Month: April 2020

Categories
Creativity

Proactively Challenging Our Perceived Reality

We’re entering a future where IQ and EQ both matter far less than how fast you’re able to adapt (AQ).

Natalie Fratto

There’s no question that change can feel stressful, but Fratto says you can stave off that stress by working on how your mind processes new information.

One of the most helpful ways to cope with change is to think about what could happen before it actually happens, Fratto notes.

Active unlearners seek to challenge what they presume to already know, and instead, override that data with new information.

Natalie Fratto

When you think about reaching a goal at work, you probably reflect on what has worked for you in the past, and try to mimic the same process that helped you achieve success beforehand. Fratto says this thought process is common, but it could be holding you back from adapting to potential changes.

Fratto says we’re too focused on exploiting our current workflow, when we should be using exploration — “a state of constant seeking” — to see what’s around the corner.

Rebecca Muller, How Improving Your “Adaptability Quotient” Can Help You Succeed

Categories
Creativity

Validating Our Experiences & Ourselves From Within

Psychologists Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow had major influence in popularizing the idea of self-concept in the west. According to Rogers, everyone strives to reach an “ideal self”. Rogers also hypothesized that psychologically healthy people actively move away from roles created by others’ expectations, and instead look within themselves for validation. On the other hand, neurotic people have “self-concepts that do not match their experiences. They are afraid to accept their own experiences as valid, so they distort them, either to protect themselves or to win approval from others.”

Self-concept, Wikipedia

Categories
Creativity

The Adventure of Our Lives

Stepping off the edge of the known world and into the unknown.

For many of us, it feels like we’ve entered unprecedented times, with change now occurring at an accelerated pace. In reflecting upon this all and putting it within the context of my life’s work, I’ve suddenly realized what we are being asked to do and how it gives this unfamiliar, epic experience a sense of familiarity to it.

What we are being asked of by life is to be the explorers and pioneers of our time, just as our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents may have been, yet within a completely different contextual realm of experience.

In effect, instead of exploring, pioneering, and settling new lands at the edge of our world around us (like my parents did taming the northern frontier of Manitoba back in the fifties), we’re being asked to explore, pioneer, and settle new “lands” at the edge of our “world“ within us.

For many of us though, this is going to be an exceedingly difficult adventure to undertake. Why? Because we aren’t even aware that these inner worlds exist and don’t understand how they fundamentally help us (and also hinder us) in perceiving our world and our very sense of self.

Therefore, until we can accept that there is a much larger “world” beyond the horizon of our conventional minds, we will continue to lack the capabilities and capacities to tackle these wicked problems which are much like dragons emerging from off the edge of the known world to wreak havoc upon it.

This is going to require us to have great courage, authenticity, and creativity going forward. That’s because we need to be real creative to openly step towards the very things we normally defensively step away from and avoid. In the process, we need to learn to drop our shields, armour, and masked helms, giving us the mobility and broader vision to make possible what previously seemed impossible.

In effect, the way forward isn’t about trying to know everything, having the certainty that we know all of the answers. Rather it’s about being comfortable with not knowing everything and embracing the uncertainty of the unknown by asking the right questions. In doing so, our questions become quests that lead us on an adventure within a wilderness that we truly want to step into and explore, pulled along by something much greater than ourselves.

Categories
General

Wayfinding Through Our Inner Worlds

All these groups appear to rely on mental imagery for wayfinding.

Yet having a sense of place – something a GPS device will never give us – is still important. The need to know where we are, to feel safe in our surroundings, is part of the human condition. We feel this most intensely when the cognitive processes that keep us orientated go awry. The dread experienced by many Alzheimer’s patients comes from their sense of dislocation from places they used to know and a past they can no longer reach. Being lost in the wilderness triggers a comparable terror. People who have been truly lost never forget the experience. Suddenly disconnected from all that surrounds them, they are plunged into a relationship with an utterly alien world. They often believe that they are going to die.

The hippocampus even drives aspects of our cognition that, on the surface, have little to do with physical space.

The hippocampus is a universal map-maker, as good at helping us navigate our inner worlds as our outer ones.

When we don’t know where we are, we lose a sense of who we are.

Michael Bond, We Are Wayfarers

Categories
General

Don’t Know Where We’re Going

I don’t know where we are going now
I don’t know where we are going now

Dakota, Stereophonics
Categories
General

On Doing Our Part

There was a meme going around which really kind of put me in my place which was like ‘Your grandparents went to war, and you’re being asked to sit on a couch.’ Like, get the fuck with it. I talked to a couple friends who are in the workforce like cops out there sleeping in their garages, working 20 hours a day; nurses coming home and not being able to hold their children because they’re afraid they’re going to contaminate their families, then going back to work. You hear that stuff and it blows my mind because it makes me feel like I have such privilege to be able to sit around here while these people are beating themselves.

But what makes me insane is seeing that the beaches in fucking Miami are still flooded with these fucking idiots. Dude, they’re dumb fucks and it pisses me off and it really makes me insane because that’s actually the problem right there. We gotta remember our grandparents and parents have survived way worse and we can do our part here.

Sebastian Stan, On ‘Idiots’ Crowding The Beaches In Florida During A Pandemic