BrainBawz #2
Peppercorn Christmas
August 31, 2017
If you need to be a Christmas tree, then be a Christmas tree.
Don't be a Christmas tree only some of the time.
Be the thing you are and own it.
If you are going to be a pickled lemon then be a pickled lemon. With all of the bitterness and sourness which comes with . . .
Relearning to Listen
We have 2 ears and 1 mouth We have two ears and one mouth and yet we spend most of our time using the mouth. This morning after reading an article on Steven Covey’s 5th habit which is “first seek to understand then be understood". Upon reflecting on this I was able to see how the importance of genuine listening is to every aspects of our life. It affects our closest relationships and the day to day interactions we have and it enriches them in every way. Perhaps this all sounds a bit over the top but we can never over estimate the value of listening and how that opens up understanding. The essential idea is the notion of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Genuinely putting yourself in their position. Seeing things through their eyes, understanding the situation from their background, with their desires and worries. This is the key to understanding someone and working with someone to achieve something which is mutually beneficial to all involved. This is difficult and I for one am terrible at it. I remember at university I was reading a book called the Intra-religious dialogue by Raimundo Pannikar from what i can remember of the book it talked about various forms of communication and it listed some different ways in which people talk about things. :One of the examples was the dual monologue: This is where to people are merely waiting for their chance to speak. This is when we sit and while someone else is speaking we are preparing what we are going to say. We are merely paying lip service to what is being said and just waiting for our chance to put our side across with absolutely no regards or attempt to understand the perspective of the other person. The feeling is best described in my head “I wish he would shut up so that I can speak and then he will se that I am right”, that probably sounds immensely arrogant but I think it is probably my default position. He might think I am right if he presumes that I am more intelligent than him. Although this is not a good presumption for anyone to make. The ideal is go for a duologue where both people are on the same page as they have taken the time to see the ideas from each others perspective. This is far easier said than done. You might even be thinking this sounds like a giant waste of time but the inescapable truth is that the more you put in listening to someone genuinely and seeing things from their point of view and empathising with their point of view then the more time you will save in the long run having disagreements and misunderstandings. Others will also see the sincerity in your desire to listen and this will benefit you in more tangible (perhaps superficial) ways. People will trust and like you more. If you are trying to get something job/girlfriend/boyfriend opportunity in something new then your ability to understand the person from their perspective and understand them will give you major trust points when it comes time to making yourself understood. When I am teaching sometimes I fail to listen to my students presuming that my perspective is more valid than the one of the student and I start talking to them from my own experience. This is useful up to a point but the student will not find my experience useful unless they have actually sought out that perspective from me. If I begin to answer a student from my own perspective then I going to make them frustrated and invalidated. So in a way by listening to them and trying to understand them I become a more effective teacher. I can think about things from their point of view, I might find Hedonic Calculus easy that doesn't mean someone else will or even if the frame of reference I provide is of any use. When doing comedy gigs the benefits of listening are immeasurable this is a very simple example but the difference between a comedian that takes a few seconds to listen to his audience than the one who just powers up with no regard to the vibe in the room. That might the difference between a memorable comedian and one who dies on his arse. One potential pitfall of trying this type of listening is being duped into mistaking a genuine exchange of thoughts and feelings with active listening or techniques which aid you in a better listener. This might be things like reorganising someone’s vocabulary to appear to understand them or to repeat what the person says. One of the things Covey identifies is that while these techniques are perhaps useful in aiding you in listening they are not listening themselves. It is perhaps best to think of them in terms of surface level aids but missing out on the authentic understanding brought on by genuine listening. By endeavouring to listen well we strengthen our relationships and friendships and we open ourselves up in an honest way that leads to genuine progress and creativity.
August 30, 2017
No content...
BrainBawz #1
Daily nonsense (Stop wasting time with your hair)
August 30, 2017
I think people spend too much time on their hair.
Too much time wasted about hair....something for which very few others care!
It grows and it grays it rusts and it falls.
Time in the morning which could be better spent considering nothing or doting on the profundities of a . . .
Helicopter Husband
special forces matrimony
August 25, 2017
We don't talk about parenting until we become parents and the only way we know how to parent is the way we were parented. The same is true of marriage! Sure we have lots of dreams about what the wedding might be like. We have ornate rituals about stag nights, hen nights. Lots of ways to mark the start of a marriage, the same could be . . .
The Beauty of Auld
The ancient art of community and ceremony
August 25, 2017
You can try your hardest to be healthy these days, we can find ourselves lost in a world of contradictory organic, freeze dried chlorine free eye-brow focused excerciseology. In fact if we do a quick google on the health benefits of milk (Cow's Milk) then lets see what comes up........(GOOGLING NOW)
Okay so on the first page of . . .
5 minutes of fear for a decade of journeys
I would like to take you back to a period nearly 10 years ago when I was working in a customer service contact centre selling ancillary credit card products. This was my day job and I did not enjoy it. I worked with some nice people but the amoral nature of the work gave everyone a shared apathy except for those who bought into the company spiel about providing the customer (existing customers who were either too disengaged or didn't care enough not to get shafted by us) with a service they needed. This was later proved to be a highly flawed premise based on the amount of payment protection insurance claims we are now seeing. My seed of creativity in this daily grind of vacuousness was that I was a budding stand up comedian and a fairly prolific performance poet. I went to poetry slams and thought I was quite the working class hero. I was at a poetry slam in Edinburgh and I was sat next to another poet from Glasgow (where I was living at the time) and we got talking. It turns out this other poet was originally from Zimbabwe and we were both lamenting the fact that our own city had a relatively limited range of poetry events. We spoke vaguely of starting our own poetry night in Glasgow which would get more of a scene going there. In any creative scene these conversations about collaboration happen a lot but rarely amount to anything. So we exchanged numbers and I thought very little of it. A couple of weeks later my new acquaintance phoned me but the place I was staying in had such bad reception that I was able to answer the phone but not speak. You know that feeling? I meant to email him back and say I was sorry I couldn't answer the phone. I think I may actually have but anyway, eventually we spoke briefly on the phone and he said that he had been into talk to the centre for contemporary arts and was seeing where this could go. He had also arranged an event at the Multi-cultural community centre and would I like to do a 5 minute poetry reading. I said yes as it was a couple of weeks away. Again I hung up the phone and though little of it. The day eventually came when I was due to go to the community centre and do the gig. I couldn't be bothered! My apathy was overtaking me. It was a wednesday night and I would much rather have gone to the pub or sat in and watched some shit on the television. I was at work all day and I was ready to text this guy and tell him I wasn’t able to make it for some bullshit reason. (You know the text excuse thing that sometimes happens). My mate gave me a lift home and I asked him to swing past the community centre as it was near where he lived so I thought what the hell it might be fun and it was on my journey home anyway. So I did…. When I entered the community centre my heart sank. The room was full of very serious looking people from a diverse range of backgrounds. At this point I must make the point that I am not at all racist or prejudiced. I was just scared to death as my poetry was very puerile and I thought was pretty much only going to make my dumb ass friends laugh. (subject matter such as pooh, hemaroids and gore). All I thought was “I am about to crash and burn like a diesel zeppelin” and “these people are going to hate me”. I was out of my comfort zone big time. I had come this far and just went with it. I got up and my did my poem all about having hemaroids, I did some other dumb poems which I thought were going to be thought of as superficial and insulting……then came my revelation……the audience were laughing. They were enjoying themselves and I couldn’t believe it. It seems that their reaction to my poetry was the same reaction as everyone else. They thought the poems were quite funny and energetic. They seemed to like them. Just because I wasn't performing to a dingy bar where the average person was in their early 20s and a fan of literature it didn't mean the people would react any differently. A few pretty simple truths came out of this experience for me. The first one is that people are essentially the same at their core no matter where they are from or what their ideas about life are. Something I create can be acceptable by the majority as something worth paying attention to. This is not even the most amazing part of taking the risk overcoming my apathy and going to that show. The man whom I had the pleasure of meeting at that poetry slam in Edinburgh has become one of my best friends whose family feels very much like my own and that feeling is reciprocated within my own family. I met a lot of the people who would have a very profound affect on the last ten years of my life that night in the multi-cultural community centre in Glasgow. That night has led to me developing one of the most enriching and creative friendships that I have ever had and it has given me tremendous inspiration both professionally, personally and spiritually. Many of the characteristics of that friendship have become part of what I have produced which are used in schools around my home. It has added a new dimension to my stand up comedy making me aware of the tremendous humour which can found in diverse places and the things which we all find funny. I have traveled to Zimbabwe to witness the most interesting and inter-cultural wedding I have ever had the pleasure of attending. I have made friends and new family with whom culture, religion, creed and background do not serve as boundaries or barriers but as references for commonality which is the seed of new creations. Take the risk. If I hadn't have overcome my apathy and done that 5 minute show I was so reticent about I would not have had the experiences that a decade of unique friendships bring. Take the risk!!!!
August 25, 2017
