My Half Of...

Published

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:58:00 +0000

Left to right: Paul, Gail (holding a copy of our compilation book - Coconuts & Pearls), John, Marie, myself in the visor, Greer and Jim

When I first came to Hawaii, I wondered where the smart people were. Found some of 'em. This is a pic of me with the the hardcore movers and shakers of my writer's group who meet at Tutu's House in Waimea-Kamuela. Luckily, where this group meets is located a short walk from my home these days.

It's really fun to read what they're writing in installments as they do it, because most of them are fiction writers. It's really lucky that they put up with listening to me write about non-fiction subjects that are quite a bit more boring to wrestle with - but they are really a tolerant and observant bunch. People who join this writer's group learn about what constitutes constructive observations - because people can ask for any sort of feedback they want to get from the group as they read their writing out loud. It's an awesome bunch of smart people to be able to know.

One of the projects that has drawn the group together was spear-headed by Paul, who taught us how to self-publish books. Of course, at Paul's helpful presentation aimed at individual writers making their book happen, I piped up, "Why doesn't the whole writer's group do their own compilation?" This turned out to be an idea that everyone else pounced on immediately; I didn't even have to lift a finger for my own writing to be included along with the writing of 20+ members of the group too. "Coconuts and Pearls" is a compilation of poets (Gail's poems beg to be sung as a sort of female Bob Dylan!) excerpts from novels in progress, (Jim's novel is about his mom's experiences in early Hawaiian culture,) short stories, (Greer writes a brand of "magical fiction" that will fascinate your old "Twilight Zone" fantasy bone) as well as my article titled "Creative Hit List."

Copies of the book are available at Tutu's House - and the proceeds are donated to Tutu's House to help with their wonderful contribution to the community. The writer's group wanted to benefit Tutu's House to help them to continue providing free workshops, meetings and events for the Waimea-Kamuela community.

Cross-Cultural Relationships

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:30:00 +0000

It's quite a common assumption that just because you both speak the same language, that there are not serious cultural differences. I spent ten years with guy from a very British family who had come to the USA to work as librarians. Our connection came partly from his need for quite a bit more demonstrative affection than was part of his former UK culture. But when we would visit his parents, (and it took awhile for this feature to dawn on me,) suddenly we weren't touching at all!

Even if you share values, there are many assumptions about how values are communicated that are quite different among those who come from different cultures or subcultures. For instance, rubbing up against the UK culture revealed to me that my assumption about politeness was quite different. For me, mannerliness is something you do for others to show you would like to know their preferences. Once those personal preferences specifically are revealed in context, you can dispense with the show of politeness and enjoy a greater degree of intimacy because you have forged an understanding based on tailor-made considerations. This strategy works pretty well among the various American subcultures and among most other cultures I have encountered, but not for the British.

My partner's mom wanted the politeness itself. This made me feel as if she was keeping me away at arm's length. Although I understood what was going on was a cultural difference and talked to her about it, I never did feel comfortable with her or trust her in quite an animal sense.

Strangely enough, eventually the time came when this mother-in-law did provide me with a meaningful token of respect. It only came after I had separated from the relationship a decade later. She made a point to thank me for my part in mediating with her son's ex-wife while raising her grandson, allowing the kid to have so much time with his dad.

This respect also turned out to be a bonding force that helped deal with cleaning up a mess that was left when their son committed suicide six years after we had dissolved our relationship. Even though I wasn't intimately involved with their son at that point, it was still up to me to be the hostess for everyone who showed up from out of town because we knew each other. It was a relief to finally realize that there was a firm connection that went beyond politeness that was functional and in place at such an intense time for everyone. Sort of sad that it took a death to reveal it for me, but it did provide me with some degree of closure.

Cultural differences are powerful - even though slight. It seems when you first meet someone, you see similarities. As you know them, the more differences emerge. If you are lucky enough to have twenty year relationships or more, you'll actually switch roles to deal with their evolving challenges of character!

Enjoy Learning

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 18:18:00 +0000

When I was a kid, I learned by imitation; gaining rapport with my teachers was irresistible. When I was a teen, I learned by accident, in spite of myself. I was lucky to have teachers who accepted that I was learning while half asleep. Once I got to college, I began to learn by absorption - so I started to choose my teachers carefully because I realized I had no idea what I was absorbing. After college, I thought knew how to spot a fantastic teacher. I became fascinated with what makes a teacher worth the topic they're teaching.

For this community musical "Carnival" in 1989, I learned how to walk on stilts, how to juggle clubs, how to hang and build sets, install stage lighting and manage drama queens. There I am on the ladder in the middle.

Sometimes I would just learn whatever a fantastic teacher had to teach. Fantastic teachers seemed to bring out talents their students never knew they possessed. I had to admit that often what attracted me to being taught was trivial, irrelevant or downright foolish. It was only after my ignorance had subsided that I could say there was "a method to madness" for wanting to learn that particular thing. My tolerance extended for learning about something before making up my mind about its value. While learning, I gained and defined the value and use of what I'd gotten on the fly.

Absorption is still my favorite style of learning, because I realize that many people who attempt to teach come up with an explanation that doesn't really match what they actually do. It's the doing of something that I'm often interested in more than the explanation. People teach how they learned - if they take what they learned further, they often don't have ways to explain what they're really doing, so they use their former teacher's words. A learner sometimes needs to ignore that presentation, and get to the source in a more direct way.

What I mean by "absorption" is to merely open up as wide as possible to the skill that is being demonstrated. With absorbing, time of arrival or sequence does not matter. Pretend as if you can already do the skill, even though you are vastly inexperienced. Imitate everything you perceive - body language, attitude and facial expression. Cast your attention wide to take in as much as possible at once, and see if it's possible to juggle all these unknown factors. "Fake it 'til you make it." Count on "beginner's luck" to fill in the blank spots. You have nothing to lose, because you have nothing invested.

Since college, have always been able to learn from books. Surprisingly to me, this is rare. People seem to get a book to "have" the contents or refer to it, seldom do they get a book to really learn it. I outline a book if I think it's something I want to learn. Learning using a book by outlining it can be done with a library book; it's cheaper than buying the book - and I have the contents that I want to use or remember after I outlined it.

The learning skill that has been the most useful for me as a learner has been to observe. Observation pays off when choosing a teacher; barefaced self observation allows faster learning. Each discipline, skill, world of knowledge or study has it's own sense, body language and lexicon, which it pays off to learn - but not at first. I find that I want to directly experience a subject first, before I'm trained into looking at it from the traditional point of view of how most people learn it. After that direct experience as a complete beginner, I'll understand what the classic solutions have answered. Sometimes confronting a subject directly will allow me to innovate beyond the classic learning procedures. Sometimes the way I give back to teachers is by asking them original questions that they haven't yet thought of asking themselves. The way to come up with these original questions is to note what puzzles you or fascinates as you first encounter the skill or subject, before you know what others think is "important" about it.

How do you learn best? What do you enjoy about learning?

Stories Drive Invention

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:09:00 +0000

Since the art of telling stories is so essential for the articulation of almost anything that is communicated, I thought I'd bring forward the continued inspiration for new creative inventions that I get from the field of screenwriting. What fascinates me about screenwriting is how it is the art of selecting what is relevant to a story that "drives" the plot line forward - and of course, what is left out as extraneous. For this reason, I'm always curious to look at movies that are inspired by much longer and more detailed books to bring forward this selection process, scene by scene.

One point that's not obviously revealed by merely watching movies is how movie viewers have been educated over the years to figure out what is happening in a story. Viewers are shown what has been determined by producers to be relevant to the story in the scene action of the actors, set and events. Of course this also includes indications of time frames, foreshadowing of later events, suspense, drama, character building, etc. Movie watchers are, to a great extent, completely unaware of how much work they are doing to construct the plot, events and characters as a story unfolds - and good storytelling never disturbs the illusion of how a viewer must continue to be tracking these elements to make sense of the illusion that is being created as an experience.

But how to put an ability to observe and analyze into becoming a new invention? Comparing to reveal differences is my favorite means. Then the differences can be used as a model or form, plugging in the different content from an unrelated area that then becomes related.

Recipes are an obvious example of this. You can take the form of a casserole, for instance - which is some sort of grain or starch in a container that is baked, containing some sort of vegetable or meat and a type of topping. Now you can take a genre of food, such as Lasagna which is a baked dish - and switch the contents to another country's food style - and you can make a Mexican food casserole instead of an Italian one and have an original combination that wasn't obviously apparent.

To apply this idea to music and screenwriting, there's a fascinating parallel that imagines a piece of music as if it were a story. This suggested to me how musicians could be playing roles in carrying out what this story will become using their ability to improvise. If you'd like to see the result of this invention that was inspired by this parallel thinking of marrying the genre of screenwriting to musical performance, check out the unique advantages of playing with the arrangement and instrumentation of a musical piece as if it were a story.

http://www.franis.org/out4improv/

Any invention takes a bit of investment to wrap your mind around, and this one is no different. It's unpredictable what happens when you take one genre and use it to inspire unique characteristics in another arena. It often creates a synergy type combination, that is often useful for more functions than could be originally expected. Using and playing with a unique combination of genres will make these characteristics apparent. Projects need to be "born" and brought to maturity by figuring out what they are good for. Any baby is lots of trouble and not really good for much of anything until it grows up into a person who can do stuff - ideas are similar.

In this case, what started out as a convenient way to combine the differing abilities and involvement level of a large group of performers turned out to have other uses. As I used this newly invented system to describe existing characteristics of musical styles that already existed to see if it was relevant to them, I realized it could be used as a way to invent a completely new musical style that could be infinitely varied. It can also be used for one person to compose arrangements of a performance piece...as a way for a music teacher to have all of their students to improvise together, as a way to discuss musical arrangement in general...how to give form to generalized "jamming" among musicians who do not know each others songs. Possibly it could be crafted into a composer's game with some programming - but I would think that the experience of making music together with other people would be it's most interesting and fun application. Of course, that means you would need a "troupe" of people who played music on instruments or performed and were interested in playing together with each other, which may be a unique situation to find in this day of virtual reality.

For instance, a business application of such descriptive function in common with the A-Game I invented is apparent in the "music genome" of Pandora.com. Musicians working with Pandora listen to music and describe the characteristics of common factors such as instrumentation, style, use of harmony and rhythm and these descriptions are correlated to other "similar" songs. These commonalities are now organized into a database, so now any user of the site can specify a type of music they like and a whole radio station is generated from these descriptions, containing songs that the user would not normally become exposed to knowing about.

I'd love to know how you think the field of screenwriting could be applied to your favorite project.

Small Talk Originality

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:21:00 +0000

I've worked for a long time to make small talk meaningful. It's my favorite application of thinking skills. From my experience, even standing in line in a supermarket talking to others can be a fascinating experience, if someone can figure out what people have to offer each other in the time they have together to spend now.

What I look for in others to indicate what this "magic topic" might be is their spark of interest, beyond the niceties of over-used one-liners. It might be inside an example they give, a little story they have to tell involving people with whom they spend their time who are important to them. It can be inside of their hobby, secret wish or dream.

Now, how do I do this in such a short time? Turns out it pays off to examine the assumptions of social cliche` and come up with other avenues that yield high-interest answers. You can follow the same routine as others, but ask similar essential questions that are more to the point than the stock questions. I came up with these alternate questions by wondering, "Why is this common social question really being asked?"

For instance, "Where did you grow up?" This is a question with the motive to find out what environment made the person who they are. So I'd avoid asking that question in a way that will illicit the recitation of a town or neighborhood location. Instead, I might ask about the environment that formed that person's experience, such as, "Can you describe environments that you most enjoyed playing in as a kid? What did you like about those places?" Or perhaps, this question of "Where did you grow up?" might being asked to find out what subculture influenced your childhood. So why not ask that as a direct question? "What sort of subculture shaped your early experience?"

Obviously, this is a technique that can offer high yield possibilities for any set of mundane conversations that would be under the heading of "small talk."

Finding a Mentor

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Why would I consider apprenticeship? That began with a college experience.

I had previously had the experience of adopting a mentor with a professor named Dung Fong Lee at U.S. International Univ. in Poway. I was in the habit of "checking out" my teachers before taking a class. After sitting at the back of this teacher's office all afternoon, I observed to him how I now understood the confusing comments I had gotten about his teaching style from his previous and current students. He seemed to radically change his persona to suit the needs of each student, (joke & storyteller, factual info dumper, sparklingly polite conversationalist, bumbler, impolite psychologist, political leader, confessor) without being concerned with presenting a consistent identity. His reply was that he believed this ability to be the mark of an excellent, flexible teacher - and that I probably also had this ability because I had noticed it in him. This began a very interesting relationship where he allowed me to hang out with his family and included me, (and my boyfriend at the time) in his social life. He also taught me Chinese at a breakneck pace for seven weeks. (Since he decided I already knew the content of a introductory class on the I Ching that he offered; he proposed I learn something else.) Later he offered me an opportunity to travel to Taiwan where he would continue my Chinese lessons and set me up teaching English. But I wasn't able to accept at that time, as I would lose the remainder of a four year college scholarship. (One of my life's regrets!)

I believed Lee and I crossed over into a personal relationship partly because he was from another culture and how the USIU college had been intentionally structured to encourage such behavior. Probably my being orphaned as a teen also had something to do with it. So that is how I found out how the apprenticeship experience could go far beyond the content of what was being taught. The few situations where I adopted a position of apprenticeship happened in the course of my various work projects, but later I got the nerve to propose it barefaced... (By asking, "would it be OK to ask you a few more questions again later?") Of course, the questions and answers became more elaborate as they had the inclination and time to teach me and as I showed more interest.

The next mentor I adopted I found by landing a job doing illustrations for a sales booklet of a solar design sales course for a sales manager, Chuck Lewis. This was a presentation meant to be displayed during a home sales call by a troupe of salespeople to introduce hot water solar panels to customers. He was also writing a book of aphorisms about life lessons, and needed a cover illustration. We spent quite a bit of time together because he wanted to explain the book to me so I'd understand how to make the cover...and we enjoyed talking with each other. Then he began to write another book, (eventually titled "You're Gonna Love It!") about sales, so he wanted to talk to me about that too, to help him write the book because he said I was his "perfect customer" that he wanted the to be written for. The book grew from our personal conversations about how to teach sales to people who formerly had assumed that selling and marketing was vulgar and beneath their ethics about how people should be treated. He also taught me quite a bit about telling jokes and how to invent them, which seemed to be a supporting subset skill of salesmanship.

Another person I routinely called where he worked and jokingly asked for the "Terry Delsing School of Comedy." (Which of course, was not where he was really working. But his boss put up with it.) Terry would tell me a joke. I would figure out why it was funny, change around the particulars and tell him the joke I'd just invented. It only took less than five minutes a call. We did that ongoing maybe once a week for a couple of years until I spaced out calling him for too long.

My next mentor, Ray Belange of Apache Signs, came from attempting to paint and fabricate signs as a business. The way I found and adopted Ray as a mentor is the most easily translated to any genre.

I had developed this strategy, when I wanted to learn to do something practical, to call up people cold out of the phone book who were in the business of doing what I needed to learn and asking them a few questions about it. The first few people I asked about what was the proper terminology for the field; the next few I asked how to phrase useful questions I could ask other people and so on... My reasoning that people were willing to answer a few questions was sound, because they were busy at work, and I was asking for free advice. So I just kept calling different people until I had the whole picture, (short of actually doing it.) As I got involved in the process of doing it and hit a snag, I'd call again on those people who seemed willing to talk with the the first time around because some time had passed. They seemed interested in my progress too.

Ray was someone who, as I explained my thinking about what I was trying to do, recognized that we thought alike in an unusual, original way. Turns out, he had expanded on the same idea I had independently originated too. So he invited me to his shop and not only showed me how he'd designed his way past the questions I had, but where to find suitable materials, how he had expanded and innovated how to use the materials, where to find new customers, as well as the joys of riding on motorcycles in foreign countries and living in RVs and warehouses as a lifestyle. (He had raised five kids as a single parent that way!)

Since then, I've hit on the idea of contacting admirable authors and volunteering to help them in whatever way I could be useful. In return I've gotten many free perks in the form of trades of me writing reviews for their book which they sent me free...to helping them using my writing abilities in exchange for their lessons in an ongoing way. One time a mentor I had contacted like this put me in the hot seat of representing them as a tele-workshop host, despite not being trained formally by them. This experience taught me that I had an unusual proclivity for talking coherently, being a high idea producer when everyone else had run out of idea, all while tending the engineering side of an online workshop, (being a natural multi-tasker) which was a talent that I never knew I had, (but Barbara Sher had recognized the ability in me.)

So - mentoring needs a dream - a focus that's practical involving what you are trying to learn to do. Then you ask for help - a little at a time. You find examples of skills you admire in people who enjoy offering the benefits of their experience. You don't admire them, but ask them specific questions about what you'd like to do, encouraging them to be the authority and to think about how they do naturally what you cannot do. If they have other students, you offer the benefits of what you're learning to others who aren't as far along as you are. As you show interest by involving yourself in what they love to teach - you're on your way to learning something and having an interesting relationship with them. Sometimes you're in the position of giving them an idea of how and what to teach others that they couldn't imagine before they met you...

Where's the Music?

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 07:56:00 +0000

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(The last stanza of Keats's "To Autumn." when he was dying of TB.)

When I read a poem, I wonder..."where is the music to this?" For me, unless a poem has a tune and is sung, it's not complete. When I hear poets read their poems, or rappers rap their lines, I think, "that person really wants to express themselves and they haven't learned to sing yet."

I love it when poetry is lyrical or when poetry is an expression of meaning that has additional images or experiences in context with it. But by itself, usually poetry just doesn't do much for me. Part of the reason I don't really get into poetry is probably because there's no music attached, or I'm not connecting with the emotional content that's being expressed.

Words and grammar structure meaning - and poetry is where words become free of their structure. Poetry is how you can rub words together and they can become something original that hasn't been meant before. But unless you're skillful, the reader won't know what you're really saying and will read things into what you wrote that you didn't mean. Understanding is constructed by the person who is experiencing it. Their assumptions and perceptions trump your intent as an artist.

Sometimes poetic words will be so delicious on the page that I can actually imagine them complete without a tune attached. But usually that is when I can imagine images that go with the words instead of a tune, as I can do with this stanza from Keats. The poetry that goes beyond this "lack"of no music will evokes its own images that completely affect me. If a poem doesn't "do it for me," then usually it just doesn't contain enough of what it's hinting at. It's not "juicy enough." Hints are OK, I guess, for those people who like them, but I'm after experiences, or the hints of experiences that I have yet to embody.

Oddly enough, this is also the reason I listen to mostly instrumental music. It's also the reason I carefully select the films and video content to which I expose myself. If I listen to music with lyrics without selecting the content of it, (the radio, for instance) I am often so disappointed with how much drivel is out there. It's that I'm so affected by any art that I must be deliberate. When there is a song with words worth listening to, I never get tired of hearing it and may even take the time to learn to play and sing it. But frankly, most of what my culture imagines is valuable to say in a song or violent movies are ...not what I want to program into my psyche by repeating it. We humans seem to be preoccupied with the sounds of our own self-indulgences - we're verbal and like to blab - even when we don't have anything to say.

Being an artist, how can you tell if what you have to say is going to be considered notable by others unless you say it? Any expression seems to find it's audience. It's always interesting how "great" works of art continue to grow in meaning as the culture changes. People continue to find new meanings in "timeless" artistic vision. What is most personal becomes the most universal, as it is artfully expressed.

Do you think about poetry and how it works with music?

Unexplained

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:09:00 +0000

Partly the reason I love October, is that in most places, fall makes dramatic changes. It makes me feel like getting busy. This is probably a squirrel-like urge to sock away food for the winter. I still enjoy fall in Hawaii, even though there isn't much evidence of change. It's making me think about getting ready to paint holiday windows in the San Francisco Bay area again.

Of course, as as artist, I find that it's also fun to mess up people's windows during this time of year - as I did here for a "Fright Shop" in Hawaii. It's so much fun for me to just draw big, improvising along as I see what happens in front of me.

I enjoy the images and themes of Halloween; the magic and the unexplained happenings. I love the idea that it is, for one night, socially acceptable to assume and act out as another persona - even if it is just for a costume party or an evening of dancing.

But strangely enough, I really cannot watch horror films. I'm just too impressionable. Horrifying images make it into my dreams and haunt me in ways that aren't at all fun or even have a purpose. Movies are intentionally designed to get an emotional reaction from movie goers; in a horror film this is overkill.

This doesn't make much sense to me, because I do enjoy taking chances and being adventurous. It seems like a strange purpose to look for horror on purpose, when so much real challenge is available in the world.

But extremes are entertaining to some people.

If you enjoy horror, what is it about the experience that you enjoy?

Relationship Stages

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 09:02:00 +0000

An interesting view, that relationships have stages. Regarding the few intimate relationships I've had, would say the stages are:

1. Who is this person? What might we do together as a team?
2. Wow, this is wonderful. I'll do anything for her/him.
3. Wait a minute. Is what I'm doing to demonstrate love working how it's intended? Maybe this needs a bit of investigation and adjustment so the demonstrations I contribute to create love in the relationship goes where there are intended. In return, what I allow them to do for me also constructively floats my boat.
4. Trades, offerings and tacit agreements evolve and are enjoyed.
5. A way to update these agreements becomes necessary. Whether agreements are made tacitly, verbally, as trades or as "standing" agreements - is everyone on the same page about what the agreement is? Who does what for whom and who gets to wait for their desires/needs to be met, and how long do they wait? Does the "waitee" ever get what it is they want/need? Can agreements-customs be changed or updated as various member's needs change? For instance, if one of the members of the relationship gets injured and needs care to heal from the other(s), can the relationship be flexible enough to provide that care and later re-establish independence after healing without breaking apart?
6. Over time, everyone's challenges, shortcomings, strengths and/or style or preferences become familiar. Can each member accept the person's intent to do their best in bettering their character flaws, or accept these flaws? How to support and/or encourage improvement of personal character development and learning? How does each member "help" one another? Do the agreements that have evolved merely adjust and compensate for shortcomings? Or is there a recognition of a process that improvement is also evolving? Can personal change be accommodated? The answers to these questions makes or breaks the relationship.
7. If a "break" is happening, character flaws are assigned the role of punishment. It would be so nicer for ME if the person improved - they must not love me enough to improve themselves and make it easier on both of us. Mountain out of molehill sensitivity develops, noting the most minuscule expression of these character flaws in spite of ongoing improvement. The relationship must end; the pressure of having someone so invested in your shortcomings or successes is too pressurized.
7. a. From my own experience, the way out of this is to re-prioritize the constant recognition of the objectionable behavior(s.) Make a specific time to express objections all at once, (without defense is best) instead of constantly having uncontrolled emotional reactions come up all the time. Meanwhile, constructively rebuild the relationship based on enjoyable, bonded experiences so the enjoyment of being together is renewed.
7. b. Of course, if you work this out, you can start new projects together. If you don't navigate this stage very well, the two of you part ways, with various clean-up work ahead. Or you get so damaged that making further agreements are impaired, but you keep going anyway.
8. I've heard after twenty years together, the partners change places in what their shortcomings have become. The shortcomings and complaints each used to have about the other swings in the opposite direction...sort of hilarious!
9. But by now, there's been some track record of getting past difficult times and hopefully, communication skills have increased well enough to continue indefinitely. Unless significant lifestyle changes intervene that make a liaison no longer practical or preferable for various reasons...

Gifts Get In

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 07:38:00 +0000

Really fun to do a detailed window like this. Inspired from various coloring books, but the hatted sleeping moon is all mine. You can see the real thing at the San Rafael IHOP where 3rd and 4th St. come together at the start of what we call the "Miracle Mile."

Values

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 08:11:00 +0000

The part that is tricky for me is how to reveal my own underlying values. In myself, the deepest values often are taken for granted and are completely obscured.
It is only in an extraordinary situation when I am paying attention that I can sometimes catch that a "good question" has been asked that could become quite valuable to me. Usually this value needs some thought to reveal it's meaning. I need to "put it together."
Probably because of the practice of TV watching, even when a valuable question arises that could offer significant insight, the non-sequitur change of topic glosses it over and so, no thinking or experimenting is done about it and the potential value disappears.
I am wondering if a better word would be motives. People rarely think about values. They speculate all the time about the motives of others.
Since I am human and part of a culture, usually it is easy to find others who share my deeper values. Having people who share your values make it largely unnecessary to know what these important assumptions are.
In fact, if you attempt to examine values as a thinking discipline around other people, these people regard it as a useless exercise in intellectual or philosophical pastimes. If you begin to systematically articulate these assumptions about values, people tend to imagine that you are being trite or insulting their intelligence by articulating the obvious.
At least, these are the reactions I've caused in polite company when I bring up values in a specific rather than general way. I've even caused these reactions at the de Bono website, when answering a person who didn't have English as their first language. Someone who was a native English speaker imagined I was "talking down" to the person who had asked for the explanation, complete with it's related assumptions about putting myself in a superior position with my answers-information. Men tend to deliver information; women listen...when the deliverer/listener genders are reversed, some imagine there are control issues.
As you continue to ask the question about values, (and context) something interesting emerges when the value is related to a mismatch where the values were not shared. It's only in a mismatch that the importance of sharing values is revealed; otherwise there is not enough of a reason to bother with values.
The other situation where values are revealed for me has happened in a group dialogue where people are discussing a topic about a human situation. A significant insight about an assumption for me came from listening to a conversation about the proselytizing of family members. I had never realized that I essentially believed relationships should be reciprocal, not competitive.
Another way is reading about the study of it. Cultural or gender mismatches in the expression of values are in a series of books by the linguistics professor Deborah Tannen.
So far, although I'm practicing the "value shoes" of Edward de Bono and asking myself questions from the model - this model doesn't help me with revealing values I did not know I had. Whereas, these other situations have done so for me.
Maybe, back to the drawing board? Or have I not understood the process clearly enough?
I guess what I'm imagining is that there must be assumptions I hold that I'm not aware of having. Can imagine that I know it all!

Hunch or Prejudice?

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:49:00 +0000

What is the difference between an intuitive hunch and a prejudice? This is one of my virtual questions that I enjoy asking.

It's curious to me how each and every perceptual attitude that someone can adopt seems to have alternate ways of describing it. These descriptions, definitions and interpretations seem to color how the subject and person is defined to express another bias or prejudice. Some can get quite...colorful, with pointed accusations.

For instance, students often stop themselves from asking a question of a teacher out of respect for that teacher. But from the teacher's point of view,, "why don't my students ask ANY question?" In my culture, you can have rapport or you can have respect, but not both.

Another instance, it's obvious from my posting here that I enjoy to take the time to offer the benefit of my observations to other people. I've taken the time to learn to write to do this, which has been an effort for me because my talking style isn't easily translated into the forms of writing. But now others are coming to recognize my investment of being able to write. Whenever there is recognition of "talent" or ability, people inevitably wonder why you do such a thing. They assign a motive to your actions - sometimes these motives are not what you would answer if they had asked you. In some cases, they react as if the person who has invested value in an opinion must be a proselytizer or a salesperson.

But sometimes, people complaint that I am being "too" helpful. They seem to not appreciate my motives or my open-mindedness because I don't communicate that very well. If I come up with creative thinking ideas on their behalf without warning them or getting their permission to do so, they react strangely. They're slightly intimidated. They don't know why I can do it or why I would do such a thing for them. Perhaps they assign nefarious motives to what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. I've been accused of "co-dependence," but I just don't have the vested interests and addictions to go along with the profile.

Demonstrating my ability to think has also often gotten me defined me as "analytical," as if I am an inflexible one-trick pony. Am of the opinion that everyone has multiple talents, often undeveloped.

I've learned to actively refuse to defend myself and instead invite participation. But sometimes it just doesn't work. People misread my communicating as being upset. They don't dare to confront or engage, fearing they might offend.

Would love to open a conversation to suggestions on how to better this state of affairs, because I think this same issue affects many, many interactions with many people.

Anyone have any suggestions or explorations...stories? Probably not. Somehow, the way that I write doesn't invite comments. Not sure what to do about that.

Witchy

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 01:59:00 +0000

In honor of deva spirits and witches everywhere, I made a witchy nymph. The face sort of looks like mine, doesn't it? That was an accident...

What you don't see in this picture is how I had to splint and graft two pieces of the stick into one to get the witchy nymph to have arms as well as legs.

While I was doing so, I was thinking about how many of us wounded healers there are, partially broken... How many there are who have had to go from being broken to making themselves whole again. This journey seems to be necessary to make compassionate teachers with some real answers for those who find themselves in dire straights.

Haywired

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 12:42:00 +0000

It is a fact that no matter how much "better" your sensory judgment gets, you are always going to be using your senses in a 'relative' way. 'Absolute fact' doesn't exist. It's not how people are wired. We're made so that we get used to being whatever we have learned, so what is new can get our attention. So whenever a significant change is made, it will always feel "strange" and "abnormal."

After recovering from over-doing and needing to adapt to terrible or extraordinary circumstances of life that nearly everyone encounters, it is pretty amazing how it's still possible to uncover your original subtle sensitivity. Eventually with the right sort of attention, you can get your bearings and learn to do things easier as you used to be able to do it when you were innocently younger. As this is happening, the changes that register as "significant" get more subtle, but they are still changes with those same "weird" sensations of newness.

I believe that sensory appreciation is far and away more important priority as a principle than most Alexander teachers give it. Most give it lesser billing as a sort of "special effects" in relation to the other "more important" principles - but I think motor sensory amnesia has center stage as the one of the three most important concepts of Alexander Technique. Sensory appreciation is the principle that needs to be introduced first.

It's important because students need to know from the beginning how to recognize that something new has happened. most people disregard happenings that are "unclassified flukes" because they don't fit preconceptions - they're not anywhere near the radar of expectations. If students don't understand what a discovery looks like, how are they going to know they are making one when it happens?

As far as humor goes - more teachers should use it!

Thinking Process Example

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:53:00 +0000

A generous friend gave me a futon mattress that had been in storage too long and went to the trouble of re-building a bed stand for it so my bed is now off the floor. But the mattress was moldy, even if it wasn't apparent at the time. Going to the trouble of cleaning it, putting it out in the sun didn't seem to make any difference. With the assumption that cleaning it needed to be done a different way... (and the frustration of having spent a great deal of time on it already...)

Wild idea: stuff it in the dryer until it catches on fire.
Observation: the dryer is hot.
Is there a way to administer heat that would work like a clothes dryer?
To use heat to kill mold by putting the mattress into a parked car and leaving it in a hot place for a number of days.
To get/borrow a steam cleaner; put a mixture of tea tree oil, bleach & detergent in the steam cleaner or on the surface of the cover of the mattress...which area all known to kill the mold that has gone into the middle of the mattress... THEN put the mattress into the parked car to dry it out.
...all the while going without a bed again.

Then I started thinking how sometimes I'm allergic to some sorts of clothes detergent. This shift to "allergy" rather than "cleaning" suggested a different solution... a mattress cover exists to help people deal with dust mites who are allergic - this cover could just as easily be applied to seal off mold!

But then the problem was - I don't have the money to buy this mattress cover right now. So...I started thinking about what else I could do to seal up the mold in the mean time. I realized I had saved an old camping air bed which was flocked on one side that I could cut up, make a bag out of it and insert the mattress into it. I could cut it open, cut the baffles out of the inside of the camp mattress and tape it shut with good old duct tape after the futon mattress was inserted.

Wow! Instant solution with free materials! Now we'll see if it works...

Love, Respect and Co-Independence

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:32:00 +0000

I was thinking about Independence Day, about independence in general. If you're familiar with the concept of "Co-Dependence," it seems to me that many counselors, (who supposedly have wisdom about the nature of "healthy" relationships,) have merely elevated independence to a state of Co-Independence.

After living alone for awhile, it seems to me that a state of inter-dependence is preferable to independence. Tomorrow I'm moving into a living situation with a friend of mine. Am very hopeful that it's a change for the better!

Respect can be so often offered as a deal or a trade - but I guess that can also be true about love. Many people attempt to negotiate tacitly while professing to be offering "love."

Marriage, for many people, just lets everything be implied rather than specified. Have always regarded marriage as a lazy person's way to say, "Hey, rather than negotiate and really make agreements specifically that we're going to keep with each other, let's get married and that umbrella will take care of the whole conversation about our agreements." Once the situation of defining what, exactly, the agreements really are, things fall apart...because people got married because they didn't have a clue how to make these agreements. In a sense, many marriages are all about expectations about how the husband or wife role is "supposed" to go, as if it's a slot or a job.

If their cultural assumptions match, then all is well. Most often these cultural assumptions do not match. Cultural assumptions about love often do not match people's own needs.

Really, professing love, many people are really only making a deal without knowing what they are actually getting or giving. Of course, people can get disappointed if the deal is not suitable - but I'm not sure if it's actually love that they're getting or giving.

Respect contains quite a bit more loving sanity than the passions of love.

Passion - looking at the root of that word is really interesting in the origin and history of the word "passion." Rather than an intense striving sort of meaning the word has come to mean in today's culture, it turns out that "passion" is related more to "pass." It is a surrendered state, an allowing sort of action. The word passion comes from meaning of "passive."

So it's not just that there is love or not love, but what sort of love there is, what sort of respect there is. Quality is everything in love and respect.

Respect can be had out of fear as well as love. Suppose that there is a twisted sort of love that is also mixed in with fear or power to wound which would be common in parent/child love as well as between consenting adults. Many emotions may be mixed in with each other.

For instance, love mixed with blame or a sense of cause and effect or consequence gives an impression that the other person is causing love to occur in you. Not sure that so many people are capable of love. Before love can happen, a person seems to need to open themselves up to loving and being lovable. That can be a challenge, to think of oneself as lovable in certain circumstances of life.

This is true for other emotions as well. Pride without fear is a desire for excellence. - (a quote from a friend of mine named Chuck Lewis, author of "You're Gonna Love It!" - a book on selling for artists.) Pride mixed with fear - it is one of the seven deadly sins of self-involved arrogance.

Many people use the more general term "love" when a better word for what they are doing might be "care," "admiration," "compassion," "desire," "attraction," "infatuation," "absorption," "attention," "adulation," etc.

It is common to be notoriously inarticulate when it comes to misunderstanding or mis-naming one's own emotions.

Any Questions?

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:04:00 +0000

A kid and a Jehovah Witness came to my door last week. Before they started in with their religious invitations, I engaged the youngster in learning to juggle. He was a kid of around ten years old. Because I'd given him something of value in learning juggling, the kid wanted to give me a booklet that was a digest of their bible. I took it and read some of it.

In this condensed Bible there was an admonition where followers were urged to burn the books of "evil" false prophets such as Tarot card readers, psychics, astrologers, etc. It got me thinking how threatening it is to religions to have competition to their cornering the market on interpreting answers to spiritual questions. Probably nowadays, anyone who dispenses advice and wisdom based on their personal experience is going to be threatening to a church. Made me wonder what definition of "evil" this threat would actually include. Pretty much whenever you decide certain people are "evil," it's only a matter of time before many more people end up in that same category.

I thought of all the people in social networking who are urged to "brand themselves" and be the number one special version of the dispenser of value gained by their followers. In a flash of inspiration, I saw every social networker on Twitter as having their own religion...and respective followers... How would threatened religions and churches burn e-books...?

In the time of Christ there must have been quite a few people out preaching "Truth." Probably there were lots of swindlers who were looking for followers who would pay them money to support their efforts, just as there seem to be now. In that era to perform the miracle of raising the dead, all you had to do is have the skill of recognizing someone in a coma who is might wake up eventually.

That Bible held up as the "word of God" was written by "psychics" who probably did not have much means to advertise - but they could write. Just getting materials to write something down must have been challenging. Probably being someone who knew how to read and write was something you had to keep secret, because people in that era were threatened by it. Creativity was probably low on the list of those cultures deliberately designed to control huge classes of people. Urban myths about anyone, translated numerous times and painstakingly hand-written and copied by those who could READ - it must have been such a privileged, rare gift to be literate in that era. Maybe all those stories in the Bible were about many people, and they all got lumped together into being about one person. (Bait and switch was a common historical tactic of religions.)

Now anyone can have their blog printed on demand. Anyone can dispense "wisdom" and write their own Bible. No wonder religions are being threatened.

Some people believe words have a firm, factual reality in themselves. They think words "mean what they mean." But this is not true. Words shift and flicker depending on context and expression, just as symbols do. This is what makes poetry and the symbols of religion and belief interesting.

Many people have an ability to think, but their ability to express their thinking may not reach the listener or reader for many mutual reasons. The topic or context may be incomplete or indistinct. Or the communicator's natural style of thinking may be so different from our own that it is difficult to figure out the communicator's intent. What is their associative pathway from point to point and how can I follow? It may be tricky to follow thinking paths - especially if thinking is original thinking.

In this way creative thinking is similar to religion - in that really original ideas must be carefully interpreted for the listener.

So often religious bureaucracy seems to want to control how people think because they invest in being the interpreter for the public of their respective "holy scripture." Religious leaders want to be the ONLY interpreter for the believers, claiming "all others are wrong or evil."

Each time they read or listen, each person is reconstructing meaning from reading what someone else has written or said. Someone who has written is pointing at...something about what they intend to say. Their skill and familiarity with their language use is a factor, in addition to their ability to think - but also their ability to articulate and guess at the assumptions of their listener. They try to answer the virtual question: "What would the listener want to know?"

It is up the person listening or reading to fill in the blanks, follow the traces or indicators while the listener reconstructs the thinking pathways of the communicator. In this way, listening is almost a spiritual practice. It is a spiritual question when a person seeks a way to express that which cannot be directly expressed. Spiritual, intuitive, or virtual questions often beg for symbols and indirect ways to express their messages and intent.

Of course, the way you frame a question structures and points to the answer. Have any questions now? Hope so.

Outside Language

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:03:00 +0000

People seem to have a really hard time thinking for themselves. They're not practiced at thinking on demand at all, especially when asked to think about what is missing. You really can't demand that others "think stuff outside of the box" and then not come up with at least one example right on the spot of what that is all about. The most interesting idea is to use language to point out how it's possible to think beyond language.

The easiest example is to get out the video camera and film people walking. Then ask them to describe what they actually did as they walked. Or ask people to demonstrate a skill and teach it to someone else in a way other than how they learned it. Some more examples... point out why art exists - because people can't describe the making of art in words. Or ask music fans to describe, in words, what musicians do that allows them to improvise with each other. Ask movie fans how come a series of movie scenes makes people get startled or what really happened in the movie scenes before the whole movie theater just sucked in their breath simultaneously, or offered some other group reaction. ...They can't do it! Only those who work in those fields are conscious of these "nuts and bolts." Even these professionals who do these things don't know HOW they do them well enough to articulate how it works in words.

Many people are able to demonstrate something successfully, but they can't describe what they are doing without sounding trite, inane and fumbling. As a collective culture, we're just not used to observing for ourselves and using our own words to describe what we are experiencing.

Why isn't self-observation taught as a foundation skill?

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - that language structures thought ability - is not merely limited to mere specific word definition. It's also related to how words are put together. It points out the perceptual assumptions within the sentence structure of language also traps us.

For instance, important to English sentence structure is the direct object. This has the whole culture being quite concerned with who is doing what to whom. We are constantly thinking about how much someone is lying, (not whether they are lying or not!) Everyone is constantly having to ask themselves, "What percentage of what so and so says should be believed?" Since the direct object is so important in our language, Westerners so often focus on what we can do to something outside of ourselves. It's all about who does what to whom, who gets whose way and who has to wait and for how long they wait - and does the one who waits EVER get what they might want or need?

This why people are so concerned with status in our Indo-European culture. It's impossible to open your mouth or write without adding to the cultural trance of defining the nature of reality. People are constantly in the position of attempting to determine how much another person is lying, teasing or joking and what their motives are.

Really, how does someone understand what another person MEANS to say? People are confronted by descriptions about what the world "is" constantly - every advertisement, every newscast, every piece of gossip, every narration of the nature of the world, every description, every lesson, every comment - any utterance that involves the possibility of word choice.

All of these constructs of words involve a unique point of view. As a listener, we must reconstruct a workable meaning out of what we hear. Nothing IS what it IS. Everything is "open to interpretation! We all must do this in spite of having little or no knowledge, appreciation, sympathy, empathy or compassion for that other person's point of view and/or experiences. We must guess at all of these or communicate directly.

For instance, although there are many lip-serviced references to an inter-woven body-mind connection, we still combine two words to discuss the feature - and the word is a noun, rather than a verb. In English at least, we are still cramming the concept of psycho-physical into our old mold of the two being separate - even though it it common that our culture now acknowledges that bodies and minds are inseparable in one person.

OK, I'll stop ranting now. Tell me what you think.

Design Isn't Opinion

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Sun, 09 May 2010 09:45:00 +0000

In my past, because I worked as a sign painter, I was in the position to be responsible to design the logos and presentational graphics for numerous businesses that were just starting out. The first year or so of being a sign painter, there were a few shop owners, clueless to the effects of why they were choosing a certain style to represent their business image, who did not take my advice. After doing a few of these signs to please the customer, while cringing about the results I knew were bad choices, I vowed not to compromise just to please an opinionated, clueless owner in order to retain payment for the job.

My problem became, how could I convince the business owner on the front end that they should take my educated and experienced advice? How do I convince someone that design is not an opinion or a narcissistic sense of "taste"? Repeatedly experimented until I found something that worked to sell the job. The approach that worked took some time to develop.

First I sat down and asked a business owner to come up with three or four words that communicated qualities they wanted their business to represent to their customer. After they chose these words, In front of them, I flashed page after page of lettering styles - over a hundred lettering styles they could see. While extolling the virtues of my education and experience, I asked them if they felt qualified to know what was the difference between each of these lettering styles and if their choice if lettering style did, in fact, represent the four qualities to the public they had chosen.

Then I reminded them that the point of hiring me and my experience was also hiring someone to know this. So perhaps it would be in their best interest to allow me to narrow down the choices for them to specify? If they want to communicate additional qualities, we could include those too.

If they were still not convinced, I randomly would go through the different lettering styles and give them examples of the sorts of shops that would use a particular style of lettering. How funny it would look if other businesses had chosen a certain style for their sign! I did this so they could see the proof of what I meant. They laughed or were horrified at the mistakes other shop owners had made with bad choices, (which had to later be redone.) From this, their faith in me and my sense of responsibility for this important selection for their purposes improved.

So, essentially I was saying to these owners - you're paying me to do a job, making this choice is an important element of the job. Please take my educated and experienced advice (probably it would have been also the advice of the people doing the nuts and bolts of the work) and allow me to perform what you have hired me to do. Demonstrate how their needs are being taken into account in their situation and describe what it will mean to both of you. Then I'd repeat the quality (and criteria and priority of the) words they had selected.

In other similar situations, (such as deciding as a group to make project decisions together) we'd go over the criteria & priorities that everyone had agreed upon needed to be taken into account again - now comparing our final results to the final choice we'd made. If there was a previous choice on the table, we'd describe what were the qualities, priorities, needs and characteristics that the old selection expressed.

Then I'd leave them to their own choices by taking a break for them to discuss and think about it on their own for a short bit. Then I'd get them to cough up the money. Worked every time.

Petting Posts

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Fri, 07 May 2010 09:05:00 +0000

Would anyone like me to hire me to make some art of their favorite pet? Just send me a photo like the photo here. Some stories about your pet would be great too, so I can understand the pet's personality.

I'll make some art from the photo - like this....or the other drawings on this blog. It's not expensive, for original, one-of-a-kind art - only $100. per drawing. You'll have a lasting record of your favorite companion's charm.

Black Cat Art

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Fri, 07 May 2010 08:56:00 +0000

Black cats are often passed by in shelters in favor of other kitties who are more brightly colored ...because they're black, I guess.

Besides being tricky to take a photo of a black cat, they're also tricky to make a drawing of too.

The nicest kitty I know is black. Her name is Jasmine. She's the second black cat I have met with that name. What makes Jasmine such a nice kitty is that she never gets mad at her person when she goes away. Instead, Jasmine gets mad at the person who "took" her person away. Now there is a kitty who can THINK!

This kitty in this picture - I'd tell you her name, but I don't know how it's spelled. Minka?

I hear that this kitty I have drawn a picture of here is a one-person kitty. This person gets to have this kitty sleep on their bed and happily snuggle up to them and purr. But this kitty really doesn't want anyone to know she exists, because - well, you know how faithful a dog can be. This cat is faithful like a dog.

The people who wanted me to make a picture of this kitty didn't give me a very good photo to work from.

Here's the photo they gave me to make the portrait from.... What do you think of the picture I made with it?

Does the art I made look like this kitty?

Lucky

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:28:00 +0000

This is a drawing I made of a very lucky tabby kitty cat named Grover. He was rescued out of the engine of a car after he got tangled up when the car started. His people were nice enough to put Grover back together.

Give and Take - Maybe an Offshoot Blog?

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 23:28:00 +0000

One of my ideas about blogging on so many subjects has been that themes would emerge by themselves. As I saw this happening, I reasoned that I could sift out the posts related to a certain theme and use them to start a targeted blog subject. A new subject seems to have emerged! Having written so extensively on this subject, I have decided that I should collect these posts into a separate blog that specializes in this subject alone. This post contains a table of contents of the various posts I've already written on this subject, collected for your pleasure. (The ones that don't have links are subjects contained in other posts.)

Reciprocal "give and take" is so essential that I've decided to collect them into the subject of a new blog - to be announced. I've been exploring this phenomena for some time now. Written about the different aspects of the problem quite a bit, as you can see here.

It's going to get to be a big factor as the baby boomers get to the point where they need to accept care gracefully during aging. For that reason alone, this issue could become a really important one to discuss.

Would you subscribe to a blog on just this subject as a way to allow yourself to free up the acts of gracefully accepting and learning about well-placed giving?

Here's where I ask questions about the different style of how gifts are offered, http://is.gd/5JfL6 asked around the gift-giving fervor of Christmas time.

Tacit Obligation http://is.gd/bMfhY
If someone has difficulty accepting, many times if you can vary the style of how the gift is offered, it will result in making it easier for them to accept. Making light of it's value is sometimes effective, because the best situation between giver and "givee" is when the thing is of great value to the givee and is easy for the giver to offer. But sometimes an action carries much more weight than anything they might say about it. Thus, accepting a gift incites obligation that may be only tacitly guessed. Why can't people accept a gift? A mystery part of a person is not sure what is the (sub)culturally tacit agreement about this gift; talking about it probably won't help.

Random Acts http://is.gd/bMeST

Some people feel a need to remove themselves from the act, so that the receiver has no idea where the gift came from. It becomes impersonal. Thus we have all of the organizations that specialize in accepting tax charitable gifts and doing the messing actual giving to others.

Giving Back The proper way to "give back" is not always to do the exact same gesture, because needs are different. The mistake many people make in selecting what to give is they assume their value system of what is valuable is identical to the givee. This is not true. Being able to put oneself in the shoes of the givee is a thoughtful, compassionate act. So this is often a good reason to reject the offer of help - because what is being offered is misplaced and not of value from the point of view of the givee.

Gifts That Fit http://is.gd/bMeDi

In the small town of Bolinas, CA, we have a "freebox" where mainly articles of clothing are dropped off to be made available to anyone who wants them. The proper way to give back for the value of what you have gotten from it is to clean and organize the Freebox. Many people focus on the stuff itself; they mistake that the proper way to reciprocate is to bring more "stuff." Actually, having a place to bring your stuff to get rid of it is also a significant benefit. So the proper way to reciprocate is more like assuming the role temporarily of a "shop-keeper." A person who wanted to reciprocate would make the good stuff available to those who stop by looking to get something, (like pairing up shoes,) glean out the trash and every once in awhile, clear out the Freebox of all of it's donations so it's empty again to accept more stuff.

Allowing Benefits of Being The Giver http://is.gd/bMeMk

The Hawaiian spirit of Aloha is a wonderful template. It observes that you must allow someone to give, even if what is being offered is not of value to the givee. Being able to give is a human right, and by gracefully accepting, you are allowing this pleasure of giving to be exercised.

Consequences of Acceptance Generally with people who have trouble accepting being given to, it's important to ask what the accepting of gifts symbolizes. To some people, accepting what is offered is a "one-down" position in a competitive sense. To others, they are fearful that accepting the gift will make them obligated to play the role eternally.They fear they're going to lose their independence as they learn to rely on the gift being provided routinely, and will act to prevent the source going away.

Independence Declarations Causing a Split I've also seen repeatedly a situation that seemed to be a direct result of mistaking the roles and pleasures giving and receiving. The situation was where a partner was forced to accept help because of a temporary injury. Evidently after recovery, the person who had been injured wanted to reject help from their partner to re-establish their independence and self-respect. ANY help was rejected entirely, so often and completely that even the "normal" pleasures of doing things for one's sweetie symbolized infantile dependence to the person who was in the process of recovering. If this was not purposefully addressed, it caused a breakup!

Respect http://is.gd/aTqdM
Giving and receiving seems to be connected to how respect is shown. In our culture, you must choose between respect and having rapport. Here's a post where I explored it's application in how respect is signified in the context of speaking in a group interaction. It's curious how listeners are valued socially, (which is a receptive role) when in the situation where the gift is tangible - suddenly the giver becomes the authority.

Suspicious of Greed It's also curious that when someone is in a situation of getting or having gotten a personal benefit, somehow what they offer or receive is suddenly suspect, because there's now a "invested interest." This is what happens when a person is really passionate about a belief in how something works for them and wants to communicate the benefit of their experience to others - everything they say about what they are passionate about is suddenly considered in that light or frame. They're proselytizers, rather than merely sharing their experience. I'm not sure why people believe that someone who is enthusiastic about something is self-involved or selfish.

Bonding http://is.gd/aTspT
Some people take the giver/givee challenge to the point of refusing to establish the bond of a relationship entirely. I talk about that here: There are many rituals of establishing a bond as there are subcultures.

Entitlement http://is.gd/aTtf1
Here's another post where I talk about the anger that results when the givee decides they are "entitled" to what the givers are offering before they're getting it. This talks about greed.

Compliments http://is.gd/aTsR9
Complimenting is also an interesting way of giving back that some people feel strange about accepting. Of course, it's a benefit to find out that what you do easily is notable for others - because it signifies what could be a valuable talent. Some people automatically reject them out of hand as an expression of the deadly sin of pride or ego. Some people regard compliments of the possession of an item as a way to ask for the thing to be offered by the person who has it. Here's a story about why I believe that complimenting is an important thing to do. In my culture, handing out a compliment implies the person was (like a puppy) explicitly seeking your approval, which may not be true. Rejecting the gift implies that you would prefer to give yourself the approval. There are many other values signified by accepting a compliment that have people have reacted negatively to it.
*************

Surpassing Expectations

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:14:00 +0000

"What is it about your environment, history and values that encourages you to surpass limiting social expectations?" It's a very interesting question to ask in polite conversation of anyone who has managed to be successful. Asking it in a non-specific way leaves the answer open.

Curious answers occur. When you ask the question of a woman, you must take the replies with a grain of salt. Women tend to "tell troubles" to bond with other women. To understand much more of how all this happens and more about what the issues are concerning women and those who do not match the current social trends in their conversational style, I recommend the very conversational but content-rich books written by linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, PhD - especially her book "Talking 9 to 5."

It took me a great deal of thought about this question to find the answers for myself. There were three pivotal experiences for me.

What made the biggest difference motivating me to think for myself first happened when I was only five years old. My idol, which was my elder brother of eight years, gave me a snake for a pet - sanctioned by my parents. It was 1959, and in that era, snakes suffered from many social misconceptions about their nature. At a crucial stage when I was going to transfer my family's authority toward the authority of school & a greater social world...Here were these serious mis-matches about snakes that I knew was completely urban legend. People I did not know or trust mistakenly thought snakes were dangerous, contradicting what I knew to be true according to my family and the San Diego Zoo. This experience encouraged me to think for myself and put out effort to learn the true nature of things before I accepted societal norms. It inoculated me against cigarettes as well as sent me to college, because I decided at five that you could be free of fear if you knew more of the facts.

Of course, the most obvious solution to change the minds of young people would be world travel. Becoming an exchange student during middle or high school is the most socially acceptable way, but spending at least six months in another culture works just as well. Once you have been a young person in a radically different environment, you return and realize how self-absorbed your peers are. Not to mention how regional fashion codes really are.

The other pivotal issue was attractiveness and the social authority that went along with it. It upset me that, according to society, women were expected to be helplessly manipulative to get things done. The social fact that an attractive female asking for a "favor" gets it from a male who has temporarily lost his reasoning - this bothered me.

For me as a young girl, there seemed no way to "opt out" of that game gracefully. I did not want the power men handed me; they wanted me to deny or accept their attention. Because of the accident of birth making me coincidentally attractive, I had to deal with this issue early on. Only later I realized that this was a social reality for almost every girl. (If you're a straight guy reading this, imagine if you had to deal daily with attention from people you did not want - from other guys, for instance. This is the environment young women find themselves.)

What eventually remedied this issue for me was learning about body language. After this education, it was indisputable that how I behaved was evident for anyone to see. What sort of a person I was, my values, showed beyond my physical features. A person's character is expressed in their walk, how they move, where their attention goes & the quality of attention used. After learning about body language, I had to accept there were, in me, obvious additional desirable qualities of character. That they were there in addition to matching social definitions of beauty - well, I could accept the attention I was getting now. The attention was my fault, instead of purely an accident of nature.

So I would recommend to teach body language as part of a relationship communication class as a solution for the common desire for membership and bonding - in high school or earlier. (For me, studying Alexander Technique in a classroom situation worked.)

There are many reasons why there is a sudden drop in confidence when girls (and boys) reach middle school age. They realize how they do not match the social norms, and there is the tendency to envy what they are not. This is when girls first must grapple with social questions about how they are going to deal with sexual attention. A desire to for membership and to belong becomes important, as well as trying on what roles might suffice to deal with this big question.

The last pivotal experience for me was when I discovered creative thinking skills. Not just the result of thinking creatively by making things artistic, or modeling creative people I admired. I'm talking about the actual nuts and bolts of how to do problem solving in a situation of decision-making.

Creative thinking skills taught me HOW to think for myself. Wanting to think for yourself in spite of societal norms and actually doing this thinking constructively are two very different things. Edward de Bono has a series of proven simple but effective creative and strategic thinking skills designed for middle school aged students and older. Again - not What to think - but How. Young people have refreshing bull-pucky detectors. These natural talents can be fostered into effective and constructive rebellion. In fact, the more rebellious, the better this education works to help you go your own way more intentionally...against the crowd.

Probably nobody is going to take my word for it. But if creative thinking skills and relationship classes were taught in high school (instead of so much of what is ridiculous mind-reading for "correct" information that is taught now,) society would experience a big jump in social responsibility from all young people.

Stereotyping and trying to be "right" affects everyone.

Parallel Thinking = Feminist Conspiracy

noreply@blogger.com (Franis Engel) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:13:00 +0000

I'm a participant on a few social networking websites. One of them is an author site on creative thinking. I'd like to invite you to join! www.debonosociety.com

What follows is part of what I'm writing over there...

In his writing, Edward de Bono has always stated that the ability to think is a "software" skill of usage and is not a "hardware" issue. Here's another area where the "software" of education triumphs over hardware. It was assumed that "men's superiority" of their brain being hard-wired for spacial ability explained chess acumen:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6378985927858479238#

The spoiler is, it was assumed that men have the hardware to understand spacial relationships to remember chess configurations and women couldn't compete with that. MRI tested this woman's brain; turns out her challenge had superseded another part of the brain; it actually worked faster and better than the spacial relationship part of a man's brain that guys thought was so wonderfully specialized.

Feminist conspiracy

I'd like to discuss the "Feminist conspiracy" accusation that you mentioned here that you dismissed as idiotic. (Which it is, but wondered if it would also be interesting to entertain as a stepping stone.)

You wrote: There is quite a 'jump' for traditional western style thinkers to disengage from ingrained critical-confrontation thinking. I have faced men who emphatically suggest "parallel thinking is a feminist conspiracy". This is of course, idiotic. There are times for debate and 'having a good argument'. There are also times, when there is a need for design thinking, planning forward and action to apply parallel thinking. Keep in mind that 'parallel thinking' is not only the domain of Six Hat Thinking. Instead, parallel thinking is de Bono Thinking.

Now we know why Edward de Bono always selects GUYS to represent his ideas instead of young, beautiful, flexibly thoughtful women. Obviously, I think de Bono should intentionally put his women trainers forward as the response to this rather interesting "feminist conspiracy" accusation.

OK, let's propose that those guys were right about that. Women do tend to first establish a state of rapport with each other as a sort of beginning ground rule. Since women were smaller anyway and were going to lose once there was a fight, women realized that fighting was counter-productive to getting things done. So they refused to fight because they knew they would lose a fight anyway. Instead, they got busy designing how to get things done while the guys were fighting. Then the guys could take the credit for the accomplishment of what the women did by copying or repeating the idea to legitimize it. Which was usually fine with the women - because avoiding "bragging" was avoid fighting.

Parallel thinking

Parallel thinking is something women have been doing for a long time before Edward de Bono gave it a suitably descriptive term and wrote a book pointing out its usefulness. He did come at the idea from a completely different origin other than copying women who had come up with a similar practice first without codifying and formalizing it.

(Good thing that de Bono also invented PO as a lateral thinking technique...or I'd be in big trouble with his loyal followers for saying all this!)

Applied design thinking

So if a person wants to "shore up" the status of value (against an accusation of "women's conspiracy" or any other accusation,) de Bono's use of the [correct] anticipation of brain research proof in designing his thinking tools would be a more effective focus point.

What's impressive is how de Bono's prediction about brain function have all been proven (once the MRI got invented,) and how he used his correct predictions about brain function to drive his designs of thinking skills.

About brains

Faster fight/flight/freeze reactions usually pre-empts thinking ability; the more often you can strengthen the GABA connectors between the Black Hat amygdala and the "everything else" design-solving fore-brain, the more effectively you can are able to think without stressing/freaking out.

The magic number is ....SEVEN

It's also a point that people can't remember more than seven points or numbers at once; so to be useful, a procedure has to have less than seven steps. So, de Bono invented a really easy parallel thinking form he calls the "Six Thinking Hats." Wearing these "thinking hats" turns out to be a really, really effective means to align groups of people to think together without fighting each other. Fights are, really, a lousy way to resolve things. Most people have figured out that everyone loses a war, (except those who supply the munitions.)

Why guys like to debate

So the previous adversarial guy-way debate style of thinking is to first activate the fight/flight/freeze survival brain, and then dare each other to use their fore-brains to use the rest of the brain while under "battle" stress. This is difficult if your GABA connecting fibers in your brain have not been thickened to refuse the faster fear reactions. It takes the practice of refusing to let fight/flight/freeze part of the brain preempt the entire brain's resources. It displays "courage" - which demonstrates grace under fire.

What works so much better than fighting

Parallel thinking, as demonstrated in the use of the Six Thinking Hats, works much faster and easier than argument to come to more complete and well-designed decisions. Solutions to design questions are the sophisticated, artful part of what happens when people work together to combine resources and build great ideas.

Stages of great innovations:

1. Inventions are at first, completely obliterated and unrecognized, (of course, women's usage = illegitimacy)
innovations are deemed dangerous and fought against...(after the argument-debate model finally recognizes their force.)
[Some tolerance and skill for lateral, parallel and design thinking needs to be inserted in this spot.]
Finally the innovation is copied & widely used, (held up as "hey, this is the way it's done now.")