Tricky to Communicate

 It is so curious how common it is, when you are attracted to study something, what usually attracts you is so seldom the real thing. You can only find out how misguided and naive you were later, once you dedicate yourself to learning about what captured your curiosity.

After reading a few books on better explaination and communication, I decided to apply its message to introducing Alexander Technique. 

 Most of the models that were suggested, (the book that "walked its talk" the best was "The Art Of Explanation" by Lee Lefever) used a "solve a problem" model. Although I recognize that the motivation to change and improve is often driven by a painful or negative problem, it has always seemed to me to be a tawdry appeal. Alexander Technique ends up sounding like snake oil if you list the many ways that it can be applied. We are hit by so much advertising in our culture.

The advantages of learning Alexander Technique are a bit like learning to read. Because the skill is a "how" and not really a "what," it can be applied to any interest. In our culture, reading is essential, but how would you convince a grownup who lived in a illiterate culture that they should invest the time to learn to read?

Of course, I ended up using Alexander Technique to solve many of my own problems. At the time, I was a sales person for my sign business. My "natural" voice mannerisms used to modulate up and down, which meant to prospective sign buyers that I was possibly unreliable so they didn't want to give me half the money up front to make them a sign. Using what I'd learned from Alexander Technique, I was able to change my voice mannerisms. A.T. had other advantages for me in that it allowed me to change how others regarded me in their first impressions. To give you an idea of its many other applications, I've used it to walk without a congenital limp, to learn to juggle, to learn faster to play nine-ball at a pool table, to prevent wrinkles on my face and to stop being petrified about public speaking.

But after thinking about all of these, I decided to select as the motive for my little storyboard the same reason that originally attracted me to become interested at my first exposure. Using Alexander Technique has the ability to change my consciousness, to expand my awareness - to evoke happiness...to "flow." Abraham Maslow had called this state of flow: "peak experience."

"Flow" - I believe that it's a term coined by this researcher/psychologist, (who's last name I can't spell) 
http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html

So, I made a storyboard. It's a sketched outline of how I'd explain Alexander Technique using my idea. Here's my story board... (Click on it to enlarge)

 In my case, my desire to evoke "FLOW" that was what attracted me to Alexander Technique. As I learned and studied, unlike most misunderstandings about the nature of what you're really learning, my hunch about Alexander Technique turned out to be the "real thing." My efforts to embody what my Alexander teachers had me "undo" did not disappoint my initial expectations. My original motive to learn Alexander Technique came from a desire to find a way to evoke an elusive state of mind that made me very, very happy... A state of mind that I'd experienced many times that was "flow" but I couldn't evoke it on purpose.

Bear in mind this sketch is merely a suggestion about how the real presentation would go...

Of course, from seeing a sketches of images on a story board, if you're not the creator, it might be tricky to imagine what the sketches would be indicating. Qualities of the communication might be determined by the pictures that are chose to be used to influence the final result. For instance, here's a picture of a Balinese dance teacher with his arms guiding a younger dance student, his hands entwined and supporting.

But this next one is even better....Because it shows the "embodied cognition" in the teacher's stance who has her hands on the torso to show by example in the moment the way she knows the younger girl in front of her could move freer. The teacher is emulating or modeling in the way she moves at the same time she is communicating what she means to the student. That's the magic part of what makes the Alexander Technique so unique. I racked my brain to find another example of this somewhere in the world, and this was the only thing I could find. But how many people have been to Bali to take dance lesson who would have known about this method of communication?

Can you think of another example where the teacher uses this direct "showing" method of teaching?

What do you think of this style of presenting Alexander Technique? If you're the sort of person who can imagine something from a sketch or an idea, what do you think of this story board plan?

(Also, I'd love to see the results of a story-board to illustrate or plan out what you'd like to communicate that you might have made.)

Real Natural

Do you have a claim to fame?

It's one of my standard fallback questions that I developed from my days of hitchhiking in the quest of becoming an entertaining conversationalist. If the person can say yes to this question, it never fails to yield an interesting tale about who they are and what has been important to them.

A former teacher of mine is someone who claims he's the inspiration for the character made famous by R. Crumb in the hippie comics era. In fact, he even changed his name legally to become Mr. Natural. This confounds those who have him fill out forms because his first name is Mr.  That's right - not Mister, but Mr. with a period.


But Mr. Natural as a real person has further claims to fame beyond his name and how he became famous for having assumed it. For instance, under his previous name, he personally fought and he won a case as that shaped landlord/tenant rights in San Francisco.

Natural has written a book about his own way of teaching music. It's a sort of reverse engineered jazz theory for beginners based on "do-re-mi..."  He and his business partner Angel have published a pretty easy-to-understand disambiguation of a college level music theory course called "Music Theory Decoded - Strictly by the Numbers". He's uploaded many group courses on music from classes he recorded and put on youtube for many instruments. He even invented a short-cut for composers to sketch their musical ideas before the song makes it into notation that's an improvement on what's known as "Nashville Notation."

 So - do you have a claim to fame?
If you don't yet, what would it be when your ship comes in?

Enjoy Learning

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.

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?

Find A Mentor

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...