Building Spatial Intelligence through Tangrams

Howard Gardner has proposed that there are 8 kinds of intelligence, one of which is visual-spatial intelligence.

An excellent way to develop your spatial intelligence is by playing with a tangram. A tangram is an ancient Chinese puzzle, made up of 7 pieces that can be used to construct a shape.

I discovered a cleverly designed Tangram set called 'Tangoes', when Angie and I were at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen West in Phoenix, earlier this year.

It holds two sets (so two people can play), along with the puzzles, in a carrying case.

I bought a set like the ones in the picture to the left and play with them once a week or so.

This week, I discovered that there is an online tangoes exercise. Just go to the main page at Tangoes.com and click on the "Play Tangoes Online. Free!" link at the bottom right.

Good luck...

Links of interest

• Tangoes.com
• History and example of Tangrams (pdf)
• Cut-out Paper Tangram (pdf)
• More Tangrams (pdf)
• ABC's of Tangrams (pdf)
• Tangram images

Emotional Intelligence: A Self-Awareness Exercise

According to experts, one key to Emotional Intelligence is Self-Awareness.

If you wonder how good your self-awareness is, here's a quick exercise you can try:

1. Grab a pen or pencil
2. Grab a sheet of paper
3. Set a timer for 60 seconds
4. Are you ready?
5. Write down all the emotions that you've felt in the past 10 days.
6. DING! Pencil down...
7. Count how many words you wrote down.

I do this exercise with a lot of groups around the world and the results are quite consistent.

• 0-5 words = You might have some work to do in the area of self-awareness
• 6-10 words = Average. You're pretty self-aware.
• 11 or more = You're very self-aware. And probably female. No kidding, 80% of the time, in my high-tech environment, it's a woman that scores 11 or more.

The first time I did this exercise, I came up with four words - happy, happier, bored, excited.

Hopefully, you did better.

There are three reasons why you (and I) might score poorly.

1. The Spock Principle - You're a robot - an unfeeling shell of a human being. Let's pretend that's not it.
2. The Caveman Principle - You have emotions, but you don't have an emotional vocabulary with which to capture those emotions. You say happy instead of gleeful, delighted, jazzed, or jaunty.
   Like Eskimos have many words for snow, some people have 25 words for disappointed.
   Here's a list of a 130+ word emotional vocabulary. Now you don't have an excuse.
   
3. The Shark Principle - If a shark stops swimming, it dies. As a result, I suppose sharks don't spend a lot of time in reflection. The same is true for many people.
   I don't 'check-in' (I think that's the phrase emotionally intelligent people would use) with myself very often and ask, "What am I feeling?"
   I just keep moving...

Does it matter?

Well, it's hard to manage people or sell to people if you cannot identify the emotion they are experiencing.

Fortunately, in the the high-tech environment I work in, my customers and employees are as emotionally illiterate as I am (I'm joking!!).

Still, there have been a few times in my career where employees didn't bring their problems to me.
When I asked why, they responded, "You wouldn't understand. You never have problems."

Building that bridge of empathy is reason enough for me to continue working on this.

How about you?