The brain doesn't hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what's out there in the world. According to this theory, what we perceive is strongly shaped by top-down expectations / predictions, not just by bottom-up sensory input. Psychology Today
Churchill observed that “first we shape our buildings, and then they shape us”. Much the same can, I think, be said of our work environments. We exist there in a mélange of objective facts, subjective truths, and confected futures driven by goals and rewards that drive us towards what is at best imaginary - and all the more restricting when we’re working in pursuit of the product of somebody else’s imagination.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
―F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
This is so difficult. We imagine a future, mentally move in there and then reject anything that calls it into doubt. We have a whole toolkit of neurological devices, from biases and heuristics to fear, which ensure we stay on track whatever the emerging reality. Then, we often consolidate that virtual reality through performance coaching. As Laurence Barrett mentioned in his post on Monday in relation to elite sports:
‘We take fucked up people. We fuck them up more. They win us medals. We throw them away’.
One of the artisan's skills is to see something for what it might be, as much as what we want it to be - whether that’s a person, a pot, or a business. To recognise that there is something there, no matter how inconvenient, that is a better expression of potential than the one we are imposing on it.
Provoking ourselves requires humility, reflection and patience - and trusted friends. To remove our immediate defence when our idea or goal is questioned and look at it with fresh eyes. To notice and be prepared to entertain the implications.
The capacity to be constructively provoked requires that we have an acceptable degree of functioning autonomy; otherwise, speaking truth to power has the capability of setting us free in a way we really don’t want.
This leads me to an interesting thought. Does holding two opposed ideas in mind require us to develop some form of “split personality” in order to present that part of us required by an employer in one mode and the other full-on, artisanal part in another? Rather like playing a part on stage? or the consultant who rides his Harley at the weekends to express his rebellious alter ego? Can we do this in a more deliberate way, rather than trying to shoehorn our ambitions into a job that doesn’t really want them? In which case, where do we take those ambitions to develop them whilst still earning a living?
That’s one of the questions I’m hoping my little adventure, free of the constraints of keeping an employer, or even a client, happy, may help answer.