Month: October 2023

Fishes and trees

/ binarybea / 1 Comment

Today, I´m bringing you a nice little phrase for reflection; it´s the quote I told you about last week:

Everybody is a genius.
But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree,
it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

Close up of a clown fish over a blurry water background

What comes to mind when you read this phrase? Do you agree? Does it resonate with you?

We all have certain things we´re naturally very good at, and then other things at which we´re not that good. But how much do we value those natural talents and abilities? Do we appreciate them? Do we work on making the most of them, or do we underestimate them, thinking they don´t have any merit, or they´re not useful?

As we already know, education has traditionally focused almost exclusively on one type of intelligence, the one that could be measured through IQ (Intelligence Quotient). But thankfully, the fact that intelligence is not one but many is getting more and more recognized, and different classifications have come up, for example the theory of multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner:

  • Linguistic intelligence: the ability to master language (oral, written, non verbal) and communicate with others.
  • Logical-mathematical intelligence: the ability to reason logically and resolve mathematical problems
  • Visual-spatial intelligence: the ability to observe the world and its objects from different perspectives.
  • Musical intelligence: the ability to distinguish sounds, rhythms and musical tones, as well as compose and interpret music.
  • Bodily-kinaesthetic: the ability to coordinate our body movements, and also to use tools.
  • Intrapersonal intelligence: the ability to understand and manage our internal states, emotions and focus of attention.
  • Interpersonal intelligence: the ability to grasp and interpret what other people convey to us and empathize with them.
  • Naturalistic intelligence: the ability to relate to our natural environment – animal and vegetal species, weather events, geographical events and nature phenomena

This list is an example of the many talents and skills humans have, each of us in our unique and irreplaceable combination, from which we can contribute to the world in different ways. The problem arises when we stubbornly apply the same measurement to everybody, especially if we only go by what society decides as the talents that "count".

What about you? What are you really good at, and what are you not that good at? Have you ever judged somebody (or yourself) according to the wrong criteria? Which talent, skill or intelligence was there and you didn´t get to see it or value at the time? And what could you do to give it its value and develop it?

True or false?

/ binarybea / 2 Comments

Something interesting happened to me a few days ago: I was in a training course and saw a slide with a quote by Einstein that I thought was really cool, so I decided to publish it on Instagram. I wrote a post with the quote in English, and another one with the Spanish translation. Everything OK up to this point.

Two minutes later, I got a message from Instagram saying that I had published false information (according to their "independent fact checkers"), that they had added a notice to my post warning viewers about the content not being true, and that my account was at risk of being disabled for monetization.

All of this because apparently, Einstein was not the author of that quote...

Paper card pinned to a cork board, with two handwritten checkboxes: TRUE and FALSE

I was a bit shocked, to be honest. I quickly rewrote the post, including the quote without mentioning the author. Once again, Instagram notified me that they had added a notice to my post because it was very similar to another one they´d already labelled as false. At least this time I could see an option to request a manual review, so I requested it; I´m curious to see their reply.

The thing is, I have mixed feelings about this topic; on the one hand, I´m glad that there´s some level of fact-checking being done, though on the other hand, I wonder how effective it may be beyond checking authorship for specific texts (by the way, all this happened with the post I wrote in English; the Spanish version got published without any issues). But mainly, I was really upset that they accused me of lying! Me, lying? It was all a misunderstanding!

Well, when I got to reflect on it a bit more afterwards, I remembered something else they told me at the same training course: regarding moral issues, like lying for example, when someone does something that´s wrong we tend to think it´s because they´re a bad person, while when we are the ones doing something wrong, we believe it´s justified given the circumstances.

In short, we believe we are in possession of the truth, and everyone else is mistaken.

We forget that there are very few absolute truths in this world, if any. We believe we objectively know the facts, but what we´re really doing is interpreting them in our own way, filtering the perceptions we receive from our senses according to our own beliefs and assumptions.

And here´s where it´s good to remember the words of Ramón de Campoamor; words that I was lucky to double-check in Google before making another mistake, as I was convinced they were by Calderón de la Barca 🙂

In this traitorous world
nothing is true or false:
everything is according to the colour
of the glass with which one looks.

Ramón de Campoamor

This whole thing about there not being anything true or false may be a bit frustrating, because our brain prefers categorical answers: good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. But in reality, it gives us a great deal of freedom; it gives us a whole colour palette to choose from. Both the great wise men of old times and our modern psychologists explain to us that in the majority of cases, our problems are not caused by the things that happen to us, but by the way we interpret them; the main cause of our suffering are the stories we tell ourselves about the things that happen to us. ¿What if we told ourselves a different story?

That´s the good news: once we realize that truth is very often a matter of points of view, and that it´s not THE truth but MY truth that I get to see, then our map of possibilities increases exponentially, and we can allow ourselves to reinterpret those situations in ways that help us, instead of making us suffer.

So, next time you´re faced with a situation that makes you feel angry, frustrated or sad, I encourage you to ask yourself what other versions of "the truth" can exist that are different from yours. What are you assuming? What other perspectives are you not seeing? What meaning are you attaching to that situation that it doesn´t really have, or doesn´t need to have? What other meaning could you find for it?

By the way, the quote in question deserves a post of its own; it´s on Instagram, and it´s true that I published it without double-checking whether it was by Einstein or not (lesson learned).

Rearview mirror

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Today I got a question about the differences between going through a coaching process and visiting a psychologist, and I thought this would be an interesting topic to comment on here. When talking about professions dedicated to help and support, some terms are often confused or blurred, so I would like to explain the main difference as I see it, based on my own experience and what I´ve read and heard from experts, without getting into too much detail or pretending to be in possession of the truth (as I´m not a psychologist).

My understanding is that clinical psychology (or psychotherapy) is mostly focused on analyzing events that happened in the past, especially when involving traumas or disorders, so that the wounds created at that time can heal. In contrast, in coaching we work with the healthy side of the person (and the vast majority of us are healthy, just a bit confused as we walk through life).

Coaching focuses mostly on the present and future: where the person currently is, where they want to go, and how they can make progress to get closer to their goal. We only look back occasionally, and when we do, it´s with the purpose of recovering resources that the person already has and have worked well for them in the past, to see how they can be applied to this new challenge they´re now facing.

This was explained to me using the metaphor of a car, where the windshield is big and wide and lets us see everything that´s in front of us, while the rearview mirrors are much smaller. We can briefly look back when we need to, but the most important thing is to look ahead, and move forward..

Close up of a car rearview mirror with an empty street in the background, during the day. The mirror reflects the side of the car, and a person inside taking a picture with a camera

But that doesn´t mean that coaching can only happen at a superficial level; quite the opposite. Along the way, provided that the person takes ownership of their process and stays open to digging deep, they will come to realize many things about themselves, and about whatever is really preventing them from making progress in their desired direction, or at the pace they would like. This is not something that happens overnight, it requires a process: first, becoming aware of what's happening to them, and then doing the necessary work to change that situation, knowing that there will be ups and downs as they follow the path, and that the greatest value is not in achieving your goal fast, but in learning and evolving along the way.

Having said all this, I'd like to share a coaching exercise that I often use that looks back at the past in the way I've just explained. It's based on the fact that, when facing a new challenge, we often lack confidence that we´ll be able to achieve it, forgetting we've already achieved a considerable amount of other things in life. We get achievement amnesia. So, the exercise is precisely about remembering them, writing down an achievements list:

  • Get pen and paper, and dedicate three minutes to writing down everything you can think of that you have achieved in life. The more things the better, it doesn't matter if they're big or small: from learning to walk or drive to giving birth to a baby, getting a job, moving houses or cooking a nice Spanish omelette (which is somthing I truly admire, because I'm not good at it at all 🙂).
  • Once time is up, dedicate another three minutes to writing the skills, abilities and talents that you have and that have enabled to you achieve all these accomplishments.
  • Then read out loud your achievements list, together with the list of skills, abilities and talents, and realize how much you can achieve when you set your mind to it.

This exercise also works very well in pairs, where one person writes down what the other person is listing out loud. Limiting the time helps to come up with lots of ideas very quickly, instead of looking for big achievements and overthinking the whole thing. We're not looking for perfection or excellence: we're looking for quantity, a variety of situations that we were able to overcome, goals that we were able to achieve, and of which we can feel proud 🙂

What about you? What do you feel proud of when you look in your life's rearview mirror?

Success

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What thoughts appear in your head when you hear the word "success"?

In my case, up until relatively recently, I always had the feeling that success was something out of my league, and that it was for other people, not for me. The things I did were ordinary, not extraordinary, and therefore, there was nothing I could think of that I had achieved and could be considered a success.

Photo taken at dawn - dark silhouette of a person standing on top of a rock, with their arms extended in victory, against the blue and pink sky

I remember how I used to hate it when I heard that cliché question: "what does success look like?", because I was never able to answer it. I didn´t have a clue.

These days, after years of learning about personal growth, at least I get to understand the question. It´s all about visualizing the result.

This concept is widely used in coaching: the first step is always to define a goal, and objective, something you want to achieve. But, how will you know that you have achieved it? What is that new situation that you´re so looking forward to? What will you see, what will you hear, what will you feel when that moment arrives? The more details, the better.

This is important for two reasons: first, because the better defined our desired state is, the easier it will be to achieve it (or at least, to get closer to it), as we will be giving clear instructions to our brain about what we´re looking for. And second, because each person has their own values, their own priorities and their own way of understanding life, and all those factors have (or should have) a massive impact on the kind of results we want to achieve, and also in how we value those results.

So, for each specific situation we get to work on, it´s good to think through what it is that we´re really aiming to achieve, keeping in mind that we may need to dig a little deeper to get to the truth: how will I benefit from achieving this goal? How far do I need to get to consider myself successful at it? And where does that measurement come from? Who sets the standard? Am I doing something that´s truly important to me, or am I trying to fulfil expectations?

Which brings me to today´s quote, and once again, it sounds to me much better in English than in Spanish; hopefully my loose translation will be understood by Spanish speaking folks:


Success isn’t about how your life looks to others. It’s about how it feels to you.

Michelle Obama

What about you? What does success mean to you, at this particular point in your life?

Taking the initiative

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How good are you at taking the initiative, especially regarding big life decisions? Are you one of those who "make things happen", or do you tend to let things happen to you?

Wooden scrabble-like pieces forming the phrase "MAKE STUFF HAPPEN"

I´m bringing this up because I´ve had a few conversations about big life decisions in the last few weeks, specifically around moving to another country. On the one hand, two good friends I met shortly after moving to Ireland are now getting ready to move back to Spain, and talking to them made me think about my own future, and consider where I´d like to live in the short, medium and long term. And on the other hand, this week I welcomed a family friend who just made the opposite move, from Spain to Ireland. His excitement and openness to living new experiences made me remember my first few years here, the tremendous impact moving had on me, and how I got to progressively forge a new life as years went by.

To answer my own question: I always considered myself a person with little initiative, relatively speaking: many of my big life changes have been either a shared decision with a little push from other people (like coming to live and work in Ireland) or decisions made by others (like my separation and divorce). But now, looking back, I realize that I´ve also made big decisions by myself. The determination to carry on with my life in Ireland when my world came crashing down around me was probably my first big decision on my own, the first time I truly took the initiative.

The first of many.

Sometimes, life gives us a little push so that we know it´s time to take ownership. The trick is to stay alert, learn to welcome what life brings to us, and trust that that´s what we need to continue to grow.

So, in line with that idea, here are a couple of quotes plus an extra bonus quote. The first one comes to us from the wisdom of stoicism:

The willing, Destiny guides them. The unwilling, Destiny drags them.

Seneca

This phrase was explained to me at the time using the metaphor of a dog tied to a moving cart. The dog has two options: he can keep up with the pace, trotting happily along with the cart, or struggle to resist, trying to slow down or change direction, and ultimately getting hurt, as he gets dragged by the cart anyway.

The second one is a beautiful wordplay:

There is a time to let things happen, and a time to make things happen.

Hugh Prather

As I read this, what comes to my mind is: how can I know when it´s time for one thing or the other? I would say it´s a question of figuring out our usual strategy, and whether it works for us in certain specific situations. What do we find most difficult, the doing or the not doing? Would it make sense to adjust?

And the third one, from the same author, closes the cycle:

Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes.

Hugh Prather