A Postcard for Stephen B MacInnis

Hi Stephen

At last! I finished my postcard and got it in the post to you. Hopefully you have it by now.

Interrupt/continue, postcard, 6"x4"

It took a long time to complete, mostly thinking time, looking at what I had done and deciding whether to

1. throw it away and start again
2. continue, or
3. stop, it is finished.

In NLP lingo it’s a TOTE (Test, Operate, Test, Exit)

I threw a lot of versions away and the “deciding whether to” took ages!

Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky – NLP for Artists and Performers

I have just seen the event Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky – NLP for Artists and Performers, with Judith Lowe, advertised for 01 May 2012, posing the question “What is creativity and how do artists effectively manage their unique creative gifts and states?” exploring how to develop and enhance creative expression, free up creative ‘blocks’ and manage the  process of bringing something new and aesthetic into the world that will resonate meaningfully with others.

What are the secrets of successful artists?
Where do they get their inspiration from?
How do they work and keep learning and growing their skills?
How do they manage the highs and lows?
How do they stay sane (ish)?

Of course, it has more general appliction than the arts alone, as it is about meeting new challenges and ‘thinking outside of the box’, so it is appropriate for coaches, leaders, trainers, parents, managers and anyone who wants to create new approaches to problems of any kind.

It is about improvising and creatively collaborating with others to produce worthwhile new structures, perspectives and experiences.

It sounds great and I want to go. I wonder if I can creatively find a way to be there, at University of London Union Building, Malet Street, WC1H, 7pm – 9pm, £15 if pre-booked or £20 on the door.

All welcome.

On sequence dancing and learning to learn

At the Blackpool Sequence Dance Festival 2011, in the Empress Ballroom of the Winter Gardens, attempting to learn brand new sequence dances, with a large group of people, I found it very difficult. It was wonderful and I loved it, especially as others took pity on us and helped us out, yet I really struggled to pick up 16 bars of steps in half an hour.

I could see many people, 20 years my senior and more, finding it quite easy to do what seemed an almost impossible task to me. What was it that made us different?

Maybe we could put it down to learning styles: this is not my favoured way of learning, I would rather read instructions first or have them explained to me in an environment where I could ask lots of questions, and then slowly piece the whole together part by part. I also seemed to suffer from ‘performance pressure’ that may have been absent in a smaller group or on my own.

It was possibly David Kolb that introduced the notion of learning styles, along the lines of: learning has a cycle of four stages and though all stages are required we may have a preference for a certain stage more than others. I have the impression that Honey and Mumford‘s learning styles are more or less the same as Kolb’s, but with more accessible labels, so we have Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist styles. One implication of the theory is that we learn best when our own style is adequately catered for, Activists and Pragmatists preferring to learn by doing, Reflectors and Theorists favouring a more thinking approach etc. Learning professionals closer to NLP might use the distinctions Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic as learning styles.

But isn’t this somewhat limiting? “I don’t learn that way” “It’s not my learning style” could easily become an excuse to prevent further learning. Isn’t it rather that what is needed is learning at a higher level?

Gregory Bateson proposed that there are levels of learning, where Learning 0 is an habitual automatic response to a given stimulus, Learning 1 is a trial and error process of adaptation to the given environment, Learning 2 is a process of corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choices are made at level 1, and Learning 3 (which rarely, if ever occurs) is about our whole process of forming, exchanging and losing level 2 habits.

Learning how to learn in the situation I described above would be Learning 2, which would then mean that on future occasions I could participate more successfully in the trial and error process of learning the new dances in the large group in only half an hour. One way to do this would be to model the strategies of other dancers/learners, which would I suggest also be a more sophisticated use of NLP.

visual intelligence

I love this clip of NLP trainer Judith Lowe on visual intelligence at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Rss_bP-9bo

where in answering a question Judith points to methods ( NLP techniques) we can employ to improve our visual intelligence, by which we mean our visual representational system, and at the same time she emphasises the natural unconscious choices we all make in developing our sensory intelligence, perhaps favouring one system in preference to another, say visual rather than auditory or kinaesthetic. In developing one system well, we may find that another is less well developed. This is one of the ways in which we are different from one other. She cites a well known football player whose highly developed system of sight helps him to site the ball in the right place, whilst possibly displaying an underdeveloped auditory system.

Donald D. Hoffman uses the term visual intelligence for “the creative genius of the mind’s eye” or for “vision’s constructive powers”. We construct the world we see. We are a all lot more visually intelligent than we know.

a complex equivalence

One of the language patterns that we pay attention to in NLP is the complex equivalence: “x = y”,or  “this equals that”. In yesterday’s blog I started to consider the complex equivalence “to follow a formula (in a painting) is unimaginative and unthinking mannerism”. (It came indirectly from a comment by Bridget Riley and an article by Peter Suchin)

The NLP meta model challenge for this statement is: “how specifically is following a formula the same as unimaginative…?”

I think that question alone could elicit some interesting information that would both reinforce and challenge the statement.

Robert Dilts added Sleight of Mouth patterns to the field of NLP, and they incorporate the above question whilst also adding many other verbal reframes that I think would be enlightening in relation to the complex equivalence presented.

As well as offering the reframes themselves, Dilts also offered a system for remembering/practising them: the Sleight of Mouth Worksheet, that I have used to explore my complex equivalence.

I find myself sharing the view that to follow a formula when making a painting is unimaginative and unthinking mannerism, and at the same time I know that my recent work is self-consciously ‘formulaic’ or ‘over systemic’.

The positive intention of the belief statement or complex equivalence is to keep the work fresh and challenging, yet its consequence could be to overlook the value that a self-consciously formulaic approach might offer. Whilst agreeing that adherence to a formula displaces the thinking in relation to a piece of art work (to the preparation rather than the act of painting) or that an unconscious slipping into old formulas is the crux of mannerism,  I can think of some good counter examples. I find the conceptual paintings of Sol Le Witt fascinating and much imaginative, experimental art takes formula as a starting point. Josef Albers  also comes to mind.

So,  although an approach that makes use of formula may be something to guard against because it seems to reduce the artist’s dialogical engagement with the piece being worked, I can imagine how the painting could have a conversation with the artist that extends beyond the painting of that particular piece. This is a systemic approach in itself, and any artist that paints in series (e.g. Mali Morris) is having these conversations with the process of art making.

Part of me wants to find the most ‘formulaic’ of paintings and ask what do I like about it? its a different issue to whether the artist followed a formula. I have the impression that it’s not so much whether there is a formula that matters so much as whether the painting is any good!

There is a sense in which “following a formula is unimaginative and unthinking mannerism” is an unthinking mannerism all of its own. We could represent the theory in a rather unimaginative formula (F = U, where F is following a formula and U is unimaginative and unthinking mannerism).

We could also ask “in whose map of the world would a formulaic approach be equal to an imaginative one?” I sense that highly creative mathematicians might have more room for a formula or two.

And now the statement that formed my starting point starts to look like a fairly partisan position, a formula for preventing formulas maybe.