Aware Expectations

I was just a kid, excited about going on a trip. Because the logistics of going on a trip were beyond me and depended on many factors about which I knew nothing, the anticipated fun event didn't happen. Or course, I was crestfallen. 

Fortunately, I had very wise parents who took my childish disappointment very seriously. They apologized for giving me the idea that this exciting thing was going to happen. But they also made me realize that I had built up the expectation on my own, with very little encouragement from them. They hadn't committed the family was going to go on this trip, they had stated they were going to explore making a decision about it after they researched the details. The trip was going to happen eventually, but not when and how I had expected it.

They attributed me building up my expectations to how much I like to make up stories; making me see that I had created my own disappointment because I had a talent and a passion for storytelling. They helped me to realize that I couldn't blame them for being the cause of my distasteful disappointment. If fact, I came to understand that because I liked to make up stories and explanations for many things, that I couldn't blame anyone else for that talent in me. The nature of talent is that it is irresistible. Paradoxically enough - talent can be almost an obsessive curse.

But still, here I was, causing my own emotions, feeling bad and how was I going to deal with it? Surely this expectation that I'd built so carefully into a blissful state of excitement wasn't a negative thing?

Even if an adult promised me who had the ability to make these things happen, was it really in my best interests to expect it and possibly make myself feel bad if it didn't happen? I realized that, so many events and factors were out of my own knowledge and influence, things could go wrong for grownups too that were unexpected. It was possible for disappointment to happen to me at any time because of what I had packed with meaning by doing this expecting.

My family offered me a much more interesting question about expectations: How was I going to use my irresistible ability to tell stories to make me feel good instead of bad?

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.)

Manifesto

I'll put what I mean in the positive,
leaving behind passé routines and shortened regrets.
Who, how and what I love shows my genius.
Coincidence-control is my delight.
I count on timing to take my talents for the ride they deserve 
Around a cycle of return, they're crying, "Me! Me now!"
Humility dazzles wealth.
  
I'll help with respect, merging with your bonding language  
to inspire, laugh & free you -  
because I am so often connected,
helped, awed and laughed. 
 
May my ruthless emotions be artful & tactful;
allowing others to misunderstand,
accepting who they are now,
releasing the curse and blessing
of glimpsing what is not yet born in everyone.
 
I'm always learning what "appropriate" means,
expanding connections & meaning-making.
My complaints are fodder.
I will design a way though artfully
dancing around my own resistance & fears,
forgiving myself again, in gratitude
as I learn what I can do, and
how I can do what I know.

Language for Perception

How do you perceive? Well, you just do it. That's an inadequate answer, so I decided to do some thinking about this.

Perhaps the way I teach people to observe themselves would be relevant to making up a language for perception. It's my business to be teaching people to perceive what they take for granted by teaching Alexander Technique. I use the often ignored kinesthetic sense as a medium, rather than the visual or auditory...but maybe we can cross-pollinate with it. Maybe we can use the same process and apply it to perception in general - say, the visual sense.

In Alexander Technique classes, students walk across the room and try to describe how they are walking. They can't, usually. So I introduce them to categories to form some questions for themselves. These categories function like thinking tools to organize and focus their point of view.

The categories are:

• timing
• sequence
• quality
• direction
• relationship

Once they have these categories, their ability to describe what they're experiencing for themselves gets unleashed. Their new ability to observe and describe what is happening works so well they can later design, on the fly, inventive ways for getting past some pretty serious self-imposed limitations.

So perhaps we could do this with perception in general. We could make general categories to help people ask themselves specific questions. Answering these questions would give us new perceptual information out of what we usually take for granted.

We're talking about the raw perception, not the content. So - how we direct attention to say, the visual sense with these categories? If I were to apply the same categories I just mentioned, I'd get something like:

• Quality: attention can be focused, like a searchlight, or diffuse like an overhead light.
  

• Timing: depending on when you pay attention, different things will be happening. A frozen image will show you stuff that you would miss in a movie, for instance. Bits and pieces do not have the same effect as the whole. Timing will influence the figure-ground relationship of what you can see. If you're moving fast while traveling, you'll have a whole different experience compared to moving slowly.
  

• Sequence: chains of paying attention to one thing after another bring different results; and mixing up sequences actually has an associative emotional effect. It's easy to mistake sequence for cause and effect.
  

• Direction: Where we are oriented contributes to Point Of View. POV and motive about what you want others to do, react and agree with you will color how you describe what you see.

Anyone else want to try one or more of these four categories about perception that I made up and apply them to help generate a new language for perception?

This is using your Thinking Skill bag of tricks!

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...