This is the state of the half of our house that is currently being remodeled. Four rooms have been gutted. The plumbing and electric work will be done tomorrow. Insulation will start on Tuesday.
I feel good! The Right Brain Workshops that we have piloted over the last several months, for the purpose of helping participants, have certainly helped me.
Although we truncated the time and offered only half day sessions instead of the one or two day sessions we really think we need, I found that it really helps to dedicate time and space to exercise the right brain functions.
Although most of what I do with clients requires right brain function...relationship building, teaming, conflict management, intervention, visioning, communicating, etc., there is a tendency to go native. My clients are very intensely left brain centric with a strong dislike for anything that crosses over from the right brain hemisphere.
It's not a benign dislike. It's a very aggressive polarized and polarizing style. In order to work in these environments, I have to appear safe. I have to appear, to some degree, left brained.
Even more importantly, I need to have and display affection for left brained people and cultures. Fortunately, I have that affection. Large amounts of it. I know the world needs a lot of good left brain dominant people. I don't want to do that kind of work, and I appreciate the people who do.
The problem for me is that I hang out with these people day and night sometimes for days on end. I don't get enough exposure to some of the most talented right brain dominant people I know. There just isn't time for everything.
So, the 'aha' for me is that four hours of immersion on five Saturday mornings spaced over two months made a big difference to my work. I had a chance to practice graceful and exaggerated body movement. I had a chance to practice improvisation. I had a chance to work on vocalization. I had a chance to connect emotion to body movement...body movement to voice...voice and choreography to other people and groups.
I had a chance to tell a story in a slower and deeper way using all four voice octaves and all range of improvisational movement to support the story and it's characters. I had a chance to draw freely on paper with markers and support my story with images.
Each Monday morning I took all those tools to work and put them into action. Even if I just made a 10% improvement, the results were dramatic. I think the work was more consistent and powerful than it has ever been.
I'm going to take a few weeks off from this 'alpha test' and create another pilot series that will be our 'beta test'. Then, we shall see where it goes.
