Getting Real Exercise – D12

We had assigned to read this book called Getting Real, by Susan Campbell. Personally I had a resistance for reading self-help book, mainly because I think of them as being too general and in order to help someone in their personal journey, we must first know the context in which they are. Thus, I think self-help books are not useful for everyone and even might be dangerous for some to read and try to apply them. Nevertheless, I said “Why not? Let’s give it a try” to this book. So far, it has been pretty good, although a little repetitive, but still good.

In the afternoon, we were supposed to have a dialogue about chapter one, but the dynamic went on another way. We decided that it was kind of boring to discuss chapter one and instead we did an exercise the author recommend. (By the way, Bert was not in the dynamic so only the MPC’ers made it). The exercise consisted of getting into pairs and saying to the other person something that you notice in him or her and then saying something you imagine about them. Something like this: “I notice you are wearing carey (tortoise) color glasses, so I imagine you like turtles!” It was a good exercise, but we decided to take it to the next level, the same but with the entire group.

Before we started, we made the premise of whatever someone told us, we had to manage to accept it or not because what someone told us could or could not be true, and we would have no heart feelings whatsoever. Then we circled up, and after two or three rounds each, we started telling each other what we really think of them, both positive and negative things. There was some heavy stuff! I don’t want to point to anybody or say names, but some of what we said was: “Ines makes a lot of movements during dialogues only to catch the attention of everybody”, “Grace tells infantile jokes that in the school “were” the "hit"”, “Alejo and I, when a dialogue may seem easy, we think of ourselves to be more bright than the rest”, “Gaby is rude and impolite with our Greek teacher, Moris”, “Franz doesn’t read because he is not interested in being a part of the group”, “Katarina doesn’t talk that much because she is antisocial”, “Pablito talks to much because he wants to be the center of attention”, and so on. 

You may think of this as rude and like we had a great conflict, but it was the entire opposite. It was practicing being honest and the result was having one of the best culture forming moments at the MPC. It was a great experience being able to be honest with each other and to form this new culture of disclosing and most of all, of respect. We also made a commitment to be real all the time and not to wait for these exercises to tell something to someone. We committed ourselves to be responsible of what we must do and to made what we promised. To me, it has been the best dialogue and exercise so far at the MPC.