All begins with an Idea

“It all begins with an Idea.” I read that as I was learning about how to add this blog section and to separate “The Ponderings” section from the TaT Calendar Page. I do agree with it in many ways or levels; however, the longer I pondered about this - concerning the starting evolution of Think about Thinking, I don’t believe that it is an absolute truth. My first differentiating reasoning came from the words, “all” and “begins”. I have come to automatically question language that uses full inclusions, such as “all, never, always”. Logically, I comprehend that there are more often than not, exceptions to most full inclusive concepts. The Philosopher, John Venn, logically expressed this comprehension through his Venn Diagrams. I remember my math teacher once saying, “Just because a tree is green, doesn’t mean ALL Trees are green.”

Then when I dove into the word “begins”, I understood this to mean the originating source. However, when i substituted that understanding with in the phrase incorporating Think about Thinking, it didn’t fully hold true: Think about Thinking (TaT) originated with an idea. Because in fact, TaT came from a vast conglomeration of ideas which could be traced back to a single event or rather person that truly originated the years of conceptual development. In other words, it originated from a massive shredding of old layers of beliefs, a crumbling of egotistical reasoning, which resulted from the death of the most beautiful person, my son, Jesse Darrell Johns.

In many ways along with his death, came the death of many parts of myself as well. The idea of despair and its various depths were related to, experienced and handled. Being human and going through grief stages, brought with them the depth of concepts and the deep pain as well that I hadn’t dealt with before. But once I understood that better, I knew I must not ever cause my surviving sons more of that. My other surviving sons, were dealing with this tragedy in their own ways. I, being broken at the time, sadly wasn’t of much help to them. The spiderweb of painful crisis kept expending from Jesse’s death into other people’s lives that loved him; negative reactions were spinning out of control. This resulted in many suicide attempts, drug and alcohol use and even imprisonment. I was courted by disparaging thoughts as well, but for some reason I was able to avoid its full grasp. Though, I knew I needed to get mentally better to help myself and others better.

This literally launched me into years of searching and redefining the purpose of living and caused me to look outside of what I had been taught because I found too many gaps that I kept falling into. I wrote the book, “The Power of You” to help myself by writing out some ideas that i came up with to stand. My dreams supplied me with the book, “This Gift called Life” which truly changed my life aspects. The following book, “Evolution of Self” came next - this information unfolded in my mind as gift beyond myself. The ideas changed how i saw and dealt with my own thinking processes and that of others. The little book, “SHEEP” came to me after dealing with a disappointing co-worker. When i wrote it i had a very hard time keeping up with the amount of words that were be given to me. There are certain phrases captured in there that have guided my life ever since i received them.

I learned more about suicide and the state of despair than i ever wanted to. I understood that suicide was just one of the many unwise acts that happen when despair takes hold. I also become aware that this lowest emotional state feeds on fear and causes the halting of logical, rational thought processes. Despair blinds one to the higher truths such as, temporariness, connectedness, options, hope, unconditional love, and the value of life. I comprehended that despair was the core culprit of harmful acts to self and others. I aos disappointingly realized that the ideas and actions that ‘preventive measures’ being touted to society as “prevention” - were not; in fact, they did nothing to prevent disparaging thoughts and were nothing more than attempts of hopeful intervention of harmful acts taking place.

Ever since I can remember, I would always ask my angels before going to bed for answers to things that were troubling me. This lead me to asking for more understanding of what to do help folks (including myself) to avoid despair and thus, prevent harmful acts to self and others. I woke in the middle of the night with the acronym LOAD repeating in my mind. LOAD states for L = lonely, O = Overwhelmed, A = Angry, and D = Depression. This simplified umbrella categorization easily represents the human emotions that quickly spiral down into despair. Gaining better ways to handle our emotional LOADs, would definitely help in avoiding despair.

So i got to work looking through my book materials with goal of building another book based on those concepts. However, I was then startled awake from sleep one night with the question, “Does an introvert and extrovert handle ‘Lonely’ the same?” Intuitively I thought, “ Of course!”. But in the morning and for the next few days, I searched for definitive proof that personality types effected emotions differently; yet, I found nothing. Remembering what I knew about Personality Types, Myers & Briggs Assessment and that I (after mulitiple attempts) scored as an INFJ. This type which is 1% of the population. Extrapolating that was i was assuming to be true, meant that the probability that the ways i deal with my emotions may not be that effective for the largest population.

With that in mind, my thoughts screamed, “GET BUSY!” My background as an Instructional designer came into play and I began setting up interviews with a large variety of folks that I met. Thy were my subject matter experts on their own lives. I designed a special interviewing process to find how they best handled their lives including the ideas of LOAD and ways for resetting and unplugging. I used special NLP techniques for exploring deeper reasoning, while being aware to guide and not judge nor lead. I filtered out behaviors that might lead to perceived harmful addictions or acts.

Just as i began to build the book correlating and combining the gold that I had gathered with current research that I found. However, I then had come to the sad realization at no one was really reading my books. Even those that had asked me for a copy weren’t. So if a book wasn’t an effective medium to used for sharing this wisdom, I wondered what was. At this point, in my other life interest, I had been creating animation for a website idea for my Literacy Project. So then came the idea of building video vignettes for the Positive Practices that I had gathered. I also wanted to build community with others that are focused on continued Self-evolvement for avoiding despair and striving in becoming our optimum selves. For this reason, I arrived at the business idea of creating a subscription-based service for accessing resources (videos and supplemental resources) and attending Live Events ( Sessions and Workshops). To ensure the quality of those, I built a training system for a TaT Certified Facilitator.

The website took a while to construct. I did not have a set audience in mind (still don’t Ha!) and wasn’t sure what information to provide. I knew more about what it wasn’t than what it was going to be. So i started with that… using descriptive words and phrasing as my guide. Artfully designed, using bright cheerful color and balance. Friendly and fun text (‘less is more’), a simple layout, divided into meaningful sections, designed for increased retained learning, inter-related and manageable. After a year of developing the site, I personally happy with the current results.

I also decided to at this time, not become a non-profit for a few reasons. Those that i know that work for a non-profit spend a HUGE amount of their time searching for continued funding. I do not wish that. I want it to be self-sustaining. I also wanted it to be affordable but at the same time valued. I decided to start with the pricing like that of joining a gym. In truth, I am not sure if this was priced enough to reflect the value, time will tell i guess.

“It all begins with an idea” - going back to the started Pondering statement, you may now have a better understanding of my pondering issue of truth with it. In reference to Think about Thinking (TaT), I believe it is far too inclusive and simple to accurately be stated as originating from a singular idea.