Dichotomy, rhetoric, evaluation and empowerment (part 1)

I am wrong all the time. I actually enjoy being wrong. Nobody learns from being right. People don’t grow from success. Show me one athlete who transformed from winning every game. What about you? What kind of intention do you hold around reflection? If we want to ramp up our experiential learning, it’s helpful to have a framework to guide our efforts. Mine has three parts. Insightful exploration, critical thinking and emotional awareness. These three categories will make it easier...

History repeats itself over and over. The rhythms of time never stop beating. And yet, humans have notoriously short memories. Our brains are liars. We easily and rapidly reimagine experiences to fit our preconceptions, rather than accurately recording what happened. I read a popular study from a psychology journal showing that our brains generate false memories of events mere seconds after they have occurred. We paraphrase, distort and misremember almost immediately. Hegel famously said that the only thing we learn...

Empowerment is the ability to take personal agency. This is what living life fully is all about. I was reading a paper in an analytic philosophy journal, and the researcher made a distinction between two forms of empowerment. Hypoagency and hyperagency. Hypoagency means that anything bad that happens to us isn't our fault. It was society, or culture, or some outside influence that made us do it. Hyperagency means that everything bad that happens to me is directly my own...

A linguistic element for navigating fear is using evaluative language. The goal is to create a sense of urgency. To prompt ourselves to critically assess our choices and motivations. Using such phrasing encourages our emotional shift from passive acceptance to active evaluation of our actions and their consequences. A question we can learn to ask ourselves is this:Would it serve me more to avoid temporary discomfort here, or confront the unpleasant truths of reality? Because sometimes there is a simple,...

Rhetorical questions are the most underrated linguistic tool in our arsenal. They’re powerful because they’re more about making a point than getting an answer. Such language stimulates introspection, which is an invaluable asset when navigating fear. We need to learn how to deploy that within on a moment’s notice. During the pandemic, I remember reading headlines each day, seeing the same doom and gloom everyone else did. But there were many moments when I asked myself some variation of the...