From Curt Rosengren comes a link to a Wall Street Journal article on trusting intution:
“Watch for bias. Don’t confuse intuitive thinking with personal subjectivity, which often emerges as a result of prejudices, biases, fears, fantasies or purely emotional reactions. Constant analysis of your thinking is the only way to winnow genuine intuitive grain from emotional chaff.
Keep a record. To determine how strong your intuitive ability is, keep a record of your intuitive insights, or hunches, as they occur. Rate them objectively. If a reasonable number have worked out, cultivate and pay attention to your intuitions.
Diary-keeping is the best way to separate genuine intuitive hunches from wishful projections. If you discover that many of your hunches turn out to be wrong, take stock. Try to learn how your personal interests, wishes, fears and anxieties tend to distort your perceptions and block the way to clear and valid intuitions.
It’s a normal function. Realize that intuitive thinking is a normal function of the brain, not a euphemism for clairvoyance, mystical precognition or similar questionable phenomena.
Intuitive thinking requires thorough spadework on a problem. You’ve got to have the basic facts and information before intuitive processes can take over. Jerome S. Bruner of Harvard University says, ‘Individuals who have extensive familiarity with a subject matter appear more often to leap intuitively into a decision or to a solution of a problem — one which later proves to be appropriate.’
A combined approach. Use intuitive and analytic modes of thought in combination. The intuitive mode isn’t opposed to the rational, cognitive mode, but complements it. Typically, intuitive insights both precede and follow the exhaustive use of analysis, reason and logic.
Depending on the problem, decide which mode is most appropriate. Where the intuitive mode is used first, the analytic mode should be tried afterward. In fact, all intuitive thinking should be subsequently transposed into linear, logical order for articulation and implementation.
Analyze and wait. Genuine intuitive insights are not under conscious control or will. You can’t predict when they’ll come. So tackle problems consciously. Learn as much about them as you can using the analytic processes. Acquire all known data. Laziness often is the source of faulty hunches.”
Following up on the music postings this week, this list is a guide for animating improvisation, because the best kinds of improvisations come from the gut as intuitive responses to a situation. But again, intuition, like improvisation, needs to be honed with practice and reflection. There is no book that can tell you how to refine your intuition, but articles and lists like this point the way towards a set of practices that will put you more in touch with the skills you need to be able to think on your feet.
Agility comes from a strong ability improvisation and improvisation arises out of a well-honed intuitive sense. Most decisions one needs to make in a complex and changing environment are not self-evident. They are made out of a field of choices. Honing these agility capacities makes one better able to make better choices, finding the je ne sais quoi that rises above the avilable data and creates something truly new and spectacular.
Got this great little piece from Killing the Buddha by way of wood s lot:
“I got a job pushing monks into the ocean. The monks don’t seem to mind, and the abbot says that my threat promotes awareness. So I’m sitting here on my observation chair, watching the mainland recede, working on my peripheral vision. Not that the monks are fast. They are at peace in walking meditation, so I don’t want to interrupt the cadence so much as divert it, shuffle out into the hot sand, barefoot and cringing, and see if the monk notices my presence. If he turns and nods, I back away. But if he is lost in thought? Whoosh. Most of them surface facing up, smiling. Sometimes — and this is part of their beatific appeal — they gurgle. ‘To drift is to return,’ as the abbot would say.”
There is a difference between being lost in thought and meditating that opens one’s awareness. In meditation, as in other activities in which the flow state is so important, one must remain in contact with the environment, in fact the purpose of the activity is to enhance connections with the environment, both inner and outer.
To do this, to have this luxury of developing a practice that expands our awareness, it is necessary to embrace the external reminders of the real world, for those are ultimately the things that seed our practice.
For more on Buddhist perspectives on working with our own reactions to disturbances outside of us, have a look at the practice of lojong mind training, a practice of working with the messiness in the world by developing our own compassion. Especially useful in this respect is Pema Chodron’s book, Start Where You Are.
For a while in the mid nineties, CBC ran a satire called “The Great Eastern” which billed itself as “Newfoundland’s Cultural Magazine,” aired by arrangement with the fictitious Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland. While looking for something else, I stumbled over their website, featuring a bunch of episodes:
“The Great Eastern–Newfoundland’s Cultural Magazine, started as an hour-long summer replacement on CBC Radio in 1994 and since 1996 was a half-hour program on the regular Saturday morning schedule. Despite critical acclaim and a dedicated fan base, the CBC effectively cancelled the show after the 1998-99 season, further alienating the thousands of listeners out there looking for something intelligent, well-written, and above-all funny on the radio dial.”
This was one of the best shows ever to air on the CBC in the mid nineties. Absolutely brilliant writing, and very subtle humour. Very much in the British tradition (see People Like Us, for example). Rumours are that the GE crew will be back in some guise in the summer, but not as The Great Eastern.
Another installment of linkage for your perusal:
- A Guide to Formal Consensus decisionmaking
- Peter Denning on Building a Culture of Innovation via EMERGIC.org
- Entomology: Invasion of the brood. “The 17-year cicadas are about to emerge in force” Watch out!
- Full text of DESCHOOLING SOCIETY by Ivan Illich
- Creating a Culture of Gift (.pdf) via Wealth Bondage
- Krishnamurti Information Network – Krishnamurti Biography via Whiskey River
- Anne Cameron on the bears of Tahsis and the morons that hunt them for fun, with a great discussion in the comments.
- Movement As Network(.pdf) via GiftHub
- You Can Choose To Be Happy, an online book by Tom Stevens with a nice chapter on self-observation. Via Curt Rosengren
- AWARENESS: The instrument and aim of experiential resarch which looks at how to ask questions that heighten our awareness
Just got a phone call from my friend Mike Mearns, who is the Executive Director of the Aboriginal Financial Officers Association of BC, an organization that supports First Nations financial and management capacity through training and workshops. They are looking for an Executive Assistant, but don’t let the job title fool you. The main duties are developing training materials and organizing workshops for First Nations administrators working “at the coal face” as it were:
“The Aboriginal Financial Officers Association of B.C. (AFOA-BC) requires an Executive Assistant to provide support to the General Manager and Board of Directors. Our association is established to represent the interests of its membership in areas of First Nations financial management and administration. Duties of this position will include office administration, education and training event coordination, membership communication and coordination.
As a large percentage of job duties include support in adult financial/administration training and education we require you to have a degree or diploma in business administration or education. As well, we require 3-5 years experience in providing assistance to a manager and board of directors in areas of training conference/seminar management and adult learning. Suitable candidates must have excellent computers abilities including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and Access. Accounting knowledge and skills will also be an asset in providing support to the association. Knowledge of and previous work experience with a First Nations organization is preferred.”
There may be those of you out there who have an interest in facilitation. adult learning, management and administration training and First Nations issues that might want to consider this one. The competition is closing very soon, and they are still looking to fill out their candidate field.
Contact Mike through the AFOA website and let him know I sent you.