humbly the feedback has been packaged, your Gremlin can easily spin a story around the feedback with so much emotional content that you feel like you are being attacked in your weakest place in public by the other person’s Gremlin.

Whether you deliver or receive feedback with attack pressure, Mutually Assured Destruction mechanisms can activate.

This is how a ‘simple’ or ‘useful’ “Beep!” from one person might feel like Armageddon Attack to someone else, and vice versa. Any practical value of the suggestions and hints from the feedback and coaching are lost in the subtle but devastating Gremlin feeding frenzy.

The treasure of group intelligence (e.g. the wisdom of other people's shared experiences) gets transformed into a devil’s whirlpool through repackaging the pressure from radically honest feedback into being a Persecutor’s hammer, smashing poor helpless Victims.

Skilling up in a different approach for sharing wisdom in a team becomes extremely useful.

But what is the approach?

The answer comes through carefully observing that: our psychological defense strategy is not so defended against a vacuum!

If you feel attacked by a force of pressure you can always fight, flee, or freeze.

What do you do when you experience a force of vacuum?

• What do you do when someone approaches cautiously and sincerely wants to listen to you in order to understand you without criticism or judgement?
• What do you do when their authentic curiosity asks open-ended questions that cannot be answered right or wrong, wishing simply to learn about how it is inside of you?
• What do you do when someone offers you a vacuum of acceptance, support, and gratitude? When only you can help them relieve the pain of their confusion about what is really going on for you?

Here is where it is important for you to learn an entirely different skillset for interacting: Learn to deliver fierce, radically-honest, vacuum questions.

Delivering fiercely-vulnerable, radically-honest, Vacuum Questions is an entirely different skillset than delivering fiercely-vulnerable, radically-honest Pressure Questions (e.g. Feedback).

We strongly recommend repeatedly practicing Holding Space for Vacuum Rapid Learning using Pressure Rapid Learning (Go! Feedback! Shift! Go!").

We also strongly recommend repeatedly practicing Holding Space for Vacuum Rapid Learning using Vacuum Rapid Learning!

This is because we are finding that Rapid Learning Through Vacuum is a miracle worker.

A vacuum is an empty Space of nothingness. Your job is to become a vacuum pump, a force that removes all the pressure that could possible exist from the Space of the conversation.

Then, when the psychological defense strategy reflexively pushes against your vacuum using its usual defensive style against pressure, it instead explodes itself from internal pressure and falls open into vulnerability and presence with you.

Suddenly a different person is standing across from you and you can relate in an entirely different manner. Whereas, before, they were defending against an attack using all their standard offensive and defensive tactics learned and practiced over a lifetime, now their own presence surprises them. They experience anew their own capacity to inquire in themselves about your vacuum question.

What you must learn is this: Vacuum Rapid Learning is Not Fair.

What 'not fair' means is, anyone in the conversation could shift the Space to Vacuum Rapid Learning, but no one else does.

You see that Vacuum Rapid Learning is possible and would be useful right now, but no one else does.

Why do you have to be the one to make the 'sacrifice' (actually, so put your Gremlin on a short chain...)? Why? Because you can do it. You are the Possibilitator. Vacuum Rapid Learning is a standard everyday tool for you. It is not fair, but it is your job.

When you have the impulse to deliver feedback or coaching, realize that the impulse may be coming from your own arrogance, from your own fear or anger trying to change the other person to match your world. Your impulse prematurely originates in your delusional assumption that you already know what is going on for that person. You have already concluded that your feedback and coaching is for sure their perfect remedy. Probably you think you know something the other person does not know, and you can ‘help’ them to know what you know.

Your practice in Rapid Learning Through Vacuum when this impulse arises, is to immediately shift to a state of not knowing. Shift to sincerely wanting to understand how a person like them in circumstances like these could possibly think, feel, say, not say, do, or not do exactly what they are doing right now. You really do not get it. What is going on in there? You are lost. You are asking for a Reality Check. You beg them for their ‘X’ on the map as sensed from the inside.

Decide that you want to be connected with this person, that you want to be present with them where they actually are – not where you assume they are – so that you can fruitfully proceed with them into the next thing.

Then instead of saying something that could be experienced as any kind of pressure, you hold a pressureless vulnerability and defenselessly admit, "I wish I could know what is really going on for you right now."
 

What you just said is not a question. It is a sharing from you. It does not require an answer, and at the same time it invites one.

The procedure for Rapid Learning Through Vacuum is:

1. Go! 
2. Reality Check! 
3. Design The Next Experiment! 
4. Go!

By adding the vacuum approach to your Rapid Learning skills you can often avoid the heartbreaking skirmishes that so frequently sabotage attempts at using 'feedback and coaching' to optimize group intelligence.

In a short time Rapid Learning Through Vacuum can generate a miracle of reconnection. Learn it and practice it!

Be sure not to get off the elevator until LEVEL MINUS THREE!

By practicing Vacuum Rapid Learning we’ve discovered that there are typically three levels of response to your vacuum-making, authentically-curious statement.

To navigate the three levels it can help to imagine standing together with the other person in an elevator that slowly descends three levels down into both of your unconscious worlds. Your world is unconscious because you do not already know what you wish to know. If you already knew, your wish would not be authentic.

LEVEL MINUS ONE: The elevator button to start your journey is the statement, “I wish I could know what is really going on for you right now.” The indicator that you have reached LEVEL MINUS ONE is when the person answers back to you from their mind. Logical comments are given because the person assumes you desire a typical conversation with them and want reasons, explanations, justifications, excuses, etc. If you get off the elevator with the other person at LEVEL MINUS ONE then you will be stuck at the logic department. Here you will find the Victimy, scarcity-based, superficial, 'right' explanations about why they did what they did. We encourage you not to get off there. Instead, breathe, wait three seconds in silence, and then push the button for LEVEL MINUS TWO by saying, “Okay, but I really want to know what is going on for you right now.” And then remain attentively silent with open body posture and eye contact. Your are a vacuum.

LEVEL MINUS TWO: Keep holding a safe vacuum Space, that is, a Space that is neutral and not confrontive, not manipulative, does not already know anything. You are heading into deeper levels of awareness together. This is a fine journey to be making! Be sure that you are Centered and Grounded because LEVEL MINUS TWO can be a little rough. You might need to add a bit of spice to the vacuum by saying, “I just don’t get how it could be possible that a person like you would do / think / say / conclude something like this. I don’t understand what is going on. Could you please explain it to me?” Be in your own private pain about this, no blame, no recrimination. The indicator that the elevator arrives at LEVEL MINUS TWO is the Client starts shooting responses back at you as if you have attacked them. Keep your attention focused and your energetic Sword Of Clarity to hand so you notice the attacks coming. Make the slightest parry move with your wrist so the accusations slide by off the side of your sword like an arrow that has missed its target. Or if the attacks are bigger, use your Red Cloth or your Disk Of Nothing. Otherwise don’t move. Breathe. Stay in contact with the accuser. Do not be hooked. Remain still. Make no stories. Let three silent seconds pass. Breathe again. Then push the elevator button for LEVEL MINUS THREE by expressing your vulnerable wish to learn what is really happening in there. Say, “How is it going for you really? I want to know.”

LEVEL MINUS THREE: You know you have arrived at LEVEL MINUS THREE when the person starts feeling an emotion, some anger, sadness, fear… This is when together you discover the core of the matter. What they may first tell you is a story they have been telling themselves over and over again, perhaps for decades, that ignites their emotions. The story triggers their emotions but they have been keeping both the story and their emotions suppressed. What a knot! The effort to suppress their emotions, and thereby deny who they actually are to the world, is often the pain that causes them to do what you originally wanted to give them feedback about. Think about it... Would your Pressure Rapid Learning style of Feedback have taken you and them this level of realization… this release of the constricting grip on their soul… this refreshed connection between you? I don’t think so. Stay linked with them. Listen to what they feel and think. Use ‘Completion Loops’ until they reveal to you – and themselves – their own inner architecture. Suddenly the restricting grip on their Being loosens through becoming conscious. Voila! Together you will have created a fresh beginning. Stay there together at LEVEL MINUS THREE until the healing of the wound of the separation heals all by itself and the elevator automatically starts rising back up again toward LEVEL ZERO, Presence.

NOTE: It can be that a person with more skill at ‘inner navigating’ will go from LEVEL ZERO (or LEVEL MINUS ONE) directly to LEVEL MINUS THREE. No problemo! Just go with them there and liberate the transformational discoveries. Thank Gaia for small wonders…

At LEVEL MINUS THREE, you both (or, you all...) can discover what was actually the mechanism - often a mere misunderstanding or misinterpretation - that set off the emotional reactions.

The fear of mistrust, the fear of being rejected or ridiculed, these fears could have festered for years creating painful disconnection. But through Vacuum Rapid Learning, staying together at LEVEL MINUS THREE, the wounds dissolve in a few minutes because the experience of reconnection replaces the wounds at LEVEL MINUS THREE.

Stay at LEVEL MINUS THREE together until the Space all by itself floats back up the elevator back to Level 0, which is Presence.

Come back to Presence, small here, small NOW, small 'you' in present-time 4 or 5 Body connection. Do not rush the transition back to LEVEL ZERO. It can take 5 to 10 minutes. In severe cases of being triggered, it can take a few hours of Holdings.

Back in Presence together, STEP 3 in the Vacuum Rapid Learning can happen: Making offers for the design of the next Experiment.

You say something like, “What if you tried this and this next time?” REMEMBER! You are still holding a vacuum! Your offers are best when they surprise and inspire even you. The other person selects one or two empowering new possibilities to try out as their next Experiment. The new results will be unknown to both of you.

Now the Client finally has the freedom of movement (free from the cramping restriction of the emotional reactions and the stories that caused it) to Shift!

The Client can Shift! into a new person. They are now the person who is committed to trying the new Experiments.

The path of Vacuum Rapid Learning returns the Client back to the top of the Vacuum Rapid Learning thoughtmap into a new first step: Go! Trying the next Experiment.

Of course, it may be only be a few moments before the Client - or you - are back in the Vacuum Rapid Learning process because something else comes up. This does not mean that Vacuum Rapid Learning does not work. In fact, it means it DOES work, because you are on the next turn around the Learning Spiral.

Rapid Learning opportunities can happen to any of us at any time. As evolutionary 5 Body experiences - complete with transformational Liquid States - Vacuum Rapid Learning is even more engaging than YouTube and online shopping!