And some people only think Aikido is hard on the feet! What a great photo!Twyla Tharp's book The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together includes excellent quotes one can apply to their Aikido training, work, or family.
I define collaboration as people working together-sometimes by choice, sometimes not. Sometimes we collaborate to jump-start creativity; other times the focus is simply on getting things done. (pg. 4)
Collaborators aren't born, they're made. Or, to be more precise, built, a day at a time, through practice, through attention, through discipline, through passion and commitment-and, most of all, through habit. (pg. 12)
Watch them, learn from them. And see if you don't soon feel that, far from being burdened with a partner, you're beginning to find new options and new ways of thinking. Thinking? Collaboration may be a practice-a way of working in harmony with others-but it begins as a point of view. (pgs. 13-14)
The sooner you establish a routine, the more smoothly your collaboration will advance. The first requirement of collaboration is commitment. (pgs. 26-27)
The root of any collaboration is interchange-literally, change. Nothing forces change more dramatically than a new partnership. Collaboration guarantees change because it makes us accommodate the reality of our partners-and accept all the ways they're not like us. And those differences are important. The more we can draw upon our partner's strengths and avoid approving our partner's weaknesses, the better that partnership will be. (pg. 36)
You need a challenging partner. In a good collaboration, differences between partners mean that one plus one will always equal more than two. (pg. 36)
As for me, I learned ways of extending movement from one place to another that would never have occurred to me had I not been able to transpose myself into this amazing artist, to feel the innumerable hours he trained, drilled, and practiced from one inside edge to the other outside edge and back, carefully tracing his patterns into the ice. (pg. 43)
Collaborative projects offer tutorials in reality. And that tutorial always presents the unexpected. (pg. 63)
Crisis focuses energy. When it really matters, people rise to the occasion. (pg. 86)
Richard Avedon taught me what Keats called "negative capability"-a willingness to suspend judgement and see reality as another might. That's creativity at its most openhearted. Those pictures of the two of us remind me that the ultimate best result of any collaboration is learning to look through your collaborator's eye. (pg. 117)
But beyond the scoring of your collaboration lies the real gain-the chance to interface with others and to develop a whole new tool kit of values. Our lives are performances-each of us starring in a play we come to know as our own. Essence isn't just who you are. It's who you are with other people. (pg. 143)
