Hello wonderful people,
Happy Wednesday, and welcome back to the Wisdom Workshop Newsletter : a selection of quotes, links and invitations for emergent learning.
This is issue #41, with a playful spin on the Delphic maxim to KNOW THYSELF,
inspired and supported by members of the beta creative innovation workshop 🧙♂️
💎 Quotes I’m Considering
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” ― Plato
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”
―George Bernard Shaw
“Genuine self-knowledge can never be gained purely by theoretical introspection or reading about different models of the mind, but only through trials and tribulations, and in dialogue with others. It needs to be acquired on our own journeys—heroic or otherwise. ”
― Anna Katharina Schaffner, Art of Self-Improvement
🔗 5 Ideas on Self-Knowledge as (Playful) Enactment
Hans-Georg Moeller’s notion of “Genuine Pretending”- a Taoist Philosophy of self-hood. This reading encourages a “playful, skillful, and unattached engagement … a way of seeking existential sanity.”
An “Alternative to Perfectionism” in a great Substack a Science of Creativity. We can choose to strive for excellence instead of perfection, and experience better positive emotions and productivity outcomes.
Room to play with placebos: David Robson’s new book on the “Expectation Effect” suggests rituals, mental simulations, and more. Robson relays current psychological research around ways to re-write our narratives of self and style.
Power of Positive Emotions in Organizations and the Upward Spiral of Self-Development for the academic- or positive psychology-minded. Fredrickson hypothesizes that positive emotions “broaden” our cognitive capacities in the moment and “build” long-term social, emotional, and cognitive resources.
The Eight Play Personalities. Stuart Brown, M.D., is the director of the National Institute for Play. He has taken the “play histories” of over 6000 people, and in so doing, he’s noticed eight general archetypes, or personalities, of play.
✍ Three Sets of Invitations to Know Thyself
I’m sharing these modes from Anna Katharina Schaffner’s Art of Self-Improvement. All quotes are hers.
Socratic modes of self-knowledge:
Knowing what we don’t know : “in a lucid awareness of our own shortcomings and prejudice.” We don’t do this alone, ideally. We have a Socratic dialogue with others who can reveal parts of ourselves to us.
✍ What don’t I know?
✍ Do I have any potential Socratic discussion partners?
Depth psychology modes of self-knowledge:
We can understand ourselves “through myths, fairy tales, dreams, and folklore.” For Jung, we might explore which of twelve main archetypes we might associate with.
✍ What are my favorite fairy tales, movies, stories? Why?
✍ Which of the twelve archetypes do I associate with? The Ruler? The Creator? The Sage? The Trickster? the Explorer? The Rebel? The Hero? The Magician? The Everyman? The Innocent? the Caregiver? The Lover?
✍ How can I be more playful with my “self,” my “style” , my “story” ?
✍ What experiments or experiences might I have to practice a playful emerging self?
Buddhist-inspired modes of self-knowledge:
This is a fun one, since Buddhist philosophy rejects the existence of the self as we commonly understand it in the West. In this view, selfhood is a complex, dynamic, and impermanent collection of a series of physiological, cognitive, emotional, cultural, historical, and interpersonal conditions. Buddhist-inspired approaches to self-knowledge, though, generally begin with mindful—i.e., non-judgmental—awareness of the present moment… and end with the insight into our true-nature as interdependent-co-arising.
✍ Where’s my heart?
✍ What’s alive in my body right now?
✍ What’s alive in my mind right now?
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These are, of course, just three lenses we might use to come to know ourselves. We did not cover MTBI, the Enneagram, or Human Design. Nor did we consider group psychotherapeutic approaches of modifying the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Nor did we cover strengths-finders or insight-providers.
Each of these modes of self-knowledge might give us a starting point — but they don’t tell us what to do next. They don’t instruct how to proceed in our lives — how to make meaning in our work, relationships, and health.
To do that — to turn our knowledge into wisdom — we need play. We need experimentation and experience. We need conversation with others and with reality. This is the idea “workshopping” wisdom. Or in the words of Herminia Ibarra:
"We learn who we are in practice, not in theory."
🎉 Now Enrolling !
Want to join the waitlist for the next Wisdom Workshop on Writing the Good Life or the Wisdom Workshop on Creative Innovations in the Art of Living Beautifully?
Just reply to this email and I’ll send you some cool writing invitations. No pressure or obligation to commit.
🎵 If you’re in Fort Collins, Colorado - Playing a show on
Saturday, February 25 at the Forge Publick House | 21+ | 8-10pm
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✌ Thanks for Reading
Hope to get to see you soon,
Sean