Imago Dialogue/Eesel/Identity-First Language

If you’ve ever thought about writing a letter of encouragement to someone, this will help you think through it. 

Heck, you’ll realize that writing a letter of encouragement to someone is like writing to yourself. Write what you need to read. That’s what I ended up doing, and it was cathartic.

This is not the typical article that I share. But it was SO interesting and SO well written. 

And it was written by an author I’ve been following because his book, The Psychology of Money, has been praised by so many people I respect. I’m going to read it very soon. 

I don’t care if Collaborative Fund is a venture-capital firm. This is a fascinating story about, at first glance, an around-the-world sailing competition The Sunday Times sponsored 54 years ago. At second and third glance, it’s a telling tale about how to live your life for fulfillment.

I mentioned the startup Pathly a few weeks ago. I’ve been going through their training to become a Reflector, and this video was shared with me by one of the co-founders / trainers. 

Even with all my mental health training as a social worker, I never came across the Imago Dialogue approach. It's a very, very powerful method for improving the quality of your relationships.

Ok, ok, ok. So many Chrome extensions are nonsense. This is not one of them. 

This one actually immediately changed my workflow and decreased my anxiety related to how long it was taking me to find documents across three Google accounts. The design of this thing is so ingenious that I can’t believe I found my most common documents and websites any other way. I even shared this with the teams at Holstee and Reflection.app, who have a high bar for helpful, beautifully designed products, and they liked it. 

Did I mention it’s free?

I thought this was an eye-opening take on a part of the learning process that isn’t discussed very often. 

Don’t let the weird word, encoding, turn you off. This is a key part of learning new things, and the writer, Dom Zijlstra should know. He speaks 7 languages, most recently Chinese, for which he baked the methods he used to learn it into his product, Traverse. 

I've used Traverse, and it's a seriously impressive, seriously affordable web app to help you learn anything you want. 

And, oh yeah, Dom is a seriously nice guy.

One of the amazing things about publishing a newsletter for over two years is that you meet a lot of really wonderful people. 

To give you context, one of the resources I shared last week mentioned the importance of person-first language. A dear reader encouraged me to share this article with a different perspective--that perspective being identity-first language. I actually changed my find about this a few years ago. 

My first, ego-based instinct was to think, “What?? Why would anyone want to refer to themselves this way, as their illness or disability?” But that was misguided thinking. Then I listened to stories and read lots of articles by people with lived experience. Like the person who wrote this one and said:

"Autism, however, is not a disease. It is a neurological, developmental condition; it is considered a disorder, and it is disabling in many and varied ways. It is lifelong. It does not harm or kill of its own accord. It is an edifying and meaningful component of a person’s identity, and it defines the ways in which an individual experiences and understands the world around him or her. It is all-pervasive."

 I get it now. Now, I try my best to listen to the people who have the experience of living with whatever they’re living with. I find it a good way to be.

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