There were only four students at Bikram this morning. This is after there were 28 in the class on Saturday morning. Crista taught the class; Heather is out for a few days. She usually teaches mornings Tuesday through Friday. We did the class in silence, followed by a lavender washcloth chaser during the final savasana.
I went home directly after class. I had plans to go out and do more work on the clearing the blue flower shrubs, but I played some FreeCell instead. It's hot dirty work out there, and I think squeezing the clipper is hurting my wrists.
I was going to go to school today, but by the time I got in the car, it was already 12:30. Then I remembered that today was Wednesday, early dismissal. School's out a 1 pm. I went back inside the house, slipped out of my dress and into home wear, and sat down to read Mike Fanuel's, Damon's good friend, book Stop Making Sense. It's billed as the new Brene Brown.
After I read a little, I fell asleep. Nap. I had a healing telephone client at 5 pm. He is doing fantastic work.
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Musings: I'm putting this separately so those who are not interested can choose not to read it.
Musing: I've been reading Mike Fanuele's book "Stop Making Sense." I haven't finished the book, but from what I have read, I find his premise very upsetting, assuming it's true. (I am planning to finish the book. It's interesting in its own right.) Mike's premise is that appealing to the intellect does not persuade people to behave differently. We respond to everything emotionally and therefore shouldn't ever appeal to reason, which he argues doesn't exist, basing his premise on Kahneman's Thinking Fast Thinking Slow" thesis.
Yes, there is plenty of evidence that we 'decide' upon an action before our frontal lobes can get involved. We are often acting before our conscious minds wake up to what is going one. Our conscious minds are merely observing what our nonconscious minds decided to do, not initiating that action. It all happens fast enough so that we trick ourselves into believing that we make conscious rational decisions.
Mike's premise means that our conscious minds have no role except to observe and concluded that it is in control. But the title of Kahneman's book is "Thinking Fast; Thinking Slow," not "Thinking Fast and Not Thinking at All." Our conscious minds have a roll in decision making.
I learned Vipassana meditation, which involves observing bodily sensations. I learned to observe what was going on in my body, which gave me a heads-up about my nonconscious mind's decisions. This gives me a chance to intervene, when necessary. God forbid I had to intervene at all times and that most of the moment by moment decisions of my life were not automatic. I only have to intervene when there is a potential problem with my behavior for myself or others.
There is a process called 'reframing," which teaches people to look at an experience differently. Reframing is a mental process. The slow thinking process gets the fast-thinking process to change its mind. As those of you who know me or read this blog from the beginning know, I recently lost my husband of 45 years. I could see this as the end of my life or the beginning. I choose to see this as an adventure. C.S. Lewis reframed the death of his beloved wife as a different phase of the marriage. Despite the physical absence of the partner, the co-creation of their life experiences continued. I adopted this point of view. Reframing is not an appeal to emotion through poetry. It involves a conceptual change.
I agree with Mike's Fanuele's thesis that it is necessary to appeal to emotion if you are going to persuade someone to do something differently. Our intellects and our emotions are codependent. The intellect can be used to bypass or repress emotion, but emotions can be used to escape undesirable feelings too. What does it mean to appeal to people's emotions to influence behavior?
Ask any conman. Conmen don't approach their victims through poetry, they use arguments, bullet-points if you like, but these arguments target emotions. Those emotions are usually ones like fear and greed or maybe desperate need. Conmen and grifters are the bad angels, those who prey on others. What about the good angels, those who are out to persuade people to do what is right for themselves or others, or at least what they believe is better, without using meaningless tricks.
I'm an elementary school teacher. How do I convince children who got stuck along the way to change? There are children I can't convince to do anything differently. With those, I sometimes fall into the unfortunate emotional appeal evoked by threats. I'll bully them. I'll tell them their lives will be terrible if they don't make an effort. If they only want to do what comes easily and is fun, they are screwed. (I don't use that word.) When I see myself approaching it that way, I have to use my conscious mind to get myself to pull back. I've never seen bullying work. If I did, I'd go for it. Rightly or wrongly, I think the quality of a person's life is benefitted by literacy and reading.
I have been working with children in the third grade for the last ten years. How do I convince a child to change? Do I use poetry and stop making sense? No. But I have to say something that makes sense to the child. I can't just point out how their life will be better if they do it my way. Last week, I worked with a boy who was uncomfortable trying to pronounce words unless he produced something familiar. Well, folks, every time you come across a new word, it will be unfamiliar. Avoiding the unfamiliar is an emotional response and a psychological problem. Learners have to develop a tolerance for the unfamiliar. Giving students a lecture with the ideas mentioned above might be a good start, but it doesn't address the problem. The problem is the student's fear of the unfamiliar. My question to this boy was. "Do you think pronouncing an unfamiliar word is dangerous?" Isn't that what fear signals, danger? So I engaged his slow thinking process to ask his fast thinking process this question. He was a bright boy without any obvious emotional problems. His answer was, "No," and he was able to move ahead. I appealed to his emotions, emphasis on HIS, the ones he was feeling that interfered with his ability to tolerate the unfamiliar. (There are evolutionary reasons for us to avoid the unfamiliar. But that's for another day.)
Mike has spent many years in the corporate advertising world. I can well believe emotional constipation is the rule there. The day of being able to bully people into buying a product is gone. I remember negative advertising designed to make people feel that they were social misfits for one reason or another. Those were bullet point arguments; they were memorable, and they worked. Now they are positive bullet point arguments for why you should use a product. I can see why that wouldn't be too successful.
Mike sites the Cadbury ad of the gorilla playing the drums to a Phil Collins song. It increased sales by 20%., a wow! result. No bullet point here. Why was it successful? The unexpected tone of the ad captured our attention. It became like an earworm or an eye worm. We talked about it with others. We became members of this smiling subgroup who were in, who got it.
Mike points out the Trump appeals to emotion. Part of his appeal is that he is surprising and engaging as that gorilla playing the drums. He is full of surprises. He upsets our ideas of what a national leader should behave. Then he also appeals to groups that feel excluded, ignored. He says, "I see you." Now that is not just poetry. "You count" is a bullet point.
