22 Aug Through Differences We Find The Place Where We Interconnect
Here I sit at my computer, giving myself 25 minutes to type through what I’m feeling. My head feels tight. My eyes are scrunched up in concentration. My jaw is clenched and so are my thighs and seat. But just brining attention to them all helps them relax a shade. My shoulders are releasing more showing me that they were tense too.
There’s so much to do. There’s much that I want to do. There’s so much that I have to do. And according to Barbara Sher, scanners like me forget that there are moments beyond now. I’m learning how to navigate life knowing who I am for the first time. Learning to navigate day to day life having been given an accurate description of my brain. A scanner. That’s what Barbara calls us because we’re always scanning the horizon.
The anxiety comes from feeling like if I commit my time today to completing paperwork, I’ll cut off time for my creative projects. But I often fill my creative projects with stuff that leads nowhere, it’s like I fill the time just so I have the time. It’s not deep enough or satisfying enough. On and one this avoidance and filling cycle goes. As time goes on, my dreams slip away.
Things I really want to do, I won’t do because it then feels like I have to fully to commit to that for the rest of my life and I won’t be able to explore other things. Thanks to Barbara’s guidance and explanation of my brain, I now know that that’s not true. For years, for decades I’ve lived a life of trying to be someone else. I’ve tried to followed the dominant social paradigm, the dominant marketing paradigm of “find one thing and specialise in that”. And whenever I’ve stuck to one thing (or tried to stick to one thing), I’m never happy. A part of me dies in the specialism.
If I could go back to my teacher self who was studying to be a healer, I’d tell her she’d living her dream already. She doesn’t need anything else. Working as a full time healer could never sustain and satisfy her either. She needs both – to be languages teacher and healer of some kind. Many can’t cope with both. Their brains aren’t wired for variety. She can. And eventually life will show her who she truly is. Life will show her that she will only ever be happy and contented with a life of variety, learning and exploration. That her teaching skills, which are really learning skills are one of her most valuable assets.
But there’s so much more to being a scanner. The nuances of how we think. No coach without understanding of the scanner brain could help her make her dream life come into reality. She needs a specialist for that. No book coach who doesn’t understand scanners can help her complete her book – a book that needs to reflect her diverse interests. And yet the irony being that allowing the diversity brings to light the thread that connects them all.
Peace for a scanner is having the freedom to explore as many pieces as we like. It’s having diverse interests that we explore deeply. It’s having the space to find all the different facets and pieces that make up who we are and playing with expressing them. Scanners understand that many people are specialists in one thing and that totally works for them. But to force a scanner to be a specialist is to strangle the life force in us. It’s to keep our dreams small and our big dreams forever out of reach.
Because dreams that are worth having require us to step up to a truer version of ourselves. A version that’s faced challenges and inner demons. That’s got stronger and wiser through adversity and a dream that is so big it can only come into reality little by little, piece by piece. A dream so big that the journey transforms and heals you in ways you couldn’t imagine before. A dream that has to start off vague and corrupted by insecurities until you face those insecurities and the truer dream emerges.
The key takeaway being that for heaven’s sake we need to stop assuming we know anyone. We have to accept that people’s brains work differently. At the deepest levels of being, we are all interconnected and paradoxically, we can only fully feel that interconnectedness when we embrace how different and unique we all are. The biggest hurdle is recognising our creativity- the creativity that makes up stories about other people based on our own lived experience and assumptions. The assumptions that block genuine connection.
The future is diversity. The freedom and encouragement to discover who you are and how you’re different from everyone else. And from that space of coming home to the truest essence of yourself, you connect with that place of the interconnectedness of life.
Are you a scanner too?
Check out Barbara Sher’s wonderful work on multi-passionate people like us!
