On the point of strengthening others, it all begins with the right mindset:
As I was growing up in a household of highly-educated parents, I heard a lot about how important it was to be intelligent. And back then, there was one major measure of intelligence: the IQ, a single number indicator that you could either brag about or never mention. So imagine my delight when, in 1999, I had the great good fortune to experience Dr. Howard Gardner, Professor of Education @ Harvard, at the 8th International Conference on Thinking.
Here’s a snippet of his fascinating story:
- while in grad studies in developmental psychology, he worked as a research assistant studying children’s artistic thinking
- then after getting his doctorate, he worked with brain-damaged patients at the Boston Veterans’ Administration Hospital
- so, every day, he worked with brain-damaged patients in the morning and with artistic kids in the afternoon. He came to realize that brain damage can be quite selective (e.g., language abilities disappear but the ability to produce music remains) and that some kids who were very good in music and dancing couldn’t write a coherent sentence
Long story short he used his experiences to develop his 1983 Theory of Multiple Intelligences, graphically depicted below:
And here’s the point about the ‘strengthening others’ mindset: imagine how you could put this theory to work as your base belief about others? Instead of asking yourself: “how smart is she?”, you teach yourself to ask: “how is she smart?” … and then by figuring out the answers to the better question, your assumptions about the person take a very constructive step forward into a relationship.
Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash
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