"Do many people understand you...

... when you talk about these things?" A question that was asked of me today as I was told I was capable of high levels of abstract thinking and was in fact a 22nd century thinker...

No wonder I have difficulty communicating my thoughts... I thought it was because I was a bit dim and my verbal communication skills had gone to pot...

But seriously, I wonder how many of us find ourselves in the position of having a mind filled with ideas, hopes and dreams, and struggling to find someone who can share our train of thought...

Discussion papers...and thoughts unfinished...

I was reading a document presented to me as a discussion paper today... I am not sure what the writer intended, however this reader perceives it to be something of a mind dump or brainstorm, rather than a considered piece of writing...

Anyway, this coupled with my delayed readings on existentialism and supervision of social workers... kitchen renovations and a sick daughter who is more than 3 hours by plane away... leads to lots of cluttered thoughts...

So... one thought at a time...

1. The feedback on the paper will take more time than I was expecting... sigh
2. My daughter is doing everything she can to get well
3. The trades-people are all booked for the kitchen... be patient!
4. I really want to read the other stuff as this will be GOOD...

As I continue my journey in and around the topic of existentialism, I came across an article titled Existential Approaches to Action Research (Allan Feldman) http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~afeldman/ActionResearchPapers/Feldmaninpress.PDF and was interested by the thoughts at the very beginning... and the notion of 'doing' without 'being'. Finally I have a personal appreciation of the term 'authentic leadership'... doing AND being... well for me anyway.

The other line that really got me was that in order to change - in the articles context, for teachers to change, they have to change their way of being a teacher... I am in the background still working on a model of leadership practice supervision... and all these readings are starting to consolidate and clarify what have till now been feelings and suspicions... you can't 'do' the job of being a managerial leader, you also have to 'be' the managerial leader... and in order to change what you do, you need to change your way of being... I reckon I already knew this, I just hadn't described it in this way...

But then, this also needs to link into levels of awareness and readiness to change our ways of being... maybe my role is not so much to develop the supervision program, rather to raise awareness of the different ways of not just 'doing' but also 'being a managerial leader...

This is where the blog comes in...more disconnected thoughts that will hopefully become clearer as I explore them further...

That's all for now...

...just to get me started

Today was like most days - it had a beginning, a middle and an end... well the work bit did anyway... the real day is not yet over...

I have often wondered what prompts people to start blogging and have read odds and ends about the narcissistic aspects of such activity... however I really do have (at times) an overly cluttered mind and a variety of sideline interests... cooking... arm chair philosophy... social networking... Harvard Business blogs and an assortment of other business feeds... which usually lead me into 'random' book purchases and more ideas and thinking... and trying to connect what seem to be otherwise disconnected thoughts as a result of this presents some interesting challenges...

My all time favourite quote is one from Schopenhauer;

"Thus the task in not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees."

This probably sums up why I fill my mind with all this 'stuff', as I remain certain that at some point, in some Dumbledore 'pensieve-type' way, they will settle, connect and a clarity will emerge.

So that's it... for today at least...