Name: Finding Your Element
Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Author: Ken Robinson

5 (Perfeito)

“Being in your own Element is like that. It’s about doing something that feels so completely natural to you, that resonates so strongly with you, that you feel that this is who you really are.” “Why is it important to find your Element? The most important reason is personal. Finding your Element is vital to understanding who you are and what you’re capable of being and doing with your life. The second reason is social. Very many people lack purpose in their lives. The evidence of this is everywhere: in the sheer numbers of people who are not interested in the work they do; in the growing numbers of students who feel alienated by the education system; and in the rising use everywhere of antidepressants, alcohol and painkillers. Probably the harshest evidence is how many people commit suicide every year, especially young people.” “These days it’s probable that you will have various jobs and even occupations during your working life. Where you start out is not likely to be where you will end up. Knowing what your Element is will give you a much better sense of direction than simply bouncing from one job to the next. Whatever your age, it’s the best way to find work that really fulfills you.” “The quest for your Element is really a two-way journey. It is an inward journey to explore what lies within you; it is an outward journey to explore opportunities in the world around you.” “Although no one else has lived your life before, there are signposts from many others who set out before you that can guide your way.” “I did it because I’ve always believed that you have to move toward your fears and not away from them. If you don’t exorcise them, they can haunt you long after they should have faded.” “Being in your Element gives you energy. Not being in it takes it from you.” “You only know the outer world through your inner world. You perceive it through your physical senses and you make sense of it through the ideas, values, feelings and attitudes that make up your worldview. To find your Element, you have to explore both of these worlds. You need to fathom your own talents and passions and you need to look creatively at opportunities in the world around you to fulfill them.” “To find your Element you have to get to know yourself better. You have to spend time with yourself, apart from other people’s opinions of you. For many of us, this is easier said than done.” “Like everyone else, you are bound to be affected by how other people see you and by how you want to be seen by them—by what they want for you and what they expect from you.” “When you add the noise of the external world to all the roles you take in it, it is easy to lose sight of who you really are. To find your Element, you need to regain that perspective. One way is to create time and space to be alone with yourself, to experience who you are when no one else wants anything from you and the noise has stopped. One method is to meditate. “But thinking is not the same as consciousness. We’ll come back to this, too, in chapter five. Sometimes, as Eckhart Tolle says in The Power of Now, thinking too much can limit our consciousness.” “An ancient analogy compares the turbulence of the thinking mind with the waves and ripples on the surface of a lake. It is only by calming the disturbed surface that you can see into the depths that lie beneath.” “I am willing to admit that I find meditation difficult because many people do. If it were so easy to stop thinking there would be no need to think about how to do it.” “Like most things that are worth doing, it is not easy but it does reward you in the end.” “The poet Anaïs Nin once said, “I don’t see the world as it is: I see it as I am.” “We see the world around us from the world within us and each shapes our perspective on the other. As human beings, we do not always see the world directly; we interpret our experiences through patterns of ideas, values and beliefs. Some of these have to do with our own dispositions and some have to do with the cultures we’re part of and the times we live in. In all areas of our lives, whether and how we act is affected by how we think and feel.” “Finding your Element may mean challenging other people’s assumptions about what you’re capable of doing. You may have absorbed attitudes about yourself from friends and family that you’ve just come to accept. You also live as part of a wider culture, which has its own ways of thinking and of doing things. Certain options may be discouraged or frowned upon within that culture, according to your age or gender or your existing roles and responsibilities.” “My point here is that in order to discover what your Element is, you may need to challenge ideas about yourself that you and others have come to take for granted.” “The main purpose of creating a vision board is to create a clear visualization of the life you would like to lead, so have fun with this exercise and focus on making it a true representation of you.” “Your life is unique in the whole of history. No one has ever lived it before and nobody else ever will.” “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, that expression is unique.” “When communities create shared ideas, values and patterns of behavior, they create a culture. What you make of what lies within you is affected by the culture you are part of: by what it encourages and discourages, permits or forbids.” “Finding your Element means reflecting on your own cultural circumstances—on the opportunities for growth that you want and need now.” “You’re not given your résumé with your birth certificate. You create your life and you can recreate it.” “My life, like yours, is a constant process of improvisation between my interests and personality on the one hand and circumstances and opportunities on the other.” “Many of the opportunities you have in your life are generated by the energy you create around you.” “What makes people successful,” he said, “are their motivation, drive, and ability to learn from mistakes and how hard they work.” “My careers teacher did not help me because he was not really looking at me; he was looking at a general list of occupations and trying to fit me into it. Even so, it’s hard to understand his leap of imagination from what I said I enjoyed to the careers he suggested. But at least he had some ideas for what I should do. I did not. I had only a vague plan to study English literature. I also had a general sense of what I wanted to avoid. I was drawn more to the arts than to the sciences. I didn’t see myself going into management or administrative work. I did like putting on plays and I liked working with people, especially if they were funny. I was not drawn to working in the theater. As it happens, this vague sense of orientation was all I really needed. I’ll come back later to what I actually did do. I think of this general orientation as trying to find your own True North.” “Because life is creative and organic, you do not need to plan your whole life’s journey in one go. Sometimes it’s helpful to have long-term goals, and some people do. It can be just as helpful to focus on the immediate next steps. Beginning the journey, and being willing to explore various pathways, can be as productive as setting out with a final destination in mind. Sometimes you can only plan the next step. But that can be enough to move forward. The important step is the first one.” “You’ve probably found in your own life that some things you do come easily to you and others do not. We’re all the same in this respect. There are activities and processes that we’re naturally good at and others that we struggle with.” “There is a difference between aptitudes and abilities. Aptitudes are part of your raw potential. To realize that potential, you need to apply and refine them. For example, human beings have a natural aptitude for language. But learning to speak is a cultural process that depends on being exposed to other speakers, especially in infancy. Abilities often require a considerable amount of education and apprenticeship to develop.” “This is true of your own life. If you open yourself to new experiences, the odds improve exponentially of one of those experiences changing your world in a profoundly positive way.” “I discovered that self-esteem was a critical factor in the career assessment and planning equation. People rise to the level of success that their self-esteem can absorb. Those with low self-esteem don’t feel worthy of the rewards that come with success, however they define it.” “Few of us need to deal with as many obstacles to get to our passions as Noppadol did. Yet we sometimes face a different kind of blindness. We don’t see what we’re capable of because we don’t see our own possibilities. You may assume falsely that certain paths are closed to you or you may not know where to look for them. Either way, you may be missing ways to be in your Element.” “All cultures smile or frown upon different particular activities and lifestyles. What’s accepted in one may be beyond the pale in another. Finding your Element may bring you up against these conventions.” “Often when people have a disability, it’s the disability that other people see rather than all the other abilities that coexist with their particular difficulty. It’s why we talk about people being “disabled” rather than “having a disability.” One of the reasons that people are branded by their disability is that the dominant conception of ability is so narrow. But the limitations of this conception affect everyone in education, not just those with “special needs.” These days, anyone whose real strengths lie outside the restricted field of academic work can find being at school a dispiriting experience and emerge from it wondering if they have any significant aptitudes at all.” “The key to making the most of your capacities is celebrating how you learn and using that learning style to explore as many interests as possible. Once you accept that how you know things is a critical component of what you know, you’re free to apply this to as many disciplines as suits your fancy.” “To find your Element you may have to challenge your own beliefs about yourself. Whatever age you are, you’ve almost certainly developed an inner story about what you can do and what you can’t do; what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. You may be right, of course. But for all the reasons we’ve discussed, you may be misleading yourself. Part of making sense of where you are now is to understand how you got here.” “We live in two worlds: the world of our own consciousness and the world of other people and events. In common sense, we accept that we each have our own essential “self.” I know this to be true from my own experience of being alive. My own consciousness is often a constant flow of thoughts, feelings, sensations and moods. Like you, I’m capable of moving through many different levels of consciousness, voluntarily or involuntarily—from idling in front of a television, to focusing on a conversation that matters, to being lost in daydreams, to enjoying the closeness of my family, to trying to organize my ideas for this book.” “In the most obvious sense, consciousness is what you lose when you fall asleep and what you get back when you wake up. In a deeper sense, your consciousness is essentially who you are; it is your spirit. There are three words that are often used in discussing aspects of the human spirit: “mind,” “personality” and “consciousness.” Defining them raises all kinds of complexities and they overlap in all sorts of ways, but let me say briefly what I mean by them here. By “mind,” I mean the internal flow of thoughts, feelings and perceptions that you are aware of and aim to control in your waking hours. By “personality,” I mean your general outlook and disposition to yourself and to the world around you. By “consciousness,” I mean your fundamental awareness of your self as a living being. Consciousness in this sense is a larger idea than either mind or personality. Both are part of your consciousness, but they are not the whole of it. In some ways, the continuous thoughts of your mind and the preoccupations of your personality can hinder your experience of deeper states of consciousness and obscure your true spirit. I think of spiritual energy on three levels: the spirit within us, the spirit between us and the spirit among us. The first two don’t require any metaphysical beliefs; the third one does.” “Our everyday metaphors express this sense of connection with other people’s spirits. We talk about being on the same “wavelength” with someone. Your energy may resonate so beautifully with them that you finish each other’s sentences. Conversely, you may be so “out of tune” with someone that you misinterpret everything you say to each other. This feeling of connection or lack of connection with others is at the heart of being human and of being with and not just in the world around us.” “For the past three hundred years, the dominant view in Western culture has been that intelligence has to do with certain sorts of logic and reason. Feelings were thought to be disruptive and distracting. Partly because of this, the history of psychology and psychiatry in the last hundred years has been mainly about emotional disorders and mental illness. Science is now discovering two things that artists and spiritual leaders have always understood: that our feelings and emotions are vital to the quality of our lives and that there are intimate relationships between how we think and feel.” “The aim is to go beyond the daily chatter of your mind, and the endless agenda of tasks and anxieties that often drive it, to a deeper sense of your own being and purpose.” “The original title I had in mind for The Element was Epiphany. An epiphany is a sudden realization—a moment of unexpected revelation.” “Ultimately, the two most important questions to ask yourself in the search for your passion are: what do you love, and what do you love about it?” “There are as many reasons for depression and disengagement as there are individuals who feel them. But there are some general trends and causes, too. They include the high expectations of material goods and standards of living that are incessantly promoted through the media. The financial insecurities unleashed by the 2008 recession have also shaken the confidence of people around the world. And then there are the profound changes in family and community life and the growing emphasis on individual achievement. These can all add to a sense of personal insecurity and risk. Ironically, the so‑called social media may also be adding their own pressures. Although they have far more connections than ever online, many young people feel they have fewer real friends they can turn to for actual company and comfort when they need it. On top of all of this, one of the most fundamental reasons why so many people feel unhappy is that happiness itself is so widely misunderstood.” “often our images of what will make us happy are illusions, not visions.” “One of the most important things you can do as you try to find your Element is to pay careful attention to your emotional states. Is there something you do that consistently elevates your spirits? When do you experience stretches of real joy?” “He identifies three different elements of happiness: positive emotions, engagement and meaning.” “We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways,” Frankl wrote: “(1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.” “In Flourish he says that there are serious limitations to his earlier arguments. Focusing only on happiness is too narrow, he says: happiness should be seen as part of a larger concept of well-being. Well-being has five measurable elements. To the three elements of happiness—positive emotions, engagement and meaning—he adds relationships and achievement. It is well-being, not happiness, says Seligman, that is the proper topic of positive psychology.” “Career Well-being: how you occupy your time or simply liking what you do every day Social Well-being: having strong relationships and love in your life Financial Well-being: effectively managing your economic life Physical Well-being: having good health and energy to get things done on a daily basis Community Well-being: your sense of engagement with the area where you live” “How much does your disposition influence your levels of personal happiness and well-being? Research suggests that it may account for up to fifty percent of how happy you are at any given time. So, if your biological disposition plays such a large part in your levels of happiness and there is not much you can do about that, and if your material circumstances have a relatively small role, what can you do to become happier? The good news is, quite a lot. Whatever your disposition and circumstances, you have more power than you might imagine to increase your own levels of happiness and well-being. Behavior Research suggests that 40 percent of what affects your actual levels of happiness is what you choose to do and how you choose to think and feel: in other words, your own behavior. The key to happiness lies not in changing your genetic makeup, which you can’t, or your circumstances, which may or may not be possible, but in your “daily intentional activities.” Finding and being in your Element is a critical part of that process." “He states that he has “come to understand that although some people are naturally happier than others, their happiness is still vulnerable and incomplete, and that achieving durable happiness as a way of being is a skill. It requires sustained effort in training the mind and developing a set of human qualities, such as inner peace, mindfulness and altruistic love.” “People in their Element still have bad days. They still suffer annoying friends and colleagues. They still face times when everything seems to be going wrong, and they still need to muddle through stretches of too little sleep and too much stress. I believe two things to be very true, though. One is that being in your Element dramatically increases the odds of your being happy more often. The other is that feeling a strong sense of happiness while doing something is a good sign that what you’re doing might be your Element.” “TO BE IN your Element you have to be willing to do what it takes. Finding your Element is not only about aptitude and passion. It’s about attitude.” “In chapter five, I suggested that the two major factors in being happy are your natural disposition and your actual behavior.” “This is a process, not a test, and if you persist, you will get closer to what you’re looking for. Everything depends on how much this matters to you and on how determined you are in your quest. If you know what your Element is, you need the self-belief and determination to pursue it. If you don’t know what it is, you need to feel entitled to look for it.” “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” There is a fundamental truth in this. I said earlier that we don’t see the world or ourselves directly but through veils of ideas, feelings and values. Some of these we learn through the cultures we live in, some through our unique experiences in life, and some through our own personalities. Just as one person may love to do something that someone else would loathe, we all see the world through different filters.” “What Jef Lynch learned relatively early in life is that the things that are stopping you often exist only in your mind. “I don’t see the barriers that other people see. With Tektronix, I just walked in the door and started talking to people. Everything I do, I do like that.” “I assume he’ll be as successful at these pursuits as he’s been in every other because Jef has always understood at a fundamental level where he was and where he wanted to go.” “I argued in The Element that all systems of classification have deficiencies, including MBTI. You should approach them all critically and not try to bend yourself to fit them. If you treat them as ways of generating questions and ideas about yourself, they can be useful. If you use them to brand and limit yourself, they are not.” “Jef Lynch, Ellen McArthur, Sue Kent and Mimi Weddell all show in their different ways that it’s not only aptitude and passion that lie at the heart of finding your Element. It’s also your attitude. Your biology and background may define your starting point, but not your destination. Whatever your situation, it’s always easier of course to make excuses than to actually do something. As the political activist Antonio Gramsci once said, “The man who does not want to act says that he cannot.” But if you are inclined to act, self-belief and determination are a match for the most unpromising beginnings and the most challenging circumstances.” “How you respond to the world around you deeply affects how the world responds to you.” “Taking stock of where you are is essential to getting a new perspective on where you want to be.” “she’d been shuttled through the educational system far too quickly. Because she was academically bright, she skipped two full grades. While she was up to this challenge intellectually, she was not up to it emotionally, as she was surrounded by people who were at different levels of maturity than she was. “My whole education was just botched,” she said. “It’s taken my whole adult life to recover from my education.” “As Joseph Campbell says, if you move in the direction of your passions, opportunities tend to appear that you couldn’t have imagined and that weren’t otherwise there.” “What I am saying is that you shouldn’t assume that going to college will guarantee your future or that not going will undermine it. I know many students who drifted from high school to college without any real understanding of why they were going or what they hoped to get from the experience. They and their parents and teachers simply took it for granted that this was the next required step. Many college students ramble through the experience and graduate with no clearer understanding of what they want to do with the lives than when they enrolled. The facts, I think, are these. Some paths through life do not depend at all on having a conventional college education. Some people prefer to get into the world of work right away after high school. Second, many people get much more from college if they do something else before they go.” “Are you going to dive in, or are you going to put a toe in the water? Can you start your journey while maintaining your old job, as Yasmin Helal did when she started Educate‑Me, or does it require making a complete break, as the Labons did when they headed off on their travels? Much of this will depend on a variety of factors you’ll probably have considered by the time you get to this point: your sense of comfort with change, your financial safety net, the support of friends and family, and how desperate you are to be fully engaged on your journey. Finally, it’s important for you to have a plan for dealing with the predictable challenges (as opposed to the challenges you can’t predict, which everyone faces). How are you going to address detractors? How are you going to navigate through financial difficulties? What will you do the first time your lack of experience throws up a wall in front of you?” “If you are considering earning your living from your Element, it’s important to bear in mind that you not only have to love what you do; you should also enjoy the culture and the tribes that go with it. When I was a student in my twenties, I loved to direct plays and I was reasonably good at it, too. Some of my friends assumed I’d try to make my way in the professional theater. I didn’t assume that. I enjoyed directing, but I never felt that life in the theater was for me. I love and admire performers and directors, but there is something in the rhythm and dynamics of the life they lead that doesn’t resonate with me.” “Tribes aren’t always a perfect fit. But they do need to be good enough to sustain your connection.” “We are organic creatures and many of the dynamics of other forms of organic life apply to us, too. For example, different types of plants sometimes grow better when they are near each other. In gardening, this phenomenon is known as companion planting. In an article in Flower and Garden magazine, Jeffrey S. Minnich explains that “Plants, like people, get along with one another in many ways. Sometimes two different plants get along well as neighbours. Sometimes plants growing near each other don’t get along. At other times plants actually help each other to grow.” Similarly, members of tribes, however various and diverse they may be, can help each other to flourish. Finding your tribe is a powerful validation of your own interests and passions. It affirms and reinforces your commitment to what you’re doing and can relieve the sense of isolation that people sometimes feel without such a connection.” “Eventually, Neroli moved closer to the rest of civilization. She went to boarding school, and then to university. Interestingly, no matter how far she traveled and how many people she met, she found that drawing, writing, and the other expressions of creativity she’d developed while she had little contact with the outside world were still what interested her the most. As it turns out, she’d found her passion very early, but didn’t realize that until she tried a number of other things on for size.” “She doesn’t love every aspect of her job—there are few in the world that do—but she loves far more than she doesn’t. “The stuff that feels right really outweighs the stuff that feels wrong. Whatever I’m doing, I think it really matters. It’s so important and interesting to me.” “But for his interest, we would never have known of the Temple’s existence. But for the abbot’s welcome, James would not have developed his interests to such a deep level. His connection with the monks illustrated for all of us the great power of tribes in validating and inspiring personal commitments and their roles in providing mentorship and support. Discovering the temple was also a vivid illustration of the resources that may manifest in the least likely places, when you turn your attention to finding them.” “Tribes that work together can achieve more than individuals acting alone because they stimulate each other’s creativity and sense of possibility. In The Element we called this “the alchemy of synergy.” “One of the things that a tribe offers is support and peer review.” “This is one of the most valuable traits of a tribe: the love for the pursuit tends to outweigh the instinct to protect one’s turf.” “Though in many ways they are competing for the same customer, they also seem to sense that they can build something bigger by supporting each other.” “The principle is always the same: you create new opportunities by taking the ones in front of you.” “current situation. Where do you go from here? In planning your way forward, it’s important to remember the three core principles that are at the heart of my argument. First, your life is unique. You can learn from the experiences of other people, but you cannot and should not try to duplicate them. Second, you create your own life and you can re‑create it. In doing that, your greatest resources are your own imagination and sense of possibility. Third, your life is organic, not linear. You can’t plan the whole of your life’s journey and you don’t need to. What you do need to plan are the next steps.” “Jeffrey Myers’ experience confirms that you may have more than one Element and love them both equally. It also shows that sometimes the next step forward is to retrace a path that you thought you’d left far behind you. As I say, life is not linear.” “you may be in the most extreme circumstances, but you can always choose to think, feel and act differently. The critical factor is to make a move—to take the next step. To do that you need to look inward as well as outward. You need to tune in to your self and be open to where your spirit may be pointing.” “As Chris Jordan’s story shows, there can be risks in taking the high road to your Element. But there are other sorts of risks in ignoring the call of your spirit. If you know what your Element is, you can only ignore it by damping down the parts of you to which it appeals. The result can be a dull spiritual ache that holds you back where there should be an impulse of energy that drives you forward." “One important reason for keeping your options open is that you’re not limited to one Element for life. Some people find they love several things equally; others that their passions shift and evolve. Finding your Element for now doesn’t mean that you’re locked in to it forever. In fact, when you ask, “What’s next?” the question can easily become, “What else?” “Once you start to get too comfortable with a job, watch out, because you might be freewheeling and not all using all of your mental and physical assets to your best advantage.” “A good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure. You are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then, if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.” All quests involve risks and you can’t anticipate them all. They involve opportunities too and you can’t foresee all of those, either. You can only set a direction and take the first steps. You then need to stay open to risks and to possibilities and be willing to respond to both. This is how the creative process works and how organic processes take their shape. Martin Luther King had just this in mind when he said, “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” “Someone once said that whenever you see the dates of someone’s life the most important part is the dash in the middle. What did they do to fill the dash?” “It’s important to try and honor at least some of your dreams along the way.” “VALUE YOUR OWN LIFE AND FEELINGS You can’t control the reactions of others. Although people may initially react badly when you speak honestly about your feelings, in the end it raises the relationship to a new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.” “Finding your Element is about discovering what lies within you and, in doing so, transforming what lies before you.” “And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

Finding Your Element - How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life

Ken Robinson

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Ken Robinson

Ken Robinson