I attended an interesting personal development workshop recently with New Zealand coach and mentor Keith Mason. All about getting into our heart space, he invited (and challenged) us to adopt a new mantra: Wrong is the new right and right is the new wrong. Instead of driving ourselves ever forwards to a fixed concept of what we think we should do and how we think we should be, we can experiment with checking in with our feelings and sense of individuality.
Following this line of thought, I was interested to read an article in The Age’s Sunday Life magazine on how children who are emotionally and creatively intense (labelled eccentric by society) don’t fit the mould. The challenge for parents is to resist the temptation to force these ‘non-conformist’ children to adapt to social norms and expectations. Not all little girls dress in pink and play with dolls… But it goes beyond this and is about respecting their individuality and contribution. As Oscar Wilde said: “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”
We should allow them to be curious, to play, to invent, to dream and to imagine the unimaginable otherwise they shut down their creativity. One child described in the article believes in magic, plans to invent a time machine and is interested in tarot. Brilliant! He hasn’t sacrificed his creative spark to the gods of the computer game, TV or Ipod.
What’s right for one person is not right for another. We need to get out of our straight-jackets and mix and muddle up our perceptions to avoid bland conformity. They have just swapped (driving) sides of the road in Samoa and right is now wrong and left is now right. That’s enough to keep anyone on their toes and ready to embrace change.
