Get ready, folks, this one’s a doozie! This solo episode became a “manifesto of sorts” as I shared my current definition of the “Renaissance Mindset”. This mindset is a philosophy that helps explain the complicated, sometimes seemingly contradictory actions of Renaissance People that set us apart.
I look at survey data from past guests to explore what it means to be “multi-passionate”, and I dive headfirst into research around being a “lifelong learner”. I once again share neuroscientist Paula Croxson’s elegant explanation of the “left brain vs right brain” myth. I discuss patterns in how Renaissance People think and act, where we shine, the critical role we can play in today’s world and so much more.
If this conversation sparks ideas for you (even if it’s a challenge to something I’ve said), reach out and let’s connect! You belong in the Renaissance People Community!
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Transcripts
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(sung) Connecting the Dots with The Renaissance People
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Hello Renaissance People and people who would like to cultivate a Renaissance Mindset. I'm your host, Renaissance Woman, Sara Kobilka. And I've been saying that, the same opening, for many, though not all, of the episodes of Connecting the Dots with the Renaissance People. If you're curious as to which ones don't have it, hey, why don't you go back and check?
I've spent a great deal of time digging into what a Renaissance Person is in my previous episodes, but I think it's time to focus a little bit more on what this Renaissance Mindset is that I've been talking about. That, and the fact that busy scheduling kept me from recording another interview means it's just me this time.
But I'm looking at this as a little bit of a serendipitous thing because this topic has definitely been on my mind lately. However, as I began mapping out what I wanted to say, it began to feel a bit more like a manifesto, so this is your warning. Prepare yourselves. We're gonna dive deep. We're going in. Here you go.
When I originally decided to create this podcast, you pick the categories that you'd like your podcast listed under. And so I picked three different categories for mine.
First one was education, putting that under the subcategory of self-improvement. Wanna help Renaissance People, wanna help others who want to act like a Renaissance Person and, and use that mindset that we'll be talking about today.
The second one was business under entrepreneurship. I am a Renaissance Person. I moved into entrepreneurship myself because it gave me that freedom, that control, that ability to be multifaceted. So OK, that made sense.
Then came the third category, and this is the one that I think might seem kind of strange to people at first when they hear about it. So under the society and culture category, there is an option to pick philosophy, and that is what I'm gonna focus on today, is that Renaissance Mindset as a philosophy. And we'll talk a little bit about what a Renaissance Person is as well.
So, as I've been mentioning in my last couple of episodes, I actually have sent out surveys to my past guests and asked them some questions so I could do a little bit of data analysis. I don't have all the responses just yet, but I can definitely say a few things.
First off, this is just based on the interviews that I've done, multi-passionate has been the number one term that people have been drawn to in terms of their identity. In fact, six of the 11 guests that I have had on this show have chosen that as the term to describe themselves when I made them limit themselves to one word. When I didn't limit them as I did in my survey, even more people picked that as an identity that really aligned with them and who they are.
As I look at that, one of the things that comes to mind is that word passionate. Not everyone looks upon passion as a positive thing or being passionate as being a positive thing. But we're not scared of it.
I know I'm definitely not scared of it because I have had many jobs throughout my career. I've had to write lots and lots of cover letters. And I've had my mom and my brother as my top two proofreaders for me. And I forget which one of them it was, but I think it was Mom. And one time she was reading through a cover letter, and she went through and highlighted the word passionate. And let's just say I had used it a little bit more often than was appropriate. So I sprinkled in some other terms.
But it's true! We get really passionate about stuff! In fact, my brother Brian Skellenger and I talked a little bit about this idea of passion in episode nine. Here's what we said.
" Somebody I was talking with earlier today, she came up with a term that I just like immediately was like, that's perfect! We are knowledge magpies.
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[00:04:10] Sara Kobilka: Like the birds who collect all the shiny objects
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[00:04:13] Sara Kobilka: and like hide them in their little nest.
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[00:04:17] Sara Kobilka: Yeah. And they collect all the shiny, sparkly, thoughtful things. And just like, ooh knowledge! I'll collect that one and that one
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[00:04:24] Sara Kobilka: and, and store it in here.
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[00:04:35] Sara Kobilka: Yes.
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[00:04:59] Sara Kobilka: There's caring and empathy again!"
We'll get back to that idea of caring empathy and a little bit later. But here's where the rabbit hole appeared that I jumped in feet first, dove down to the center of the planet. I don't know. I went down a rabbit hole, so this is your warning.
And it all tied back to another identity term that was the second most popular one of all those that I offered up when I gave my guests a choice to pick more than one term that they identified with.
The term? Lifelong learner. This concept was one that many of my guests have embraced. As Stephanie Castillo said in episode seven.
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And so even now, I finished like a really large, exhausting gig. And I'm like, I'm gonna pick up embroidery. Like why not? Why not?
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They said, quote, "Lifelong learning is the lifelong, life-wide, voluntary, and self-motivated pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons." And for us Renaissance People, that seems so true.
Yes, it's lifelong, but it is life-wide. It's not just in school. It's outside of school. It's in our sports. It's in our hobbies. It's in anything that we really get passionate about. It's voluntary. We just do it for the fun of it. I read peer-reviewed journal articles just for the fun of it. And that's not everybody. And we have this internal motivation, this drive that leads us to pursue knowledge. And we not just say either personal or professional, we find opportunities to do both. Yes, and always more complex.
In this particular study, what they wanted to know was could they evaluate college students to see if they would be lifelong learners? And they looked at a number of things, including the Curiosity Index. This term kind of stood out to me, and I, I really liked it.
And curiosity was really interesting because this index looked at not just how curious you are about lots of different things but also how deep do you go? How deep is that rabbit hole that you're willing to dive into? There wasn't a super tight correlation between the Curiosity Index and people who were deemed to be lifelong learners, but this was just one of the factors that they looked at, and you can look at the paper for more details.
Another paper that I looked into that I found by following the trail of breadcrumbs that is references in peer-reviewed journal articles is called Profiles of Epistemological Beliefs... and let me tell you, that word's hard to say... Knowledge about Explanation Norms and Explanation Skills Changes After an Intervention.
Here's what they looked at. They wanted to know about people's understandings of how scientific arguments are made and their skill at making this type of argument. And they wanted to see whether that was tied to their epistemological beliefs. What is that word? Well, it just means what are your beliefs about learning and knowledge?
So they actually had this profile. If you think about when they talk about, like, the murderer, what's their profile gonna be like? It's gonna be male in his forties, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, they have a profile of these epistemological beliefs dimensions that they found to be more favorable for proper argumentation than others. So people who are really good at making a strong scientific argument.
There were some beliefs that ended up being really strong in most of those people, and some ended up being on the weak side. So categories that fell into the weak belief side included personal justification, " I have to justify things myself internally"; justification by authority, " It is true, this knowledge that I hold, because the authority says it is." Yeah, you can understand why that might be weak. And then also certainty of knowledge. It's, " Yes, this is the right answer, singular. This is the capital T truth." That's again, something that's on the weak side for people who are really good at making these arguments.
What was strong? Well, justification by multiple sources. See that Renaissance Person connection? People looking at a lot of different people or sources that were saying the same thing. Or justification by the scientific community saying, "OK, the community has been looking at it. They've been poking holes or trying to poke holes in this argument, and there's kind of this consensus that has been formed within the scientific community at this point in time."
And then finally, the reflective nature of knowledge. And I really love this one! Because what it means is that people who are really good at making these scientific arguments, in this case, are people who really think about knowledge, question it, see it as a process, see things as things that evolve over time. And what they also found was that these people who were good at making this proper argumentation, following kind of the scientific model, not only were they good at understanding at how arguments are made, but they were also really good at deductive reasoning, thinking through things, and teaching other people.
So that teaching other people is gonna be something that we're going to circle back to in a little bit.
We as Renaissance People are absolutely passionate about learning. We're people who like to learn for the sake of learning. We go wide and deep when it comes to learning. So that curiosity index having both width and depth.
There's some people pick their one thing, they dig into it, they know so much about it, but that's not so much us. And most of us also aren't people who proudly go around saying, " I know a little bit about everything, just enough to be dangerous." We will find multiple areas where we will dig really deep.
And I've shared it before in links in the show notes! Ha ha, they'll be in there today! Take a drink! That's my thing about sharing resources that also we will circle back to. But one of the examples that I think is a good way to visualize this is the idea of the bramble. And Patrick Meaney has a LinkedIn post about that. The bramble spreads. It's a type of plant, and it spreads by going wide, but then also those roots go deep. So it's not a tree that just has roots continuously going deeper and deeper and deeper. It's spreading wide and going deep simultaneously.
And when we go wide, we don't do it in just one realm. We do it in multiple, oftentimes seemingly disparate areas. And when we go deep, I mean deep.
I think Morgan Anderson probably put it best in episode 13.
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[00:12:59] Sara Kobilka: It's that live hard, play hard mentality.
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[00:13:02] Sara Kobilka: I think a lot of Renaissance People and multi-passionate are good at that. They are both good at having fun and playing and being curious and creative. But then when there's stuff that needs to get done, they're also really good at like putting their heads down and getting things done.
You know what? That's kind of what I did in preparation for this episode, honestly.
Another thing that I think is at a core of being a Renaissance Person and this Renaissance Mindset that we have, is that we reject the idea of being right brain, which some people say is the creative, intuitive side of the brain versus the left brain, which they say is analytical and logical.
That's fake. That's not true. It is a myth. But how did that myth come about? I'm going to take a break, and I'm gonna let you listen to episode 12's guest, neuroscientist Paula Croxson explain this because, one, she's brilliant, and as my brother and I were saying the other day, we could also just sit back and listen to her wonderful voice talking about neuroscience all day long. So here we go.
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But there is a little, a little thing called hemispheric specialization, which is where one hemisphere of the brain has a specialty, in a particular area. And those are very few and far between. There aren't very many of them. And one of those is language. So most humans, I think around 98% of us maybe, have language faculties localized to the left hemisphere of our brains. And a very small percentage of us, maybe it's more like 5%, I forget, many of whom are left handed also
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[00:14:57] Paula Croxson: have language faculties on the right- hand side of their brains. And so number one, it's very biased against left-handed people to say left brain, right brain, different thinking even about language.
And so what happened is there were a series of studies, decades ago now, which allowed us to look at this hemispheric difference. And, I saw a talk by one of these scientists. Her name's Brenda Milner. She's a really fantastic neuroscientist. And she had an opportunity to study these people who had this surgery to divide the connections between the two hemispheres of the brain because they had epilepsy that wasn't treatable by drugs. And so in an effort to stop the seizures from spreading from one side of the brain to the other, they had this pretty extreme surgery.
And, in many ways, they were totally normal after the surgery, which is amazing! And it helped their epilepsy. But they left with some weird phenomena, like they would find themselves getting dressed in the morning with one hand and the other hand changing the outfit. And they found that there were some things that we do need to coordinate across our hemispheres for. And they were able to bring those people into the lab and do things like have them look straight ahead and show things in their left visual field, which would only go to the right side of the brain or to the right visual field, which would only go to the left side of the brain.
But they showed things to the left side of the brain, like an object, let's say they showed a spoon, then they'd say, what do you see? And the person would say, oh, I see a spoon. If they showed the object to the right side of the brain, the person would not be able to respond. Because their right side of the brain, it knew what it was seeing, but it had no way to express what it was seeing. And so people would not say anything at all. But more frequently their left hemisphere would get in there and start confabulating.
So let's say that the right hemisphere saw a spoon and they asked the person to pick it up. They could do that, right? The right hemisphere, could control movement. Then they would say, why did you pick up the spoon? The left hemisphere would intervene. Brenda Milliner calls it the chatty left hemisphere. It would intervene and it would say, oh, well I was just feeling a bit hungry, so I figured I'd pick up a spoon so I would have it for after this so I could eat my lunch.
And that's how the left brain got a reputation for being the logical, I'm using air quotes here, the logical side of the brain. Because it rationalized. Because it got in there and it was chatty and explained away the movements of the right hemisphere, having no idea that the whole reason was because the right hemisphere of the brain had just seen a spoon and was responding to the question. So that's how that whole myth arose is because the left hemisphere of the brain talks a lot. However, that doesn't really make it more logical.
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[00:17:48] Jenni Gritters: I also really resonate with the idea of being a constant expander.
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[00:17:52] Jenni Gritters: Just like always changing my mind, always a different person every three months.
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[00:18:04] Brian Skellenger: probably anybody who really considers themselves a Renaissance Person has that mindset of wanting to learn about other people and other skills and cultures and things like that. I think that's just the type of person that is drawn to be a Renaissance Person and maybe vice versa.
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[00:18:24] Brian Skellenger: I do!
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[00:18:26] Brian Skellenger: Yeah, yeah, I am drawn to people who are just interested in a lot of different things and are very multifaceted people.
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We as Renaissance People do not let boundaries stop us, as Melissa Vining said in episode three.
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[00:19:04] Sara Kobilka: We're taking these ideas, we're bringing them across those boundaries. We don't stop where other people say, " This is the end. You stop here." Because we rebel against conventional wisdom. We are, in my case, anti-niche. We're people who question when somebody says always or never. And as Nancy Scales Coddington said in episode two as my very first guest.
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[00:19:34] Sara Kobilka: Challenge accepted!
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[00:19:49] Sara Kobilka: We love that challenge. We can jump into conversations feet first as well, but brings a little bit of a challenge, as Marika Luneaux said in episode six.
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[00:20:14] Sara Kobilka: I just came here for the wine and free hor d'oeuvres...
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[00:20:25] Sara Kobilka: We can overwhelm others with our intensity. As Morgan said during our improv game,
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[00:20:42] Sara Kobilka: Yeah. No, you can't be doing one thing.
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[00:20:51] Sara Kobilka: So getting back to that lifelong learning, figuring out lots of things simultaneously. We want to learn all this stuff. We're self-motivated. We just do it because we love learning.
But part of the Renaissance Mindset, in my mind, is our belief in serendipity, and we truly, deep down, believe that opportunities will arise to share what we're learning with others. We are the ones in the Zoom meeting who are throwing link after link into the chat because, like Elin Filbey said in episode 11,
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[00:21:25] Sara Kobilka: And I find it so interesting that every guest so far who has come on this show has been an educator, whether in a formal setting or an informal setting, and most of them have been coaches in some sort of capacity. Now, I can't make the assumption that that is the case of all Renaissance People.
It could be possibly that that's who I'm drawn to. That's who I end up connecting with. And so I end up having a lot of educators. But I think there is something to that because, again, with that Renaissance Mindset, love of learning, love of learning all sorts of different things, but we don't just keep it to ourselves. We like to share it with other people.
Another thing that we get from the fact that we're looking at a lot of different things, bringing in a lot of different perspectives and angles, is that we're systems thinkers. And as Jenni Gritters said
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[00:22:30] Sara Kobilka: We're interrogative. We are asking why like a toddler or a preschooler. A great example was something middle school science and STEM teacher Jess Rowell explained in episode eight. She saw patterns in the concepts being taught by teachers in the writing classes and the things that she was discussing in her science classes
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[00:23:03] Sara Kobilka: She wanted to connect the dots for those students. And because she's a Renaissance Person and because she knew a lot about all of these different areas and could recognize the pattern, she was trying to make it make sense for the students instead of them just having to either do that on their own or just have a sense of feeling really lost.
I think that another thing that makes us particularly unique, at least in for me, for the United States as it is right now and other places in the world, is our level of comfort with complexity and nuance.
We can handle it better than others. Our comfort level is higher than other people. We don't have to have that black and white thinking. We don't have to have an us and a them and see it as two separate circles. We see it as a Venn diagram. We are Venn diagrams. I'll let that sink in a little bit.
I want to circle backwards. When I started my business five years ago, during the pandemic, I like to say, I had already had a baby right before the pandemic. And rather than starting sourdough, ah, Renaissance Woman Consulting was my sourdough.
I chose the term Renaissance Woman partially as kind of like a jab, a little bit of a feminist play on the term Renaissance Man. Leonardo da Vinci is probably the most famous person who would be categorized as a Renaissance Man. He was living in the Renaissance time period in Western Europe. PBS Learning Media has some great curriculum that I came across when I myself was writing curriculum for them, and one really stood out to me.
It was written by Mary Kate Longorgan, who is a social studies history teacher. And it is curriculum that meets both middle school and high school science and art standards. You know, kinda makes sense with Leonardo da Vinci being that Renaissance Man.
Here's what she wrote about him: " Driven by his unbridled curiosity, wonder, and ability to make connections, Leonardo da Vinci's skills and talents manifested in unparalleled achievements as an artist, scientist, inventor, and visionary."
So that brings me back to something that I've been grappling with a little bit ever since I started this podcast. This played sort of a conflict in any of the guests that I invited on the show. That question is, do you have to identify as a STEM professional or a STEM person and an artist to be a Renaissance Person?
Because if we're gonna have somebody like Leonardo da Vinci as the Renaissance Man, you know, are these people who don't necessarily feel connected to both of those areas gonna feel like they fit?
My answer, after thinking about it for a while, is no. But I would say a requirement is that you can appreciate, celebrate, and engage in the practices of both realms.
You have to be somebody with a willingness to accept multiple ways of knowing. You can't just be a STEM person who crosses the boundaries in science, but looks at art as like, meh. You know, that's, that's woo woo stuff. That's just emotional stuff. I'm an objective scientist. I think just in an objective manner.
And you also can't be somebody maybe who is an artist who is thinking about history or some other realm of, again, that myth of left brain, right brain, who completely rejects science and says anything that comes from the scientific establishment, and I'm using science but I mean STEM more broadly, but rejects anything that comes from that realm because, you know, there's so much more than that, and they don't know what they're talking about, and science is always wrong, or science is only about knowing the right answer.
To be a Renaissance Person, you have to be able to appreciate both of those. And you might lean more heavily in one direction or the other. But again, you have to have both, in my mind, to truly fit this Renaissance Person identity.
Now, another question I've kind of been thinking about is: What makes Renaissance People different from other popular terms, such as generalist?
I reference frequently the book, "Range: Why Generalists Thrive in a Specialized World." But so many of my guests and people who are part of Renaissance Readers, The Renaissance People Community Book Club that I started.
When we read that book, one of the first questions I asked was, "What do you think about the term generalist?" And almost everybody found it icky. It just didn't feel right because I think the base of the word generalist is general, and it felt like going wide but not deep, and that's what we need.
We need the curiosity, we need the diving down in the rabbit holes that are happening and are wide and deep. We don't necessarily have to be going deep in multiple realms at the same time, you only have so much energy. You have to focus in some sort of capacity.
But being generally good, I can get a, like a C in everything. That's not how we roll. If we're passionate about things, we want to get the metaphorical A+ in our areas of passion. And again, that idea of the bramble that I talked about before, that Patrick Meaney discussed in his LinkedIn post, feels more adequate to represent, metaphorically, what our brains are like.
I wanna say one last thing. So the world tells us that we are too much. But walking Venn diagrams like ourselves, I would argue, are exactly what an increasingly siloed and polarized world needs. We are here for that purpose, and if we can live confidently our expansive lives, we have a role to play, especially right now. But we don't have to do it alone.
We need each other, too. We need spaces where we can be volcanoes of ideas. My daughter has a book that I got for her from the library that I guess is award-winning, and it is "My Mouth Is a Volcano". And it's about a kid who listens to other people's conversations and gets so excited! And he tries to stop himself, but then a volcano of words comes out of his mouth, and he interrupts other people. And so it's, like, teaching children how to be respectful and not interrupt other kids, which is great. You know, like, I don't like to be interrupted by other people.
But we need a community space like the one I'm trying to build in this Renaissance People Community, where we can be that volcano of ideas. And we don't have to feel like, " I'm too much. Other people are gonna judge me for what I want to share."
The idea, the metaphor of a volcano is also interesting to me because an eruption can be both destructive and restorative. Soil from a volcano is a very fertile place for growth of new ideas.
And that happens when we genuinely connect and build communities with each other. We connect the dots, whether those dots are ideas, whether they're resources, or whether they're individual people. We connect those dots. We weave the fabric of the safety net of the community that we all need.
And so last thing I'm gonna say is that this idea has led me to think of the next thing that I want to do for this Renaissance People Community, and that's gonna be a monthly gathering that I have decided to call Fertile Grounds.
It's gonna be a place to play with ideas. We're gonna supplement the soil by contributing resources, speaking our love language. We're gonna be pollinating possibilities with the unique experiences that each of us brings to this space.
So I wanna invite you to join, to get help and an outsider perspective maybe on a challenge that you're facing. Or maybe you just wanna contribute to assist other people and find new paths to explore. This is a place where you can exercise your creativity with fellow Renaissance People who can actually appreciate you for your complexity, for your volcano of ideas, for your passion and your drive. So if you're really interested in this, you wanna be part of it, I'll have a link in the show notes to take you to register to join us.
the late summer, maybe August:
My go-to metaphor is gardening. And that's what I'm gonna do after I get done with this, is get out into my garden, water the plants, see what's growing today. So thank you for taking the time to listen to this manifesto on the Renaissance Mindset and the amazing people that are Renaissance People. Thank you to all of the guests who have come on the show so far and to all the future guests for the amazing conversations we're gonna have.
See you soon!
(sung) Connecting the Dots with The Renaissance People
