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The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life Paperback – September 24, 2002
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Discover the twelve breakthrough practices for bringing creativity and a sense of possibility into all of your endeavors in this bestselling guide from the author of Pathways to Possibility
Presenting twelve breakthrough practices for bringing creativity into all human endeavors, The Art of Possibility is the dynamic product of an extraordinary partnership. The Art of Possibility combines Benjamin Zander's experience as conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and his talent as a teacher and communicator with psychotherapist Rosamund Stone Zander's genius for designing innovative paradigms for personal and professional fulfillment. The authors' harmoniously interwoven perspectives provide a deep sense of the powerful role that the notion of possibility can play in every aspect of life. Through uplifting stories, parables, and personal anecdotes, the Zanders invite us to become passionate communicators, leaders, and performers whose lives radiate possibility into the world.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateSeptember 24, 2002
- Dimensions7.76 x 5.08 x 0.54 inches
- ISBN-100142001104
- ISBN-13978-0142001103
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"In the presence of either Zander, one's spirit soars. Now they reveal their secrets in a deeply satisfying book. I guarantee you'll be inspired." —Gail Sheehy
"The passionate energy permeating The Art of Possibility is a true force for every reader for self-development and life fulfillment." —Klaus Schwab, founder and president, World Economic Forum
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE FIRST PRACTICE
It's All Invented
To the marketing expert who sees no shoes, all the evidence points to hopelessness. To his colleague, the same conditions point to abundance and possibility. Each scout comes to the scene with his own perspective; each returns telling a different tale. Indeed, all of life comes to us in narrative form; it's a story we tell.
The roots of this phenomenon go much deeper than just attitude or personality. Experiments in neuroscience have demonstrated that we reach an understanding of the world in roughly this sequence: first, our senses bring us selective information about what is out there; second, the brain constructs its own simulation of the sensations; and only then, third, do we have our first conscious experience of our milieu. The world comes into our consciousness in the form of a map already drawn, a story already told, a hypothesis, a construction of our own making.
A now-classic 1953 experiment revealed to stunned researchers that a frog's eye is capable of perceiving only four types of phenomena:
· Clear lines of contrast
· Sudden changes in illumination
· Outlines in motion
· Curves of outlines of small, dark objects
A frog does not "see" its mother's face, it cannot appreciate a sunset, nor even the nuances of color. It "sees" only what it needs to see in order to eat and to avoid being eaten: small tasty bugs, or the sudden movement of a stork coming in its direction. The frog's eye delivers extremely selective information to the frog's brain. The frog perceives only that which fits into its hardwired categories of perception.
Human eyes are selective, too, though magnitudes more complex than those of the frog. We think we can see "everything," until we remember that bees make out patterns written in ultraviolet light on flowers, and owls see in the dark. The senses of every species are fine-tuned to perceive information critical to their survival—dogs hear sounds above our range of hearing, insects pick up molecular traces emitted from potential mates acres away.
We perceive only the sensations we are programmed to receive, and our awareness is further restricted by the fact that we recognize only those for which we have mental maps or categories.
The British neuropsychologist Richard Gregory wrote, "The senses do not give us a picture of the world directly; rather they provide evidence for the checking of hypotheses about what lies before us." And neurophysiologist Donald O. Hebb says, "The `real world' is a construct, and some of the peculiarities of scientific thought become more intelligible when this fact is recognized ... Einstein himself in 1926 told Heisenberg it was nonsense to found a theory on observable facts alone: `In reality the very opposite happens. It is theory which decides what we can observe.'"
We see a map of the world, not the world itself. But what kind of map is the brain inclined to draw? The answer comes from one of the dictates of evolution, the survival of the fittest. Fundamentally, it is a map that has to do with our very survival; it evolved to provide, as a first priority, information on immediate dangers to life and limb, the ability to distinguish friends and foes, the wherewithal to find food and resources and opportunities for procreation. The world appears to us sorted and packaged in this way, substantially enriched by the categories of culture we live in, by learning, and by the meanings we form out of the unique journey each of us travels.
See how thoroughly the map and its categories govern our perception. In a famous experiment, the Me'en people of Ethiopia were presented for the first time with photographs of people and animals, but were unable to "read" the two-dimensional image. "They felt the paper, sniffed it, crumpled it, and listened to the crackling noise it made; they nipped off little bits and chewed them to taste it." Yet people in our modern world easily equate the photographic image with the object photographed—even though the two resemble each other only in a very abstract sense. Recognizing Pablo Picasso in a train compartment, a man inquired of the artist why he did not paint people "the way they really are." Picasso asked what he meant by that expression. The man opened his wallet and took out a snapshot of his wife, saying, "That's my wife." Picasso responded, "Isn't she rather small and flat?"
For the Me'en people there were no "photographs," although they lay in their hands as plain as day. They saw nothing but shiny paper. Only through the conventions of modern life do we see the image in a photograph. As for Picasso, he was able to see the snapshot as an artifact, distinct from what it represented.
Our minds are also designed to string events into story lines, whether or not there is any connection between the parts. In dreams, we regularly weave sensations gathered from disparate parts of our lives into narratives. In full wakefulness, we produce reasons for our actions that are rational, plausible, and guided by the logic of cause and effect, whether or not these "reasons" accurately portray any of the real motivational forces at work. Experiments with people who have suffered a lesion between the two halves of the brain have shown that when the right side is prompted, say, to close a door, the left side, unaware of the experimenter's instruction, will produce a "reason" as to why he has just performed the action, such as, "Oh, I felt a draft."
It is these sorts of phenomena that we are referring to when we use the catchphrase for this chapter it's all invented. What we mean is, "It's all invented anyway, so we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us."
Most people already understand that, as with cultural differences, interpretations of the world vary from individual to individual and from group to group. This understanding may persuade us that by factoring out our own interpretations of reality, we can reach a solid truth. However, the term it's all invented points to a more fundamental notion—that it is through the evolved structures of the brain that we perceive the world. And the mind constructs. The meanings our minds construct may be widely shared and sustaining for us, but they may have little to do with the world itself. Furthermore, how would we know?
Even science—which is often too simply described as an orderly process of accumulating knowledge based on previously acquired truths—even science relies on our capacity to adapt to new facts by radically shifting the theoretical constructions we previously accepted as truth. When we lived in a Newtonian world, we saw straight lines and forces; in an Einsteinian universe, we noticed curved space/time, relativity, and indeterminacy. The Newtonian view is still as valid—only now we see it as a special case, valid within a particular set of conditions. Each new paradigm gives us the opportunity to "see" phenomena that were before as invisible to us as the colors of the sunset to the frog.
To gain greater insight into what we mean by a map, a framework, or a paradigm, let's revisit the famous nine-dot puzzle, which will be familiar to many readers. As you may or may not know, the puzzle asks us to join all nine dots with four straight lines, without taking pen from paper. If you have never seen this puzzle before, go ahead and try it ... before you turn the page!
If you have never played this game before, you will most likely find yourself struggling to solve the puzzle inside the space of the dots, as though the outer dots constituted the outer limit of the puzzle. The puzzle illustrates a universal phenomenon of the human mind, the necessity to sort data into categories in order to perceive it. Your brain instantly classifies the nine dots as a two-dimensional square. And there they rest, like nails in the coffin of any further possibility, establishing a box with a dot in each of the four corners, even though no box in fact exists on the page.
Nearly everybody adds that context to the instructions, nearly everybody hears: "Connect the dots with four straight lines without taking pen from paper, within the square formed by the outer dots." And within that framework, there is no solution. If, however, we were to amend the original set of instructions by adding the phase, "Feel free to use the whole sheet of paper," it is likely that a new possibility would suddenly appear to you.
It might seem that the space outside the dots was crying out, "Hey, bring some lines out here!"
The frames our minds create define—and confine—what we perceive to be possible. Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.
This practice we refer to by the catchphrase, it's all invented, is the most fundamental of all the practices we present in this book. When you bring to mind it's all invented, you remember that it's all a story you tell-not just some of it, but all of it. And remember, too, that every story you tell is founded on a network of hidden assumptions. If you learn to notice and distinguish these stories, you will be able to break through the barriers of any "box" that contains unwanted conditions and create other conditions or narratives that support the life you envision for yourself and those around you. We do not mean that you can just make anything up and have it magically appear. We mean that you can shift the framework to one whose underlying assumptions allow for the conditions you desire. Let your thoughts and actions spring from the new framework and see what happens.
THE PRACTICE
A simple way to practice it's all invented is to ask yourself this question:
That I'm not aware I'm making,
That gives me what I see?
And when you have an answer to that question, ask yourself this one:
That I haven't yet invented,
That would give me other choices?
And then you can invent spaces, like the paper surrounding the nine dots, where four lines can do the work of five.
We now move on to the second practice, which entails inventing a new universe to live in, a universe of possibility.
—Reprinted from The Art of Possibility by Benjamin and Rosamund Stone Zander by permission of Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 2002, Benjamin and Rosamund Stone Zander . All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (September 24, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0142001104
- ISBN-13 : 978-0142001103
- Item Weight : 5.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.76 x 5.08 x 0.54 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #22,870 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #448 in Happiness Self-Help
- #652 in Success Self-Help
- #707 in Personal Transformation Self-Help
- Customer Reviews:
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About the authors
Benjamin Zander has been the conductor of The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra for the past thirty years. He has been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory since 1965 and has taken the NEC Youth Philharmonic on thirteen international tours. He is the Artistic Director of the Walnut Hill School, a high school for the performing arts. Mr. Zander is one of the most sought after speakers in the world, giving highly effective presentations to organizations on the subject of Leadership and Creativity. He has been profiled on CNN, CBS's 60 Minutes and the BBC, and in the New York Times, the London Times and the Wall Street Journal. He was the 2002 recipient of the United Nations Caring Citizen of the Humanities Award.
As a family therapist and an executive coach, Rosamund Zander develops models for leadership and effective action. Ms. Zander's work is based on the idea that creativity is an innate adult capacity. She offers intuitive, inventive coaching that trains people to apply their creativity in a way that shifts them into more effective personal and professional relationships. Ms. Zander works with corporations, institutions and teams to leave a system of business as usual and enter an abundant and generative realm. She designs programs for global corporations and her universally applicable principles have been circulated internationally by the media. She has been featured on such programs as CBS's 60 Minutes, the Diane Reims show, and in Parade Magazine.
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Contents:
An Invitation to Possibility
Launching the Journey
Chapter 1: It's All Invented
Chapter 2: Stepping into a Universe of Possibility
Chapter 3: Giving an A
Chapter 4: Being a Contributor
Chapter 5: Leading from Any Chair
Chapter 6: Rule Number 6
Chapter 7: The Way Things Are
Chapter 8: Giving Way to Passion
Chapter 9: Lighting a Spark
Chapter 10: Being the Board
Chapter 11: Creating Frameworks for Possibility
Chapter 12: Telling the WE Story
Coda
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Benjamin Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and has been a guest conductor with orchestras from around the world. Rosamund Stone Zander is an executive coach, family therapist, and artist, who is able to generate a high level of creativity and accomplishment from organizations and individuals. Together, they have written a book of "practices" that allow the reader to create a framework where extraordinary accomplishment is normal. They break the book into "practices" which illustrate specific facets of The Art of Possibility and allow you to reach new heights of success; personally and professionally. As a teacher, Ben Zander proposed that at the start of his classes he gives every student an "A." The result was more passionate students, ones that, on their own, were able to achieve more than Zander could have hoped. His premise is that if your teacher, manager, significant other, gives you an "A" at the start, you may be surprised at the extraordinary things that you will accomplish. Simple, and yet, using their examples, the Zander's have hit on an important trait of human behavior. In Chapter 6, the "famous" Rule Number 6 chapter, you are reminded that you take yourself way too seriously. This creates a downward spiral of emotions and actions that makes you less effective and more prone to destructive behaviors. And then there is Giving Way to Passion, with the acronym "BTFI." One of the funniest and most effective stories in the book. You will find yourself in a situation where it seems that no matter what direction you choose, you are being setup to fail. It is at that moment when you remember "BTFI" (Beyond the F$%k It), rediscover your passion, your energy, your *possibility* and go from good to great.
If you peruse this book, prior to purchase or borrowing, you may wonder, as I did, how is it possible to connect with stories mostly from and about world class musicians? Strangely, you can. And they have validity in your personal and professional life. You can see the connections in a new and refreshing way. I think that it what makes this book stand apart from the crowd in the "self help" section. Simple lessons, fortified with anecdotes from music, art, and business, that have a lot of value to the everyman. Not every chapter will have meaning for you immediately or solve all of your problems, but you *will* find value in this book. It should alter your perceptions, change the way you relate with your superiors and subordinates, and give you the tools to break free from the downward spiral into a world of possibility. A simple lesson, one which I picked up in Chapter 9, Lighting a Spark, is appropriate in this very connected, Web 2.0 world in which we find ourselves; the value of a face-to-face meeting cannot be overstated. It's easy to send an e-mail, instant message, or phone someone. But when you make the effort to meet someone in person, it solidifies the relationship and allows both people to achieve more than was possible through electronic means.
This is one of the best books I have read this year. And, if you have the opportunity, I highly recommend attending one of Ben Zander's presentations.
A coaching associate recommended this book. I didn't know what to expect, yet when I realized it was written by a world-famous conductor AND his therapist wife, I knew there would be good value.
I have been telling everyone about this book. My women's group is reading it and we will use it as a workbook throughout the year. I've asked my business colleagues to read it in order that we may be utilizing the same practices with our mutual clients to everyone's benefit.
I have never believed any one book was suitable and indeed necessary for every reader, until now.
"The Fourth Practice: Being a Contribution" is my favorite. We all do this automatically to some extent, and I promise this chapter will envigorate you to value your generosity and expand it to generate new methods, offering greater value to your gifting experiences.
This book encapsulates all the tenets of an optimist, a kind-hearted wannabe and all of us who intentionally choose to live side-by-side with grace and humanity.
Ben & Roz combine their memorable, relevant life stories throughout the pages, peppering with anecdotes, letters and intimate perspectives of other notables. The writing is beautifully mingled, flowing, thoughtful, timely and applies to us all.
You will want to share this book with friends, associates and co-workers. Let's make this book a contagious gift to support our planet in greater well-being and LOVE.
Pie Dumas
Author & Life Coach
As described above, this book is filled with rich, uplifting stories that help us look at our lives, both personal and professional under new paradigms. These paradigms will help unlock more potential as well as improve well being both physical and mental.
An inspiring and enjoyable read!
Below are excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:
1- "The lesson I learned is that the player who looks least engaged, may be the most committed member of the group. A cynic, after all, is a passionate person who does not want to be disappointed again."
2- "We keep looking so hard in life for the "specific message," and yet we are blinded to the fact that the message is all around us, and within us all the time. We just have to stop demanding that it be on our terms and conditions, and instead open ourselves to the possibility that what we seek may be in front of us all the time."
3- "Now, in light of my "discovery", I began to shift my attention to how effective I was at enabling the musicians to play each phrase as beautifully as they were capable. This concern had rarely surfaced when my position appeared to give me absolute power and I had cast the players as mere instruments of my will."
4- "Humor can bring us together around our inescapable foibles, confusions, and miscommunications, and especially over the ways in which we find ourselves acting entitled and demanding, or putting people down, or flying into each other's throats."
5- "When one person peels away layers of opinion, entitlement, pride, and inflated self-description, others instantly feel the connection."
6- "The practice in this chapter is an antidote both to the hopeless resignation of the cow and to the spluttering resistance of the duck. It is to be present to the way things are, including our feelings about the way things are. This practice can help us clarifu the next step that will take us in the direction we say we want to go."
7- "There is viability, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine ow good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open" - Martha Graham
8- "Gracing yourself with responsibility for everything that happens in your life leaves your spirit whole, and leaves you free to choose again."
9- "Love is neither about self-determination nor sacrifice. It is a context in which two people build the life they want together. Strength and independence are qualities that can enhance a relationship."
10- "In the realm of possibility, there is no division between ideas and action, mind and body, dream and reality. Leaders who become their vision often seem uncommonly brave to the rest of us. Whether from the middle of the action, or from the sidelines, they are a conduit for carrying the vision forward."
11- "...A vision releases us from the weight and confusion of local problems and concerns, and allows us to see the long clear line."
Top reviews from other countries
- Page 34: Try giving a person A at the start of a learning period. Then ask the person to place themselves at the end of the learning period and look back by writing a letter which starts like this. "I got an A because......." Giving a person an A transports your relationship from the world of measurement to the world of possibility. It brightens people's lives.
- Page 57: When you focus on making contributions, you think of yourself as a human being who makes a difference - a person who is doing things which are viewed as gifts and is transforming conflicts into rewarding experiences. Ask people, "what contributions have you made this week?"
- Page 199: Listen for the music of your being. Choose the practices that shape yourself. They will shape your voice as a unique contribution to us all.