Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 166
This week’s guest is Paul O’Connor, a former political columnist and professor in UNC’s Journalism School.
Paul talked about his new book “The Missing Child: The Life She Lived and the Life She Missed.” It’s an extraordinary story about his mother as revealed by her private papers discovered only after she passed.
Paul O’Connor is now offering a program designed to help families tell their stories. Several research programs have discovered the great range of benefits for family members, and especially children, when the family’s stories are told, repeated, celebrated or mourned.
In one research project, young people were asked to narrate stories about themselves, their mothers, their fathers and their closest friends. The researchers then examined the extent to which narrators made connections between the experience of the person they were narrating (“my mom loved to dance”) and their own sense of self (“I get my rhythm from my mom.”).
When telling stories about friends, narrators connected these stories to who their friends were as people, but very few connections were made between their friend and their own sense of self. In contrast, when telling intergenerational stories, they made connections to their own sense of self much more frequently. More importantly, it was only these intergenerational connections that predicted the narrator’s exploration of their own identity, an important part of adolescents’ coming of age.
For more information about Paul and his work go to paultoconnor.com
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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