Tuesday, June 29, 2010

The Touro Communication Club Notes - #122–June 30, 2010
Tourocommunicationclub.blogspot.com


The 6/30/10 meeting will be our last for the summer. The Club will go on vacation until the Fall semester. Because of the Jewish holidays, our first Club meeting will be on Wednesday, October 13 – same place, same time, new and old people. See you then!

Contents:
1. Quotations about “Emotions: Anger - Fighting Fury”
2. Upcoming Club program: “Emotions: Anger - Fighting Fury”
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 @ 2 pm in Room 223
3. Logical Fallacy of the Week # 12 – “The Red Herring”
4. A Note to Communicators: “Emotions – The Motor of Our Decisions”
5. Upcoming Conversations
6. Possible club topics – please add your topic to the list
7. What happened last week: “Getting Organized”

Six Quotes about Anger

There is nothing more galling to angry people than the coolness of those
on whom they wish to vent their spleen.”
Alexander Dumas père. 19th century French novelist and playwright
“Never write a letter while you are angry.
Chinese Proverb

“Anger as soon as fed is dead -
'Tis starving makes it fat.”
~Emily Dickinson, 19th century American poet

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it
at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
Gautama Buddha. Ancient Indian spiritual teacher, c. 563 BCE to 483 BCE.
“Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.”
Robert Ingersoll, 19th century American orator and political activist
“Anger is only one letter short of danger.”
Popular saying

The Touro Communication Club
2 pm - Wednesday, June 30, 2010– Room 223
“Emotions: Anger: Fighting Fury”

Anger is a familiar emotion to all of us. We may recognize it others, but do we recognize it in ourselves? Anger appears in many packages: loud and boisterous, soft and icy, a slowly escalating intensity, etc. Clues to recognizing triggers of anger are present but are often overlooked by the angry person and the target of the emotion - a person, an object or an idea. We cannot hope to fully understand this emotion in one session, but we’ll try to discover how many ways the emotion of “anger” manifests itself in ourselves, in others, in the world. With luck, this will be a cool and dispassionate discussion about a very hot topic.

Logical Fallacy of the Week #12: “The Red Herring”

Have you ever noticed that people often don’t answer the question posed? It happens in everyday conversations, in class, in political punditry in the media.
Most of the time, a “Red Herring” can be unintentional, but in a political situation – a job interview or a television debate –the device can be a deliberate distraction to divert the direction of the discussion or change the topic.

Depending on the question, the response can often be a “Red Herring,” an incredibly frequent logical fallacy which appears in a number disguises:
· A response that does not answer the question, but changes the topic.
· A response that introduces a different topic, often completely unrelated to the original question
· A response to another statement that skews the original statement by changing emphasis or introducing weak or irrelevant evidence.
Beyond the question and answer exchange, a Red Herring may be part of a larger point of view which introduces unrelated and dubious statements to support a point of view. Much of the current political discourse on almost any controversial topic – immigration, health care, the financial meltdown, etc.

The media explosion in the last decade with the Internet, radio, television, print has created an unmonitored almost laissez-faire environment in which we the consumers must be aware of what is being thrown at us. The citizen-listener must learn to sharpen their acoustical “crap detector “(source: Ernest Hemingway).
With its roots in the Middle Ages, the term derives from a fish, a herring or kipper which has a red cast to its flesh and smells. An acute listener can smell something fishy. When you sense something is “fishy” about a situation, your olfactory senses are at work.

Alfred Hitchcock, the late filmmaker, uses the Red Herring device often to scare his audiences. The tension is slowly building in the scene, the outcome is uncertain and dangerous for the hero and suddenly a car screeches unexpectedly. Audiences lift out of their seats at this clever manipulation of their emotions. We feel sheepish for falling for the trick, yet safe despite being fooled.

.
.A Note to Communicators:

Emotions – The Motor of Our Decisions

As much as our education would to persuade us that we are rational beings, daily empirical evidence and recent research tells us that our emotions are the engine of our lives.

Why do we know so little about emotions? Our education has placed a premium on reason. We can understand reason. It is calm, logical and “reasonable.” If reason is the measure of all things that we value, then emotions are sooooo “unreasonable.” They appear to be unpredictable. We have to put them in a box to control them.
Let me draw an analogy,

  • Our body is the automobiles of our beings;
  • Our brain is the driver of our automobile and
  • Our emotions are the engine of our reasons.
We need the motor of emotion to get us through our daily routines. If we don’t have any emotion about anything or anybody, we begin to atrophy. No passion – think emotional support – for a point of view, the point of view dies. Too much passion and the project dies. Or, passion guided by reason allows for success.

While emotions are not at the center of our education, they are certainly the core of any entertainment – play, movie or soccer match. We watch, suspend our disbelief and, if we are to believe Aristotle, we become purged of these destructive behaviors.
Now that the soap operas have disappeared, we have to look for our emotions on the reality shows or on American Idol. When Dr. Phil or Tyra Banks have a case to entertain us, we can get embroiled in someone else’s emotions. Because television emotion is safe, we can turn it off and go about making dinner with no consequences.

This short missive can hardly do justice to the topic of emotions, but it might be instructive to give some context for why we continue give short shift to emotion
It’s not surprising that most of the statements about reason are made by men. Sadly, men have controlled everything since the beginning of time. The Greek philosopher, Plato, does allow that emotions exist. We should use logic and reason to channel our emotions to create something constructive that leads to truth.
Rene Descartes, the 18th century French philosopher, is in the same camp. He argues, “I think therefore I am.” (“Je pense quand je suis.”) Thinking is the only way to function in a man’s world.

Our education teaches us to ignore emotions and focus on “Critical Thinking.” In our classes we focus on one-third of our learning system – the head. We ignore other two-thirds - the emotions and the body - in our biased learning.

Benjamin Bloom virtually codifies the importance of reason in his famous Taxonomy of Learning with his impressive hierarchy of cognitive learning levels. To his credit, Bloom does acknowledge the Affective and Kinesthetic learning channels, though they are not as nearly well developed.

Emotions have been the province of the arts - theatre, poetry, painting, sculpture – even music. In that contest, the artist could control them. Emotions could be made to appear real, but since they were invented and “pretend,” then serious people could enjoy them at a distance without having to really understand them.
However, in the latter part of the 20th century, a number of authors began to address emotion as a separate entity from reason. Bloom’s own 1956 taxonomy allowed that we did learn three channels, but gave predominant emphasis to Cartesian reasoning – the cognitive function.

Sociologist Erving Goffman published his landmark, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” in1959 which provided the foundation for understanding how human beings put on a mask to hide their internal emotional life when in public.

Howard Gardner’s 1983 classic, “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences,” blew apart the rigid SAT-enforced dichotomy of I.Q. as being just math and verbal abilities.

In 1994, psychologist Paul Eckman presents develops his influential “The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions” and goes on identify the 43 muscles in the face that produce emotional affect. His work is now on popular display with the television series, “Lie to Me.”

Although reason is still the dominant mode of understanding, emotion receives an enormous boost in 1995 with journalist Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence” which provides the intellectual framework for an elementary understanding of emotions.

That history is fine, but it doesn’t address our need to understand emotions on a daily basis. What do we do when we get angry? How do we cope with being afraid? How do we understand falling in love?

In future Communication Club discussions, we will explore this emotional thread, looking at one emotion at a time. We begin with one of the most prevalent emotions – anger.
UPCOMING CONVERSATIONS:
See you in the fall!

What about one of these topics?
“Repetition”
“Meaning”
“Why Does History Repeat Itself?”
“Heroism”
“Concentration”
“Coping with Adversity”
Student Poetry showcase
“Empathy”
“Connecting the Dots”
Role play of cynical people
“Cold Calling in Sales
“He’s Just Not That into You”
“Money”
“Critical Listening Institute: Ravel’s ‘Bolero’”
“Criticism – Giving and Receiving”
“Logical Fallacies”
“Freedom II”
“Gender Communication II”
“SPAR Debate”
“Distraction II”
“Negotiation II”
“Imagination II”
“Rodney King: ‘Can’t we just get along?” II”
“Political Savvy”
And dozens of others!

Compare the notice of the session with what really happened!
What happened on Wednesday, June 23, 2010?
“Getting Organized: First Things First”

How do I prioritize? What rationale do I use? Which system best suits me? How do I measure my improvement? An invisible part of everyone’s life is being organized. As our lives get busier, we need to be organized. No one starts off being organized. Some learn more quickly than others. The business people are usually ones who are very organized without being overbearing. We’ll try to identify the tricks people employ to keep their lives together. What about distractions? We’ll talk about how increased pressure affects our organization. This should be a very practical session.


Newcomer Yangchen Lama participated vigorously as another newcomer Derek Smith observed the goings-on. Familiar faces included Lorinda Moore, Nina Davila, Warren Kunz, Markus Vayndorf, Jean Missial, Charles Mason, Chui Hing Yau and Hal Wicke.

The question, “what is organization?” got a variety of responses.
· I am a Type A person with Type B tendencies
· I must clean up everything before I do anything.
· OCD? (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) – Not really. Things just have to be orderly.
· I’m just the opposite. I let things go and only clean up when I have to.
· My father is completely obsessive about arranging everything before he does any.
· My, this is a Psychology club, not a Communication club.
To the question, “Do you have a plan for your activities and follow that plan?” everybody had an opinion.
· Everything is dynamic.
· There is a great impact of being disorganized.
· What about putting up with the disorganization of other people?
· Everybody is always rushing about at the last minute.
· What about a wedding? Graduation? A funeral is worse because you can’t prepare for it.

An anecdote of a sign a printer had put up over his cash register:” An emergency on your part does not necessitate an emergency on my part.”

Hal handed out a blank piece of paper and asked the group to write down all their thoughts as they occurred. [The exercise comes from the French Surrealist poet Andre Breton who promoted “automatic thinking” in his poetry to bypass logic.]
After a few minutes, he has the group what they noticed?

  • “I repeat the word ‘need’ a lot.”
    “I’m all over the place.”
  • “I wrote about the mathematical connection to this discussion.”
  • I’ve got to prioritize.
  • What about Murphy’s Law? (What can do wrong, will.)
  • Murphy is my friend.
  • Prepare for Murphy.
Since Lorinda was in charge of the ushers for last week’s organization, she shared some of her planning for crowd control.

Jean talked about his planning for crowd control for an event for Louis Vuitton who sponsored a birthday party for Kanye West. He was quite blunt with the sudden friends of Kanye who wanted to crash the party.

Hal asked, “Are you organized?” Yes or no. No one seemed to give a clear answer. The discussion seemed to drift in a number of directions.
· You’ve got to be prepared for the unpredictable.
· A discussion about healthy food.
· You’ve got to be pro-active.
· Some discussion about President Obama’s meeting with General McChrystal that day and what might happen.
· Most people thought McChrystal should be fired. [He was.]
· Warren Kunz announced the formation of a Math club in the fall.
· I like to come to the Communication Club to explore ideas.
Although the entire discussion was upbeat and energized, the focus seems to blur after about an hour and a half. This is indicated by the frequent change of topic.
---
We always have a great time exploring these issues. So often our daily life never focuses on these Communication issues. If you have something you want us to discuss please let us know and we’ll add it to the list.

Next time bring a friend. The Communication Club is always an open discussion, limited only by time. Everyone gets a chance to speak. All opinions are welcome. Here is an opportunity for students to challenge professors’ views outside the class without any homework or assignments. You just have to show up and listen and talk if you want.

Hal Wicke

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The Touro Communication Club Notes - #121–June 23, 2010 Tourocommunicationclub.blogspot.com

Contents:
1. Quotations about “Being Organized”
2. Upcoming Club program: “Tomorrow We’ll Get Organized”
Wednesday, June 23, 2010 @ 2 pm in Room 223
3. Logical Fallacy of the Week # 10 – “Moving the Goal Posts”
4. A Note to Communicators: “Tomorrow We’ll Get Organized
5. Upcoming Conversations
6. Possible club topics – please add your topic to the list
7. What happened last week: “Rodney King: Can’t We Just Get Along?”

Six Quotes about Being Organized
"A place for everything, everything in its place.”
Benjamin Franklin, 18th century American author of “Poor Richard’s Almanac
“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom."
Charles Peguy, 19th century French poet and essayist
“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."
A.A. Milne, 19th century British author of “Winnie The Pooh”
“It is more difficult to organize a peace than to win a war, but the fruits of victory will be lost if the peace is not organized.”
Aristotle, 5th century Greek philosopher.
“In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.”
Jesse Jackson, American civil rights activist
“That’s all nonviolence is – organized love.”
Joan Baez, American folk singer and civil rights activist

The Touro Communication Club
2 pm - Wednesday, June 16, 2010– Room 223
“Getting Organized: First Things First”

How do I prioritize? What rationale do I use? Which system best suits me? How do I measure my improvement? An invisible part of everyone’s life is being organized. As our lives get busier, we need to be organized. No one starts off being organized. Some learn more quickly than others. The business people are usually ones who are very organized without being overbearing. We’ll try to identify the tricks people employ to keep their lives together. What about distractions? We’ll talk about how increased pressure affects our organization. This should be a very practical session.

Logical Fallacy of the Week #11: “Moving the Goal Posts”
The name of the fallacy comes from a game like soccer or football which has goal posts. In an actual game, it would quite angering if one team decided to change the position of the goal posts. All strategy would change.

In another context, you might call this fallacy, “Changing the Deal.” You think you have agreed to one set of circumstances and suddenly you find details of the deal have been changed. You find many people moving the goalposts when it benefits them.
· Real estate – A tenant agrees to rent an apartment with a refrigerator and stove. When she arrives, she discovers they are not in the apartment and the landlord denies that they were part of the agreement.
· Car sales – You think that you are buying a particular car, but find that only the more expensive model is available. (Also called ‘bait and switch.”) This behavior applies to all sales situations.
· Academic classes – Your professor changes the criteria on which you thought you were being evaluated. Perhaps a student argues that the professor gave her an A when the professor’s grade book shows a “B.”
· Relationships – Either the male or female promises his intended that certain things will happen– a fancy car, a fancy vacation, lots of luxuries and blings - and they don’t, some is mighty angry.
· The TV commercial – two children are promised ponies by a male adult; one gets a toy, the other gets a real one. The jilted child feels cheated because the adult changes the deal.
· Product content – the price of the product is kept the same but the amount of the ingredients is decreased

There are dozens of situations in which the deal is changed by a shark preying on the innocent. The greatest tragedy is the loss of trust by the deceived party. Trust is fragile to begin with but naïve trust is brutalized by predators. Its extreme is date rape when the woman has one set of expectations and the male has another.

Strategies – Realize that trust evaporates in the face of betrayal. Sad to say, the reality of our learning curve almost demands some level of betrayal in order to toughen awareness at the risk of instilling a permanent fear. Obviously, you need to read the very small print of every contract. Less obvious, you need to listen closely to what is said by the salesperson or the teacher or the love interest.
.
.A Note to Communicators:
Tomorrow We’ll Get Organized
This is a sign that appeared several years ago, along with another sign “PLAN Ahead” Humorous as they might be, they point to the daily challenge each of us has to get our individual acts together.
Personal management is not at the top of the education agenda. We may teach management in business and education, but how each of us manages our own lives is largely left up to our accidental learning in the College of Hard Knocks.
What are some of the characteristics of organization?
· Activities happen on time.
· Lateness is not a difficulty.
· In our writing and speaking, our organization is sequential, coherent and understandable. It is “clear.”
· Planning is only the beginning of being organized.
· Monitoring of the process at every step of the way is a vital part of organization.
· Follow-through is a vial part of organization.
· Organization is an endemic part of process.
My rule of thumb about someone or something being well organized is that if it looks easy, the person or event has been well organized. If there is sloppiness or mistakes, the organization is a major part of the problem.
· The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a result of poor organization, either accidental or deliberate.
· Although the final results of the current financial crisis are not yet conclusive, early returns indicate that deliberate lack of regulation enforcement, an important part of organization.
· The perennial lack of an Albany budget is a function of poor organization, derived from conflicting political interests.
· The execution of a business plan, any team sport strategy is dependent on good organization.
· A political campaign cannot begin to attract votes without strong organization.
Because organization is invisible, you only know something is wrong when the roof falls in.
· Have you ever planned for a trip and didn’t think about what you are going take with you?
· Have you not studied during a course and prepared for an exam?
· Have you ever gone food shopping without a list?
· Have you had guests over for dinner and scrambled to prepare for the meal?
Aesop’s fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant is a comparison of good planning and no planning. While the Ant continues to store away food for the winter, the Grasshopper flits about during the summer. When the winter comes, the Grasshopper doesn’t have any food and dies.

Many projects are very complicated in the number of details. A check list is required to remember them all. My son, who has been a pilot for American Airlines for over 20 years, has a pre-flight check list to execute every time. A surgeon now has a check list to complete before operating. A building engineer has a check list to follow on every construction site.

A recent New York Times bestseller speaks to the power of organization: “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande, MD, a surgeon in Boston, a MacArthur Fellow, a writer for the New Yorker and associate professor at the Harvard Medical School. Taking a cue from the airline pilot’s preflight check list, he writes about incessant surgical mistakes that were dramatically reduced with a checklist of organizational procedures.

I learned the necessity of being organized from over 300 productions of plays, operas, musicals and experimental theatre pieces. As either producer, director or designer, I learned the hard way that every aspect of a theatre production is deadline driven. Everything has to be rehearsed and ready by curtain time. Despite its careful preparation, even the Metropolitan Opera makes mistakes once in a while, witness the recent crashing down of a piece of scenery.

Despite the best efforts of some people to organize themselves, they may be diagnosed with a learning disability know as “Executive Functioning.” According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, Executive Functioning (EF) difficulties have some of these warning signs:may involve abilities such as:
· Difficulty planning and completing projects;
· Problems understanding how long a project will take to complete;
· Struggling with telling a story in the right sequence with important details and minimal irrelevant details;
· Trouble communicating details in an organized, sequential manner;
· Problems initiating activities or tasks, or generating ideas independently; and
· Difficulty retaining information while doing something with it such as remembering a phone number while dialing.

This EF disability is fascinating because we all share some of these dysfunctional behaviors. For your own research, you have a goldmine of information by just googling “Executive Function disability.”

In order to become better organized, you need to become aware that disorganization is a problem for you. Start with a date calendar and record your appointments and your assignments. Forgetting to do this will add to your disorganization until you decide to make a commitment to becoming better organized.

The only worry about being organized is acquiring O.C.D. (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). But we’ll worry about this when you transform yourself into Adrian Monk. Or, his opposite, Alfred E. Newman, of “What Me Worry?” fame.

UPCOMING CONVERSATIONS:

June 30, 2010 – Emotions: Anger: Fighting Fury; Clues to recognizing triggers of rage whether they are people, places or things and ways to overtake them before they overtake you. This is a familiar emotion to all of us. We may recognize it others, but do we recognize it in ourselves? We cannot hope to fully understand this emotion, but we’ll try to discover how many ways the emotion of “anger” manifests itself in ourselves, in others, in the world. With luck, this will be a cool and dispassionate discussion about a very hot topic.

The 6/30/10 meeting will be our last for the summer. The Club will go on vacation until the Fall semester. Because of the Jewish holidays, our first Club meeting will be on Wednesday, October 17 – same place, same time, new and old people. See you then.

What about one of these topics?
“Repetition”
“Meaning”
“Why Does History Repeat Itself?”
“Heroism”
“Concentration”
“Coping with Adversity”
Student Poetry showcase
“Empathy”
“Connecting the Dots”
Role play of cynical people
“Cold Calling in Sales
“He’s Just Not That into You”
“Money”
“Critical Listening Institute: Ravel’s ‘Bolero’”
“Criticism – Giving and Receiving”
“Logical Fallacies”
“Freedom II”
“Gender Communication II”
“SPAR Debate”
“Distraction II”
“Negotiation II”
“Imagination II”
“Rodney King: ‘Can’t we just get along?” II”
“Political Savvy”
And dozens of others!

Compare the notice of the session with what really happened!
What happened on Wednesday, June 16, 2010?
“Rodney King: ‘Can’t We Just Get Along?

In 1991, Rodney King was the subject of a violent beating at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department which was videoed and shown around the world We won’t recount here the details which led up to the beating, but the acquittal of the LAPD officers led to the 1992 LA riots. During the riots, King appeared on television, pleading with the rioters, “Can’t we just get along?” His question continues to reverberate in any discussion about peace. We’ll examine the many sides to King’s provocative question.

A quartet of familiar faculty faces, Richard Green, Markus Vayandorf, Dean Donne Kampel Hal Wicke, chatted for about an hour on an increasingly wide series of virtual non-sequiturs, some of which related to the topic.

and
We circled around some causes of not getting along with the consensus that many people have difficulty setting aside their own points of view. This observation led to a discussion about the inability of some people to have their point of view challenged.

Hal offered that the Communication Department is undertaking a campaign to introduce video recording of student speeches for analysis. Richard has used video in his Communication classes for years.

Political savvy was a term raised in Dean Kampel’s workshop. It will be added to the laundry list of topics.

At Hal’s request, Markus promised to develop an algorithm for gossip.

Lightheartedly, we adjourned.
---
We always have a great time exploring these issues. So often our daily life never focuses on these Communication issues. If you have something you want us to discuss please let us know and we’ll add it to the list.

Next time bring a friend. The Communication Club is always an open discussion, limited only by time. Everyone gets a chance to speak. All opinions are welcome. Here is an opportunity for students to challenge professors’ views outside the class without any homework or assignments. You just have to show up and listen and talk if you want.

Hal Wicke

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The Touro Communication Club Notes - #120 – June 16, 2010 Tourocommunicationclub.blogspot.com
Contents:
1. Quotations about “Getting Along”
2. The Upcoming Club program: “Rodney King: Why Can’t We Get Along” Will Be On Wednesday, June 16, 2010 @ 2 pm in Room 223
3. Logical Fallacy of the Week # 10 – “Moving the Goal Posts”
4. A Note to Communicators: “”Why Can’t We Get Along?””
5. Upcoming Conversations
6. Possible club topics – please add to the list
7. What happened last week: “Imagination”

Five Quotes about Getting Along
If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.”
Maya Angelou, contemporary American author
“The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.”
Voltaire, 18th century French philosopher
“If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th century German philosopher
If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
Atticus Finch to his daughter, Scout, in “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee (1960)
“You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.”
Indira Gandhi, 20th century Indian political leader

The Touro Communication Club
2 pm - Wednesday, June 16, 2010– Room 223
“Rodney King: ‘Can’t We Just Get Along?
In 1991, Rodney King was the subject of a violent beating at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department which was videoed and shown around the world We won’t recount here the details which led up to the beating, but the acquittal of the LAPD officers led to the 1992 LA riots. During the riots, King appeared on television, pleading with the rioters, “Can’t we just get along?” His question continues to reverberate in any discussion about peace. We’ll examine the many sides to King’s provocative question.

Logical Fallacy of the Week #11: “Moving the Goal Posts”
The name of the fallacy comes from a game like soccer or football which has goal posts. In an actual game, it would quite angering if one team decided to change the position of the goal posts. All strategy would change.

In another context, you might call this fallacy, “Changing the Deal.” You think you have agreed to one set of circumstances and suddenly you find details of the deal have been changed. You find many people moving the goalposts when it benefits them.
· Real estate – A tenant agrees to rent an apartment with a refrigerator and stove. When she arrives, she discovers they are not in the apartment and the landlord denies that they were part of the agreement.
· Car sales – You think that you are buying a particular car, but find that only the more expensive model is available. (Also called ‘bait and switch.”) This behavior applies to all sales situations.
· Academic classes – Your professor changes the criteria on which you thought you were being evaluated. Perhaps a student argues that the professor gave her an A when the professor’s grade book shows a “B.”
· Relationships – Either the male or female promises his intended that certain things will happen– a fancy car, a fancy vacation, lots of luxuries and blings - and they don’t, some is mighty angry.
· The TV commercial – two children are promised ponies by a male adult; one gets a toy, the other gets a real one. The jilted child feels cheated because the adult changes the deal.
· Product content – the price of the product is kept the same but the amount of the ingredients is decreased
There are dozens of situations in which the deal is changed by a shark preying on the innocent. The greatest tragedy is the loss of trust by the deceived party. Trust is fragile to begin with but naïve trust is brutalized by predators. Its extreme is date rape when the woman has one set of expectations and the male has another.

Strategies – Realize that trust evaporates in the face of betrayal. Sad to say, the reality of our learning curve almost demands some level of betrayal in order to toughen awareness at the risk of instilling a permanent fear. Obviously, you need to read the very small print of every contract. Less obvious, you need to listen closely to what is said by the salesperson or the teacher or the love interest.
.
.A Note to Communicators:

“Why People Can’t Get Along”
Like so many positive traits, many people believe that imagination belongs to others. “I don’t have an imagination.” “I couldn’t have thought of that.” “He’s so creative – he’s got a good imagination.”

Not true. We all possess imagination in different ways and to different degrees. The imagination of artists is easy to acknowledge. But the stereotype of a scientist or engineer is that of an unimaginative drudge. Einstein’s quotes above demonstrate the opposite.

How do we recognize imagination at work? Imagination depends on context. If the context is repeated without variation, there is no imagination at work.
· The solider is trained not to be imaginative. Who wants an imaginative soldier who must follow a given set of orders under fire?
· The bureaucrat has a set of procedures to follow. If he does not follow them, chaos ensues. We are all familiar with the imaginative bureaucrats who give incomplete or wrong information.
· The assembly line worker is another person who must follow a series of procedures for the product to work. You may remember the famous skit on “I Love Lucy” where Lucille Ball is sorting tomatoes on an assembly line. She starts questioning her decision of which tomato is good or bad, hilarity follows.

Now when the soldier, bureaucrat and assembly line worker is finished with their assignment, they are free to let their imaginations run wild. Unfortunately, the training to follow orders and not think has taken over all the behavior and imagination is snuffed out.

Since imagination is a precious commodity that needs to survive – and thrive, it needs basic rules to be productive. Imagination can begin several ways.
· It can begin with a dream, often a visual picture. The visualization may be vague at the beginning.
· It may be just an impulse – “There’s something wrong here.” “This has got to be better.”
· It may appear by serendipitous accident. Some interruption, an accident, a connection between two unlikely elements.

The genesis of imagination is the easiest phase. Then next phases are more difficult. Here many people quit. A professor, when asked to follow up on an idea he suggested, said, “My responsibility is to suggest ideas. It is for others to follow up on them.”

If you are to be serious about developing your imagination, you must decide to commit to developing the idea. You must set a deadline for completion. As the adage says, “A dream without a deadline is a fantasy.”

Using Thomas Edison’s statement, “Invention is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration” as a model, you need to
· Make a selection as to which idea you want to work on to its completion,
· Next, you will spend a period of time brainstorming the range of possibilities. Here your imagination has unfettered liberty. The crazier the possibilities the better.
· Gradually, a constellation of ideas begin to coalesce around a central theme or pattern,
· Once the pattern comes into focus, the idea then starts to be refined again and again.
· After many trials, a final outcome becomes frozen and then is presented to the public.

This is the creative process, the outcome of imagination. For some it happens quickly. For others, it may take time. For still others, the process is never completed because of intervening factors and events or the creator’s fatigue or disillusionment at the process or the direction of the project or for a hundred other reasons.

At every turn, imagination and the creative process that imagination engenders is fragile. Distractions, discouragement, all kinds of mental, occupational or domestic obstacles delay, dismantle or destroy imagination and the creative process.

Promiscuity is imagination’s enemy. Like a marriage, you must make a commitment to your idea, despite the obstacles. Otherwise, we end up like Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront,” saying, “I coulda been a contender.”

UPCOMING CONVERSATIONS:
June 23, 2010 - “Getting Organized: First Things First” How do I prioritize? What rationale do I use? Which system best suits me? How do I measure my improvement? An invisible part of everyone’s life is being organized. As our lives get busier, we need to be organized. No one starts off being organized. Some learn more quickly than others. The business people are usually ones who are very organized without being overbearing. We’ll try to identify the tricks people employ to keep their lives together. What about distractions? We’ll talk about how increased pressure affects our organization. This should be a very practical session.

June 30, 2010 – Emotions: Anger: Fighting Fury; Clues to recognizing triggers of rage whether they are people, places or things and ways to overtake them before they overtake you. This is a familiar emotion to all of us. We may recognize it others, but do we recognize it in ourselves? We cannot hope to fully understand this emotion, but we’ll try to discover how many ways the emotion of “anger” manifests itself in ourselves, in others, in the world. With luck, this will be a cool and dispassionate discussion about a very hot topic.

What about one of these topics?
“Repetition”
“Meaning”
“Why Does History Repeat Itself?”
“Heroism”
“Concentration”
“Coping with Adversity”
Student Poetry showcase
“Empathy”
“Connecting the Dots”
Role play of cynical people
“Cold Calling in Sales
“He’s Just Not That into You”
“Money”
“Critical Listening Institute: Ravel’s ‘Bolero’”
“Criticism – Giving and Receiving”
“Logical Fallacies”
“Freedom II”
“Gender Communication II”
“SPAR Debate”
“Distraction II”
“Negotiation II”
“Imagination II”
And dozens of others!

Compare the notice of the session with what really happened!
What happened on Wednesday, June 16, 2010?
Imagination
Many people limit this human ability to the arts and artists, but everyone has an imagination which can be the springboard for all kinds of enterprises in business and the professions. We’ll talk about what imagination is and can do. If we’re lucky, we’ll even do some imagination exercises.

Newcomer Nina Davila joined Richard Green, Gena Bardwell, Carlisle Yearwood and Hal Wicke for a short but discursive yet interesting exchange:

“What is the root of imagination?”
“Image.”
“What is image?”
“The game face we put on when we go out into public.”
“How we like to think of ourselves.”
“I am an entertainer and I am quite conscious of the image I project.”
In their search for approval from an audience, the actor’s persona mixes with that of the character.
“We put on a mask because we are afraid of failing.”
Insecure.
“If you are not a B.I.T.C.H., they’ll eat you out.”
“Ego doesn’t mean talented.”
Compare Joan Rivers and Sandra Bullock.
Meryl Streep as Julia Childs and Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side”
Lucille Ball.
Samuel Coleridge
Imagination at work
The poem tells you what to do.
The “I” disappears
We see in our mind’s eye.
I like what I like.
Where has the story gone?
The music business has gone down with the reality shows which make money.
The goal of the music business for age 12-18 is to make money
Making products, not music
Alicia Keys’ story
“We are the World.” You can repeat perfection
E.E. Cummings
The ability to go back and capture an image
Tchaikovsky’s “Capriccio Italien

The remainder of the unfocussed discussion focused on food, PowerPoint, T.S. Eliot, among other topics.

The discussion went in an unanticipated direction. We will reschedule the topic to further examine what imagination is.

Professor Yearwood offered to present a program on T.S. Eliot, the American/English poet of the 20th century. The Communication Club will inaugurate a new series called, “Faculty Colloquy” with the Eliot program of Professor Yearwood. He has been working on Eliot’s magnum opus, “The Wasteland.”

Gena Bardwell suggested that the Department create a Communication bibliography.
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We always have a great time exploring these issues. So often our daily life never focuses on these Communication issues. If you have something you want us to discuss please let us know and we’ll add it to the list.

Next time bring a friend. The Communication Club is always an open discussion, limited only by time. Everyone gets a chance to speak. All opinions are welcome. Here is an opportunity for students to challenge professors’ views outside the class without any homework or assignments. You just have to show up and listen and talk if you want.

Hal Wicke