Our work at Kairos Cognition comes from our name: Kairos: the conditions for decisive action.
The Cognition part represents the forces our brain uses for decisive action.
For thirty years now, we've been exploring those kaleidoscopic forces in order to optimize our conditions for decisive action.
In that time, there has been an explosion in the awareness of those forces and the variety of their expression in different people. Much of that awareness has focused on the struggle we often have to bring those forces under control. That struggle to create the conditions for decisive action is real and is often expressed as a disorder or disability.
Here's an experiment to try. If you've been diagnosed with a neurodiverse condition, or maybe you haven't been formally diagnosed, but identify with the characteristics of one of those conditions, try flipping the terms. You may correctly understand that it's harder for you to engage decisive action in the same way it seems many other people do.
Now, what can you decisively engage that many others can't?
One of our collaborators in this work, Tom West, author of several books on cognitive awareness including, Thinking like Einstein made the link between dyslexia and its frequent appearance in people with heightened awareness of visual/spatial perception. His research, for example, revealed a family in England with a familial tendency toward both dyslexia and Nobel Prizes.
More and more we see people who identify with conditions like Autism Spectrum Disorder or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, among numerous others, display elevated fluency in other arenas of decisive action.
Our forces for decisive action are kaleidoscopic. The conditions for decisive action aren't limited to one of these forces. We bring together multiple forces to engage decisive actions. Some of our actions depend more on one, or one collection, of those forces more than on one force or one particular collection of forces.
How are you doing with that exploration of your plusabilities?
Consider this: our brains have a limit to how much energy they can process. Dialing up one force usually dials down another. All of us have the default settings on these forces dialed to different levels. Often those forces that appear disordered or disabled need more force to activate. This may result in the conditions for decisive action, but for a shorter period of time. Or it may require a sharper focus on the target for decisive action. That force is available, but may have different conditions for accessing it. What looks like a disability might be a plusability under different conditions.
All that said, look for your plusabilities. They are the ignition from disordered to dynamic. I've been around the world and back again engaging people with their forces for decisive action. In the journey, I've learned two big things: never envy anyone; never underestimate anyone.
Our mission at Kairos Cognition is to keep you from underestimating yourself.
Achieve that, and you'll find yourself losing envy and raising your estimation of others.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Tom West: https://krasnow.gmu.edu/trustees/biotw/
Thinking like Einstein: https://www.prometheusbooks.com/9781591022510/thinking-like-einstein/