Sunday, February 20, 2011

“Let Silence Speak!”

By Gabby Morales

The title of this blog entry comes from the PD Guide and it says it all, “Let silence speak!”  Last semester in our healthy communities class many of us got to experience this without even knowing until later on in the semester.  We would speak and listen and we practiced this every time we met in class and we carried it over to our everyday lives.  We wrote about it, we talked about it, we listened and we let silence speak.  What amazes me about that class was how comfortable we all were with our ideas and our opinions.  We never allowed anyone to feel like they weren’t important, we never allowed anyone to feel that their voice wasn’t strong enough.  We did exactly what this PD Guide says to regarding the approach of PD.  We were a small community, we held our ground and our task was to be able to aid in creating healthy communities and we did.  Even though most of us had never heard of positive deviance, we started to understand what it truly meant by ACTING on it.  That is yet another thing which stood out in the PD Guide, “PD is best understood through action and is most effective through practice.”  Practice is what carries the action and I quote one of my favorites characters from The Office, Michael Scott, “Because you can’t get anywhere without practice.” 

The TED.com videos that we were invited to watch were so unusual.  Here was Jane McGonigal and Neil Pasricha talking about two very different yet similar things that are so ordinary, yet powerful.  Pasricha’s message was undoubtedly inspirational.  For those of us who have had the world crash down on us not once but various times, we can see the power in his words.  His “Awesome” motto is PD.  It took him and his community (his family) to realize just how the most trivial thing can bring that special kind of happiness that one always looks for in the wrong places or takes for granted.  The reason why I say PD applies is because he was able to get out of his gloom by focusing on something greater and he and his community (his family) did it together.  They became the experts of their own happiness.

McGonigal spoke about gaming.  She explained this world in a way I have never heard before.  Usually what I read is how online gaming, video games and anything else regarding video games are ruining today’s youth.  How these games are ruining youth by showing that violence is acceptable and fun.  Yet, McGonigal brought up a different way of thinking and wants to be able to harness the determination and concentration found in gamers to make a better world.  I saw PD all over this video and started thinking of gamers as positive deviants who have everything going against them.  Their skills have always been targeted as negative.  Their skills have been dubbed as useless, but McGonigal doesn’t see it that way and neither do a good percentage of gamers.  Who is to say that these positive deviants cannot create a change that leads to an EPIC WIN!

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