Going to the Circus

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Please turn your attention high above the center ring . . .

Hush. . .”

“High above ladies and gentlemen on the trapeze and working without a net, the lovely Belinda will now attempt a triple somersault into the waiting hands of Raul. . . Ladies and gentlemen we ask for complete silence while she attempts this death defying feat. . .”

My sister and I, still in our pajamas, were under the covers on a Saturday morning with my father looking down at the dark where our feet should have been. But we were staring above the center ring of the circus listening to the booming voice of the ringmaster.

My father, the ringmaster, wove a spell; my sister and I were spellbound. Imagination can take you into a wonderous magic world.

My sister became an artist, a printmaker. Now I am a storyteller. I don’t know if that had anything to do with going to the circus, but maybe. . . just sayin’. . .

What is imagination?

Is imagination a mental faculty to create objects and concepts that cannot be seen, heard, or touched with the senses? Is it the foundation of creativity, art, and innovation? Is it emotional? Can imagination help us be more sensitive to the feelings of others? Can imagination turn destructive creating a downward spiral of negative self-images and envisioned judgements?

I imagine all these characteristics are true.

Is imagination only visual?

”In my mind’s eye” is where Shakespeare had Hamlet tell Horatio he saw his father’s ghost, (or did he see a “real ghost?”)

Imagination is sometimes described as visual, as mental pictures, imagery, visualization. While mental imagery and visualization techniques do rely on imagination, other senses can be involved.

We can easily imagine sound, which many musicians would quickly attest. We can imagine smells or texture,  You can test this for yourself. Have you ever said something smells, feels, sounds “entirely different than I imagined.”

We think we can imagine another’s feelings, but we should be careful that our imagining doesn’t become projection. It is just better to ask someone how they are feeling.

Is imagination like dreaming?

Maybe. Both are mentally produced sensory feelings that aren’t there.  Imagination is a capability of the conscious mind; dreaming happens when you  are asleep. It is an unconscious process.

There are some similarities between imagination and the dreamworld. Both aren’t limited by reality or what you have seen before and remember.

I’m told that Fritz Perls, psychiatrist and one of the founders of Gestalt therapy said about dreams

“All parts of the dream are you. If you dream about a house. The house is you. If you dream it is on fire, the fire is you as well.”

To interpret dreams, Perls recommended to give voice to each part of the “you” in the dream. I tried this once. I talked as a broken skateboard, as the hill down, as the hill up, and in the process realized that my unconscious was telling me to stop working 100 hour weeks before my body broke down. I used my imagination to interpret a dream.

Imagination is an active capability. Is dreaming more passive or is our unconscious more active than we give it credit for?

Imagination is that right-brained stuff, right?

I have always liked the left hemisphere-right hemisphere rubric of brain theory. I studied the work of Ned Herrmann who documented and measured the right and left hemispheres and the cerebral (thought) and limbic (emotional) hemispheres. Herrmann’s work has held up to MRI analysis.

So I would have said yes. Apparently I would be wrong.

Dr. Alex Schlegel of Dartmouth conducted MRI studies and found that imagining was equally distributed across the entire brain, even if the imagination was focused on one sense or another. Schlegel theorized that imagination was  “part of our mental capacity”

““Our findings move us closer to understanding how the organization of our brains sets us apart from other species and provides such a rich internal playground for us to think freely and creatively.”

How does Imagination compare to memory?

It seems to me that memory is a record of actual experience and imagination is an active creation of the unexperienced. Having said that, they are both mental processes. Presumably, they both involve neurons and synapses. Might there be a comingling of memories and imagined events? Would that explain how different people remember events differently or that we can “remember” things that didn’t happen?

Imagination can build upon remembered experience, by considering the question, “What if?” African elephant’s ears are so much bigger than Indian elephants. What if they were big enough to provide lift for an elephant to fly? And Dumbo is born in a Disney animation studio.

When Gramma Billie bought the farm

When our first grandchild was around three, my wife bought a farm toy. It is a painted pressboard barn and stable that goes together with tabs fitting into slots. “Silly Grampa,” thought the attraction would be assembly. I thought that putting tab ‘A’  into slot ‘A’, etc. and after the build arranging animal tableaus, would provide a little rainy day or pre-playground enjoyment.

The first granddaughter is now a high school graduate, The six and ten-year-old still play with the farm. All the animals talk. Even the dump truck has a voice with a rrrmmm at the front and back end of everything he says. The farmer and his wife (who are invisible) have fights and make up with saccharine lovey-dovey kisses that produce huge giggles.

We keep buying animals with zero regard for scale, which we are told isn’t important “AT ALL.” We have witnessed mother daughter heart-to-hearts between horses, cows, pigs and chickens and some cross-species talks. We have been invited to play along and sometimes “get it right,” but just as often “do it all wrong,” when our voice doesn’t match the imaginings.

Based upon the first granddaughter I thought the farm had a half-life of about 7 years, but based upon my enlarged (but still too-small) sample of three granddaughters I’ve increased it, playing with your sister changes the age limit.

Uses of Imagination

Science

Albert Einstein famously said:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”

Einstein’s major discoveries came from what he called thought experiments. We might not have special relativity without Einstein imagining chasing a beam of light when he was sixteen. In an argument with Niels Bohr, he imagined quantum entanglement, two particles suddenly separated doing “spooky action at a distance,” which Bohr later proved.

In 1869 August Kekulé, a chemistry professor at found the ring-like structure of the benzene molecule, by imagining the ancient symbol of an “Ouroboros,”

“But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.”

Some say Kekulé had a vivid imagination, but imagined the snake story to conceal that a French chemist discovered the benzene molecule structure before him. Imagination has many uses.

The Arts

I probably don’t need to justify that artists are imaginative beings. Some people think the entire creative process is imagination.

Neil Gaiman, the science fiction and fantasy novelist, relates that he is always asked, by naïve readers, “Where do you get your ideas?”

“Writers get ideas the same way everyone does, we just tend to notice them. .  .The idea is less valuable than people imagine. The writer’s challenge is to sort and develop ideas  and write twenty pages – then tear it all up and start over. I wish I could imagine my way through all that.”

Divergent thinking

In innovation, continuous improvement, design, we use divergent thinking, brainstorming, lateral thinking, etc. to generate large quantity of ideas that we then use convergent thinking to choose the best idea.

We might generate ideas by comparing our design to completely unlike things (metaphor), thinking of the opposite of the outcome (anti-solution) or by creating a world where certain natural laws didn’t apply (fantasy), or other techniques that use our imagination.

How to Increase imagination

There are some cognitive theorists that maintain that our imagination decreases as we age. They say that as we experience more, we have more knowledge and memories to access, which replaces the need for imagination. Tell that to a Disney Imagineer, or an advertising creative director, or a theoretic quantum physicist.

It is easy to look at imaginative children and feel like an  “old stick in the mud,” but I think imagination responds like other physical and mental capabilities . “If you don’t use it you lose it.”  I think it is possible and maybe imperative that we strengthen our imaginative capacity.

Here are some ways I think work:

• Set aside some time to imagine, like you make time for exercise (or if you are like me, maybe better than that). I write down what I imagine, pen and notebook, (rather than a computer) because that aids my mental processing.
• Start with a visualization. Imagine a journey on foot up a mountain, climbing a difficult path in the woods, or a walk on a beach, or a sail on a sunny day. Imagine sights, sounds, smells and texture, people you might meet, animals. Change the weather, change your interactions with the environment.
• Play with some kids, I have been accused of “never growing up.” It is an inheritance of sorts from my father. But kids under seven have very imaginative play that I’ve found contagious.
• Do some non-representative art – Write a series of words that describe a sound, a sight, a smell, a touch, carve a bar of soap, finger paint – to stretch your creative muscles.
• Ask ‘what if’ or “I wonder” or ‘is what ways might we?’. Better yet use these questions in discussion with others. ” what if intelligent platypuses from another dimension asked us to explain streaming?””

Our world might be described as a “hot mess.” We can’t afford a failure of imagination. I take inspiration from the words of Robert F. Kennedy,

“Some men see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’ I see things that never were and ask ‘Why not?’”

 

Artifacts of “The Boy”

When I cleaned out my parents’ house I discovered that my mother saved everything that had any significance to my growing up.

In 1998 my parents moved from assisted living to a nursing home and my sisters and I cleaned out the family home which my parents built themselves in 1952. We got the house ready for sale unloading or dividing up possessions and memorabilia.

My mom saved things related to all her children, but I noticed  there seemed to be more about me. “Of course! You were the BOY!” Said my sisters in unison. My special status as the youngest and only male child is something my sisters have given me grief about for now almost seventy-five years.  So there was more of my stuff, finger paintings, hand-made Mothers’ Day cards, report cards.

In a fifth grade report card the teacher had drawn in a separate evaluation category HOMEWORK complete with an “unsatisfactory” box that was checked. Below  it she wrote,

“Alan, seems to believe he is entitled to NEVER DO ANY HOMEWORK. His classwork is exemplary. He is very smart, but is developing a real problem with authority. If he doesn’t resolve this it will severely limit him in his life.”

You can imagine the fun my sisters had reading this out loud in my fifties.

I stumbled across this card today. (Apparently, my mother isn’t the only one who saves everything.) I showed it to my wife who laughed and said “Some things never change.”

I protested “I’m not as bad as I used to be.” She just smiled.

From time to time I see articles in various electronic and print media  “What I would tell my teenage self.” Some writer has interviewed celebrities who go on about what they wish they had learned earlier.. The writer always closes by turning the question to the reader, “What would you tell your teenage self?” Some readers answer. I don’t.

I always feel it would be a colossal waste of time. My teenage self would never listen to me. I couldn’t tell me anything.

But if I could . . .

I’d  first have to get through that “problem with authority,” that finely developed need for power and control that sets my jaw, digs in my heels, and closes my ears to any wisdom that might come from anyone who lays claim to being older, smarter, more experienced or is otherwise more exalted than I am in any way. If I could. . . I’d say. . .

“OK, TEEN ALAN, LISTEN UP!”

A Chip on Your Shoulder Cuts Off Blood Flow To Your Brain

At my first job as a booking agent, I battled my boss and my friend Ed said to me, “Alan, you think that anyone, anyone who has the smallest amount of power over you is automatically an asshole, but maybe just maybe, sometimes you’re the asshole.” I laughed, took pride in the accuracy of his assessment, but continued to battle my boss.

I had a career of boss battles for nine years in the speakers agent business and at five management consulting firms. I ended up spending twenty-three of my thirty-seven years as a consultant working for myself. When people asked me why I became independent, I joked,

“I found I’m a lot nicer to clients than I am to bosses.”

Along the way I learned a great deal, but almost always the hard way. So, teen Alan if you can open your ears, here are some other things I learned.

Capability and Connections are the Only “Secrets to Success”

Capability = competence + focused practice + habits and support systems

You have to be able to do something well to be successful. Yes, entrepreneurs and capitalists hire others to do stuff, but they become “capable” at knowing who, when and for how much money, they must hire others.

Capability begins with competence;

Competence is the knowledge and skill required for a task. Competence is the base level. For competence to become a capability you have to add practice. The only way to get better at anything is to practice and not just time in role. You must practice focused on improvement.

Focused Practice:

Focused improvement requires measuring where you begin, breaking a task down into component parts, measuring and practicing to improve each of those, measuring where you got to. Then you must  put it all together and then repeat that process.

I learned to do stand-up training. That required presenting, facilitating, and connecting with each member of the class. I measured presenting by staying on time and getting the message across. I measured facilitating by the engagement of each member of the training class. I measured connections by the conversations I had and by the post class evaluation sheets. I got better because I prepared and I practiced.

Habits and support systems:

My training and facilitation preparation included a special instructor note form, which divided materials into blocks with timing, opening statements or questions for each block and  three clear points.

I reviewed each day with notes about what went well and what should be improved next time and documented that for future review. If I was working with other people we developed a system of notes and preparation that we could e3ach learn from. Individual habits and job aids needed to become information systems for larger teams and organizations.

Connections: Nobody succeeds entirely on their own

If I look at the ‘big breaks” in my consulting career they came because someone went out of their way to help me. A boss, who fired me, recommended me to a friend after I insisted on managing an orderly transition with my clients after I’d been fired. That new relationship produced the most exciting project of my career, British Airways and a ten year relationship with my most significant mentor.

A business partner, with whom I’d just broken up, recommended me to someone he met in an airport, which led to a ten year client relationship.

I can also see missed opportunities which I just “blew off” A very well-known organization development professor wanted me in his PhD program; without understanding who he was I dismissed him because that OD stuff was” squishy.” A public television producer who later produced several extraordinarily successful series wanted to talk with me after I got my undergraduate degree in theatre; I dismissed him as a friend of my brother-in-law.

Arrogance and my “problem with authority” closed my eyes and ears” to opportunity on many occasions. Not everything happens because you “know someone,” but intention attracts help.

There is More Than One Path and No Experience is Wasted

This is the last thing I would say to Teen Alan. Some would look at my work life and call it a series of failures. I studied to be an actor, but never learned to support myself acting. I became a booking agent for speakers for nine years and chucked it all to go to business school to become a consultant. I worked for five different consulting firms, from four to six years each and was an independent consultant in four different structures.

But from theatre I started learning about human motivation, and the emotions that are often unspoken under interactions between people. From being a speakers agent I learned to sell, and learned that even celebrities are just people, who want to be listened to. These two earlier work adventures made me a good consultant who focused on helping clients. Those capabilities fed me for thirty-seven years and gave me the stories I am writing in my retirement.

So Teen Alan, do not be concerned that you have to pick the perfect career, pick something you love, or try a bunch of different stuff, but really do it.  Often being in the right place at the right time follows many times being in the wrong place or wrong time. Keep your eyes and ears open.

And for the love of Mike, get over your “problem with authority.”

What would you tell your teenaged self if he or she would listen?