Being Your Own Potter: A Guide to Living with Maturity

You and Me This book is about you and me. It emanates from my experience of working with ‘experiential groups’ for more than a decade, and being part of their life, struggle and growth. It is ‘voice of experience” rather ‘application of mind’. The book is a collection of ‘ten fictitious characters’ representing often repeated behaviour patterns which get manifested in the ‘experiential groups’ and observation, understanding, analysis, change experiences and learnings which could be inferred from theses character’s lives. The book also dwells on few concepts, life skills and gifts, of and from their lives We are made of patterns, we have patterns of behaviour. A pattern is a repetitive behaviour. We are able to conduct our life because of our ability to recognize patterns. Patterns are essential for living and provide stability and consistency to our actions and behaviours. Our reactions to situations, responses to people, our way of engaging or relating with people, tendency to be in comfort zone, the way we communicate and our actions are fairly consistent and predictable. Knowing our patterns is knowing ourselves. Each person has unique set of patterns. When we interact with others; our patterns interact with their patterns. When we interact with each other more frequently then we develop specific responses for each other, and these become our ‘made for each other patterns’. Awareness of both functional and dysfunctional patterns and the consequences of the patterns is necessary otherwise dysfunctional patterns could be cause of real mess-up in our lives. Similarly, not becoming aware of our strength patterns heavily undermines our potential. We fail to see connection between our various patterns and combination effect of the patterns. We also fail to link roles similar patterns play in different situations and their cumulative impact on our lives. These are life building or life ruining determinants. Unless until we have high degree of self awareness and we are in track of changes in our behaviour patterns and keep moulding our behaviour, we would not know and control many of our behaviour patterns. In any case they are likely to be step ahead of our conscious awareness, and only proactive exploration and feedback from others may lead to discovering patterned self. The book is about simple things of people’s lives, people like you and me, reasonably successful but coping with life in their own way. IQ, EQ or SQ all fall short of guiding us to conduct our lives with maturity or our AQ i.e. Adult Quotient is really an area to look for. Maturity does not come early and easily; and sustained efforts are required for ‘living with maturity’. Experience suggest that forty plus is the age in our culture when it tends to be visible. Based on experiences of the groups, it is evident that, at bare minimum, one must understand commonly perceived functional and dysfunctional behaviours and minimize the dysfunctional ones and cultivate maturity. The seven dimension of Living with Maturity are:- Self Presentation How do we come across to people. Self Governance How do we manage ourselves. Friendship How do we engage in relationships. Responsibility How do we own our behaviours and actions. Reality How do we understand and adapt to life. Love of Learning How do we draw meaning in life. Love of Doing How do we make our life. Most of our life is spent in small groups. Family, friends, classmates, neighbourhood, relatives or colleagues and most often our close circle in each would be in single digit i.e. small group. Even in larger gatherings, meetings, conference, marriages, parties, most of our time is spent with small groups. Therefore, what happens in small groups, to which we belong , is most often our life. Please do get in touch with me at, for discussion on any of the content and context and for interaction in context of experiential learning and personal growth, giftofinsights@gmail.com