Remember that our students are often surprised when they write down their experiences with each chapterâs credo. You might try the same thing each week. The discipline of analyzing your experiences brings new light.
Related Quotes
Myers as an artist and musician who had consulted with businesses through the Myers Institute for Creative Studies; Ray as a social psychologist and business professor who started bringing creativity into classes in the early sixties. We had each repeatedly observed that without the involvement of some very deep personal sources of creativity, idea-generating techniques used alone could produce confusion - or at best, short-term gains. As with the proverbial Chinese meal, an hour later and youâre hungry again.
So let us begin the adventure of living with the chapterâs heuristic: âDestroy judgment, create curiosity.â The first step is to recognise the power of your own thoughts by exploring your inner terrain.
A study from Harvard Business School shows that we learn more when we couple our experiences with periodic reflections. Even though people prefer to learn by doing, âparticipants who chose to reflect outperformed those who chose additional experience.
In each case the writer was possessed of an insight that organized the writing, and in each case a persona had been created to serve the insight. I became enraptured, tracing out the development of the persona in memoir after essay after memoir (it was out of this rapture that I realized I was a nonfiction writer). I began to read the greats in essay writingâand it wasnât their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae.
I challenged myself over the course of a single year to write down, as accurately as I could recall, the details of at least one session every week (or every other week) when something interesting caught my eye, when I had the sense that the Buddhist element was in play. Sometimes this influence was overt: people might ask me about meditation technique, or I might spontaneously bring something I had learned from Buddhism into the conversation. And sometimes it was only a feeling: I might find myself reaching beyond traditional analysis to help someone grasp an alternative perspective on whatever issue was troubling them.