Lives In Progress

"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." 
                                                    Heraclitus, Greek Philosopher

     "The view you adapt for yourself profoundly affects the way you live your life." 
                                                    Carol Dweck, PhD 



Mindset is a frame through which we view our successes, mistakes, fears, and triumphs and plays a key role in an individual's capacity to learn and change.In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Stanford University researcher Carol Dweck writes that mind sets are powerful driver of perceptions about self and others as well as one’s capabilities and place in the world."They guide the whole interpretation process." Herwork identifies 2 distinctly different mindsets that have the greatest implications to successful learning and change over the lifespan, the "Growth mindset" and the "Fixed mindset."

A Growth mindsetis a s…

In my conversation with Long Island social worker Martha Kahan in Episode 5 of the (mostly) TRUE THINGS podcast, we talk about the topic of social-emotional learning, how she uses applied improvisation to cultivate social-emotional skills with the teens she works with, and why Real Housewives is her guilty pleasure.  
Here are some links to research on the topic of social-emotional learning. Enjoy!

"Improvisation is a system's unplanned but purposeful response at a particular point to a turbulent, fast-changing environment" according to the authors of  "Learning To Improvise, Improvising To Learn: A Process of Responding To Complex Environments" in the Journal of Business Research. Improvisation engages the cognitive, the emotional and the social dimensions in every experience, making it an ideal method for cultivating skills for navigating change and uncertainty. 

From "Feelings Count: Emotions and Learning"
Stanford University School of Education
"…

As a classically trained musician and music therapist, I internalized structure, form, and technique that offered clear guidelines for how to sing or perform a piece of music properly. "Getting it right" meant playing what the composer intended with emotional interpretation entirely personal but heavily influenced by what is written into the piece. The formal structures of classical music clearly lay out the order of a piece of music, tell us what notes to play, how loud or soft to play them and even which passages to repeat. It becomes comfortable with practice, and these musical "habits" are reliable under stress. Improvisation in music is something entirely different and much scarier. It builds on those structures while at the same time breaking them up. Experimenting with notes, phrasing and dynamics in a highly-individual way can be a tough transition for a classically-trained musican to make. In the same way, improvising our professional lives is claiming fr…