HALLAZGOS ECOCARDIOGRÁFICOS

Imagine…. it’s easy if you try (as John Lennon sang to us)

Imagine. Sometimes a single moment of instinct between two people, if pursued, can change the course of the universe forever. A Big Bang moment. Something is instinctively created that impacts everyone and life is never the same again. I would like to dedicate the chapter to one such moment in 1962.

I had the enormous privilege of meeting the legend who is widely considered to be one of the greatest record producers of all time. His own Big Bang moment came from a most unlikely source. On 13 February 1962 he met Brian Epstein, manager of a group of four young primal boys from Liverpool not really known in the music industry. Epstein had already been rejected by several record companies and was nearing the point of desperation.

Yes, I am talking about Sir George Martin and his genius creation of the Beatles. A music maestro who blended the primal, rock instincts of the band. To me, he is the master blender of all ingredients that combine instinct, self belief and focus. I couldn’t believe my luck when I was seated at his lovely home in an Oxfordshire village, sharing a couch with this timeless legend, a cushion apart. An unprecedented moment of excitement had just washed over me a minute before, in his guest toilet, seeing all his world famous record labels on display.

I opened with ‘You to me are an epitome of instinct, aren’t you, Sir George?’

‘I guess you could say that. In 1962 an instinctive moment became momentous. I was on the point of turning these four boys down because I didn’t think they were very good. [I laughed] Now, you laugh, Rhea, but it’s true. And their manager, Brian Epstein, had got an interview with me through the EMI music publishers. I was working for EMI running the Parlophone label and everything on that label was stuff that I produced. So, I was looking for a band of this sort because I was very envious of one of my colleagues who ran Columbia, which was Norrie Paramor, and he had Cliff Richard. And it seemed to me that Cliff could record anything, from the Bible to God Save The Queen and he would still be a hit. I’d been working on comedy records for a long time because I had to find a special niche for my little label. So, I worked with Flanders and Swann and the Beyond The Fringe crowd, which was Peter Cooke, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, people like Rolf Harris, Charlie Drake, Bernard

Cribbens, Peter Sellers of course, and Spike Milligan, all these kind of people.

To shape their records I had to be very creative. I had to think of the idea, what we were going to do, and each record that I made was jolly hard work. I couldn’t then say, “Oh, we’ll make another one in a month’s time,”

and it would come out. It didn’t work out like that, you had to start from scratch each time. Whereas with Cliff Richard, as I say, Norrie would select a song for him, take him into the studio, bing bang with the group The Shadows, and he’d have a hit. So, I wanted something like that.

Well, when Brian Epstein played the tape to me first of all, the demo tape, which included some of the stuff they’d done for a test recording at Decca, I said “Look, if I have to judge this act on what I’m hearing, the answer’s no.”

He looked very crestfallen so I thought I’d give him a lifeline. I said, “But if you bring them down from Liverpool I will give them an hour in the studio to find out what they can do.” He said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,”

and went away.

I remember Sir George Martin saying to me, ‘Instinct matters because that’s all I went with when I heard The Beatles play for me that first time.

Musically, I wasn’t sure – that’s what my technical, rational brain told me – but they were interesting and I liked them as people. I acted on my instinct and signed them to the label.’

That was a little taster on instinct. We will meet up again with Sir George in the chapter on Creativity.

Meanwhile, bringing it back to every day moments of instinct, have you ever called a friend and they said they were just thinking about you? Or walked into a room and just sensed something unprecedented was about to happen? Or met someone and felt you have known them forever?

If so, you already know that your instinct is powerful but this chapter explores how you can act upon it more consciously. Although we refer to it by words and phrases such as ‘gut feeling’, ‘my heart is telling me’, ‘it doesn’t ring true for me’, ‘I saw the whole thing in a flash...’ in fact, we make decisions intuitively all the time.

Here is an example. I often use first impressions as an energiser in our leadership workshops. On the first day of a programme, twenty or so participants from different cultures and markets, who have never met before, walk in and meet and greet each other. The rule is they have to jot down first impressions about each other and try to read each other’s

personalities based on instant perceptions. Questions are not allowed.

To my surprise every time, these random assessments often turn out to be very accurate. It is almost as though people can read each other without a code, but my point in this book is that there is a code. It is called instinct.

I use instincts all the time. In my own personal experience, nine out of ten major instinctive choices I have made, however avant-garde for some, have been right, and the tenth one, even if wrong, has gone a long way in teaching me about life.

Not only that. I believe instinct is not just an exclusive gift some are born with. It is a skill that can be developed and strengthened by everyone.

In this chapter, we will see how, like a metaphorical muscle, the more you exercise it, the more it can develop. Intuition, another term for instinct, is increasingly recognised as a natural mental faculty, a crucial element in the creative process, a means of discovery, problem-solving and decision-making.