Sensory Learning

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