Generative Fields: Powerful Resources for Learning, Strength and Productivity

We Are Swimming in a Sea of Invisible Resources

This brief article is part of a series focused on how our environment shapes us in ways we cannot see and the resources we need in order to create the change we seek. You can find more resources here and at the end of this article.

Question: Since everything needs to change, where do we begin?

Answer: We begin by understanding our own and others' Generative Fields

While doing research at the University of Michigan on how people and organizations change, I discovered what I call Generative Fields, a type of relational field that contains the essential energy, intelligence and resources people need in order to become our best selves and find our way in the world. On an individual level, our contact with Generative Fields helps us become more motivated as well as deeply connected to both ourselves and the world around us. The term “generative” is used because these fields are inherently resource-generating, they naturally create interpersonal resources such as purpose, resilience and creativity that allow us to be deeply focused, productive and purposeful.

You’ve already experienced these fields countless of times, even if you haven’t been aware of them. Since most people don't know these fields exist, they don’t know how to make use of them. The problem is that they are hidden. In any given moment, a human being is taking in up to 11 million stimuli but is only conscious of 40 stimuli, which means, most of what we’re responding to in life is completely hidden from us.

What Does a Generative Field Look Like?

You can begin to recognize these fields by noticing when people are "in their element" - doing something that immediately puts them in their Zone of Genius while connecting them to their right place in the world (e.g., watching LeBron James play basketball or Janelle Monae perform her music). For instance, whenever I’m leading a class on Generative methods aimed at helping people find the vast hidden resources they already possess, I enter into my primary Generative Field. As soon as I start teaching, I immediately become completely calm, present and grounded. I can begin a teaching session having the worst day imaginable - struggling with devastating emotions or even physical pain – and within a few minutes of starting to teach, those conditions completely disappear (for more on how I discovered this phenomenon and used it to heal from a deadly disease, see my Ted talk). From one moment to the next, I can seem like a totally different person. I shift into an extra, "higher" gear where I have more of my own resources available to me. I settle into myself and enter fully into the flow of life. I have endless energy and can handle whatever comes my way. I am filled with insights - one after another - that benefit those around me. Anything that is not in sync with my Generative Fields (fears, doubts, physical pain, etc..) recedes. Even if I'm feeling deeply challenged, I’m so focused and engaged that the stress of the situation doesn’t bother me. I become the best version of myself.

My experience is not at all unique, everyone has this extra gear. The reason I can shift into this "better" version of myself is because our Generative Fields exist in a place that is much deeper than our fears, anxiety, traumas and even physical pain. As a result, these fields not only help us meet our day-to-day challenges, but more importantly, they can also transmute the energy of those challenges into purposeful and creative action. When I teach, the energy of the fears and doubts I often struggle with become alchemized into concrete resources that serve others. That's why, by finding and following my own Generative Fields, I’ve been able to create tools and methods that have supported the transformation of thousands of people.

Through my research, I’ve discovered the following six facts about Generative Fields:

1.    They are absolutely essential for people (individuals, groups and organizations) to experience coherence, purpose and direction.

2.    They empirically exist, which means, they contain essential data and information that can be surfaced and verified. 

3. They produce interpersonal resources (resilience, purpose, focus and creativity) and data regarding what individuals and groups need in order to learn, grow and transform. 

4. Our brain, body and nervous systems were designed to register the resources and data they create. 

5.    Since they exist in our bodies, outside of our day-to-day awareness, most people don’t know how to access the life-changing resources they generate.  

6.    When people and groups find and “unpack” their generative resources, they become the best version of themselves.

How Do I Locate My Generative Fields?

For the vast majority of people, connecting with our Generative Fields is a completely relational process – it happens in response to others and to the world around us. Our brain, body and nervous system register these fields through embodied resonance - a subtle experience of energy and aliveness that moves through our bodies, often just outside of our normal awareness. This resonance automatically happens whenever we connect deeply with ourselves, nature, our "right" place in the world, or another human being. The more we learn to activate this resonance, the more we can access our own and others' Generative Fields and learn to decode the essential information they contain.

The problem is these fields are part of our embodied knowledge - knowledge that lives in the body. Typical modes of self-reflection, asking questions such as "What do you think?" or "How do you feel?"cannot reach this essential knowledge. We need another way.

I’ve spent the last fifteen years discovering the specific types of questions and methods people need in order to activate embodied resonance and identify their own and others’ Generative Fields. The easiest way to gain access to our own Generative Fields is to intentionally activate them in others. The basic steps (which will be covered in more detail in subsequent articles) include the following:

1. Asking embodied questions

2. Recognizing Embodied Resonance

3. Decoding and Articulating Hidden Generative Patterns 

4. Strengthening Generative Patterns in Everyday Work and Life

If you'd like to learn more, check out the resource links below or contact me, Dr. Melissa Peet at melpeet@umich.edu

The Generative Knowledge Institute

An Online Generative Coaching Course

Overview of Embodied Questions

Tedtalk on the Discovery of Generative Knowledge

Using Generative Fields and Integrative Learning to Increase Retention by 40% in First-Generation College Students.

How Relational Fields Shape Our Life

Why is Change So Hard? The Hidden Role of Relational Fields in Transformation

In this post, I introduce an essential resource most people have been missing in their efforts to create change.

Twenty years ago, while I was getting my PhD at the University of Michigan, I taught various undergraduate courses. Even though they were in different schools, they all focused on the same thing: how people learn, grow and change. My courses changed students’ lives and garnered me several teaching awards. It was a life-changing experience for me too. However, by the time I completed my own research, I realized that almost everything I’d taught my students was woefully incomplete. The most essential ingredient to creating change was something I discovered much later and quite by accident: the role of relational fields.  

 What is a relational field?

(hint: it’s what we need to get out of this mess)

Relational fields are the energetic, mental, emotional, and physical space we share with other people, places and things. Like the rest of nature, our entire existence is based on our interconnectedness with the environment and the relational fields we share. Everything we relate to, whether it is a person, an idea, a place, a plant, a social media post, or a political system, is a relational field that affects us.

Nature endowed us with a nervous system designed to help us discern the massive amounts of information/data that come from these fields automatically without our conscious awareness. We have hundreds of millions of neural networks throughout our body designed to “read” and respond to the endless number of relational fields that constantly emerge and recede within us throughout the day.  For instance, as I sit and write this at my kitchen table, the relational fields that immediately grab my attention are my home, my street, an email from my best friend, a couple of online news sites, and an urgent text from a coaching client.  Some of the less visible relational fields shaping my experience right now include my research on how people create change, memories of the last online course I taught, the English language, a deadly pandemic, our broken political system, and the ongoing surge of white supremacy. Although some of these relational fields may seem less tangible, they’re still shaping my day-to-day experience. They’re influencing the questions I ask, the words I write, how I buy groceries, the people with whom I interact, who and what I worry about, and the kinds of conversations that I’ll engage with. In short, whether we’re aware of them or not, relational fields shape everything we see, think and do on a daily basis. Through our attention, each field activates an array of potential responses that make their way into thoughts, decisions and actions.

If you’ve never heard about relational fields before, you’re not alone. We don’t know about them mostly because western psychology approaches human development as if we are individual entities rather than dynamic and deeply interconnected natural systems that are part of everything else. Traditional psychology ignores the vast complexity of our existence.  Additionally, our normal modes of perception keep relational fields completely hidden from us. According to Dr. Tim Wilson, author of Stranger to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, in any given moment, our brain/body takes in up to 11 million different stimuli from the environment, but of those, we are only conscious of about 40! That means, well over 99.999% of whatever we’re perceiving and responding to is completely outside of our awareness!

 “The world is always larger and more intense and stranger than our best thought will ever reach.”  John O’ Donohue

Why should I care about relational fields?

 All change takes place relationally – in response to someone or something else. Thus, in order to transform ourselves and the world around us, we have to learn how to consciously recognize the role relational fields play in our lives. We can’t change something if we’re not aware of it.

While some relational fields activate our innate strength and intelligence, others make us feel confused and even sick, often without our knowing it. Relational fields impact each of us in unique ways, something that really works for me may impact you quite differently. For instance, when I read books about quantum mechanics or plant intelligence (how nature works), I feel connected, energized and at peace. My mind clears, my low-grade anxiety recedes, and I feel grateful to be part of the Great Mystery. Conversely, if I spend too much time watching the news, scrolling through my Twitter feed, worrying about the latest assaults on our democracy, I will start feeling numb, disengaged and anxious. That’s because those relational fields don’t work for me. They leave me feeling overwhelmed, drained and unmotivated.  

Have you ever felt lost, confused or overwhelmed and didn’t know why?

Murky and toxic relational fields make most people feel lost, confused, and stressed, but often in such subtle ways we don’t even notice. They are especially harmful now that they are becoming a normal part of our lives.  Even if we’re doing our best to ignore the deadly virus killing hundreds of thousands of people, the surge of racism in our institutions, or the fact that our democratic norms are coming undone, we’re still registering the stress somewhere in our bodies. Unless we are doing things to consciously offset this bombardment to our relational bodies, it’s taking a toll. For instance, we’re less likely to play, have new ideas, feel flow and reach out to new people. It is far too easy to slide into survival mode and not even notice. At best, we can busy ourselves through distraction, and at worst, we become vacant, anxious, addicted and depressed, haunted by the sense that that we no longer have a place in the world.  

Since we are being bombarded in the relational field, we must heal, transform and regenerate within the relational field.  We cannot do it alone. We have to this together, but how?

Through my research on how people and organizations transform, I I’ve discovered the specific types of relational fields that help people change and the ones that keep us stuck without our knowing. I teach people how to find and activate the relational fields that work best. The result is transformative (to learn more, you can see my Tedx talk).

How Can I Recognize Relational Fields?

The best way to locate relational fields and the essential life-giving resources they contain, is to activate them directly with other people as often as possible. This requires training and practice. I’ve spent the last fifteen years discovering the specific types of tools, questions and methods people and organizations need in order identify the vast resources buried within their relational fields.  If you’d like to get started on your own, here are a few ways you can begin to locate some of the hidden knowledge you possess:

1.     Get Curious About Your Instrument.

Your body is 220 billion neural networks of nothing but dynamic intelligence. Your nervous system is designed to register when relational fields “work” for you and when they don’t. However, most of us have been socialized to ignore this essential information. In order to consciously connect with it, you have to start at the beginning. Suggestion: set your intention everyday for a week to be conscious of the relational fields directly shaping your life; write down at least 10-15 each day.

2.     Locate Your Sensory Compass

We each have at least one primary “knowing location” in our body where we register sensations from the relational fields we encounter. It could be energy moving in your feet, a feeling of warmth in your chest, a quickening in your solar plexus, a solidness in your abdomen, or something else. These physical sensations indicate some critical information is coming to you that your conscious mind can’t comprehend. Again, the reason you might not be aware of your sensory compass is because you’ve never been taught how to pay attention to it. Suggestion: pay attention to how your body registers different types of information. Do you sense fear or frustration in the same place that you feel joy or curiosity?  Pay attention and write it down. By writing it down, you train yourself to be much more aware of relational input.

3.     Look for Aliveness

In my online and face-to-face courses, I teach people how to recognize the relational fields that bring out their worst, and how to activate the ones that bring out their best. The result has been profound changes in people from all walks of life. If you’d like to learn about upcoming courses and workshops, please go here. Suggestion: make a list of at least 3-5 times in your life when you felt clear, grounded and completely alive. Where were you? What was going on in your environment and what were you moved to do as a result?

If you’d like to talk to me directly about my work, feel free to reach me at melpeet@umich.edu. You can also schedule a 20-30 minute informational interview with me here. Please don’t hesitate to reach out, I truly enjoy talking to new people.

Getting Unstuck

In my workshops, I teach people about reversals – that’s when we experience a  negative mental and/or emotional state that gets us stuck, or worse, dragged into a downward spiral.

It can feel like fear, dread, depression, anxiety, confusion, or just a plain lack of clarity or motivation.

I call it a reversal because what I’ve discovered is that the energy that feeds these states is the same energy that feeds some essential positive quality within us as well. The energy is a force of our nature that needs to be expressed, but how it’s expressed can either move us in a positive or negative direction. Neutral isn’t an option. 

Reversals can be incredibly difficult to spot, even while they drain us of our life force for weeks, months or years at a stretch. 

For instance, one of my core capacities is that I can make sense of a great deal of complexity. I can make hidden information visible, boil complicated things down to a few principles, and teach those principles to others. 

But when I’m in a reversal, the opposite happens: I can’t think straight, I’m easily frustrated and the simplest task feels overwhelming. I get lost in a sea of complexity of my own making. It’s awful. 

I’m not alone. Everyone has reversals, it’s just that some of us have them more *intensely* than others and traditional types of therapy totally miss them. 

In my coaching and workshops, one thing I teach people is how to recognize their own and others’ reversals and fix them. I call it “reversing the reversal” or “flipping someone back into their strength” and I’ve done it with hundreds of people, even some who’ve been stuck for years. People have often said it’s life-changing. 

My own example.

I feel compelled to share an experience with one of my own reversals I had a few years ago and how my friend, Melea, flipped me out of it. I knew I was stuck, but all the awareness in the world couldn’t change it (again, I’m not alone, this is often the case). 

I’d been dealing with a horrific bout of PTSD for several weeks. I was only sleeping for 2-3 hours a night, was steeped in constant anxiety, and couldn’t concentrate.

When I’d try to work, I was lost:  didn’t know where to start, couldn’t follow-through with anything, and when I tried to read, words just jumped around on the page. It was hell on earth.  

And then Melea called. She’s an incredible acupuncturist in town who’d attended one of my workshops. She knew I was struggling and called to check on me.  

I told her about the PTSD and what triggered it: a friend of mine I’ll call Dan, a man I love and trusted very much, suddenly quit our relationship via text. No explanation, no adult conversation, nothing. Just a short, “That’s it, I’m done!” and then POOF! Gone. He was obviously very upset, but rather than talk to me, he called it quits.

I was shocked and heart-broken. We’d been in daily contact, often several times a day, for nearly six months. I truly enjoyed him. Among other things, he was a voracious learner. I loved seeing how his mind works. He was kind and made me laugh. I thought we had a foundation for a deep and lasting friendship, and possibly more.

The shock of his behavior sent my brain/body reeling back to several terrorizing experiences from my childhood, moments when adults harmed me and then just turned and walked away.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever happened with Dan was somehow my fault, or worse, that I couldn’t trust myself to choose safe people. This collapse of trust fueled the PTSD fire flooding my brain/body with terror. 

I was a wreck and couldn’t make it stop.

 Anyhow, in order to flip a reversal, we have to experience it’s opposite in a deeply embodied way, which means, we have to feel it throughout our entire body.  

Thank god Melea knew what to do, without me having to ask.

“OK, tell me about a time when you experienced a man, someone you could trust, who stayed with you through hard times, a man who loved you and didn’t walk away.”  

It took me a moment to retrieve an experience but one finally came.  I told her about my friend, Clifton. Whenever he sees I’m having a hard time, he leans in, “Hey, what’s going on?”  He never backs away.  He’s intentionally fearless when it comes to bearing witness to others. His motto, “Don’t quit before the miracle” compels him. He’s that way with everyone.  He’s a local legend. 

As I talked about Clifton, Melea used my method to help me experience my connection to him as deeply as possible.  Then she said, “Ok, now tell me about another one.” 

I told her about Dr. Don Betz, the former president of the University of Central Oklahoma, and the greatest leader I’ve ever known. Thousands of people, not just me, love and trust him deeply.

I told her about a time when I was consulting at the university and he noticed, despite my best efforts to hide it, that I was struggling. He stopped in the middle of his packed schedule to support me. His kindness turned everything around for me that day. Again, he’s that way with everyone. 

She prompted me to live my experience with Dr. Betz all over again. Then she said, “Great, how about another.” 

My 28-year old son, Isaiah, immediately came to mind.  He too can be fearless in showing up to difficulty, including having the rare courage to confront other men about their sexist behavior.

When the two of us have run into hard times, he’s usually the one to reach out first. I often tell the story of him as a four-year old saying, “Mommy, you’re not actively listening to me.”  When I replied with, “Isaiah, what does that mean to you?” his response was, “That’s when you listen with your head, your heart and your tummy, and you’re not listening with your heart or your tummy!” (He was right). He knows how to speak hard truths, how to stick and stay through difficulty. 

By the time I shared my experiences with Isaiah, I was coming back home to myself again. I was still sad about Dan but no longer steeped in self-incrimination. The dread and anxiety was gone. I could breathe again. 

As Melea prompted me to talk about a few more of the extraordinary men I know, I was woven back into the fabric of trust, love and safety within myself again. 

It took less than 40 minutes. The change I experienced mentally, emotionally and physically was so abrupt, that it was hard to believe at first. Even though I’d facilitated this kind of transformation in others before, I’d never known it so deeply within myself.  It felt like the first time I’d ever truly experienced my method from the inside out.   

I’ve been myself ever since. 

Thank you Melea, Thank you.

In some ways, I was lucky, this was an obvious example of a reversal, usually they’re much more subtle.

Now, it’s been my experience that after I share an experience like this, people want to learn more. So, if you are interested in Melea’s work, go to her site.

To learn more about the kinds of questions she asked me, sign up to be on my email list. You will get access to a brief video and all the other free resources that will be coming your way in 2020.

My First Blog Post

I don’t know what purpose blogs really serve, other than to share our experience, strength and hope, so here's my first entry, please let me know what you think.   

Earlier today, I had the honor of seeing a dear friend I’ll call “Tom,” a former Marine, celebrate 35 years of sobriety.  This week, 35 years ago, he was sentenced to prison for vehicular manslaughter.  He killed a young man, a dear friend of his family’s, while drunk behind the wheel.

 As he recounted his journey, he wept. The weight of his grief over taking that young man’s life filled every inch of the room.  We all wept too, we couldn’t help it. Through his tears, he shared how the boy’s mother had said to him at the time, “If you really felt bad about what you’ve done, you’d kill yourself.” He talked about not having the courage to do that even though it was the only thing that made sense.

But another reason his tears flowed was because of the Grace he’s experienced since. Years ago, another Marine told him that his story could help others, especially soldiers, get sober.  So he did his prison time, stayed sober, and became committed to sharing his heart-wrenching crime with others.

He wept today because last night he slept underneath a quilt made for him by that boy’s aunt, given to him as a symbol of that family’s forgiveness. 

He wept today because he’s since helped countless people stay sober.

He wept today because Grace – that mysterious force in the universe that can fix broken people and things in wholly unimaginable ways – guides his life.

He wept today because he knows his life's purpose. 

I wept today because I know the inner and outer workings of that Grace too.

It is the force that animates my life and work whenever I allow it to do so.