Relax into learning and peace
Sandra Dodd
Sandra Dodd: But why would it be "self control" and not just "conscious decision-making skills”?
Someone else: It wouldn't be. I was just using crappy terminology. :/
Me again (not new today, but newly posted today because it seems a good week for it):
Weeding out terminology we would prefer not to mean improves thinking.
A hundred times or more people have said "just semantics" and "stupid" about me saying "don't say teach," which I've been doing for years. Every time someone says "taught" or "teach" they can slip back into the whole school thing and be seeing the world through school-colored glasses. If they do what it takes, mentally and emotionally, to recast their reports and then their thoughts in terms of who *learned* something, then they can start to see the world in terms of learning.
The last holdout for some people is "he taught himself..." but maybe that should be the FIRST to go. Teaching comes from someone WITH skills or knowledge passing them on to those without them. If I taught myself to play guitar, I would have had to have known how first. I sure did learn how. I told people for years that Ymelda Martinez taught me to play guitar. She got me from mystery to understanding, in one lesson, by me asking her tons of questions and her pointing out physically which angles would be better for my fingers, and how hard and how close to the frets, and how to finger pick. And I had a chord book, and my mom played guitar (a different style than I wanted to do—she did flat-picking, and I wanted to do folkie finger-picking.
I learned from everything around me, from trial and error, from watching others and asking questions.
The information was being sucked in by me, not pushed in by me or anyone else. I didn't PUT the information inside me, I drew it in.
And so with "control" and "deciding"—control implies one KNOWS the right answer and if he's not "out of control" or "lacking self control," there will be no choice; he will control himself. Decisionmaking requires lots of data and thought and freedom and discernment.
Sandra
This is from http://sandradodd.com/control
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Someone else: It wouldn't be. I was just using crappy terminology. :/
Me again (not new today, but newly posted today because it seems a good week for it):
Weeding out terminology we would prefer not to mean improves thinking.
A hundred times or more people have said "just semantics" and "stupid" about me saying "don't say teach," which I've been doing for years. Every time someone says "taught" or "teach" they can slip back into the whole school thing and be seeing the world through school-colored glasses. If they do what it takes, mentally and emotionally, to recast their reports and then their thoughts in terms of who *learned* something, then they can start to see the world in terms of learning.
The last holdout for some people is "he taught himself..." but maybe that should be the FIRST to go. Teaching comes from someone WITH skills or knowledge passing them on to those without them. If I taught myself to play guitar, I would have had to have known how first. I sure did learn how. I told people for years that Ymelda Martinez taught me to play guitar. She got me from mystery to understanding, in one lesson, by me asking her tons of questions and her pointing out physically which angles would be better for my fingers, and how hard and how close to the frets, and how to finger pick. And I had a chord book, and my mom played guitar (a different style than I wanted to do—she did flat-picking, and I wanted to do folkie finger-picking.
I learned from everything around me, from trial and error, from watching others and asking questions.
The information was being sucked in by me, not pushed in by me or anyone else. I didn't PUT the information inside me, I drew it in.
And so with "control" and "deciding"—control implies one KNOWS the right answer and if he's not "out of control" or "lacking self control," there will be no choice; he will control himself. Decisionmaking requires lots of data and thought and freedom and discernment.
Sandra
This is from http://sandradodd.com/control
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]