Notes on The Doodle Revolution by Sunni Brown (Amazon).

You have to get out of your head and into your body to think.

The seemingly small act of using our hands to create something not only gets us reliably unstuck but also changes the way we look at and understand the world. It harnesses and directs some of the energy that would either be dispersed or made aimless through fidgeting or daydreaming, and the movement of the pen across paper or the marker across the whiteboard discernibly anchors the learner into the present moment.

Working memory is limited. Experimental work that tries to measure the bandwidth of short-term memory is necessarily going to be task-specific, but I don’t think the exact number of concurrent concepts we can work with matters — we can test it with our own experience, in the work that matters to us.

Adding a visual channel to a conversation helps the group track more and repair misunderstandings faster.

[…] creating a physical place in which to pour our thoughts and images permits our minds to release that information from short term memory, thus letting us see it externalized and releasing us to organize, examine, and reflect on its deeper implications.

Short words and phrases on a whiteboard go a long way to draw a group’s attention back to its agenda, and weaving the threads of digression back to where they help.

Pictures help even more, but self-consciousness about drawing is hard to shake.

[…] it doesn’t matter if I say “try and suspend judgment about your work” […] Vocalizing this advice never works, and the reason it doesn’t work is because words are rational and suspending judgment about ourselves is not a rational event. It is emotional, and it needs repeated embodied experience to become real, particularly when it comes to visualization work.

A capable facilitator raises the energy of a group by creating a safe space for failures and goofs.

Real listening demonstrates grace for another person, that they have inherent worth regardless of their instrumental value.

For social creatures like us, to go ignored or unheard is akin to not existing at all. It’s like being dismissed from the world. It SUCKS. So listening intently to someone is one of the most generous things you can offer

Practice showing grace to others and you might just learn to show grace to yourself.