The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Letting Go of the Outcome

Our 2-year-old friend, Tate, contemplates the temporal nature of bubbles!

As graphic facilitators, we go into many conversations blind to the real depth of the content and unaware of the outcome. As facilitators, it is imperative to keep our ego in check.

It is a very Zen way of working.

Keeping the Ego—representing reason, common sense, decision-making and personal ambition—sublimated to the needs of the moment is key to participating fully.

Why?

Ego defense mechanisms are psychological strategies used by humans to cope with reality and to maintain self-image. They are often used by the ego when our unconscious behavior conflicts with reality and the behaviors of those around us: usually driven by fear and desire.

The real trick as a facilitator is to achieve a level of mindfulness that is aware of the suffering and needs of all parties, now and into the future, while remaining unattached.

This article from FacilitatorU.com shares a wonderful story of how a 2-year-old became a teacher on the importance of mindfulness and joy.

While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks

I often refer to scribing as a magic trick: We watch a human pull images from thin air, grabbing pictures and ideas from the vapor of conversation and giving them physical form.

This article gives insight on why the physical performance of illusion is so captivating and how the brain uses neural tricks to do this: approximating, cutting corners, instantaneously and subconsciously choosing what to “see” and what to let pass, neuroscientists say.

clipped from www.nytimes.com In a paper published last week in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, both simple and spectacular, take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality. For the scientists, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, it raised hope that magic could accelerate research into perception. “Here’s this art form going back perhaps to ancient Egypt, and basically the neuroscience community had been unaware” of its direct application to the study of perception, Dr. Martinez-Conde said. One theory of perception, for instance, holds that the brain builds representations of the world, moment to moment, using the senses to provide clues that are fleshed out into a mental picture based on experience and context.