Posts Tagged ‘positive psychology’
Self-Knowledge XVII
And a man said, “Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.”
And he answered, saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always know in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”
Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.
Khalil Gibran
4 puzzles of positive psychology
I forgot to finish my series on the 4 puzzles of positive psychology, but I was reminded by lines I read in Khalil Gibran.
The maths of happiness
Old school
Much of the time we forget that everything written about psychology is based on an underlying mathematical model. Psychologists like measuring things and as soon as they do, they’ve made an assumption, whether they realize it or not, about the shape of the thing measured.
Much of our work uses as straight line like the ruler we used as school. We fill in questionnaires. We get points and we get a score. We think of intelligence, for example, as being a straight line. We have more. We have less. And we can describe our intelligence as a point on that line. A point.
New school
Positive psychology tosses that assumption out of the window. Mostly.
We stop seeing something like intelligence or happiness as more or less. We discard the line. We definitely discard the point. Points will now signify illness. Serious illness requiring hospitalization and round the clock care.
Now we see psychological phenomena in terms of “flourishing” or “languishing”. Are we moving around the world freely, or are we stuck in the mud unable to move in any direction?
The mathematical model that we now use describes what is means to be flourishing. It is a model of movement, not stillness. It is a model of action & reaction and how we change from one moment to the next, not how we stay the same.
Kahlil Gibran came to my rescue to explain the combination of happiness and sorrow in poetry.
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
Sorrow and joy are two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other. When our life is all one or all the other, we are ill. We are living in a make-believe world.”
Personal, persistent & pervasive
But being what we are, we tend to think that “what is” will continue forever. When times are bad, we tend to feel that bad times will continue forever. That whatever is is “personal, persistent & pervasive” when it is simple a natural oscillation that in this moment is giving us particular pleasure or sadness.
The danger is that in our anxiety we might bring our worst fears to pass. The trick is to mourn that which should be mourned but not claim that everything else is also a source of sorrow. Nonetheless, this is a trap that we all fall into sometimes.
Enough for now. The important thing to grasp is that happiness is not a question of a mark on a ruler. Happiness exists only in contrast to sorrow; so it coexists with sorrow. Oscillation between the two, and all the points in between, is normal and healthy, because without sorrow, it would not be possible to be happy. It would not be possible to appreciate happiness. If nothing changed, if nothing every changed, we would not even notice it were there.
It is not a contradiction to say that happiness includes sorrow. It just depends up on the maths that you assumed at the beginning.
When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.
Posted on: January 13, 2010
Like so many people, I resent the paper of business. I resent the untidiness of returns that go off to government at odd times that bear no relation to what is happening in the business itself. I hate the way it takes half-and-hour to process a bit of paper.
Other people hate other aspects of their job and probably for the same reason. The rhythm of what they are doing clashes in some respect with another rhythm. As I resist settling down to a task that takes far too long to orient – to work out a step-by-step process – and needs to be finished from beginning to end otherwise that settling down time will be wasted again tomorrow, I found another poem from Khalil Gibran. We work to be in step with “life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.” We need to find the rhythm of the dull parts of our job and revere them. Not to do that is “to become a stranger to the seasons”. That’s a more interesting way to look at the parts of our job that we find deadly.
What do you think?
Work chapter VII
Then a ploughman said, “Speak to us of Work.”
And he answered, saying:
You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.
When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music.
Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?
Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.
But if you in your pain call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written.
You have been told also life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.
And I say that life is indeed darkness save when there is urge,
And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge,
And all knowledge is vain save when there is work,
And all work is empty save when there is love;
And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.
Often have I heard you say, as if speaking in sleep, “he who works in marble, and finds the shape of his own soul in the stone, is a nobler than he who ploughs the soil.
And he who seizes the rainbow to lay it on a cloth in the likeness of man, is more than he who makes the sandals for our feet.”
But I say, not in sleep but in the over-wakefulness of noontide, that the wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass;
And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.
Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distills a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
Khalil Gibran
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom
Anais Nin
I wonder when that time comes?
We fret when we are not blooming
I think we always know when the blooming is about to happen just as surely as some days we wake up and know we will tear through the to do list. But we can’t bloom all the time and when we aren’t blooming, we fret.
- Some times we are anxious to flower before our time. We are not really ready to bloom. We are just anxious that we will miss the summer. We want reassurance like a child needs to know how many nights to Christmas.
Our sense of timing has gone missing. I am sure we could get it back with a few moments quiet contemplation or a five minutes of genuine listening to a friend’s distress.
- Other times we are reluctant to bloom and we miss the summer. Sometimes we are not paying attention or we are trying to blackmail the world.
Maybe we need to “go out” and get in touch with the world to see if we notice the seasons changing. Maybe our friend needs a brief of fresh air or a change of scenery.
- Other times we need to blossom but the weather is foul and we don’t want our fine petals to be cast into the wind. We fret because we also know that there is no time other than now. “Conduct you blooming in the noise and crack of the whirlwind.” says Gwendolyn Brooks.
Maybe we stopping through vanity. Yes, we will be ragged and have no idea where our petals will fly. Maybe they will just lie unnoticed.
But it is time to bloom. And we can’t remain in a tight bud out of vanity. It is time to burst into flower.
We always know when we are about to bloom
We will know when we are going to bloom anyway. Though we may have no applause.
No need to be vain. Bloom.
Autumn will come soon and we will be in another season of our lives.
Is happiness = pleasure?
Gaye Prior kindly commented on my post about poetry and positive psychology.
“Pleasure does not give life meaning and purpose and love. These are more important to me than passing enjoyment and survive even in the face of tragedy, horror, awfulness and loss.”
Do positive psychologists equate happiness with pleasure?
I’ve promised to reply in four parts describing the 4 puzzles of positive psychology. This is the first part.
Principles of positive psychology
Let’s make the 1st principle of positive psychology the study of the positive (rather than the study of the negative or gaps or deficits.)
The 2nd principle is that well-being or happiness has three parts. As Gaye says “Pleasure does not give life meaning and purpose and love.”
Martin Seligman points out that well-being is made up of
The pleasurable life
The engaged life
The meaningful life
There is a questionnaire on the Penn Uni site that anyone can do. The items on the questionnaire flesh out the concepts. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and pick “measures 3 routes to happiness” under “life satisfaction questionnaires” (2nd last on the page as I write).
Using the ideas of pleasure, engagement and meaning to enrich your life
Here is the description of the three levels of life provided by the psychologists at Penn Uni.
Higher scores on the Engaging Life (knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life) and the Meaningful Life (using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are) have been shown to lead to greater satisfaction with life. Higher scores on the Pleasant Life (having as many pleasures as possible and having the savoring and mindfulness skills to amplify the pleasures) don’t add to satisfaction. To measure your satisfaction, use the Satisfaction with Life Scale.
Keeping pleasure, engagement and meaning in balance
Few of us have our lives in balance. That is the message for people who live in abundant circumstances. Seek balance (and stop complaining!).
Seeking pleasure, engagement and meaning in difficult circumstances
For those of who do not live in abundant circumstances, we have serious shortfalls in one area or another and these shortfalls are not under our control.
I am always uneasy about casual interpretations of positive psychology that dismiss reality. Life can be awful.
The point though is what can be done about it? If something is not under our control, there is little point in railing about it. It it is not under our control then it is not under our control. Focusing on what is out-of-control just makes us feel helpless. That was Seligman’s original speciality btw ~ learned helplessness. Continually focusing on what cannot be done destroys our ability to do anything.
What we can do is work with what we’ve got, and work with whomever will work with us, to leverage whatever we can. We may not be able to change reality but we can do what we can.
Taking control of what little is under our control increases our chances of surviving difficult circumstances
Doing what we can with people who are important to us also seems to increase our chances of survival. Those chances might be minimal, as they were for later psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who survived an extermination camp. But they improve.
The overriding rule
We must remember that we have to work with what is under our control. That is you, me, the people around us and what works. Those are our tools.
The importance of pleasure
We should also not neglect the pleasurable life. We should respect fine food, the sunset and the rose growing in the garden. Oddly, savoring and mindfulness, though nowhere near the whole story of positive psychology, start a positive spiral.
Gratitude diaries provoke a spiral of well being. On a really bad day, feel the earth under your feet. Look at that unexciting doorway of brick and mortar as the most magnificent invitation.
The unfairness of engagement
The engaged life is easy for professional people. We work and like to. Engagement is much more problematic for young people who generally only find ‘flow’ in sports and hobbies. One of the reasons that computer games are popular is that they provide the autonomy, social interaction, opportunity to learn, and opportunity to belong to something meaningful that is often not possible in our educational system.
People in low level jobs also have trouble finding flow in jobs which are poorly designed, micro-managed, and in which they are treated with rudeness and contempt. It is common for people in low level jobs to “recraft”. Why is it that security guards in Zimbabwe are more knowledgeable than shop assistants? Why are domestic help loyal? There is an element of Stockholm syndrome, but there is also a natural tendency to create a job that is satisfying to do.
The fragility of meaning
The meaningful level is provided by being part of something larger than ourselves.
I imagine more wars are created by violating this level than by anything more complicated. We are sensitive to exclusion and exclusion ‘crashes’ our psychological structures very quickly indeed (5 to 10 minutes does it.)
When we are victims of exclusion, we can create a temporary protective buffer with savoring, mindfulness and gratitude diaries. Some people use the pleasure principle badly, of course, and take to overeating and drink, both of which have their place in celebration but are ill-advised compensation for lack of belonging. A walk or smelling a rose allow us to avoid adding a punished body to a battered soul.
Exclusion is devastating.
I hasten to add, that we shouldn’t be too judgemental about people who ‘get it wrong’ because exclusion is devastating.
There is a saying
“when someone in authority like a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, it is like looking in a mirror and not being able to see your face.”
I imagine this is why migrant who “walk both sides of the street” settle better than those who try to assimilate.
Buffering oneself from the impact of exclusion
The antidotes to institutional exclusion (that go beyond a painful social slight) are to develop empathy with others, to show solidarity, and to work on healthy political structures.
We all know the do-gooder who ‘helps’ others. I mean travel the same road as others. Suffer the same risks and share the same glory.
Solidarity is a long road but it is the best road. Mindfulness matters again but not the mindfulness of concrete pleasures. This time we want mindfulness towards the dynamism of the universe.
Simple techniques like closing one’s eyes and listening for the furthest sound can break the cycle of intense stress. Paolo Coelho’s post of today tells us to look expectantly for the magic moments that arrive unannounced and are gone in a twinkle. When we think there is only one microsecond of possibility a day, we pay attention. Even David Whyte’s line of “everybody is waiting for you” suggests to us that we need to reach out.
In teaching, we often use Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese to show that we are part of any situation in which we find ourselves and by showing compassion to ourselves (as opposed to self-pity and indulgence), we help to feel in touch with the movement of the universe. I’ll add the poem at the bottom.
Three levels of a good life
In summary, Gaye identified the three levels of a good life:
- pleasure ~ respect for beauty and comfort
- engagement ~ enjoyment of work
- meaning ~ belonging to something bigger than ourselves
With this layout, pleasure seems as if it is the lower level. It is a level that is easily abused but so to is over-identification with achievement or subordinating ourselves to readily to others.
All three are part of the good life. When life is in a mess, try doing an audit of what is going well in each area. Sometimes the map that follows is surprising.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Don’t spend a day without having noticed a miraculous moment when the universe converges and you were there
Posted on: January 7, 2010
Positive psychology in poetry
When it comes to understanding positive psychology, there really is no competition between prose and poetry.
Today, Paulo Coelho quoted a passage from his book By The River Piedra I sat Down and Wept, the first in the triology about a week in the life of someone ordinary to whom something extraordinary happens. You must read it for yourself.
Positive psychology in prose
In prose, which is no substitute, this is what he said.
Every day there is a moment when a miracle is possible. It doesn’t announce itself. It is easily missed. And it is likely to present itself in the most unlikeliest ways. In a humdrum guise, or as to lowly that it is not worth earthly notice.
When we look back on our day or our year or our life, we want to look back on those miraculous moments when we were fully attentive and our understanding changed in a flash and our lives changed too.
Because these moments are easy to miss, it is very easy to spend a whole day attending only to what we know. To make sure we never miss those glancing moments, we have to pay attention, expectantly to everything around us.
So we slow down and live a less cluttered life. To be sure, the more we pack in, the more we are likely not pay attention to anything.
And even when life is slow, when our company is dull, when we yearn to be elsewhere, we can still pay attention to the moment, and look out for a miracle. It may not come in that hour. There are no promises. But it might.
Be mindful
Don’t miss it.
Don’t spend a day without having noticed a miraculous moment when the universe converges and you were there.
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Positive psychology in poetry
Posted on: January 7, 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
Positive Psychology in Poetry
in time of daffodils (who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why, remember how
in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so (forgetting seem)
in time of roses (who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if, remember yes
in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek (forgetting find)
and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me
E E Cummings
Positive Psychology in prose
#1 Don’t worry about why you are here. Do what stirs your heart and expands your life.
Rule-of-thumb: Live your life without regrets. When you are on your deathbed and you think back on this decision, what will you wish you had done.
#2 Don’t worry about who is letting you down. Call for the “angels of your better nature”.
Rule-of-thumb: Think again. What would happen if you ‘invite and apologize”.
#3 Don’t worry about what may fail. The future doesn’t exist. Be mindful. There is only now.
Rule-of-thumb: Count ten things that you love and can reach out and touch. Even the coarse texture of the dungeon walls.
#4 Don’t judge your life by what you will “achieve” or “get”. Become adventurous.
Rule-of-thumb: When your goals worry you, ask which part of the project you will do.
#5 Remember that nothing in life endures except our relationship with others.
Rule-of-thumb: Ask what would happen if you put people first and put other concerns second?
Would you phrase the prose differently?
At first, I was suspicious about positive psychology
I came to positive psychology some 10 years ago and like many people, I was deeply suspicious. Life is not about happiness, I thought. Life is about effectiveness. Life is about dealing with reality.
I still think that is what life is all about but I have also changed my “mental model” of happiness
Many people encountering positive psychology and happiness for the first time feel the same suspicious. And they write columns in newspapers and the speak on radio and TV about why focusing on happiness is wrong-headed.
A straight-forward summary of the puzzle of positive psychology
Gaye Prior writing from Zimbabwe, commented the post I wrote yesterday on poiesis and auto-poiesis and has captured the debates very clearly.
I realise that you write often of happiness and I wonder how you define what happiness is? It seems to me that many people might describe happiness as pleasure, which to me is more of an ephemeral thing and not happiness in the least. Pleasure does not give life meaning and purpose and love. These are more important to me than passing enjoyment and survive even in the face of tragedy, horror, awfulness and loss.
All over the web people write about happiness and often it sees to me, living here, to be more about pleasure than purpose. I know your blog is more about work and how positive psychology pertains to that and that you may have already done this and I missed it before I found you blog. Perhaps you could just [give] me the reference?
4 puzzles of positive psychology
I’ll answer her query at four levels
#1 The contribution of pleasure, engagement and meaning to well-being.
#2 Happiness at difficult times and in difficult places.
#3 The ‘maths’ of happiness and why positive psychologists agree that much of enjoyment is “passing”.
#4 How conventional psychology is a ‘straw man’.
I’ll leave this here for today and summarize each of the issues in a separate post.
Poiesis
I learned something very interesting just now. The Greek word for poetry is poiesis – ‘making’.
That wouldn’t have been too dramatic a discovery but management theorists are fond of the word auto-poesis.
Auto-poiesis
Autopoiesis literally means “auto (self)-creation” (from the Greek: auto – αυτό for self- and poiesis – ποίησις for creation or production), and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function.
We like this word in management because it expresses the constant interplay between our relationships with the world and ourselves.
Autopoiesis vs allopiesis
An autopoietic system is to be contrasted with an allopoietic system, such as a car factory, which uses raw materials (components) to generate a car (an organized structure) which is something other than itself (the factory).
Management theory in the 21st century
Much of the management theory I grew up with was about allopoietic systems. How do we turn inputs into something that we will send out or away? X and Y.
Indeed, even allowing for the transformation of X into Y is somewhat of a novelty for a psychologist. To have a feedback loop from Y to X is so challenging that the loop mysteriously disappears from some text books!
When we think of ourselves as autopoietic, we allow that “if organization of a thing changes, the thing changes.” Here we are saying that every time a bolt and a washer, or indeed anything enters a factory, or a car leaves a factory, the factory itself has changed.
We are less concerned with what goes in and what goes out and more concerned with way the factory reinvents itself minute-by-minute.
An example of an autopoietic system
It’s a bit giddy-making when we switch from one idea to the other.
For the research minded
It is easier for research, stats-minded people to see the idea when they think of Losada’s work on the maths of happiness. Happiness is made up of three things yet any one these is not happiness, or even the beginning of happiness. The three things are a positivity/negativity ratio of around 5 to 1, slightly more curiosity than advocacy, and slightly more interest in the outside world than ourselves. We don’t add up these three variables. Rather, they “feed” off each other. At any one time their coordinates (x,y,z) can be anywhere in a 3D space shaped like a 3D butterfly.
Happiness means we have a big plump space and the coordinates swoop around. Unhappiness means they have a repetitive circle or limited space. Here we see the dialectic between structure and function.
We are healthy when we are constantly regenerating ourselves in response to the world around us and what we were a minute ago.
We become ill when we don’t look after who we were one minute ago (right now in other words) and we don’t attend to what is going on around us. We are ill when our head is anywhere except here and now.
There is room for day dreaming, planning and reminiscing. But as the icing on the cake. Devoting space to what we are not is not healthy. A healthy mind is asking what is going on now and celebrating what is rather than what is not.
For the non-research minded
For the non-research minded, lets think of a cake made of flour, eggs and sugar. We can vary the proportions, or at least good a baker can, and by varying proportions we get a good range of delicious cakes. To have one type of cake all the time is boring. Happiness, in this analogy, is a wide variety of cakes from plain biscuits to luscious forest cakes. We have a plain biscuit today and we feel like a rich cake tomorrow, and vice versa.
Life becomes grim when the recipe never changes or we try to swap eggs for something else (like potatoes). We need constant variety within broad rules.
We need to enjoy each cake for what it is. A dry biscuit is that. It is not chocolate cake. It never will be.
We also need to bake the cake. Happiness is the cake. Not a line of eggs, sugar and flour on the kitchen table. It is a baked cake. It is the product of interacting parts mixed sensibly.
Poiesis
I didn’t know that poetry means making. Auto-poiesis is the poetry of ourselves. The constant interplay between structure (me) and function (the world).
Psychology blossomed in the noughties
Positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, and mytho-poetic tradition are well understood and taught in psychology and management classrooms in all corners of the world.
But we need a name
Paradoxically though, the technical names for these fields are relatively unintelligible to lay people. If there is anything we want to achieve in this field, it is to be intelligible to ordinary people.
Would personal leadership do as name?
Eventually, I settled on the term personal leadership.
We are concerned about styles of leadership that are personal. What I do, for example is not strictly relevant to what you do. And what I do today, has little bearing on what is relevant tomorrow.
And does the name contribute to our understanding?
Having described the rationale of this new field in these words, is it truly a discipline that belongs in the professions?
How can this definition of leadership generate a theory that is useful in practice? After all, if what is relevant today and is not relevant tomorrow, what use is that theory?
We have an ontological challenge
The difficulty is less in the epistemology, that is in the way we study leadership, than in the ontology, the nature of leadership.
We used to think of leadership as something we do.
Now we look at ourselves in context. Our unit of analysis, as researchers say, is “ourself in context”.
What are the practical implications of defining leadership as ourselves in context?
We don’t exist when we don’t see
David Whyte refers to attention. “When my eyes are tired the world is tired also”. We are our habits of attention. We are what we attend to. We are our capacity to pay attention. When our way is lost, we find ourselves by paying attention. By becoming mindful and “touching and feeling” what is around us.
The big change in our understanding of leadership
Who we are is not what we do repeatedly and well.
Who we are is our frontier. Who we are is the place where we are curious about the world. Who we are is the frontier we cannot ignore.
Paradoxically, often when we feel tired, it is not because we are at our frontier, it is because we are not. We are not at a place where we are confronting the unknown carried by the energy of compulsive curiosity.
Leadership is not a spectator sport
We feel alive when we are in a place where “we want to know”. We are leaders when our curiosity about a situation leads us to ask questions. We are leaders when our compulsive curiosity asks questions which holds a mirror up to a situation.
We are leaders when our questions allow people to ask their questions.
How can we understand leadership in a way that allows us to share knowledge?
This question has two goals.
#1 What is the knowledge I can share?
There are many ways of sharing knowledge and we know stories are much more effectual than dry statistics answering questions that were unlikely from the outset to produce a practically significant answer.
We also know that knowledge is also more likely to be absorbed when people trust the presenter – when the presenter shares the journey of the students.
#2 What can I charge for my knowledge?
And probably more important is the heretical question of what can we charge for our knowledge. How can we claim and sustain status for our knowledge?
It is this question that personal leadership answers. We share knowledge not because we are right, but because we are willing to share in the gains and losses of a decision.
It is here that the field of personal leadership enters into the spirit of our age. Authority comes from being willing to share the gains and losses of a decision.
Are we so curious about the people we are with that they are willing to be changed by them ~ without notice and without guarantee?
That is knowledge to be passed on. Am I willing to act with you right now?
flowing motion 
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