And that is so because in times like these many people desperately seek a context to in which to play. All too often, we are watching other people play. We are literally paying people millions of dollars to play for us. And not just on the baseball diamond. They are playing for us on compact disks; playing for us on videotape; playing for us on stage, at the concert, on the silver screen. We pay them because they play so well. Perhaps we pay them in exact proportion to our longing to be playing ourselves, which is why they are worth more and more every year. The longing for play is the longing to take the field ourselves, to play with heart and soul as each of us has the potential. We need a lifestyle that creates a context for us to make our own music, rather than always listen; do our own dancing, rather than always watch; perform our own plays, make our own films, write our own stories.
D. Stephenson Bond, Living Myth
Maturation, fully living the pattern of development, leads to a growing sense of self. The play on the symbolic field must eventually lead to something durable and vital. Play aims at coalescing into a work, an “opus.” The structure that emerges in play is the sense of our self as a “self.” If I may suggest this subtle distinction: play, if followed to its true development, evolves in a game. In the end, play imposes a set of rules. It begins to develop into a way of life, which is to say, a myth.
D. Stephenson Bond, Living Myth
Worries Teens Have About Themselves
How can teens be coached to remain calm and patient with themselves as they mature?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/understanding-hypnosis/202212/worries-teens-have-about-themselves
Given their newfound awareness, teenagers work at understanding who they are and what they believe in. Because of their limited experience, they often make the mistake of assuming that their characteristics during early adolescence represent permanent traits.
I explain to teens that the process of developing better self-understanding should be a lifelong endeavor. In the case of teens who are undergoing rapid growth, their character will naturally change a great deal by the time they become young adults. Further, character also changes as a result of how people react to various life circumstances.
Some of the teens who seek counseling from me for their anxiety have a similar profile. They tend to be gifted intellectually, sensitive, mature, and have different interests than most of their peers. They often find it easier to relate to adults than to their peers, or to lead activities with younger children with whom they do not expect to share interests. As a result, they feel different and conclude that something must be wrong with them, which contributes to exacerbating their anxiety.
Some teens are so consumed by their inability to choose a career that they feel they cannot move forward in life.
The suffering in our lives is often caused by wrong perceptions of life itself which, as we grow, develop, and mature, can hopefully be corrected with time. The number one misperception of life is that we have to figure it all out before we begin our lives. This is completely backwards, as though Life is a traditional roleplaying game, where we have to figure out our role, class, and abilities before we begin to play the game.
Instead Life is an unconventional roleplaying game whereby we understand our role, class, and abilities while we are playing the game itself. In effect, the greatest Adventure of Your Life is to “Know Thyself” which can take you your entire life to actually figure out. So the more experience you gain in life, the more you can level up your character and understand your deeper Self all the more.
For this to work though, it requires that we look at life as an adventure of many surprising, open-ended possibilities that we can forge on our own rather than a linear well-worn path that we have to follow and fit within.
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself, just as I am, then I can change.
Carl Rogers
Ultimately, true heroes legitimize themselves, not by anything they do, but by being who they are.
Daryl Conners
This dude has the dumbest hot take yet about transgender people – LGBTQ Nation
Wait. What?
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/12/dude-dumbest-hot-take-yet-transgender-people/
Can you really become a male or a female if you’re born the other. I don’t believe you can. We’re too different psychologically as well as physiologically. And the psychological is much harder to change.
Dennis Prager, Conservative Writer & Radio host
Yes, psychological changes are obviously much harder to make. But that’s exactly the whole point of understanding transgender people though! Their internal psychologically is different than the norms. So it’s easier for them to transform their physiology than try to change their psychology back to expected norms.
In my opinion, society needs to try to relate to and understand transgender people more because they represent all of us in terms of trying to express a deeper aspect of ourselves that others often cannot comprehend.
For example, I believe there are many people psychologically “levelling up” right now in these challenging times of rapid change, yet they are often afraid to try to express the transformation they are going through because society norms may stigmatize them. So not only is their psychological development hard but stepping beyond societal norms makes it twice as hard.
1 in 3 people are wired as high performers. Why are they afraid to show it?
3 ways to harness the power of sensitivity at work—yours and others
https://qz.com/nearly-1-in-3-people-are-wired-as-high-performers-why-1849874280
That’s because those behaviors are common signs of a sensitive person—someone whose mind is wired to go deep. And sensitive people tend to be high performersin the workplace, often bringing unique gifts that create value and drive innovation.
There’s just one problem: many sensitive people try to downplay and even deny their sensitivity—especially in their careers.
As someone who has similar traits such as these, I completely disagree that we downplay our sensitivity. Actually we are the ones being downplayed by others, especially management. I’ll explain further below.
As a personality trait, being sensitive means you process more information about your environment and respond to it more strongly. That gives you a keener eye for detail and an innate ability to read the emotions of others. It also means you may think longer or feel stronger emotions than someone else in the same situation.
That explains the occasional workday crying session—and the struggle with fast-paced deadlines. However, it also means the sensitive mind is akin to a next-generation supercomputer. All that extra processing power turns up more creative solutions, insights, and a startling ability to connect dots that others miss.
Two ways I’ve described this in the past is that your sensitivity makes you too empathetic to the point of it being debilitating. If someone is fired unjustly or if someone is targeted by a toxic boss, you feel like you are that person, experiencing their emotions as if they were your own. It also makes you feel like a canary in a coal mine, which usually doesn’t end well for the canary.
A simpler way to understand people like this is to realize that our pattern recognition capabilities are supercharged, so we can detect patterns usually way before other people (i.e. in days or weeks instead of months or years).
In a survey conducted by graduate student Bhavini Shrivastava, the IT workers who tested highest for sensitivity were indeed the most stressed out at work—but they were also those whose performance was rated highest by their managers. This is no surprise to experts on giftedness, who have connected sensitivity to high ability for nearly sixty years; one recent study suggests that up to 87% of gifted individuals score as highly sensitive.
In practical terms, sensitive people come with five main gifts: they are wired for deep thinking, understand emotions, score high for empathy, are natural creatives, and have a high sensory intelligence—a trait that includes situational awareness, which wins soccer games and keeps patients alive in the ER.
Many of these gifts are in high demand in our economy; they are the building blocks of innovation and leadership. So, by rights, sensitive people ought to put their sensitivity at the top of their resumé. But that is not the message we get about being sensitive.
And yes, if you’re able to detect and recognize patterns before others, that amplifies your abilities and increases your situational awareness (which I’m impressed that this article sees the relationship between the two).
When I was a Systems Support Officer for the Federal Government, I would often have people from other departments coming to get my help instead of getting help from their own Support Officer. The reason being is that 1) I often was able to detect the cause of issues before other people, almost on an intuitive level, and 2) I actually talked to people like they were human beings, using metaphors to help explain what was going wrong, rather than talking to them using computer terminology that made them feel like they were technological idiots.
When I was initially hired as a Junior Web Developer for another web firm later in my life, I quickly became one of two Senior Web Developers, with one of the firm’s owners telling me that I was the “gem” of their hirings. This happened though because the owners specifically asked for our input, thus being very open to feedback from us. The more I opened up and provided my deeper perspective of things I was seeing and aware of, the more they were amazed by me.
Despite its many gifts, “sensitive” has become a dirty word. It’s used to mean easily offended, overreacting, and weak. Men run away from the term altogether, and women are slandered for being too sensitive—a phrase that should be retired. This stigma is why many sensitive people hide who they are.
One reason for this stigma is our culture’s obsession with toughness. We idolize people who are loud, assertive, and quick to take risks—never mind that these are traits of a toxic leader. But a sensitive person’s slower, more thoughtful approach pays off. In studies of both humans and primates, the genes associated with sensitivity also lead to measurably better decision-making.
So how do we tap that advantage in our companies and careers today? First, we must embrace sensitivity by encouraging and rewarding it at an organizational level and by owning it as sensitive people.
This is pretty much why I disagreed with the earlier statement that sensitive people downplay their abilities but rather their abilities are often downplayed by others instead, particularly management. And I’m not even talking about a “toxic leader” downplaying their abilities, it can happen with a non-toxic leader as well. I mean just think about it and imagine how things play out in a typical scenario.
A highly sensitive person detects a pattern within the organization that most other people are blind to seeing, so it’s invisible to others. This could be a cultural pattern of behaviours, beliefs, or values that are negatively affecting the organization and affecting the well-being of its people in turn. If a highly sensitive person relays what they’re perceiving to management, take a guess how management or leadership is going to react to someone critiquing their company? Probably the same as how a leader typically reacts to someone telling them about a new paradigm in their business.
So it’s not courage that sensitive people need to step forward with their amplified abilities. It’s management that needs the courage to accept the critique and feedback from their employees about their business. Most conventional management and leadership teams do not have this capacity though, although you might see it in Fortune 500 companies, if you’re lucky.
Again, as I’ve iterated in the past, if your a leader within a company and you’re looking for people to take leadership positions in your company, you don’t need to look outside of it to find them. There are leaders all around you. You just need the perception to be able to see them.
That’s the problem with our world today though. Most people, particularly leaders, are using outdated mindsets, paradigms, and worldviews to navigate and make decisions in their daily work lives, which is why they are blind to what’s right in front of them. Until they can broaden their perception and internal worldview, their external sight will continue to be limited, thus limiting their organizations in turn.
Categories
Imported Older Archived Posts
I’ve imported my old archived posts dating back to August 2005, as I’ve been revisiting them and noticing repeating patterns that I think are important to reintroduce back into my website.
That said though, most of these older posts do not have their original accompanying images but I think I’ve got an archive somewhere of some of these images that I can add back at a later date.
Actually upon closer inspection, it looks I’ve got my work cut out for me, as there’s some other issues with the imported posts, like excerpts that were automatically added somehow. Not sure if this was an import issue or something that happened a while back (although I’ve revisited my older posts before and never noticed this issue then).
Categories
Suffering From Wrong Perceptions
Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions. To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong perception.
Thích Nhất Hạnh
Categories
Good Night Sweet Prince
The time finally came last week to say goodbye to our sweet Prince Sam. Even though he was probably one of the most needy pain-in-the-butt cats at times, he was definitely one of the most affectionate and lovable cats we’ve ever had as well. He will be sorely missed indeed.
Sandra mentioned that she hasn’t been without a cat for 37 years, so we’re going to give ourselves a little break and wait until mid 2023 before getting a kitten, thus giving us some time to take a mini-vacation without having to worry about someone always having to take care of our feline friends.
I stumbled across this interview yesterday. It’s evident that most people, including even the interviewer, are completely misinterpreting the meaning of Brandi Heather’s work around play because she’s using it within a much larger context and meaning beyond what people conventionally perceive it to be. She’s not talking about playfully tossing a football around at work but more about “playing” beyond the boundaries of the existing, outdated, rigid social structures within our society today that are effectively standing in the way of the potential creativity and innovation within us all.
I talk in the book about our kids losing this ability to play when we standardize and structure everything but we’ve actually done it in our business and in our educational worlds as well.
Brandi Heather
And because of this dependency and addiction on having everything so “standardized and structured” with such certainty and control, thus leaving no room for people to play within their lives (in the sense of exploring and discovering who they fully are), she then goes on to indicate the adverse affect of this loss of play within our lives.
We’re seeing people unable to cope and navigate things that are new and different and unknown to us.
Brandi Heather
In reflecting upon this all, I think the only way you can make people truly aware of the power of play in their lives is by helping them to become aware of how so much of their existing reality, their world and even their sense of self-identity, are constructs of our collective playing and imaginations which become “reality” for others. But these collective playings and imaginations are not The Reality but rather just one possible reality. We can playfully imagine another, if we so choose to do so.
Steve Jobs has an eloquent quote about this below but most people misinterpret it and think it only applies to technology and physical things. It doesn’t. It applies to the social structures and cultures within our lives as well. For example, our institutions are a social construct that were playfully imagined at one time in the past and became a “reality” for us, a part of our daily lives. But we can just as easily play and imagine something new, if we so choose to do so (especially now that they are so inadequate for the times we are living within).
When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life.
Steve Jobs
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.
I previously said that, “I don’t see how I can effectively communicate and continue my work anymore because the depth of it is often misunderstood and paradoxical to conventional minds.” This is just a cop-out because I’m afraid of expressing something beyond the conventional. So it’s not like I can’t do it. It’s more I’m fearful of doing it.