Intentional Society: Cleaning up skill integration
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This week we gratefully received an introduction to Clean Language from Gina Campbell, author of four books on the subject. It looks to be something we want to carry with us! Talking subsequently about how to practice and integrate that skillset/practice/vocabulary leads me to my question of the day: How can we best help each other, as a face-to-face community investing time together, to solidify our "being who we want to be"? Specifically, how best may we be bridging/blending across formal practice and "everyday" modes of interaction?
Walking the walk. Turning propositional knowing into participatory knowing. Integration of learning is not some new or fancy challenge. It is confronted by parishioners in their pews, corporate trainers in their conference rooms, physics teachers in their classrooms, soldiers in their drills. Practice often fails to transfer when the real-life arena is sufficiently different than the training context.
In our next IS community session, we'll take a "cheat sheet" approach to broadening our Clean Language usage and application, practicing those skills of asking questions that are "clean" in that they are not contaminated by our own assumptions and projections and rewordings. We'll build up our abilities with focused practice, like doing a machine at the gym that works a particular muscle. But we've already noticed: there's a difference between the coaching context of CL and the conversational context we encounter much more frequently in our homes and workplaces and social spaces.
We have social space within IS too — we're not doing structured relating practices all the time. But when we take a balcony view on our conversations, and our practice, we can see something of that transfer gap between the different modes. I love the "How are we different?" question (hat tip to David, I think) in the sense of, would a person off the street hear or see anything different in our conversations compared to the conversations they see elsewhere? I think I'd prefer that their answer be a bigger "yes" in the future compared to how we "just are" with each other so far.
That IS-conversational future would present a bit more difficulty to that theoretical random person: the language, the perspectives and skills needed, the cultural baseline would be "thicker" and less accessible due to the difference. But that's the ever-present tradeoff of (individual and communal) self-transformation: in reducing the gap between our behavior and how we really want to be, we tend to increase the gap between our behavior and baseline societal normative behavior.
And we have a lot of practice in socialization and being normal. So intentional practice is great, gotta start there. But to work our way up the stages of competence with any particular skill, we need a smooth skill-transfer ramp to the contexts in which we wish to reshape our intuitive (unconscious) fidelity (competence).
So this has me looking at what gradations of practice and intentionality are available to us, as we go from structured practice to unstructured life. There are some possible partial moves away from the structure of practice space:
- Add a topic or goal in addition to the practice
- Reduce meta talk/commentary
- De-emphasize the cheat sheet or rules
Aha, and the trick I'm seeing right now is those can easily translate into "do the practice less, be more normal" instead of the intended "rely on the structure less, embody the skill fluidly more". So to get the latter instead of the former... keep a structure-supported awareness around the excursions out to the edges of context-transfer space, I think?
There's also plenty of opportunity for us in IS to strengthen our common knowledge of our intent to be un-normal in our relating, using our seeing, skills, and stances to embody the fluid mode of being (that we want to inhabit in our doings). We're not here to be normal! Or rather, we're here to craft a new normal within our society-of-choice — not to stay stuck in orbit of the world's normal center of gravity.
And then also, plenty of opportunity to strengthen our regular Noticing times/practice relative to that intent! Maybe the word "practice" should go back into the name for our "Community [Practice] Sessions", in the sense of "even when we're not practicing, we're always practicing. Or practicioners, that's even better as an stance more than an activity.
It's almost like the strategy of Anki cards for spaced repetition for long-term-memory integration: The intentional practice, the ramp-down of structural support for a particular word/skill, the checks for "but do we still have it". But not quite: Adopting and integrating ways-of-seeing and perspectival-stances go deeper than using particular phrases of speech, which is again deeper than "do I remember this nugget of info when prompted". Still, we know lots about how to do learning and skill integration!
I have that insight-accomplishment feeling right now, that "oh, it all fits together!" that has so often been a faithful guide down the trail of development and progress. Crisping up why we do "Exploring", how we can do it better, another why of "Noticing", cleaning up our own awareness of the flowing lines of purpose connecting our activities — the self-sustaining web of intentions continues to accumulate!
Cheers,
James