Yesterday morning, I wrote about a fantastic superpower we all have: our imagination.
And then, for the rest of the day, I've been asking myself, how do you teach imagination?
If it is such a powerful force, how do we teach imagination to children? And to adults?
The bad news is that you can't teach imagination.
Imagination is elusive to our cognitive mind, so you can't squeeze it into a teachable model.
The good news, however, is that you don't need to.
Imagination is built in.
It's a gift we all receive with our first breath.
We don't need to teach imagination to children. It's their most developed skill. They have plenty of it. They need to learn how to harness their imagination to manifest beauty in the world. Unfortunately, too often, we focus so much on teaching harnessing that we smother their imagination.
How do we adults avoid that?
The best, and probably the only way, is to awaken and harness our own imagination.
How?
In their book The Runaway Species, David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt suggest relentlessly running internal simulations practising the art of "what-ifs".