Wednesday, July 25, 2007

The Art of Possibility

As expected, HTR Phase-2 is really difficult for me. Although I am fairly comfortable with introspection, I have never had a great deal of interest in understanding the mechanisms behind my own thought processes. But, for me to really get rid of some HAVE TOs, I ... well, there really is no other way to say this ... I have to do this. Weird, huh?

So, I've been on the lookout for some ideas to help. One of the most common is the idea of framing. It basically says that the world that we see is contained by our own point of view - our "frame". We can't see our own frames very well and we are usually not aware of their impact on our perceptions. This makes them very difficult to change.

I did have something cross my path last week, however, that jolted my frame a bit. The book is called The Art of Possibility. It was written by a husband/wife team. He is a symphony conductor, she is a family counselor and they do business consulting together. You can see why I was intrigued - especially since I found it while questing for Ommi books.

I sent it to her and she decided I needed to read it, too. She was going to send me her copy but decided to re-read it. I can't send my copy to any of you because I will be doing the same. For those of you who don't know, that is fairly unusual behavior, but it is necessary in this case. There was something about the first few chapters that I resisted. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but I'm pretty sure that I didn't get much out of them. In fact, if I had not been on an airplane with the choices being this book or "Blades of Glory", I'm not sure that I would've read far enough to get past it.

But I did. Have you ever had the experience of struggling through an idea? I remember feeling this a lot in Quantum Mechanics in college, but I've been feeling the same thing lately in the HAVE TO reductions. I knew the answer was in there, but I couldn't get it to come out into the part of my brain that could deal with it. The language in this book helped me to verbalize several concepts that I have been fighting through. It isn't that the words or ideas are necessarily new. It has to do with the application of them to life as I know it in corporate America and outside of that structure. So, I'll talk about a few ideas that come from this book over the next few posts. And, yes, Ms. AD, this is for you!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

AHHHH She sighs in relief of finally a post!!! So busting out of the frames. I've heard of this but phrased differently. It's called cultural conditioning by Will Durant. I'm thinking that being bi-cultural (especially Arab, although anything Indian or Far East would qualify) you would lack some of that framing because you know things that are acceptable change depending on location, belief, morays etc. However, you still have trouble wearing things that are sleeveless so who knows. Maybe you've become more suceptable to them and chose the conservative middle ground. Ang is the pattern finder who finds the line where the cultures overlap and walks it. Perhaps trying to please both is more defined. Picking the camaflouge that hides you in both cultures. That would be tough for sure. Of course I could be way off the mark here. Still I'm itching to hear these ideas I hope you write more on it.

Angela said...

You are actually dead on! The camo thing is a serious issue for me. It means that I spend too much time calculating all of the possible angles before acting. Part of Phase 2, for me, is figuring out how to actually just be me in public situations. It has been very uncomfortable to think about, but I will be posting more. Maybe even tomorrow!

Madelyn said...

Yeah, I think it's all about the stuff in chapter "Rule Number 6", connected with the cultural stuff AD's talking about. I too, btw, say AHHHH and want to hear where this goes. I'm there too - to some extent. Though I'm not consciously focusing on it - or anything but the house - aaargh!