Process Values

This month we are looking at process in some areas besides collaborative work. We are looking at other fields where you have a choice to focus on content or focus on process, to see if valuing process works in those fields. This week we are looking at cooking. I am not a professional chef. There was one break point in my career when I might have taken that route. I was recently widowed, disillusioned with my job, and looking for a new direction. I consulted a career coach who administered the Strong Interest Survey. It had one question on cooking: “Do you enjoy experimenting with recipes?” I answered “no.” I don’t play with recipes. Recipes are about content. My cooking is all about process. But because I answered “no” to the only cooking question, the career coach did not recommend that I become a chef. My stepdaughter bakes with a food scale. She doesn’t measure ingredients, she weighs them. It is a much faster and more accurate way of cooking, and it allows her to keep up

This month we are looking at process in some areas besides collaborative work. We are looking at other fields where you have a choice to focus on content or focus on process, to see if valuing process works in those fields. This week we are looking at prayer. Praying seems to be almost ubiquitous. Even Buddhists, who don’t believe in a deity who is a being, pray. Who are they praying to? No one. Then why are they praying? Carl Jung says that there is a part of the psyche that needs to deal with the spiritual, the divine, the ineffable. “It doesn’t matter whether God created that part of the psyche or that part of the psyche created God, we ignore that part or our psyche at the risk of our mental and emotional health.” Prayer is the process of paying attention to that part of our psyche. The content of the prayer perhaps doesn’t matter. If you believe in a deity that has a physical reality and is capable of affecting physical reality, you may pray certain content, for ph

Give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, you feed them for a lifetime. In other words: Give a person content, you give them nothing. Give a person process, you give them everything. This month we are looking at process in some areas besides collaborative work. We are looking at other fields where you have a choice to focus on content or focus on process, to see if valuing process works in those fields. This week we are looking at teaching. Our church is recruiting Sunday School teachers for our summer time schedule. “All curricula and materials are provided. All you have to do is show up and teach.” That’s all. That’s a lot. I used to try and teach Sunday school. Sure, they provided me all the content I needed. But they never provided process. Most of our church’s Sunday School teachers are also teachers. The rest have been teaching Sunday School for so long that they are accomplished teachers. It never occurs to any of them that they need to

This month we are going to look at process in some areas besides collaborative work. We are going to look at other fields where you have a choice to focus on content or focus on process, to see if valuing process works in those fields. This week we are looking at the writing process, particularly the process of writing fiction. I recently completed my first novel. (Actually, at 42,000 words, some would call it a novelette.) It deals with the healing process after rape. It is the only novel I have been able to find (with my admittedly weak research skills) in which the victim is the main character, not simply a pawn in a chess game between the perp and the criminal justice system. When I was writing the story, I took the advice of Ann Lamott, Erica Jong, and many other writers and let my character tell her story. I was surprised when she told me a story of rape and healing. No woman chooses to be raped. I asked my character why she chose to tell me a story of rape. She said th