Receiving Advice

When you get advice, you are asking what that person would do if they were in your situation. That person is not you, and only knows what you have told them, in the way they have understood it. Once you have heard the advice, you can filter it for the bits of information that make sense to you in your world. 

A danger in giving advice, arises with the expectation that it will be implemented. That is not advice. That is an instruction. It is true that if there is no evidence that the advice has any impact, the person giving the feedback is unlikely to continue giving it. If the recipient does not seem open to it. If they are feigning interest without genuine listening or learning. There is a dance going on. 

There needs to be real curiosity, but also an acceptance that advice is autobiographical and projects experiences onto someone else. Not everything is going to land. There still needs to be clarity about whose decision it is. Otherwise, you get into a situation where responsibility does not walk hand in hand with authority. 

Similarly, when advice is being given... it is not a debate. The person listening doesn’t have to defend themselves. There may be clarity needed, or additional context required, but you don’t have to convince the advice-giver to act in the way the decision-maker would.

Oculus hoc est (1619)

Sharing Interests

People are interested in people who are interested in them. I have a deep reserve of inner confidence, partly because my Mother was always fascinated in, and supportive of, anything (and everything) I found interesting. My curiosity always had an army of motherly reserves. The South African bubble I grew up in has some resistance similar to British reserve to faking and overenthusiasm. I didn’t read the book “How to win friends and influence people” (Dale Carnegie) for years because the title sounded very “American” and fake. It is, I discovered, a brilliant text with some very practical observations on reality. One of those realities is we respond to people who show interest in us. Who are interested *because* we are interested. We recognise that indicates a deeper level of loyalty and willingness to put effort in, in order to share our worlds. If you want people to be genuinely interested in you, be genuinely interested in them. Yes, that takes effort. It shows.

Got my Back

With Ropes

I have approached approaches in one of two ways. Growing up, I was deeply involved in the Church.  I believed deeply that there was only one way, and it was the way I was learning. I didn't understand it fully, but I had guides (who also didn't understand it fully) and was very committed to going deeper with them. The truth was clear. It was me who needed to do the work. To iron out the inconsistencies. I could attack holes because it was my understanding that was at fault. The holes were holy.

This led to the first - a combative approach. I wanted to give myself fully. There was a period where people were 'Drunk in the spirit'. They had fully given themselves over and this had had physical manifestations. 

'Do not get drunk with wine, which will only ruin you; instead, be filled with the spirit'

Ephesians 5 : 18

The holy spirit had entered some of my fellow church-goers. Some would shake, some would tick, some would just glow with joy. Often it would be part of a service where we had been singing or listening to a sermon. We would then be asked to come to the front to give ourselves over to God if we had been moved by the spirit. To be born again. I desperately wanted this to happen to me.

I did go up on occasion. I always had a niggle I was faking, but the desire was genuine, the intent was good, and the love was there. I could shhh the niggle. I felt the '11th Commandment' (to love one another, as I have loved you) resonated deeply and I wanted to connect to that. But still. The holes. So behind the church tent, I would launch into my doubts with whichever poor guide had to be subjected to a very heady approach to a very hearty experience.

What about my friends who are really good people, but don't believe?

What about these truly awful things that have happened to people who don't deserve it?

My eventual moving away from the Church came from my head, and (more painfully) my heart. I dived into books and conversations trying to iron out those inconsistencies, and find that one truth. I couldn't. From the heart, life dealt me and those I loved too many blows to not get viscerally angry with the version of God I had grown up desperately trying to connect with. I couldn't connect to the 11th commandment with all the other pain that had built up. Like a relationship where you love someone, but have to create boundaries and walk away. I have never fallen out of love with anyone. I have had to walk away.

This led to the second - an exploratory approach. I stopped trying to iron out the holes in any philosophy I came across - IF the consequences were positive. If the story was constructive in helping me deal resiliently with life.

I was able to get involved in a fairly conservative form of Yoga - with Swami's wearing orange and Sanskrit chanting, by seeing the holy rather than the holey.

I think I will always be too attached to consistency to ever let go completely (without deeply trusting someone to come with me, and bring me back). I think of this as the difference between those who love rock climbing, and those who love rock climbing without ropes. I will never do extreme rock climbing without ropes. I value life too much to take that risk. I value the people I love too much. I will also not remain on the ground, if I am confident that I will be caught if I fall. 

Ropes snap, so there can never be certainty. Life is confusing, ambiguous, and uncertain. I can be very conscious about the risks I take. The consequences. The advantages. The costs. Then act. 'First with the head, then with the heart'.

First with the head

then with the heart

I love exploring. It comes from a position of constructive curiosity rather than destruction. To find the truth in something, not the truth of something.

But I will do it with ropes.

With Ropes

Faith

Constraint has value. Escape hatches have real costs. I value change, and critique, more than I value faith, but I see the value in faith. It can be beautiful. I can't sufficiently contain my curiosity in some areas to sustain faith without challenge. In other areas I have forced myself. Built trust in others. Choice can be as much of an impediment to understanding as blind faith. To go deeper, at some point you have to accept an end to going wider. Call that faith. Call that trust. We will always be ignorant. All we can do is choose our basket of ignorance. Strong relationships, founded on trust, let us go further as we expand our idea of who we are. Placing faith in those relationships, and making the choice to work at never letting them break is the choice I make.

Lifelong Learning (by Jeffrey Cufaude)

Guest Post: Jeffrey Cufaude

I talked in 'Finding your own river' about my excitement at the ongoing disruption of education. While information is becoming more freely available, one of the biggest attractions of 'expensive education' is the network. Even if you are able to get access to the same great content, how can you meet the same great people. Facebook is about people you know personally. LinkedIn is about people you have or might work with. You don't need to know people on Twitter. Think of it as a dating service for ideas. In amongst the usual noise of marketing and trolls, there are some amazing people on Twitter. You get direct access to an unfiltered filter of authors, thinkers, scientists, leaders, peace-makers, artists and doers and they engage!

I met Jeffrey Cufaude through Twitter. Jeffrey is a US-based designer and facilitator of high impact learning experience including conference keynotes and workshops. He currently is at work on his first book, Say Yes Less: Why It Matters and How to Do It. This essay is based on his 2012 TEDx Indianapolis talk (10 minutes) and an updated and expanded version (25 minutes) presented at the 2014 ACPA Convention. More info about Jeffrey can be found at www.ideaarchitects.org. Twitter: @jcufaude 

I think our banter started over the brilliance of Roger Federer, and then expanded to the lives of mere mortals.

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Lifelong Learning

by Jeffrey Cufaude

Lifelong learning? I gave it a whirl once, but it's really not for me.

It's unlikely anyone who hopes to lead a good life in the 21st Century would ever say such a thing. We toss out "lifelong learner" as implicitly desirable, but I'm not sure we've sufficiently unpacked the obligations that come along with self-proclaiming ourselves to be one.

Doing so may be even more important given how many of us will live longer... much longer: what is required to be a lifelong learner when life is long? I'm finding four dimensions help me answer the question: (1) increasing diversity, (2) ongoing discovery, (3) personal discipline, and (4) intentional disruption.

1. Increasing diversity ... of the content we consume, the communities in which we interact and contribute, and the connections we make in our personal and professional networks. It is not uncommon that later in our life our range of experiences begins to narrow. The types of life changes that force us to broaden out or start anew often become less frequent: job changes, geographic locations, et al. Lifelong learners know the value of continually diversifying the people, places, and publications that they explore and engage in periodic self-examination to ensure they do so.

2. Ongoing discovery of the possibilities of the diversity we encounter as opposed to automatic dismissal of perspectives that don't ring true with what we already believe or know. But the accumulation of our life experiences and the meaning we have made from them often rejects new findings that don't correlate and we succumb to confirmation bias.

Diversifying our experiences is of little value if we don't approach them with the curiosity of a beginner's mind: open, receptive, interested. Doing so requires sitting longer with what we are experiencing (observations) before trying to make meaning from it (inferences). See the ladder of inference for more information about this phenomenon.

3. Personal discipline to facilitate increasing diversity and ongoing discovery can be likened to both compounding interest from regular savings and interval training on a treadmill. Regularly set aside a small amount of money on a consistent basis and over time the reinvested interest and principal can amount to quite a lot. The same is true for small, but doable bites of lifelong learning. They accumulate value regardless of how small our ongoing investments. One "savings" habit that is part of learning discipline is to routinely hang out (read, write, etc in new environments. Routine immersion in different spaces populated by different people causes me to think differently.

Building cardiovascular endurance also requires interval training (interspersing shorts bursts of maximum effort with brief rest periods and the repeating immediately), particularly for longtime exercisers who have hit a plateau with their normal workout regimen. The same is true for lifelong learning: we need ongoing "steady state" learning that is comfortable for us to do, but as we age it increasingly needs to be coupled with interval learning in which we take short, but deep dives into content or a community.

4. Intentional disruption of our discovery, learning, and meaningful-making systems is inevitable if we want to avoid our once helpful routines becoming limiting ruts. Unlike a Twinkie, no personal discipline process can last forever. Forcing yourself out of a routine lets you disrupt yourself before the demands of the world around us do it to you.

As author Marina Gorbis notes in The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the SocialStructured World "The new system of learning is "best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows."

Living longer requires learning longer. May we all be successful at both.

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In writing a blog about several topics in which I admit to being a complete beginner, I am going to have to rely heavily on the people I am writing for who cumulatively know most of what I am likely to learn already. I would love it if some of you found the time to write a guest post on the subject of happiness or learning. The framework I use for thinking about these things is what I call the '5 + 2 points' which includes proper (1) exercise, (2) breathing, (3) diet, (4) relaxation, (5) positive thinking & meditation, (+1) relationships, (+2) flow. Naturally if you would like to write about something that you think I have missed, I would love to include that too. If you are up to doing something more practical, it would be awesome if you did a 100 hour project and I am happy to do the writing based on our chats if that is how you roll. Email me at trevorjohnblack@gmail.com