Valdemaras' Thoughts

Every person desires to be appreciated or, in other words, to be worthy of esteem and respect. Paradoxically, the feeling of self-esteem mostly depends on other people's opinions. To put it briefly, person's self-esteem is damaged when they are criticized and their achievements are depreciated. People feel more appreciated when their achievements or traits are praised.

It is very interesting and sometimes also very useful to observe how people react to criticism or praising. In my limited experience I noticed that people who have a lack of self-esteem tend to lean to the following two states of mind. Wether they start talking down others and become extremely categorical in their opinion or, on the contrary, loose their self-confidence.

I have had an opportunity to observe the first case much more often than the second. So, if some friend or acquaintance is talking you down for some trifle, or someone is assuring you too often that he is right and you are wrong, then you have all the reasons to suspect that a person just wants to gain more confidence in his merit and increase his feeling of self-esteem this way.

In these cases, I think, it is important not to start fighting back, and proving who is wrong, which would leave the person feeling even more depreciated and also angry on you. In my opinion, the wisest would be to understand that the argument is not about the trifle you're arguing about, it is about someone trying to become appreciated. Sometimes it's enough to show some appreciation to solve all the problems.

Sometimes you can not write anymore, especially when you have to write something like an essay for your English exam. You don't like your text, you feel anxious and frustrated, you are stuck. Peter Elbow in his book “Writing Without Teachers” introduces a method to overcome the so called writer's block. As a main tool to fight the anxiety he introduces freewriting. Freewriting is a process of writing for a certain amount of time non-stop. You can write something on a specific topic or just write down all the thoughts that come to your mind. When you freewrite, you don't judge your text, you don't delete or correct anything either, regardless of the mistakes and the stupidity. Freewriting is claimed to help to develop and to grow the ideas for the text, an activity being similar to brainstorming. Peter Elbow claims that a chain of associations that can produce precious ideas and words is often stopped by critical thinking. Freewriting allows all of your ideas and thoughts to grow regardless of how stupid they are. I believe it helps a lot to overcome the anxiety while writing, since you let everything that is in your mind go to the paper, you don't block anything.

It appears that sometimes critical thinking is a hindrance not only in writing, but also in drawing. Bert Dodson in his book “Keys to Drawing” describes two types of inner dialog when drawing: the critical dialog and the practical dialog. Critical dialog includes judging your drawing in the process. For instance: “That arm doesn't look right” or “I never draw the legs right”. This kind of thinking often stops from finishing the drawing and causes impatience, anxiety and confusion. Another, practical way of thinking includes practical thoughts like “What does that shape look like?”, “How bumpy is that contour?”. Practical dialog is all about observation of the object that is being drawn.

I found the concepts of freewriting and practical dialog in drawing somewhat similar. They are similar in the way they make you stop the self-involved process of criticizing what you do. I wonder what could be the other fields where one could use the method of free-doing to expand and explore the ideas. Jazz improvisations could probably be called free-playing. What is free-speaking then? The process of free speaking in a group of people could eventually bring out many interesting and smart ideas. If one starts speaking only smart things the process of associations is crippled and many wonderful ideas are left behind. What about free-coding? Probably it is something similar to agile approach, where you explore the ideas by constant refactoring.