Back-firing, Suggestions?

I have many talents, but many of them seem to be back-firing on me at once. My headlights went ON when I discovered creative thinking as a teen. Since then I've been experiencing what I've read is quite common that many inventors run into head-on as they attempt to present their new ideas to others.

Proselytizers are icky - that's how many creative people interpret and respond to my enthusiasm when I bother to show it. They don't understand why I have suggestions for them. (Only Barbara Sher's Idea Party crowd really gets it.) My magic power is a high-idea talent generator that keeps the ideas coming when everyone else is spent.

Evidently, there is a cost to doing what is new. People can't imagine what motivates, so they assign the motive they can imagine. Most people are not very imaginative. Most commonly they become quite concerned with self-preservation while they freak out.

Of course, you're different. You're imaginative! You love to think!

Here are three situations where my brilliant creative thinking is causing chaos rather than solutions. Please offer your suggestions and bright ideas!

1. My ideas and experience of Alexander Technique are random acts of senseless beauty here:

In the situation of being able to come up with many ideas for their benefit, people mistakenly assume that I have some sort of investment in controlling them by telling them how and what else it is possible. This doesn't happen on the internet, because I don't know who they are, where they are or if they take my ideas for a ride or not and I've put a great deal of thought behind making it simple.  This is great deal why I put so much of my energy into writing about creative thinking and writing about Alexander Technique. This takes up a great deal of my time without me getting much personal benefit back from it. But it's fulfilling on many levels because at least my intent is clear to others. So I spend 'way too much time doing it online - how can that be more productive time?

My way of teaching Alexander Technique in private lessons doesn't happen with the right timing for people. When I show someone how to get free of restrictions, (and what else is possible once you get free,) it's sometimes too effective hands-on. But teaching that way it takes too long and makes students dependent. So I make it more simple and  "hands-off" so students can do it themselves from the very beginning. Then it's too simple and repetitive so they trivialize the usefulness of the information. (Obviously, there's a fine line between simply accessible and a topic being so conceptual that it becomes watered down and useless.) What would you prefer?  Hands off or hands on? Or what else? Could you suggest a way to solve both these issues at once?

2. Relationships

If I know the person intimately, I'm a great observer with a long memory who can compensate for time of arrival. So I can describe for them what patterns of behavior I see them doing over this long period of time, (patterns that they have determined are in their way from before they met me.) So when I give them a way out, they tell me I have an investment in changing them and fight me because I handed them this observation and gave them keys to significant improvement. So, I let them fly on their own and they fall down, because someone who was "trying to change them" for their own selfish convenience wouldn't allow that freedom. Them identifying my care-taking as "twisted co-dependence" meant I could not express my care for them at all! Perhaps because I predicted their fall after seeing the pattern, they get rid of me because I "caused" them to fall, (the "kill the messenger" approach.) I regard this as being part of a pattern that is bound to re-occur because it's inherent in the caretaker/care taking role. This issue is surely to evolve if I hook up with a partner who will eventually need care - or I will eventually need help.

3. Social Change

Other people who don't know me very well imagine I'm really weird to broadcast my bright and wild ideas that shows them what else they can do (to be more imaginative about relationships, for instance.) If I show the benefit of my own inner understanding of myself, (my lack of jealousy, for instance,) they react by being afraid of me. The feedback I've heard about that is I am flaunting my maturity and insight... toward various negative effects only limited by their lack of imagination. In one case, my motive, (according to one person,) was supposedly to make a splash and incite controversy as if discussing the idea was going to result in me doing the idea personally. (Not my intent. But I can see how most people personally identify with their ideas. So at least I can understand where this assumption originates.)


OK - any ideas on one or all of these three? You can blog a long-winded answer, leave a comment, give a tweet on #ideaparty or call me up on the phone and talk to me... if you have my number. I'll add them to future posts...

Any Questions?

 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.