Month: August 2015 | the Wakefield Doctrine

TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine- ‘…of morning showers and early sunsets’

August 29, 2015 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Others describe this bloghop much more eloquently, emphasizing the value of (a) sharing of gratitude, re-enforcing, (or reinforcing, I suspect, in some circles, both could apply), the strength imparted from a long tradition in demonstrating self-examination and the resultant life-enhancing development of skills allowing truer expression and, therefore, increased appreciation of the positive side of life.

This being the Wakefield Doctrine, I thought, ‘well, they have the normal good stuff covered, how about the other elements that are inherent in a practice such as this, what about them?!’ So, I am totally grateful for:

1) The fact that this community is made up of people who enjoy the non-…… normal, rather than threaten by it. The TToT invites all of us to share the things for which we are grateful. It’s sorta of expected that there be Ten Things…. if, for no other reason than, the ‘Some-Number-Depending-On-Your-Week Things of Thankful’ url was already taken.

2) The fact that concepts like hypo-gratitude, an example of which I’ll cite in #3, is considered a valid Grat List item. (To the un-initiate, the idea that a bloghop that is focused on cultivating gratitude, would allow items reflecting things that we really kinda hate, might seem a bit…. off-putting.) I will maintain that it is the very opposite. In the real world things are not always good. And, while many here at the TToT do a remarkable job of taking a bad thing (incident, event, whatever) and find the perspective that converts the negative into the positive, or at very least, into the not so negative, is a true expression of the underlying principles of a gratitude exercise. Well, hypo-gratitude items are like that… if you go to the trouble of expressing it in a way that the others can understand and identify with, then you have surely left behind the toxic negativity that is usually a part of the negatives that we encounter in our day-to-day lives.

3) Hypo-gratitude item: Since June, when I take a shower*, I set the faucet (one of those single dial things) at about ‘5:00 o’clock’. Comfortable. Yesterday…. morning shower and ‘5:00 o’clock’ was…. cold! Surely one of the most fundamental ways to be reminded of the inevitable change of the seasons. (I won’t even mention how ‘not-still-light’ at a reasonable time in the evening things are these days.)

4) The people, (all virtual), who ‘enjoy’ the Gravity Challenge. Kristi and Christine and Lisa and Val and Joy . All, ( I assume), enjoy the process of the Challenge for different reasons. I, for one, find that the coolest thing about it is that, on one level, we all can identify with each other. (Sure, it’s a very, very small, quite focused and specialized aspect of a person’s life, but the magic of ‘identification’ is that I can say to a another person, ‘I know how you feel’.

5) The Six Sentence Story with headmistrae zoe. (Despite the fact that, in High School, I was this close to being named the, ‘Most Likely to be Mistaken for an English Teacher at virtually any Stage of Life’, I saw no value in learning to write. ( Hey! Come on! I was 17 years old, it was 1969 and loud music had just been invented! What use did I have for gerunds and participles? If it didn’t cure acne or promise to make me less of an awkward semi-geek, I did not have time for it.) Of course, today I’m scrambling to make up for the lack of skills with the written word and such. In fairness to me, most bloggers seem to be women (who are former girls) and god knows you people never had the desperate, near-psychotic levels of drive to be acceptable by the opposite sex that was de rigueur for those of us who grew up in Y Chromia. ( I suppose, to be fair, I should qualify that last statement. The ‘desperation’ of those days of adolescent agony didn’t really apply to my (caveman) scottian classmates, or, and ‘stepford husbands’ that were the rogers in high school.) Where was I? zoe and the 6 Sentence Stories! What a great learning opportunity! I write and I read what the others do (with the same prompt) and I learn. And I get better. Thanks z (and Josie)

6) We can’t have a TToT without expressing gratitude for one of the single coolest features of this here bloghop here, the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules). It is license to be creative, it is (an) invitation to flaunt the Rules, (such as they are), and it adds another dimension to writing Gratitude Posts. very cool

7) Dyanne…. she wrote a fun Six Sentence Story this week. (The fun was, itself, a manifestation of what it is that’s so incredible about the blogosphere. For those with sufficiently developed powers of Imagination (and his sexier sister, Visualization), it’s like writing and producing your own TV shows. Way better than what’s on the ‘real’ TV) btw…. I have never had dark hair, even back in the day… you’d be better off to think more, what’s his name, Fabio… yeah, light color hair… ( about as long, ‘cept less straight and more… bozo fro…)

8) Phyllis and Una

9) Well, ‘where is the day-to-day, real life happenings that most people write about being grateful for?’ might be a valid question. I need to get back to you on that, ok? (Update! real world/real time content!! (oh boy lets see what exotic and interesting things happen in our day-to-day-world!) 7:01 am Saturday:

“why no, officer, I do not have a permit to run a petting zone! Haven’t you ever seen a Lithuanian Short-haired Shepherd before?

(psst!! Mrs Bambi, yo get the frickin kids outta here! alright, the fawn. just lay low, it’s gonna be hunting season soon.)

10) 1.3

* no, I took showers before June!! It’s just the point is about Summer, you know?!

Your hosts

A Fly on our (Chicken Coop) Wall, Amycake and the Dude, Considerings, Finding Ninee, Getting Literal, I Want Backsies, The Meaning of Me, Thankful Me, Uncharted, The Wakefield Doctrine

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Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: personality types, relationships, the Wakefield Doctrine

Six…that’s right! all it is, is Six Sentences comprising a Story -the Wakefield Doctrine-

August 27, 2015 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Tough one. At least it’s striking me so, here at 12:30 am Thursday the 27th, as I sit at my computer, typing, near-automatically with similar ambition, (to the automatic writers of old), hoping against hope that the very motion of the pen (or keyboard), will be mother (or father) to art. Maybe they were on to something.

‘The Project that was projected was to project as much of the project to as many of the people comprising the Project.

To Project, speaking from a faux psychoanalytic perspective, is, in part, to attribute (project) onto to people, places and things in ones’ world, the attributes and characteristic that one attributes to oneself but would really rather not accept.’
Luckily this is only this week’s Six Sentence Challenge and all I have to do is finish and submit and then go one with life, which has enough difficulties in it without having to contend with zoe’s latest deviously simply word prompt.

Man! this is a tough one…

Awake, thank god that night is over!

Tossed and turned all night, chased by worry and hobbled by loss of confidence, surely, (so spoke the voices of the night), there is no way to get through this next set of challenges.

Coffee to stimulate the mind, producing the illusion (maybe even the allusion) of being capable of efficient and effective action.

The caffeine, (a delightfully psycho-active part of a complete breakfast, ‘the Best to me each morning’), surely the Lord Chamberlain of morning, has me convinced that my worries of the past night were simply that… worries, not real at all; the reality of this morning in front of the computer with a cup of coffee on the desk is what is real and all of the tossing and turning of the night were merely projections and everyone knows, they are but shadow shows, the illusion of action and character and can’t be the actual world, otherwise I might find myself caught in them, like last night’s seemingly endless struggle, and that would be….

…Tough one.

At least it’s striking me so, here at 12:30 am Thursday the 27th, as I sit at my computer, typing, near-automatically with similar ambition (to the automatic writers of old), hoping against hope that motion of the pen (or keyboard) will be mother (or father) to art. Maybe they were on to something…

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: predicting human behavior, psychology of personality, relationships, the Wakefield Doctrine

secret hiding place experiment # 1 08/24/15

August 24, 2015 By clarkscottroger

Cynthia

(first I will say ‘thank you’… for being the clark that you are in the situation you are in, real life Doctrine learning and application…I do feel fortunate to know you)

and therein is our best starting hint: you’re clark and, and you are in a position to need to bring out additional leadership quality. those italics? …exactly! (it’s so easy talking to clarks, at least about the beginning of a solution to a clarklike problem…heh heh) you are needing additional quality development, not! (I repeat), not needing to find or otherwise acquire the quality itself. Your problem is surely real. You are farther along your path than you ever been before, which is great. However, in my opinion, it’s critical that you remember that you got to where you are because of the qualities you have… not because you got dropped into a place/situation, out of context.
it (your question) is a totally valid one and goes to the heart of the contradiction presented by the nature of the 3 worldviews that the Doctrine is based on, i.e. you’re a clark and you know things but you need personal qualities that are not necessarily grounded in the intellect (ha ha only joking, scotts!) so how can you access your scottian aspect when you’re a clark?

and thats where perspective and faith* comes in… perspective via what you’re doing and I’m doing, stepping back to see where you were, what happened and where you are now…. helpful. not the entire answer, but very helpful we all lose a certain perspective on our own efforts when were busy doing them!
unless I turn this (discussion) into a post, I better keep it brief: trust your passion. where you are is because of what you are… you have this (secret) notion of creating a family from among those who might benefit from your help and efforts… you will eventually attract people who might have more developed skills in certain areas (yeah, scotts and rogers)… and that’s where the real transformative part comes: you’ll need to accept them into your family …. ‘your’ family (not join with them to create something, you already have done that!) they will be willing to give you something… that can help your efforts and that’s where it gets tricky for us clarks…. letting others help us to achieve what we feel strongly about)
…more to follow

*faith: with all respect to those who see the religious element/place of faith in their respective lives, I’ll make use of the concept as being the deliberate investment of our selves in a belief/proposal which requires commitment without the support of ‘proof of efficacy’…

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Leadership, Passion and clarks -the Wakefield Doctrine- (of parentheses and conversation, it’s Friday Monday and the pressure is finally off (for the rogers and scotts, that is!)

August 24, 2015 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Once again, we have Friends of the Doctrine to thank for an interesting Post topic. Our friend Cynthia wrote, in a Comment, the other day,

“And…and…clarks. I need to do some learnin’ about bringing out the “leadership” quality in a clark. You know: making those 60-second decisions, not backing down, managing a lot of people. That sort of thing. Not a very clark-thing to do at all. :P“

“:P” indeed!

(I was just thinking, ‘My reply to Cynthia, the other day was pretty comprehensive and, well, lets just say, ‘the post is almost complete with a couple of copy/paste(s)’, go ahead! who’s gonna object?’)

I’ll compromise and put the Reply, (my response to our friend’s Comment), somewhere else. Actually this will be quite useful in allowing me to experiment with an idea for using un-categorized Posts as secret hiding places. So, if you would like to read my response to Cynthia’s excellent Post-topic-to-be, click here.

To the topic on hand! One that I started writing about this August 19th and am only just now publishing it, which is not, as it turns out a bad thing. The reason is that in the intervening time, discussion ensued, specifically, what might we suggest to Cynthia as (possible) paths to explore as she continues on with the remarkable tale of profession and personal development?

(New Readers? note here. the Wakefield Doctrine, besides being a lot of fun is also a tool for understanding the people in our lives, which includes ourselves… as people in our lives. Now the thing about the Doctrine is that we do not claim to have ‘the Answer’, hell, we don’t even insist that our way (of looking at the world) is ‘the Better Way’. All we say is that the Wakefield Doctrine provides an additional perspective on life and the world and dealing with that pain-in-the-ass guy at the deli counter at the Stop ‘n Shop (and) the girl that we would really like to believe we have a shot with and (even) the new boss who seems to be going out of his way to be a first class dick, our emphasis here being, of course, on ‘additional’. We sincerely believe that the more we understand the people in our lives, the better our lives can be. So, the next time you find yourself saying, “I really thought I knew them better than that! How could they be so mean?” stop. remember the three worldviews, see if you can infer how that person is ‘relating themselves to the world around them’, (as an Outsider (clark) or a Predator (scott) or a Herd Member (roger). and then…. then do your best to see the world as they are experiencing it. If you do that, you will know them better. Maybe just a little better, maybe a lot better, but you will have a better understanding/appreciation of them.)

My! that certainly was a jumbo parenthetical aside! Back to our ‘discussion’. how do clarks become more effective leaders and managers? You’ll recognize, in these two, the worldview of scotts and rogers, respectively. It is fundamental to the Wakefield Doctrine that, while we all have only one predominant worldview (our personal reality), we retain the potential and capacity of ‘the other two’. We refer to these as our secondary and tertiary aspects.* At first blush, the ‘answer’ to Cynthia’s query might be thought to be ‘well, develop your secondary and tertiary aspects!’ And, in fact, that is the answer. However, the question remains, ‘how the heck does one do that?’

Hey! here’s what I’ve got: enthusiasm.

Yep! there it is. the answer.** Enthusiasm… or, as we presciently wrote in our Post Title…passion. That is the keystone, the touchstone, the abracadabra of accessing her secondary and tertiary aspects. Now, I alluded to discussion over the course of the weekend that contributed to a better understanding of this mechanism (in clarks). Remind me later in the week to tell you about it. Mention: spinner and hydraulics for cars and I’ll totally get what you mean.

Got to go to work.

* e.g. I am a clark with a strong secondary scottian and weak tertiary rogerian aspect(s) as a result I am a creative Outsider, but have at times found myself driven to act aggressively on the world at large, this blog being the best example of that effect.

** this is the answer specific to Cynthia’s Comment-question. It is applicable to clarks. If we were dealing with a roger or a scott, even with the same question, the answer would be different. Why? well because they have different set of rules, the worldview, the personal reality of (a) scott or (a) roger is different. It only makes sense, doesn’t it?

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: personality types, predicting human behavior, psychology of personality, relationships, self-development, self-improvement, Understanding Human Behavior

TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine- ‘it’s easier to finish a Post than it is to start one’

August 21, 2015 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the-bloghop-that-Lizzi-built, and it is, as befits all communal activity in the virtual world, many things to many people. There are few Rules, (but many Secret Rules), the people who participate vary from the new-to-blogging to extraordinarily talented blog writers, however, the bottom line here the charge to us to make the effort to identify parts of our life/our world/our reality that elicits a feeling of gratitude and to share what that means, (to you), here at this virtual gathering, every weekend.

1) I’ll start by thanking Denise for today’s Post subtitle. Not certain what prompted it, but, in the course of conversation, we agreed that, when it comes to writing blog posts, its’ easier…’

2) funerals. This is not an attempt to be macabre or worse, contrived, but I have to go to a funeral service (a work connected person, close but not family close) tomorrow and I am grateful because most of the time I go to one, I leave with a refreshed sense of the importance of appreciating the here and now. It’s not a ‘glad I’m not them’ thing, rather, it (the experience of going to a funeral service), is a very real and effective reminder that no matter how caught up I get in my dreams and ambitions, fears and hopes, the fact of the matter is that there is only today. (Sure, there’s probably going to be tomorrow… but that’s exactly how I get myself in trouble, living in the future, as most clarks do.*) And, I also experience funerals as an opportunity to self-understand myself more… not being an overly-emotional person, (which is not to say that I lack emotion), I find it a challenge to convey what I would convey to the people that I care about at (a) funeral.

3) Lets hear it for work! (The employment type, not the dig in the yard, physically demanding, mentally refreshing activity, which will be Item #5)… I enjoy what I do and sometimes I catch myself avoiding making mistakes and that’s really an excellent feeling. (I did mention that I’m a clark, right?)

4) I will cite as Grat Item #4, the opportunity to use the word macabre in a sentence where that is the legitimately best word

5) digging holes in the ground. (the photo below) is my home made drainage …thing. (turns out that the new driveway was not quite properly pitched, at least the section of it that Phyllis uses to park her Mini. Which is a problem in the winter. The snow melts and pools inside the enclosure that we have for the car and the car sits in water until it gets cold enough and then the car is locked in the ice for a couple of months. So, the solution is to create a lower point. The problem is, most of the area around this section of the driveway is higher. (damn! this is taking a long time to write! Hell, I devoting nearly as much time describing my drainage project as I did trying to relate my feelings and attitudes toward funerals… that can’t be right! lol)

6) Phyllis’s Treehouse is coming along fine… for this year, the only things left are some sort of curtains (probably some of those bamboo roll-up things) and a little landscaping and that’s about all for this season.

7) Una, of course.

8) the fearless and intrepid Graviteers over at the 2 Mile Run ‘Gravity Challenge’ (that would be Kristi, Christine, Val, Lisa and Joy) ya oughta come by and join us! It’s fun and gravity-defying!

9) z and her Six Sentence Stories…. A weekly mid-term/class project/term paperette and impromptu presentation all rolled into one! (no! normal bloggers! don’t listen to me on this. this is only how I view the challenge of writing a six sentence story, most of the others have the skill (and talent) to not only create great stories, but also make it look easy! My own interest is very simply, if I hangout with people with superior skills in the word-wrangling biz, then mine will surely improve as well!

10) SR 1.3 …and,of course, the entire Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) for being nothing less than license to do almost anything in these pages (with the clearly appreciated caveat that this is still about being grateful)

* and rogers live in the past and scotts, now they, they’re the one’s that live in the present, ‘cept they don’t have the interest to over-appreciate what it is they do…

Your hosts

A Fly on our (Chicken Coop) Wall, Amycake and the Dude, Considerings, Finding Ninee, Getting Literal, I Want Backsies, The Meaning of Me, Thankful Me, Uncharted, The Wakefield Doctrine

Join the Ten Things of Thankful Facebook Group

An InLinkz Link-up