Cameron D. Norman

The Censemaker

Cameron Norman

Censemaking

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Censemaking is my main blog and ideas site. It’s been running for nearly 10 years and has been a labour of love.

Like many properties — digital or otherwise — it’s been undergoing some renovations lately and now includes a bi-weekly newsletter focused on innovation.

It’s been a natural extension of the work I’ve been doing to advance understanding of innovation and the support of change efforts of those looking to make the world a little better. That might mean a world that’s a little more caring, healthier, kinder, more effective, more sustainable, and fair and just. Just a little.

But a little over a lot is a LOT.

The newsletter can be subscribed to here.

The main site can be visited anytime.

Innovate better.

Sensory Learning

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Few things in this life are guaranteed in our professional lives. As someone who has developed his vocation around change, design, and the evaluation of both I can say that no amount of goodwill, solid thinking, skill, or energy can guarantee much when it comes to humans. We are such a strange group.

We are certainly not a rational bunch, at least most of the time.

One of the few things that we can count on is the opportunity to learn. I say ‘opportunity’ because I believe fully in the phrase “when the student is ready, the teacher appears”.

If I can say anything about working in the area of supporting change, it is that giving heed to this phrase will save a lot of stress and angst over the quality of the work we do. It’s easy to ask for change, it’s far harder to actually do it.

Or at least it’s a lot easier to ask for change from others than it is to change something ourselves.

Getting out of our head

Part of the reason that I think change is so incredibly difficult is that we keep it largely in our head. We think about change and we feel a set of emotions about the idea of change and its consequences. It’s flight, fight, and all that over again. We don’t really sense what is around us all that well.

We don’t feel the change. And by that I don’t mean some flaky new age thing, but rather literally appreciate the texture of a particular situation. By texture, I mean the subtle differences in landscape, tone, shade, layout, and hue. Architects, who’s main job is to change and transform space, know this. So do artists. Musicians — good ones at least — can speak to the subtleties of changes in rhythm and structure as a means to communicate things between each other (often seen in jazz) and to the audience.

These are sensory forms of communication. It’s our eyes, ears, and body as we feel the music or feel something connected to the experience we are having and what we perceive.

I’m struggling with this idea right now. I get hired to help people change and yet, these are ideas that resonate in the hallway conversations that take place after or before a meeting, but not in the meeting because these ideas take time, attention, are unclear, complex, and not very rational (i.e., linear and reducible to a few rules). And yet, most of our life lessons come this way. They do involve the head, but they also involve all these other things.

The question I leave myself today is: What do we need to do to get us out of our head and into our whole body to learn through sensing, not just thinking?

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

Goals and other lies I tell myself

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“You need to have a goal.”

That’s what I hear from ‘experts’ all the time. Without a goal, you’re listless and will not accomplish what you want in life.

Ah, there’s the rub. What do we want in life? If we knew that, perhaps a goal might help — or maybe it would just be self-evident because we knew what we wanted.

Whether it’s planning your career, your finances, or your your weekend, the idea of having a goal or goals is something that seems too seductive to resist taking up, yet it ultimately presents a rather unappealing reality. What is the goal of my life?

I don’t have a goal for my life, my relationships, my career or for most of my days, which has made planning ‘systems’ rather useless, despite my continued attempts to use them. This resistance to goals has manifested in some major challenges in my life. For example, I’ve resisted overtures to do financial planning on the basis that it is entirely goal-driven. I actually have little concept about what life is going to be like when I retire, if I retire. I know I need financing to support life beyond my most productive years, but for what purposes beyond the basics eludes me. This may be something I come to regret, but the absence of a plan hasn’t prevented me from saving or investing, it’s just not given me anything.

Goal attempts

Like many people, I’ve thought about creating some type of support system for goal-development and realization. This idea of a system is closer to what the research says we need to do and James Clear has a great post on this distinction for those who are interested. Recently, I tried the Self Journal system that’s become quite popular. This system (really, a journal with an injection of aspirations into it) is the brainchild of a couple of ‘high achievers’ who sought to create some form of motivational / focus tool that would actually work through their initiative called Best Self.

The system is working OK. What I struggle with is the goals part. Each day it asks me to set out the goal for the day. Too often I either leave it blank or write something I feel half-hearted about. One might suggest that I write a SMART goal, but as I’ve argued elsewhere that’s not really good for complex, dynamic situations and my life is certainly one of those things. What I need is a real system and the Self Journal is partly that, albeit an incomplete system.

What does work nicely is the sections for gratitude in the morning and evening. The pages ask you to list three things you’re grateful for at the start and at the end of the day. Gratitude, however inconsistently defined, has been shown to be related to positive wellbeing (PDF). Is wellbeing connected to goals? To productivity? Is that the right question?

What is my goal for goals?

The bigger question is why I bother to continue on with goals at all. My PhD is on the science of human behaviour change and goals were a part of many of the key theories and models on behaviour change, yet most of the research on behaviour change was done in healthcare settings with goals defined by a problem with a discernible cause: smoking, excess weight, drug or alcohol use, lack of energy etc. These have clear, near dichotomous outcomes: either you [ ] or you don’t. If cigarette use is a direct, clear cause of a problem and you do not wish to continue with using it, then quitting it as a goal is a pretty decent idea.

But if you want to be well? What does that mean? For me, I’ve self-defined my personal wellness when I was single and when in a committed loving relationship, when 20 pounds heavier than I am now and now, when I was in harder times financially and when I was doing well. Yes, there are clear correlations between the extent of certain things and others, but it’s not a straight line.

I don’t have goals for wellness aside from ‘being well’. This doesn’t work with SMART goals at all. It’s non-specific, not measurable, uncertainly achievable, realistic (I guess), and time-bound only in that I want it NOW and not later.

From goals to getting things done

My answer is: give up on goals unless they help you accomplish what you want.

Spend time thinking about what you want and work towards living a life — creating a system — that is designed to amplify more of the things that you like and enjoy and less of the things you don’t. Attend to your thoughts and feelings and record what you do somehow to help reflect on it and codify it into your memory (like through a journal). This learning, coupled with a genuine intent to do something should probably help get you moving in a direction that achieves something you look back on and feel good about having done.

That’s a goal, I think.

 

 

 

 

Hard conversations

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Spirit Within

Yesterday on my local CBC radio morning show, regular guest on pop culture Jesse Wente, opened up about an issue that has caught fire in the Canadian media within the past two weeks: cultural appropriation.

The issue was originally sparked by a poorly timed, badly thought-through editorial in the journal for the Writers Union of Canada that argued for the benefits and almost necessity of cultural appropriation in writing good fiction. While the argument itself has some flaws on its own, what made it strikingly tone-deaf was that it was written by the white editor to kick off a special issue devoted to First Nations writers. There was criticism of the piece, debate, further voices adding support or denouncement of the article, a resignation and even more debate. The issue isn’t done.

Which brings me to Jesse Wente’s commentary on Metro Morning. Jesse was part of the debate and, as a cultural critic and Obijwa, has a legitimate and well-informed opinion on this matter of cultural appropriation. Appearing on the show (which I listened to first and then sought out the video feed later, see below), Jesse went beyond rhetoric in the debate and spoke to the heart of the matter about why cultural appropriation is such an important issue for him, his people, and his ancestors in a way that is beyond my ability to comment with much value. His words speak for themselves.

https://www.facebook.com/metromorning/videos/1218732138231338/

It’s real, honest, and visceral in how he points to the hard truth that those from our First Nations live with. Those of us from other lands are here on theirs and have been, often by force, oppression, lies, and deceit. This is about having hard conversations.

I didn’t do any of this to First Nations peoples, yet I am a beneficiary of those injustices. I have and continue to reap benefits from the systemic oppression, genocidal efforts, and tacit (and overt) racism that the government of the country I call home — and was legitimized by its citizens — has done to Jesse’s people for more than 150 years.

Reconciliation

This is really what it comes down to. Hard conversations are hard, so why not just not have them? That’s really the big issue. We are amazing at deflecting, denying, rationalizing, distracting or otherwise simply refusing to have hard conversations because they mean getting really deep about who we are as humans, who we are as ourselves, and accepting or at least confronting certain truths that we don’t want to face up to.

The reconciliation movement in Canada has provided a great point for this kind of discussion to happen and also brings into bear some very tricky things. Reconciliation is not about making non-First Nations people feel guilty, it’s not about making things “all better” and saying that the past is the past, nor is it about finding reparations.  It’s something bigger, bolder and more aligned with real healing than any of these ideas. I was introduced into the reconciliation movement by Paul Lacerte, a policy maker, activist and member of the Nadleh Whut’en First Nation in northern BC when he spoke at a conference I attended not too long ago. He spoke eloquently about what reconciliation means and, above all, it means having hard conversations and having them often.

But it means having conversations that are about love, too. And love, when you think about it, can be as hard of a conversation as any when you mean what you say and say what you mean. That moment when you tell someone you love them for the first time, from the heart, is a game changer in a romantic union or a friendship. What reconciliation does is take that sentiment of love and initiate conversations about what that means today. If someone we love deeply has been hurt, violated, denied or neglected because of something we were a part of — historically, what does that mean?

The parallel is apt, for me. It’s easier to relate to the idea of speaking to past wrongs on a personal level than on a societal level. Yet, the conversation is still similar.

To heal is not just to repair, it’s to develop and grow. It’s about designing a future from the present building on the raw materials from the past, now and finding what’s missing in the days ahead. It’s also about being conscious and aware of what it means to hurt and live in the present. That’s what Jesse Wente did for me: he made his present far more visceral and real to me in a way that I’d not experienced. I’m still not sure what to do with it all, but I know there will be some hard conversations for me in the days and weeks ahead as a result.

Creating as Healing

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If there is anything that I’ve learned about the healing process is that it requires creating something from what remains and going beyond. Healing is a creative act and creating is a part of healing.

It might be for that reason that the stories of creators of various stripes, particularly artists, touch on the process of recovery and transformation that they go through in producing their work, in part as a reaction to trauma of some sort.

I’ve seen, experienced and deeply believe that our traumas and confusions are often fixed by creation. Sing in the choir. Paint pictures. Write poetry or a blog. This is a space for healing, it allows me to write freely and discuss things that I might not elsewhere to the same extent. For me, writing is a healing act.

When I get into one of those spaces for rumination on something not particularly enjoyable, perhaps painful such as a memory and all it elicits or a present conflict that I’m dealing with, I find it rather circular. I think, I worry or fret, and re-think and repeat. Creating is the pathway outside of that.

Putting things out there

Writing is also a way of putting some of those thoughts and feeling down on paper. However, as I’ve learned, there is a difference between writing as a journal and creating something. Journaling is something I’ve done since I was a teen, something not that common for a man. Journaling helps honour what has happened, what I am feeling and allow me to give form to what is going on inside me. However, it’s not the same type of creating as something like writing for an audience, even if I am creating the audience through the writing.

Writing and art allows me to find new ways of engaging the world. It makes my world a little bigger. When I’m in my darker moments, that bigger space allows me to see light and let it in. When I am in moments of great light, it allows me to shine it more on those spaces that are dark. It’s always a win-win.

It’s partly because creating is also about putting something into the world. My journal never gets into the world, much. A website post, an Instagram picture, a tweet, a video, or a painting shared with a friend or even just intended for a friend can all get us to summon courage and marshall us to create coherence in our story. It’s not about having us style the story for the world (it’s our story after all), but it means making coherent sense of what it is we want to say for others, whatever the medium.

Creations usually have some rules of form, which create the boundaries that focus the creative process. These boundaries like the border of a canvas, the margin of a page, the three-line form of a haiku and so on all are vehicles for coherence. That’s probably why creating is so healing: it allows for us to bring coherence to things that we are experiencing as incoherent. We add structure to the mess.

This all reminds me of just how important that dialogue between the creator and the audience becomes, which is why healing is always partly social.

When writing about the rules of creation for the new, non-print media (which was, at the time of his writing, not even digital), Edmund Snow Carpenter stated the following ‘rules’ about how the creator deals with their audiences:

“1. Know your audience and address yourself directly to it

2. Know what you want to say and say it clearly and fully

3. Reach the maximum audience by using existing channels

Whatever sense this may have made in world of print, it makes no sense today. In fact, the reverse of each rule applies.

If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don’t address themselves to audiences; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear and are affected.” (Carpenter, 1970, p. i (forward)) 

Talking to ourselves in public

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that talking to ourselves is highly therapeutic and healthy. What creating does is present you with an audience — even if that audience is you. But mostly, that audience is others.

I once had a moment of intense heartache and disappointment as a wonderful relationship that had started ended suddenly without warning or much sense. Suddenly, all this energy I had that was devoted to someone else, our relationship, the worlds that we shared and were building, was left unfocused. One of the tools I used was social media.

I have a very uneasy relationship with social media. There is an increasing body of evidence that time spent on Facebook is detrimental to your mental health — and the same may be true for social media overall. This obviously plays out differently among people, but I know that I almost always — probably 9 times out of 10 visits — feel worse about the world and life after a visit to Facebook, which is why I barely use it. However, social media can be a source of creative energy, too.

I used to use Instagram as a means of focusing my gaze on the world around me. My posts got me to thinking about what I was seeing and capturing that in some creative manner. I really enjoyed it, but stopped posting much as I got busy and found that social media was distracting me from the world.

When my relationship ended, I renewed my focus on Instagram again,  focusing a lot on the creative potential within the various media — photography. Since then, it’s got me out and thinking about what kind of things I want to capture, how and in what means do I wish to present these ideas. But it was also a way of speaking to myself out loud. It’s about healthy self-presentation in this case. I don’t have many followers and don’t really care how many people see my pictures, but it gets me creating.

Don’t wait for inspiration to hit — just write, paint, sing, photograph, record — whatever. Create.

Points of Departure

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This post is about 10 years in the making. I registered this domain on advice that I needed to ‘protect my name brand’ so I did.

And then it sat.

I didn’t know what to do with it, until recently. Consider it a bit of an awakening, but maybe it was more just a coming back to a lesson that I was first taught 25 years ago and finally got around to learning.

This story is all about me and that lesson and about how I got here.

And it all began with a date to the prom.

Life lessons at the prom

It was my high school graduation – ‘the prom’ : First Class 90’s was the theme. I didn’t have a date so I brought my friend Deron, who also didn’t have one. The funny thing about not having dates — and I felt like we were the only two people in the entire graduating year who didn’t have them — is that we got stuck at the teachers’ table.

The teacher who was responsible for the prom that year was Mrs Antrobus. She naturally brought a date, Mr Antrobus. Dr. Paul Antrobus was a professor in psychology at the local university and most closely resembled the living embodiment of Dr Emmett Brown from Back to the Future. Paul had just returned from China on a tour with other psychology students – one that overlapped with the Tiananmen Square massacre – and was a fountain of stories of adventure, wonder, and learning. He was the psychologist version of Indiana Jones.

While Deron and my peers were focused on prom-stuff (girls, music, more girls) I spent most of my time talking to Paul and learning about psychology. I’d planned to take a little time off between high school and university, but knew I’d have to take his class when I did, even though psychology was not what I’d planned to study.

And so I did.

In that first class, Paul walks into the room, sits on the table, dims the lights, and puts in a video. The film was the Powers of Ten, the classic IBM film from Charles and Ray Eames done in the 1970’s, that basically takes a couple lying on a towel in what is now Millennium Park in Chicago and zooms out until you see nothing by nebula and galaxies and then zooms in until you nothing by atoms and subatomic particles. The lights come up and Paul says: “This is the domain of psychology: let’s begin“.

Mind. Blown.

This wasn’t just Freud, rats and mazes, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as I expected – this was all about, well, everything – the entire universe. And Paul meant it and showed it to me for the next few years.

From that moment onward I knew what I wanted to do: be a psychologist. That was Paul taught me over my lifetime: psychology is about the human condition in it’s entirety and our place in the universe.It was a gift of a lesson and one that I was given from a truly remarkable human being. One who’s lesson’s I’ve been inspired to share and haven’t fully done so, which is why I’m writing here, in this space, now.

The path to now

Paul was no ordinary psychologist. He was facile in many different approaches to the discipline — psychodynamic, humanistic and transpersonal — and brought perspectives from both traditional Western and Eastern perspectives. He’d spent 10 years in India as a missionary, was an ordained (but not practicing) minister, and was a fervent believer in science and spirituality as complementary forces. His mind was as wide open as any person I have ever or likely will ever meet. Paul believed our lives were the greatest classroom and laboratory and that listening to it would provide more than any lecture, practicum or job. He was so right.

But alas, it was a lesson I didn’t truly pick up until later, much later.

Paul saw the world in systems and said it was our responsibility to work and act with this thinking in mind: we’re connected creatures that require connected thinking.

Paul wasn’t alone in shaping my worldview; his colleague Mary Hampton, a wonderful, compassionate, intelligent and wise psychologist with deep connection to First Nations healing traditions, taught and mentored me for years and served as my undergraduate thesis supervisor. Mary ignited my interest in something called community psychology: the study and practice of how we can take our understanding of human behaviour and apply it to support learning and healing (more on this concept later) in our neighbourhoods, organizations and societies.

Paul and Mary and the community of learners that they nurtured and mentored showed me the way forward and for the next 14 years I completed an advanced undergraduate degree, a masters degree, a PhD and a post-doctoral fellowship in pursuit of my goal of becoming a psychologist. I studied healing practices in schools, how people solve problems together using technology and the ways in which individuals, organizations and communities change and how they operate as systems.

I had done it. I arrived. I was being courted for jobs and landed a big one back at my alma mater, the University of Toronto, where I inherited my doctoral advisors lab and re-built it from the ground up into a 15 person operation that had more than 15 staff, millions in grant funding and was generating a lot of research with some of it translated into more than two dozen languages and remains among the top 1% most cited in my field. I had enormous success, grew my reputation, and was poised for more greatness….and I was miserable.

I was the dog that chased the car and finally caught it. Now here was this dog with a bumper in it’s mouth going: Now what?

In the pursuit of it all I’d forgotten to listen to my life. Those things that had inspired me to become a psychologist had been forgotten.

Here I was: burnt out, with a failing marriage to the love of my life who was now a friend, a shrinking friendship circle thanks to strange life circumstances (how is it that four people move to Australia in one year? It’s not like it’s down the road — it’s on the other end of the earth!) and neglect on my part, a family that had its own tragedies to bear and deal with, and a career that sharply going nowhere I wanted to be.

My community — marriage, friends, family, work — was crumbling all around me. Here I was a community psychologist without a community to speak of.

It was time to listen to my life. Time to heal.

Healing the healer

What is this healing I speak of? It’s not some new-agey, touchy-feely term, but rather an ancient approach to thriving in a dynamic environment that is tailor-made for the modern world.

Everyday we are constantly presented with micro and macro ‘traumas’ — shifts in our psychosocial world due to new information and experience that challenge our present state. Everything from minor things like a having to navigate and implement a new policy at work, a child who won’t get dressed in the morning, or a friend cancelling plans at the last minute to bigger things like living with income or job insecurity as an employee or entrepreneur, reliving traumatic memories from past events, real threats of violence to our person or property, or managing chronic illness. Healing is the process in which we sense, understand and act on these experiences to integrate them into ourselves and survive, thrive and flourish.

Trauma just is. As long as we change, we will always experience some of it. By not integrating it into ourselves we let these events dictate their impact on us, and not always in ways or times of our choosing. Healing is about acknowledging our hopes, fears, experiences and desires and listening to our life — whether as individuals, groups, or communities.

It’s not about just getting back to the status quo, but building strength. Muscular growth comes from trauma. Muscles build because your body repairs or replaces damaged muscle fibres through a cellular process where it fuses damaged fibres together. These replaced and repaired fibres get thicker and grow.

Healing is really at the heart of innovation, social change, resilience and healthy personal development. It’s not something done to you, but with you, for you, by you – but not only you. That’s the difference between healing and self-help. It’s never just about you as much as we in the Western world like to think of ourselves as independent, in control, people. We need our effort, but our efforts alone aren’t enough. It never is, because we don’t exist apart from everything else it makes sense that we can’t fully heal without some engagement outside ourselves.

That’s social and community psychology. Its also about design: designing our lives. And like good design, it needs to be fit for purpose, is context dependent, is embedded in a system and will engage with others in that system.

Coming back

This space is ‘a coming back’ for me. It’s about re-rooting to topics, ideas and experiences that created a deep, profound resonance with me and led to my calling; one that I briefly forgot.

My vocation is bigger than the labels given to me. I wasn’t meant to be a psychologist as much as a healer. My path isn’t about being a professor, but an educator. I’m not a designer, but a creator. I might be called a consultant, but I really coach, guide and share stories to help people find their way. I’m here to be a curious wanderer, not just a researcher and evaluator.

This is not about the world’s labels, but my truth. Maybe some of these reflect your truths, too.

Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll come along for the journey in the writings ahead. Let’s heal — create, grow, learn, wonder, reflect, dream, share, innovate — together.