One of the books I read while working on my MEd was Ben and Rosamund Zander’s The Art of Possibility.
My first reading of it was clouded by my suspicions of anyone associated with Landmark Education – which the authors are. Since then I have met a couple of people who have had good experiences with Landmark, I’ve been enlightened by people who have looked into Landmark more than I had and finally, people who know nothing about Landmark had good things to say about the book. Especially one online buddy, whose opinion I really respect – she’s a Philosophy instructor and kicks ass at critical thinking. So I went back and read it without my gray coloured glasses. And guess what – surprise! – I found I liked it much more the second time around. Which ironically reinforces one of the book’s points – that we can change how we think about situations to allow for possibility where there was none. Which is a big topic in this blog, too.
Ben Zander was just in Canada teaching a seminar and there was a clip of him on Canadian TV – and luckily I found it on Google Video. If you have or haven’t read the book there is good stuff in this clip (and you can ignore the 30 seconds where he talks about Landmark), for example:
Transformation happens when you shift your view of the world. When you see that what you’ve been doing is hiding, taking yourself away, not participating, not engaging, not taking risks by sitting in the back row of your life.
1 Comment
January 1, 2008 at 1:14 pm
[...] “I will stop smoking.”, etc. These are limiting because there is no new state – no possibilty. We know from the research that we are not motivated by negativity or fear, but we are motivated by [...]