Doing By Doing
essay
squareONE's work in the environs of personal and professional development can be about many things, yet, in the main, it is concerned with the experiential exploration of personal purpose, capabilities, and worldviews. How does this work?
Think about a very common challenge people face: "what do I really want to do?" Faced with dissatisfaction about what we may do, or, if we're in transition, faced with the quandry of what we will end up doing, this one question packages many other very important questions. Such as:
"What is the best fit between who we are and what we wish to do?"
"What's the best way to put my capabilities to work?"
"Are there bigger purposes that my life might serve?"
"How do I get other people, or employers, to really get 'me,' really understand who I am and what I'm about?"
"How do I unlock and unleash my hidden strengths?"
"Why do other people, or employers, not see all my capabilities and strengths? Why is it so hard for them to come to use them?"
"Who am I, really?"
These are just a few of the questions a person might ask. These are all great questions! In a profound way, they are among the greatest of questions we might ask. Why? Because questions about who we are, what are our real capabilities, and what is our purpose in life, all point in the direction of our vision for our life, our life's mission, and, how it is we might use our strengths to uncover and discover possible answers.
Crucially, the personal inquiry made into and 'through' these questions should, in the optimal case, connect up with a person's core assumptions and values.
What sqaureONE's facilitation does is aid the process of personal, experiential exploration of great questions and their founding assumptions. This assists a process of deep, exploratory inquiry. The content of this learning process is the learner him or her self. The process is exploratory because it is literally so: artistic, creative, meaningful and adventurous. Nobody can know what its results will be in advance!
The goal of this process I hold, as its facilitator, as an over-arching intention. This intention is a frame and it is joined with the frame of the client. This creates a field. The goal via experience in this field is discovery of an experiment a person can do to test what they've learned about themselves, and, learned through exploring themselves.
It works simply. The process, by design, implements new ways of looking at questions. It does so by folding into the field of the process random, novel, and meaningful data. In the learner's exploratory, reflective experience of this rich field, almost invariably, possible insights are revealed to their awareness. Such insights are suggestive of ways of practically testing the insight(s).
This is how exploratory learning works. It is seemingly different when spelled out like this. But, in truth, people do it intuitively all the time. At the same time, with practice, exploratory learning can become one of our keenest capabilities. My own hypothesis is: questions about our purpose, vision, and mission, are creatively resolvable the better we become at exploring who we really are, and, what we are really to become.
This type of learning is also a blast and is especially fun for persons who enjoy wandering a bit outside the conventional modes of inquiry. For others, (experience has shown,) it takes a little bit of getting used to, and then, blast off!
(November 2003)