Getting Real is the first book in the Curriculum I've finished, so I'm pretty stoked. More about this later... 
A little preview of what I'll be talking about (click here for more):

The Ten Truth Skills

1. Experiencing what is.

Distinguish between what you actually experience (see, hear, sense, feel, notice, remember) versus what you imagine (interpret, believe, assume) to be true. The statement “I see you looking at the floor’ is your own experience. The statement ‘I see you are uncomfortable’ is an interpretation. If you get caught up in believing your interpretations about another person’s behavior, you’ll be responding to your interpretation of what she did instead of what she actually did.

2. Being transparent.

To be transparent is to be willing to be seen, warts and all. Contrary to what we may think, most people become more appealing when they reveal their needs and insecurities. This doesn’t mean presenting the story of your wounds and misfortunes in vivid detail. It’s more a matter of practicing being open about your feelings, impressions, wants, and self-talk about your interaction with the person in front of you.

3. Noticing your intent.

Do you communicate to relate or to control? When your intent is to relate, you are most interested in revealing your true feelings, learning how the other feels, and connecting heart-to-heart. When your intent is to control, you are most interested in getting things to turn out a certain way – avoiding conflict, getting the person to like you, being seen as knowledgeable or helpful, etc.

4. Giving and asking for feedback.

Giving feedback is the act of verbally letting the other know how his actions affected you. Being open to receiving feedback means you are curious about and willing to hear how your actions affect other people. Most people don’t get very much valid feedback in their daily lives, and they long for it.

5. Asserting what you want and don’t want.

Many of us are afraid to ask for what we want in a relationship for fear or either not getting it or of having the other person give it to them out of obligation. Asking for what you want is an act of trust. You are taking a step into the unknown – not knowing how the other person will respond.

6. Taking back projections.

If some aspect of my own personality is unconscious or suppressed, I may find that I have a pattern of being attracted to men who exhibit this quality in spades. Have you ever been attracted to someone for some wonderfully appealing quality only to discover a few months down the road that this very same quality turned you off? That’s a great opportunity to take back or rediscover your own hidden qualities.

7. Revising an earlier statement.

This means giving yourself permission to revisit a particular interaction or moment in time if your feelings change or if you later connect to some deeper feelings or afterthoughts. For instance: “After I said such and such, I later realized there was more to it than that. What I now feel is ________.”

8. Holding differences or embracing multiple perspectives.

Many people fear intimacy because we fear losing ourselves in a relationship. If you know how to practice holding differences, you won’t need to fear losing yourself. This is the capacity to listen to and empathize with opinions that differ from yours without losing touch with your own perspective.

9. Sharing mixed emotions.

Sometimes we want to tell someone the truth but at the same time we are concerned about their feelings. A desire to clear the air might be accompanied by a fear of being misunderstood. If you do have mixed feelings, expressing both feelings can add depth to your communication.

10. Embracing Silence.

Authentic communication depends as much on silence as it does on words – the silences between your words and the silence you have spoken as you await the other’s response. Embracing silence encourages understanding that there are many things that cannot be known all at once or once and for all. These things emerge gradually as we get to know the other person.

From Truth in Dating: Finding Love by Getting Real by Susan M. Campbell, Ph.D.

Today was my Morning Meeting. Remember I had been saying that I wanted to do something super crazy and cool? Ok, I had everybody blindfolded and....

Made them try different foods and describe what they tasted and how they experienced it. 
My intention was for them to approach something they already knew well, like a Pomegranate or an Oreo Cookie, as a stranger, like Socrates says in Plato's Apology. 

My MM was divided in three parts: Activity # 1, which consisted in transmitting a feeling using only your eyes, no utterance of any sound whatsoever. Activity # 2 was the one I just described; approaching food as a new experience. And the third part was a debriefing, where everybody shared what they had learned.

I was grateful that Grace joined the Inner Circle (she was late) and shared her understanding of the MM because she said what I had been hoping was the lesson taken from the activity; dare to try new things, and approach "old things", past knowledge, as if you had never experienced it before. 

Today, since it's Friday and most of us didn't come on time, we agreed we would have a TED Morning Meeting. I think it's been established that every Friday will be TED MM, but I may be imagining stuff. Here I share with you the TED Talks we saw today.

Candy Chang - Before I die I want to...

"Thinking about death clarifies your life..."
It's amazing how somebody can change your perspective in seconds. I love how she said that the two most important reasons we have in our life are time and our relationships. 

Adam Garone - Healthier men, one mustach at a time

He urged us to make something significant in our lives, and told us the story of how his Movember Movement started.  I learned that one of the most important things in everything you do is to have fun. 

Alejo shared with us a project of his called FlatBox, which is a business start up he launched over the weekend at an event called Start Up Weekend. His project won second place and he's already got some investors interested in it.

This is quite amazing really, the fact that he's already leaping into the big wide world. I admire that.

For Diego's Morning Meeting on Thursday November 8th, he had us work out our System 2*! We had to do complex (not that complex) math problems!

But then, he gave us cupcakes and taught us how to eat them with style.

Isa showed us a series of optical illusions for her Morning Meeting. Some were super crazy and some I had seen before. I was happy that I could identify every image, but I don't know what it means in terms of brain capacity. I shall ponder and rumiate that idea... but not now...

For now I will merely share with you the Opticall Illusiony Presentation Isa exposed us to during her Morning Meeting: 

Steven Pinker and Ian McEwan - A Conversation Part I

For his Morning Meeting, Bert showed us this audio of an interview between Steven Pinker, the author of Words and Rules, and Ian McEwan, author of Atonement. 

Today we have a guest! He's a Prospect for joining the MPC next year. :)

Steve Johnson declares during his TED Talk at TED GLOBAL 2010 that he set out to discover the recurring patterns that we can apply to our lives to foster an environment that allows us to be more creative. He says an idea is a network, and the question we should be asking ourselves is how to get our brains in such an environment.

As Johnson states, an idea is not an isolated event, an Eureka Moment, a unique epiphany, but the result of an interesting combination: a long process he calls The Slow Hunch and the collective sharing of experiences, mistakes and viewpoints. Ideas are nothing but many parts of other things cobbled together, he says. 

I relate this to The Future and Its Enemies, by Virginia Postrel. She talks that progress, and future itself, is created by an infinite series of combiniations of old ideas, old concepts, old rules that, when combined within themselves, create something completely new. In her words:

There are many dynamic systems in the world, many areas of life that evolve and improve through trial-and-error learning, from "digital organisms" that evolve better computer programs to global financial markets, from adaptable architecture to international science. Looking across these various processes, we can find patterns in their fundamental rules, though we can fully apply those patterns to a specific case only when we understand that particular system...

Chacho showed us two videos about Crossfit, since he's really into it and I loved them. I was going to get into Crossfit before I started MPC but then my resources availability changed and though I still want to do it, I'll wait until December or probably January to begin the program. 

Chacho also had us make 5 Burpees, which is an army training exercise, and most of the MPC'ers couldn't do the 5. I took my time and finished last, but actually managed to do them. 

I will upload the videos later.