[TT 020] experience design, life design, sacred masonry, Meow Wolf

Howdy Thrivers,

This month, each week I'll be writing you from the home of a different family or friend in a different city. This week, I'm near the beaches of Southern California. It's been a joy connecting with some of my dearest people and receiving warmth and reflections in my life transition. I'm also enjoying the time to lean into my own reflections and internal preparations ahead of my graduate degree program.

Otherwise, my first cohort-based course wrapped earlier today and I had a growthful and meaningful experience putting that together. And sadly, my running training is on hiatus as my foot heals from an injury (likely capsulitis of the big toe). Such are the transitions of life.

With a loaded step, let's skip into this week's Thriving Thursday.

On precision-engineered experience design

This week I took a 2-day intensive workshop titled Scaling Intimacy, from the same people that bring you Play on Purpose. The purpose of the program is to offer a group facilitation framework, tools, and techniques that empower deeper connection and more impactful transformation for participants.

The program itself was very well done, and it was especially cool to see how they mapped our participant experience and exercises to their framework. This is the 8th cohort of this course and it's clear they've refined the methodology because it felt very tight and coherent. I especially appreciated how they wove storytelling and vulnerability gradients to offer something meaningful to different learning and personality types. I took away a lot of insights and practical tools for my professional course as well as Thrive experiences I'll be leading in the future.

Randomly, Scaling Intimacy and Play on Purpose founder Jenny Sauer-Klein earlier co-founded a hybrid partner acrobatics / yoga / thai massage movement practice called AcroYoga. I trained in that tradition for a few years, and it tickled me to meet the person behind the movement.

For anyone seeking to start or hone their group facilitation and experience design skills, this course was well worth the resources.

On designing a life worth living

A friend of mine, upon learning I was headed to MSx, sent me this TedX talk on Life Design. The speaker is Bill Burnett, one of the two directors of the Design School at Stanford, and a big proponent of "design thinking". Together with the other director, Dave Evans, Bill teaches a "life design" course at Stanford and they also wrote a book on the same topic.

Collectively, the design thinking toolkit includes 5 key elements:

• Re-framing
• Radical collaboration
• Curiosity
• Mindful of process
• Bias toward action

The book is an easy, quick read that is itself a case study in anti-shame and internally connective facilitation. My favorite exercise was the "good time log" where we notate daily moments that were energizing and other moments that were draining. These act as guideposts for life prototypes to explore in subsequent sections.

None of the ideas were particularly ground-breaking, but taken together "design thinking" was a meaningful and timely reframe on some of my current introspective practices. I'll incorporate some of the exercises into future Thrive workshops as well as fold them into my reflective flows.

Plus, I've never thought of myself as particularly artistic or design-oriented. This book highlighted that I'm already doing many of the things, and that tweaking them just so can level up my insights and output without incremental resources expenditure. Or, at least that's the design.

On creating sacred space out of stone

Voice over aside, Rising Star makes truly incredible temple spaces out of stone.

Creating sacred spaces is a remarkable art and talent, and it's wonderful to see work at this level of mastery.

On purring like a Meow Wolf

This past week I had the privilege to check out Meow Wolf's installation in Las Vegas titled OmegaMart. It was like Burning Man meets escape room with dozens of artistic interactive stations that weave together a master narrative of savior and redemption. Altogether, I had a wonderful time admiring the art and creativity

My favorite piece, by far, is Claudio Bueno's Pulse. It's worth watching the 5 min video to hear about the inspiration and painstaking process of this piece. Then end result is stunning.

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Until next week!

~Henry

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