We can change the way we see ourselves to change the way the world sees us. It’s the promise of Edward De Bonothe American psychologist, creator of lateral thinking who signed “You want to be more interesting – Change the way you see yourself and the way the world sees you”. (Franco Angeli). The essay analyzes the reasons that make us interesting in the eyes of other people and shifts the emphasis from “what” to “how”. According to De Bono, in fact, “people spend an enormous amount of time, effort, attention, worries and money to become or remain beautiful”. But much less to become interesting. The focus is on the body, but beauty is wasted if you are not interesting and the secret to becoming one is to be interesting in interacting with your interlocutor. “An interesting conversation is a lot like jazz. There is improvisation. There is a forward and a backward. Themes are taken and elaborated. The instruments talk to each other. There is a continuous flow.” Therefore, what makes us interesting is precisely the ability to play with ideas, to offer new, unusual, sometimes provocative perspectives to capture the curiosity of our interlocutor, but also – on the contrary – to develop curiosity towards him. With a series of seventy exercises, De Bono takes us on a peculiar journey outside the consolidated mental paths.
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Take roads less traveled
By exploiting the mind’s ability to imagine and create connections, De Bono trains us to explore unknown territories. An example is broaden the field of possibilities, or the ability to make hypotheses and conjectures. “Possibilities – explains the author – are the basis of interest. If we spoke only when we were able to present data and facts, we would be silent most of the time.” Alternatives, that is, the intentional devising of different ways of explaining something and acting, also offer us the opportunity to create new connections. Playing to imagine possibilities can also become a form of mental habit which puts us on the right path to see situations, people and even our problems from a different, perhaps more constructive, perspective. The abstraction of concepts, imagining different versions that can materialize over time, finding hidden relationships and connections are other paths that stimulate the capabilities of our mind. By introducing these exercises into everyday life, it often happens that we find ourselves talking to a person and the communication stalls. Imagining a different idea or focusing on a detail of what he or she is telling us are mental strategies that can rekindle the conversation and make it continue. a new direction. Provocations, sanctioned too often by our culture, deserve a separate word; they are – according to De Bono – actions that are the basis of creativity, because they open up food for thought and take the mind outside the usual patterns. Figures of speech, such as analogies and metaphors, can also help us develop unusual perspectives. “Because they are powerful ways of expressing complex relationships.”
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The software does not change
Even though people are different from each other, the “software” does not change. The drivers of attention, in fact, have their roots in sensations, what De Bono defines as “the fuel of interest”. Increasing our familiarity with sensations, physical and emotional, helps us to recognize a wide variety to enjoy them, on the one hand, and to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, to approach them with an open mind. “People are interested in people. They are interested in how others behave. They are interested in how they themselves behave and in human behavior in general,” observes the author. When it comes to fueling interest, not all emotions are created equal. “Emotions are so strong that they dominate the situation and kill the interaction, exploration and processing essential to developing interest,” observes De Bono. Paradoxically, negative emotions and even situations dealing with shock, horror and disgust stimulate interest, because at the root there is a deviation from normality. Similarly, bizarre things, expectations, and even deviation from expectations can be sources of curiosity and interest. In short, it’s like cooking: De Bono, in fact, reminds us that the goodness of a dish does not derive only from the quality of the ingredients, but also from the chef’s ability to assemble them, from the creativity with which he does it. The same goes for interest: starting from the “ingredients” of everyday life, we have the possibility of creating an alchemy that makes us more interesting in the eyes of other people and, at the same time, it makes the way we look at our lives and the world more interesting.
#Beauty #Overrated #important #interesting
– 2024-03-31 04:49:40
