Seven

"Seven, Richie thought. That’s the magic number. There has to be seven of us.  That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”   

Stephen King, It 

Numerology, Wikipedia tells me, is any belief in the divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events. 

Numerologists call ‘7’ as the Seeker (but not in the Harry Potter Quidditch sense) and along with a host of other thinkers and writers for thousands of years they describe 7 in special terms.

Here are seven ways in which 7 shows up:

•    Seven colours of the rainbow
•     Seven days in the week
•     Seven deadly sins
•     Seven wonders of the ancient world
•     Seven continents
•    Seven dwarves saved Snow White
•     Seven stars in the Big Dipper or Great Bear constellation which help us locate the North Star

One famous incidence of seven as a magic number took place in 1956 when George Miller published his paper on the working capacity of short term memory in The Psychological Review Vol 63. He had found that while some individuals could hold 9 items in mind others could do only 5 with the majority of people being somewhere in between. He called his paper “The magical number seven, plus or minus two”.

My preoccupation with the magic number at the moment is that this is the seventh year, with the support of Paul Chippendale of Minessence Group, that I have run “Values at Heart”.  This social media campaign encourages people to explore their values using a tool which is built upon the Minessence Values Framework and is, in my view, simply one of the best profilers in the world. It runs 1-14 Feb asking “what makes your heart sing?”

People who take part receive their top 7 values (out of a possible 128) for free and amongst those seven they may well encounter their own North Star – I know I found mine. It is the combination of my values of Creativity, Discovery/Insight and Transformative Communication which are driving me to pursue a PhD even though it will take quite a while and probably contain more downs than ups.

Conscious connection with our personal priority values can buffer us from stress, increase our resilience and enable us to be present with greater authenticity thereby increasing trust. 

So if you are reading this before the 15^th February 2018 why not explore your own magnificent seven?