Can Business Heal the World? Michael J Gelb on Plant Yourself
Channel: Sick to Fit | Plant Yourself Podcast
Date: 22/03/2022

I first "met" Michael J Gelb in 1988, when I chanced across a copy of his first book, Body Learning, while renting a room in a London flat owned by a piano teacher. At that point in my life, I wasn't interested in the body except as a life support system for my brain, which was the only organ I was truly interested in.

OK, that's not totally accurate - I was 23 years old, after all - but you know what I mean. Education, learning, erudition, philosophy, personality; that's what made humans themselves. How we walked, sat, moved, danced - irrelevant.

Body Learning introduced me to the Alexander Technique, and through that intellectually rigorous discipline, to the very idea that body and mind are connected, and may in fact be mirror images of each other.

And that's a concept that has informed my career - and my life - ever since.

Thanks to Body Learning, I began studying Alexander Technique. I started juggling seriously, attending weekly juggling sessions with some of the best street performers in Europe, and traveling to juggling conventions. I became a juggling teacher, and helped hundreds of people discover their own dexterity, creativity, and bilaterality (I may have made that word up).

Gelb's book, Lessons from the Art of Juggling, helped me see juggling as a metaphor and doorway into learning in general. I still use the concepts of stepped growth and primary inhibition in all my teaching and coaching to this day.

And his book Thinking for a Change introduced me to principles of neuroscience that support the development of creativity, which I've attempted to use in all my work.

Gelb reached a mass audience with his bestseller, How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, which even made it onscreen in a blockbuster movie, The Italian Job.

He's now interested in saving the world through love, respect, creativity, art, and juggling. And among other things, that's what we explore in our conversation about his hugely important recent book, Healing Organizations: Awakening the Conscience of Business to Help Save the World.