How a Triangle Can Change Your Life – TWL Episodes 1-4

The Wandering Lightbulb is SUCH a juicy read every Saturday, that I thought I’d pull each month’s episodes together in one long episode so you can sit down with a cuppa and lose yourself in the topic without having to click around on the website. Enjoy 🙂

Big-Picture Moment: Could a Triangle Be What You’re Looking for?

Welcome to The Wandering Lightbulb. A very warm welcome to the first edition. Boy, have I got some excitement planned for you over the coming weeks. But I’m going to hold off from spilling all the beans right now and let The Wandering Lightbulb tell you its own origin story. To do that, we first have to go back in time …

On page 16 of my book The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need, I recount an event that happened in 1995: “Out of nowhere, I hit on the idea of a triangle being an explanation of everything. Literally everything.” The resultant ‘Triangle Theory’ has been with me ever since and, if you’ve read the book, you might be able to see the impact it could have on your own life.

June 2024’s episodes are all about taking a deeper dive into my Triangle Theory and giving it the scrutiny and space it needs for you to see it for the amazing tool it is.

When I say triangles are everywhere, I mean it. I have found them in group dynamics, home renovation projects, wedding planning, family therapy, and I even used it to help me construct these weekly newsletters. The Triangle framework, although incredibly simple, is also incredibly important, as it can reveal where flaws could be lurking or oversights need to be addressed.

My Original Triangle looks like this:

The Triangle is always point up, like a side view of a pyramid. Always at the top is the concept, and by that I mean the emergence of an idea or thought. Next is the system, which is the bottom-left corner. Finally, we come to the bottom-right corner of the Triangle, which is the energy supply needed to cause it to work. In my book, I use various examples of this:

Let me tell you how a Triangle helped with my wranglings over writing a ‘newsletter’. I knew I had to keep in regular touch with people interested in learning more about what I do, but I cannot abide newsletters. The ones I’d subscribed to over the years had fallen into two distinct camps: the ‘look-at-me-and-all-the-reading-thinking-achieving-I’m-doing’ type and the ‘thinly-disguised-selling-you-something’ type. I’m not sure if there is a benefit to the reader of either of these types of newsletter, and I certainly didn’t want to be accused of peddling more of the same.

But I have to keep in touch, so … I decided to WRITE more about what I do and, as I’m sat here today crashing my way through writing the first episode of The Wandering Lightbulb, a couple of things have occurred to me:

(1) I really like writing – it hasn’t taken me long to get back into my writing voice and feel confident about my choice of content,

(2) A communication tool like The Wandering Lightbulb is a perfect opportunity to delve deeper into topics my book could only touch on. The thing is, the more I explore, the more I learn, and the more I learn, the more I want to pass on that learning to you.

So, I’m writing to you if you definitely don’t want to know the last three books I speed-read, or what somebody on my podcast said or the amazing value of a course I’m plugging. I’m writing to you if you want to just learn … more.

It was at this point a new Triangle began to emerge. The NEWSLETTER TRIANGLE.

I knew I wanted to convey more information to you, but then it struck me that the Self-help Triangle was the one I could base it on. In case you haven’t seen my construction of a Self-help Triangle, here it is:

My argument against the ‘self-help industry’ is that it might give you KNOWLEDGE and ACTION (imagine me saying might in a cynical tone), but it could never know your EMOTION, because it wasn’t physically with you, trying to help you understand your complicated and fascinating inner world.

The self-help industry is always selling you something, not listening to you, not understanding you. Your feelings, your EMOTION, is always the key to your true Self-help.

So, how did this Triangle help me decide the content of The Wandering Lightbulb? If you won’t settle for more of the same old KNOWLEDGE and ACTION but expect me to also supply EMOTION, then it all just clicked and FOOF! There it was: a brand-new Triangle. The Newsletter Triangle:

Ta-dah!

You have been the first to see this brand-new little Triangle. Aww 🙂

But, even though it is a powerful lil’ fella, this Triangle adheres rigidly to the rules: the top is the concept, so every month you will receive a chunk of KNOWLEDGE about that month’s topic.

The bottom-left corner is the system, so you will have ACTION to take and additional ways to use the KNOWLEDGE.

But finally, I know none of this will be read, or used, or assimilated in any way, unless there’s a big, fat WHY in it for you. Your EMOTION has to be engaged or you won’t be bothered about the WHAT or the HOW.

And that’s EXACTLY how it happened for me when I was examining my resistance to writing a ‘newsletter’. I didn’t want to present you with just more KNOWLEDGE, or coerce you into more ACTION. I want you to understand the EMOTION involved. I want you to consider the WHY.

And that’s when your WHY became my WHY. I write because I care that people can learn what took me decades to piece together. Investigating true self-help has been my obsession for over thirty years and runs like a river through the heart of everything I’ve ever done and everything I will ever do. To seek and learn true self-help is my WHY, and to describe my findings to you in all the ways I can is my WHY for The Wandering Lightbulb.

I know this because I feel EMOTION when I think about it, when I write about it, and when I have moments of discovery, like I did with The Newsletter Triangle. My soul is a very happy place. I want yours to be, too.

I invite you to join me in The Wandering Lightbulb. Click here, come on in and make yourself at home 🙂 In the next episode, I attempt to discover if I stole the idea of my Triangle Theory from somewhere else and, if so, where? Yes, next time it’s all about KNOWLEDGE.

Episode 2 – What: Did I Make This All Up?

This week we look at the concept of my Triangle Theory. Did I steal it (albeit subconsciously)? Is there anything else like it out there? Is it even a ‘thing’? This week is all about KNOWLEDGE.

So, has anyone else ever formulated a Triangle Theory like mine? You can imagine trying to discover the answer to that innocent-sounding question would be a mammoth undertaking. How on earth does anyone start to find out something like that?

A few years ago, I accidentally got a Masters in Research, so I dusted off my atrophied skills and headed to Google Scholar. ‘Triangle Theory’ was my first search, although I wasn’t expecting much. However, I got LOADS of Triangles referenced in the results. It appears that Triangles are definitely ‘the thing’ when it comes to explaining a concept.

I found Triangles to describe:

• Employee fraud tactics
• Detection of explosives
• Responsibility-avoidance excuses (yes, really)
• Management styles
• Energy harvesting
• Rent seeking (?!)
• Change process
• Destination marketing
• Dynamics in adult education
• The CBT framework

I’d clearly found another one of those never-ending lists, as everyone seems to have a lovely theory and decided to use a triangle to depict it. I was particularly interested (and thought I’d got close to what I wanted) in the paper The Metaphor of the Triangle in Theories of Human Development.¹ Actually, a fascinating read, but it only described the Triangles themselves and not really WHY a Triangle.

Was what I was asking too … simple?

Next up I searched ‘why a triangle works for explanation diagrams’ and came across a wonderful entry about diagrams in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy² which, after some time (quite a lot of time), led me to another angle about the usefulness of diagrams in explanations,³ but still no satisfactory explanation of (or even acknowledgement of something similar to) my Triangle Theory with its ‘concept, framework, energy’ configuration.

However, I now understood my Triangle as a theoretical representation, so thought I’d try the ‘why do projects have three parts’ as a search term.

Well, funnily enough, that rubbish search term actually got me a bit closer. I arrived at a LinkedIn article⁴ where contributor Joe Dager proposed that creative project management had three elements to it: concept, vision, production. This is very similar to my Triangle Theory, as I could see those three labels mapping very closely on to my own.

BUT this was, again, just another EXAMPLE of a Triangle, not an explanation of WHY the balance of these three elements was in … well, everything.

Any reasonable researcher will tell you it’s the quality of the question that determines the quality of the answer. It was becoming clear I wasn’t very good at coming up with the right question. So how about if I came up with a statement instead? I searched ‘conceptual triangles are in everything’ and came across a paper that made my heart sing: Facts, Concepts and The Shape of Psychology’s Epistemic Triangle.⁵

As I read the paper, this sentence in particular leapt out at me:

“the harmony of the triangle must be restored before the problems can be solved.”

Yes! That was much more what I was looking for: the Triangle as a continuum, not a fixed proposition or completed process. My Triangle Theory is expressing a continuing balance between all the elements. That was why it was so essential to find the Triangle in everything: it made you consider the balance of the elements.

Referring back to the example Triangles of Movies and Projects, try making a movie without a producer, or a story. Or expecting a project to work out when you haven’t got a plan. Every time a Triangle popped into my head had been because I could suddenly see a balance in something, or there was an element missing and I couldn’t figure out where. It reminds me very much of the importance of Belbin’s Team Roles in organisations. I shall definitely pop more about that into a future episode of The Wandering Lightbulb.

As I returned to my ponderings on the role of the Triangle’s importance in highlighting balance/imbalance, it struck me that perhaps I was aiming too low. Maybe I needed to get philosophical … ‘Triangles in philosophy’ was my next search.

And … relax; the philosophers had got there way before me. I discovered this astonishingly similar (albeit simplified for comparison) diagram in Information in the Universal Triangle of Reality for Non-living/Living Structures: From Philosophy to Neuro/Life Sciences.⁶

Note the elements all match: Information = Concept, Matter = System, Energy = Energy! (In this model the Energy and Matter are at different corners of the Triangle, but they match my descriptions nevertheless.)

This paper argues that Plato’s original observations that the universe, and life itself, consisted of ‘energy and matter’ were out of date. The ability of mankind to record scientific and philosophical findings began to form a body of ‘knowledge’, and this knowledge can be referred to and built upon by others. Therefore, knowledge itself becomes a third foundational element, and essential part of being.

I was blown away. All those years back, as a beginning teacher, a simple diagram to describe my findings after an NLP course had caused me to stumble across the formula for reality itself. I was pretty chuffed.

I hope you have enjoyed my rambling journey to discover if anyone else had stumbled across a Triangle Theory like mine. While researching this topic, I noticed that writing this episode had also formed a Triangle (of course!):

Enough of this indulgent research, I hear you say. How can a Triangle help me? Well, that’s the topic of the next The Wandering Lightbulb, as I will show you what ACTION you can take to start your own Triangle. But before then, don’t forget to see how many ways Triangles are already hard at work all around you …

If you’d like The Wandering Lightbulb delivered fresh into your inbox each Saturday, please click here.

References – they really are interesting 🙂

¹ Zittoun, Tania & Gillespie, Alex & Cornish, Flora & Psaltis, Charis. (2007). The Metaphor of the Triangle in Theories of Human Development. Human Development. 50. 208-229. 10.1159/000103361. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/39731534_The_Metaphor_of_the_Triangle_in_Theories_of_Human_Development

² Shin, Sun-Joo, Oliver Lemon, and John Mumma, “Diagrams”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/diagrams/

³ Larkin, J.H. and H.A. Simon, Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand

words. Cognitive Science, 1987. 11: p. 65-99 (no hyperlink as this paper is firmly behind paywalls, grrr).

⁴ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-stages-creative-project-management-joe-dager

⁵ Lourenço, Orlando & Machado, Armando & Silva, Francisco. (2000). Facts, Concepts and Theories: The Shape of Psychology’s Epistemic Triangle. Behavior and Philosophy. Behavior and Philosophy. 1-40.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282851269_Facts_Concepts_and_Theories_The_Shape_of_Psychology’s_Epistemic_Triangle

⁶ Gaisean, F. (2021). Information in the Universal Triangle of Reality for Non-living/Living Structures: From Philosophy to Neuro/Life Sciences. Philosophy Study, August 2021, Vol. 11, No. 8, 607-621 doi: 10.17265/2159-5313/2021.08.003

https://www.davidpublisher.com/Public/uploads/Contribute/613a23ae7fc67.pdf

Episode 3 – How: Could You Triangle?

This episode we’re getting to the bit that no one thinks is possible: how a Triangle can affect your everyday life. (Buckle up and enjoy the sensation of things falling into place). This episode is all about the ACTION.

Many people like the KNOWLEDGE bit of any personal developmental stuff. They like the feeling that they’re filling their Big Brain and enhancing their life in some way. Yep, a book, course, video, event (whatever) will do that for most people. The dopamine hit of ‘achievement’ at the end of completing something is well documented.

But what has the KNOWLEDGE actually done? Especially if you cannot really grasp what it was that you learned. I say learned in italics, as simply reading or participating is not really learning; it’s what is at the top of the Triangle: pure KNOWLEDGE. It just exists, out there, waiting for you to discover it. Should I mention here how many unread books we all seem to have piled about these days? Is it possible to have too much KNOWLEDGE?

Ah-ha! Here comes ACTION! Putting the KNOWLEDGE to some use. Embedding the learning into your brain by taking steps to see if it fits in your life. This episode is all about how you can use a Triangle to take ACTION. Even better, it’s how you can start to construct YOUR Triangle to take YOUR ACTION.

In The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need, I describe how I might advise a younger me, using a Triangle. It’s very cute 🙂

I added the following table, breaking down each element a bit more:

In the book, that was it. I couldn’t do any deep-dive into HOW you could take any of the apparently flippant advice like Discover who you are and what you believe. I also have to add that’s my advice to a younger me. It’s what I would have wanted. I like a path, a plan, a framework.

If’ I’d stumbled across some sort of magical wise woman when I was in my 20s, who told me to just follow this plan NO MATTER WHAT and I would have a happy, fulfilling and successful life, I might have chosen to believe her, but I would definitely have loved the idea that there was a plan.

Much of the hard stuff I have encountered in life has a LOT to do with the last (and often ignored) part of the Triangle: EMOTION. And that’s the topic of next week’s episode. It’s the last part of the Triangle that I discuss for a reason. But let’s get back to ACTION right now, because you can suspend your EMOTION (your why) for a short space of time.

If I say that taking ACTION will help clarify your EMOTION when we come to it next week, you might be curious enough to try. KNOWLEDGE and ACTION can overcome EMOTION, just for a short while, so that’s what today is about: that space in time before EMOTION barges in shutting stuff down, belittling your efforts or causing you to turn away.

The ACTION described in the table above is pretty massive, e.g. ‘Know that life is a journey’, so I’m not suggesting the ACTION you take will be quick or simple to achieve. But it should be relatively clear, because the ACTION will be all about you. (SUSPEND the EMOTION part if it just rose up and objected! Let’s just see what ACTION can do.)

All you have to do for this first part of taking ACTION is to try to understand what your next ACTION needs to be. I know that sounds like a riddle, but I can’t possibly tell you anything about your ACTION from here, because YOU are the only person qualified to decide on any ACTION you might take. Even then, you will really have to understand why you are considering taking it.

Relax though: it is doable. I have written out a series of questions, and all you have to do is answer them. Like I said: maybe not quick or simple, but it is clear what the first ACTION is, and your answers will give you a clearer picture of what your next ACTION might be.

You might never have been asked questions like these before. But they shouldn’t come as a surprise to you if you’ve accessed my book, as they are both built on the themes of the table, above, and styled in a Socratic way. That is: questioning modelled on the way Socrates (Greek philosopher c. 470/469-399 BC) asked them. He would attempt to help people get deeper insights by encouraging them to spot and question their own assumptions.

I have made a printable template available in the Resources Section of my website if you like working from such things – me too 🙂 – Or just grab a piece of paper, leather-bound thoughts journal or digital tool and get answering the questions below. Right now.

For those who like a few rules before we start, here they are:

1. Do not edit yourself. Noop. That’s where EMOTION will derail you. Just record your responses. You’re taking ACTION and your responses are perfect just as they are. If you like, you can record any EMOTION that pops up, but really we’re dealing with all that next week. This week, just answer the questions.
2. Be gentle with yourself and let your hand record the answers that pop into your head. It’s all fine. No response you have is stupid or irrelevant. You can write a stream of consciousness, or just some bullet points. All answers are fine, however you choose to record them.
3. If you really cannot answer a question or are drawing a blank for some reason, record that as something like ‘Nope’, ‘no response’, ‘BLANK’ or something in your own words. These answers are perfect too. If anything triggers distress, just move on to the next question.
4. There is NO RUSH. Take an hour, take a week. Mull. Go with your instincts and notice (in a Socratic way) how you approach this ACTION of question-answering.

So, if you’re sitting comfortably:

What did you absolutely LOVE to do when you were a young child?

Remember a moment of happiness in your life: what was happening?

Describe an environment you like being in. Be as vague or as specific as you like.

If you could do the perfect thing for you all day tomorrow, what would it be?

What do you think life is all about?

Do you think in pictures, sounds, feelings, words … or a combination?

How easy is it to answer these questions?

If your best friend described you, what words would they use?

Describe how you can be different in different situations. For example, describe what you are like when you’re at home with your family, meeting friends, alone in a new place, having to make a complaint about something, etc.

What do you do if something is troubling you?

***

I think that’s quite enough ACTION for now. But what if you can’t answer any of the questions, or some of them are just too hard? Don’t worry, just try to take even the smallest ACTION. We’ll address EMOTION, the tiny elephant in the room, in the next episode.

If you’d like The Wandering Lightbulb delivered fresh into your inbox each Saturday, please click here.