Metaphor - CAMELS

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Camels Metaphor
In addition to being a corporate trainer, Ive spent many years doing one to one
coaching and personal development work. One of the things that I often
encounter when Im working with someone, is a situation where the problem
that the person presents just does not make any sense at all.
In a similar way in business you've may have been in situations where no
matter how you tried to figure something out logically, it was just not going to
work out that way, and you could analyze it and you could intellectualize it and
you could come up with exactly what you thought was the correct answer yet
for some reason the answer just wasn't amenable to logic.
There probably will be more times maybe today or in the future where you may
experience that exact same phenomenon; in fact it's a phenomenon that's not
unlike a situation as rumour has it, that occurred a long long time ago, in
another part of the world.
There was a guy, in fact an older gentlemen and one of the things that was
going on with him was that he was getting ready to pass over. he was getting
older, and he had 3 sons and he was getting ready to pass on in his life and
one of the things that was traditional at that point in that culture was that . . .
number 1 the father or who at that time was running the family needed to get
very very clear with his will before he was ready to pass on. . . .
And I subscribe to that same idea, I mean I think it's pretty important that
you're really, really, clear about your will before you move on. It seems too it's
an important thing to do.

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Anyway, to the extent that he was getting very very clear with exactly what his
will was, he realized that in doing so that it would have an affect on other
people. And in fact, if he wasn't really clear on his will it would have a rather
detrimental affect on other people . . .
So what he did at that point, since he was about ready to pass on, was he
looked at all of his valued belongings, and all of his valued belongings,
amounted to 17 Camels.
WRITE ON FLIP CHART
He had 17 camels, and what he wanted to do was he wanted to pass on his
belongings to his offspring. And of course he had 3 sons, as I mentioned, he
had the oldest, the middle, and the youngest. So just before his time of
passing on when he did become very clear on his will, what he said in his will
was that:
the older son should receive l/2 of the herd,
the middle son should receive 1/3 of the herd,
and the youngest son should receive 1/9 of the herd.
and then he died. Now the sons were left with a rather interesting dilema,
certainly not one that was going to be appealed to by mere logic. Those of
you that are quickly now making computations in your mind determining what
the answer is to this, have probably begun to realize that unless the sons were
interested in starting a butcher shop they were going to have a little bit of a
challenge on their hands. They realized this too and they very much wanted to
carry on the spirit that their father had about continuing to have the herd live.

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And they really didn't know what to do and they would wait for passers by and
they would ask people who they thought would know the answer.
And they would say to them, well this is the situation what should we do?
And there were maths scholars that would look at it and say it's impossible.
And then there were other people, average people who would look at it and
just say I'm really glad that he wasn't my father. And then there were other
people who as soon as they realized that the situation was not one that was
logical, stayed away from it as much as they could, and yet the sons were
stuck what were they going to do? How were they going to handle this?
People would walk by and people would ride by and they just didn't know . . .
There are situations like that in life where you just don't know consciously . . .
how to solve the problem because living isn't necessarily about your
conscious mind, . . . it's also about all the inner workings of your unconscious
mind . . .
So, talking about being conscious of what we want, now might be a good time
to clarify what each of you want to get out of being here together today.
So I would like you to get into pairs and between the two of you make a list of
your expectations and personal outcomes for the day, Then well collate them
all on a flipchart.

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CONCLUSION
So, back to the problem of the three sons and the 17 camels!
What to do?
Well, one day a camel herder passed through the village and heard of the
problem of the three sons. He listened to their story, nodded sagely and
smiled. He said:
Let me lend you one of my camels. Now you have 18 camels. From this
eighteen camels,
the older son should receive l/2 of the herd which is 9 camels, so the
older son takes his nine
the middle son should receive 1/3 of the herd, so he takes six camels
and the youngest son should receive 1/9 of the herd and he takes two
camels
This leaves one camel left, which the visitng camel herder returns to his own
herd, once again smiles, and walks away, leaving the three sons with the
problem their father left them solved and everybody happy.
So, next time you have a tricky problem to solve that just tries to define logic,
think od the three ons and the camel herder and instead of using your
conscious mind to figure out the problem with logic, allow your unconscious
mind to think out of the box and solve the problem symbolically with intuition
and abtract creativity!