Jamie Whittle's Blog
Jedi brainstorming
I once watched an interview of George Lucas, creator of Star Wars, where he described the role of Jedi Knights. “The Jedi” he explained, “are principally negotiators”. Perhaps then negotiation is mightier than the sword, or indeed the light sabre!
I spent the past day and a half in the presence of a master negotiator, William Ury, author of such seminal books on the subject of negotiation as “Getting to Yes” and “The Third Side”, and a man who has negotiated between Mandela and de Klerk, with Hugo Chavez, in the Middle East and beyond. He was in Scotland to teach, meet key decision makers in government and the church, and in many ways to advocate the concept of principled negotiation. It was brilliant. The best day’s learning I’ve experienced in many a moon.
In the job I do (environmental lawyer), each day is filled with a series of negotiations. Some of them I have time to prepare for, others are on the hoof and so quick that it’s hard to realise you have just been involved in a negotiation. Then there’s negotiation outwith professional life, in the home, with friends, in a multitude of scenarios in daily life.
Two things I took away in particular from Professor Ury’s seminar were firstly the idea of a ‘positive no’. How a no is essentially a deeper yes. If you are clear about what you want, what your interests are, what is important for you to protect, then that is something positive which may need to be protected by a no if challenged. Example: someone asks you to do something which you don’t agree with but you feel pressurised out of guilt/people-pleasing to do it, but you know you don’t have the time and in any event the time in which that request is required to be performed is right when you have something more important to do. Some would say that saying ‘no’ can be one of the hardest things to utter, that we are programmed in the modern world to say ‘yes’. Instead we can respond by stating the deeper yes that we need to do, following it up with a clear yet respectful no, and then rounding it off with a further yes to some constructive suggestion. Further example: I need to be at home tonight, I can’t make it to the event, but thank you for asking and please keep me posted for the next event. A no sandwiched by two slices of yes.
The second thing I took away was about brainstorming, and how the secret is to come up with as many wild, creative ideas without evaluating them at that stage. The evaluation comes later. It’s different hemispheres of the brain working: the right side and its intuitive, random creativity and the left side with is logical, critical processing.
If you’ve never come across Julia Cameron’s book “The Artist’s Way”, it’s something I would recommend to anyone who feels blocked in their creativity. When I began my project on the River Findhorn in 2000 which unfolded into “White River”, I really had no clue how to write creatively. A friend from Australia suggested I try reading “The Artist’s Way” which encourages a twelve-week programme working through the book going on “artist’s dates” to drink in creative inspiration, and then every morning to write 3 pages in stream of consciousness style, unedited, without fear of criticism, just rambling and rolling so that you start to discover your voice as a writer and the territory you are to explore.
I admit I’ve become lazy as a writer since “White River” was published. My writing has been mainly left-brain through work (with the exception of a few magazine articles) and I’ve only been dabbling with ideas for a next creative project. My defence is that I need more life experience to have something to write about, but that’s just an excuse.
I’m really grateful for the invitation to have a blog on the Sandstone Press website. When asked a couple of months ago I responded with a principled – and what I thought to be a positive – ‘no’, as I didn’t have the time. Life is full for sure, but I realise that I am creatively dehydrated at the moment and need to start filling the well with ideas. I need to write, to write randomly without care of what others may judge. That feels good, makes the wing feathers spread a little, the sap rise. Sometimes we don’t know what we need, and that amongst other things makes it hard to negotiate. I’m pretty sure that creative expression is the stuff that cleans the pipes and lets clarity flow. Where this blog will take me, I just don’t know, but it feels like the start of a grand adventure.