Month: July 2017

Finally, I have realised that writing and exposing me to the Internet is a stiff challenge to me. Not just joy. Often, I load myself with possibilities and alternate ways to act. I also load myself with a lot of collected material. I store it in bookshelves and on hard drives. It gives me the joy to be curious but also stress and tension. What should I do with all this written material and ways to go. I have to face the fact that my capacity to value, decide and pull through does not handle the present situation.

During most of my life, my mind has been open in many directions. I am a character with a lot of curiosity. A lot of material ignites my interest. With eager, I assure avoiding the point where I still could make decisions. The result is that I collect and store a lot. It is high time to test the opposite way, to value, select and throw away. I need to start this process before it is too late. I have to do it before my kids get all this stuff on their lot. But, where are my guts to do the job? I need far stronger decisions and decisiveness than I have ever mobilised before.

I start by reducing my field of interest to what I am up to, writing. I need to reduce my focus even further. How does writing influence me as a person? My mode when writing? The things about which I write? The style I follow?

One thing is that there is a massive inflow of stuff to which I believe I need to attend. When I follow that, there will be a lot of items written about and the following question: what is the point? But my challenge is to take a grip on myself and move from point A to point B.

Point A means me in the present situation. I have a broad mind and an attitude that is not discriminative. Point B is to act selective and specific. My old way would be to identify weak elements in my character. Followed by blaming myself for not being able to solve this. Which in so many words is nothing but to escape out the window?

Well, there it is. Once, 25 years ago and in a symbolic language, I did show myself this helicopter view of what I do. Instead of taking the fight I escape out the window. Out there I struggle to see things my way, and my way only.

In conclusion, I should have told my mother how I felt at that moment back in 1944. At that time she did not to listen to my story. This rejection hurt me hard. Through my present writing, I now know the story and have the guts to tell it. At the age of 91, my mother died in 2007. Thus I cannot reach her face to face. I have to settle for the second best which is to tell the story here.  My story goes as follows…

 The other day I listened to Judith E Glaser being interviewed on Youtube about her work with Conversational Intelligence. There was something in what she said that did hit me. I cannot copy or transfer what she said. I merely act on the ideas and impressions raised in me. I compared my use of self-reflection with a conversation type one. Self-reflecting being a style of communicating that runs only within the mindset or brain structures of one brain, yours. I experience my self-reflection as a cage I want to dissolve or reduce. That is my desire. What action should I take to make it happen?

I read what Glaser says as to add a new piece of brain structure to the one that already exists. She says science supports the statement that our neurones may evolve and change the structure as long as we live. They are not fixed due to inherited DNA, birth, upbringing nor education. They tend the be the same if we run around within our old mindset and relations, i.e. self-reflecting.

So a critical thing is how do I do that? I think that close mental relating to other individuals is a critical issue. When we do so, we will assist in the growth of our brain and extend how we think. Close interaction with the thinking of another individual will help us to enlarge the structures of the neurones we have. The result is an ability to think in new patterns. The result will be a permanent change to the structure of our mind.

Usually, we learn that fact, arguments, data are all there is. Judith Glaser’s ideas emphasise that interaction with people thinking different from ourselves is important.

Are there anyone out there interested in improving their “Conversational Intelligence”. Would you like to join such a process? There is no preassigned path to success. It all depends on how we walk together and talk with each other.

In thinking over impressions given by Judith E. Glaser

Göran Stille

This morning there is a humming noise going on in my head. Okay, this is not that heavy humming that may go on all night and still is pushing on when morning comes. It is more like a sudden summer wind. I sneeze, and I long for my allergy medicine. My humming concerns all these habits that I have grown over the years. I refer to those that once made life easier but they do not any longer. Now, they have an adverse influence on the life I want to live. – Bullshit! Now, I am moving back into wining over how things are. – ”Shut up, put yourself on the mulch and wait for better times.”
What do I want? – No more attempt to blind me for old and not so adequate decisions. Or, as I heard someone say: ”invent yourself out of this hurricane of early decisions, not so appropriate”.
The first example of such a wrong decision jumps to my mind. It is when I decided to work on developing cutting-edge technology for an employer in Sweden. To my young eye, this seemed possible. But, the circumstances at this place was not the best. There were deficits in the social environment. But I did not bother.
My desire to maintain a relationship with a particular female influenced my decision. Behind that, I think there was some emotional dust on my side. At that time, I thought I would not be of interest to anyone of the opposite sex. But, one girl did show that interest. My relation with her became important. I know that at that point this feeling dictated my actions. But, I did never inspect this feeling. I was too afraid of falling back into a state of non-existing. A feeling that has been my share, all through life. My feeling might have been enhanced by a particular event at the age of 1 year. I believe I felt deeply hurt at this event. But, enough of that.
My decision did have the consequence that I needed to invent a way to learn my subject of interest. I also needed a personal style of working. No one existed that was able to mentor me. Not even acting as a raw model. In consequence, I exposed myself to many scientific articles. They gave me an image of what I was to achieve. I invested a lot of time in reading such material. I could have gone deeper, or put a limit on my scope of interest, or analysed the works presented more carefully. But, I did not.
A few years later the use of computers influenced my flow of incoming material. Our library offered a support called ” Selective Distribution of Information”. When using this tool, I exposed me to an even richer flow. Many articles passed my eyes. They came from a wide area of subjects. I must have drowned myself in incoming data without knowing it. My ability to derive information from received data has a limit. This way, I blinded myself for the social conditions at my working place. I avoided the obvious conclusion: ”this does not work for me. I do not want to use myself to compensate for a surrounding that is not supportive”. In my naive youth, I must have believed, that this did work good enough, but it did not. I felt as if my early attempts to act competently did work all right- But, in the end, they did not. At that time I did not have the capacity to scrutinise my illusions.
During these years I learned a way to relate to written material. I follow this method today. The subjects have changed. Today I do come into contact with far more data than in those days. I must admit my ability to extract information is still compromised. I must be looking forward to some golden bird whispering in my ear how to do this. Mean time, I fill my hard drive and book shelves with loads of material. When I read the abstracts of any material, I believe the article or book would be interesting to read. But I do not have the time nor the lust. If I do nothing, I will drown in data before someone has prepared me a coffin.
Where does a solution hide? Throw out the books? Delete and reformat the hard drive? Enter a monastery and become a monk? I need to focus on something that has a shorter time to payback.
This blog entry is open ended. I wish I could tell you more, how it goes, or my next step but I cannot.

Göran Stille