|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
During my Ph.D. program in marketing communication at the University of Connecticut, I met my key mentors: my advisor, the relationship and interpersonal communication expert, Dr. Art VanLear; the emotion and nonverbal communication authority, Dr. Ross Buck; and Dr. Susan Spiggle, who taught me the true meaning of integrated marketing communication and took me to meet Don Peppers to discuss the One-to-One Future at a roundtable.
During this time, I got married, which taught me firsthand about the power of trust and the pervasiveness of relationship stages. Our lives as newlyweds seemed like a series of miracles unfolding in each other’s eyes. Giving my heart so completely to another felt like jumping off a cliff with only trust on my side that my partner would catch me.
I also began to read everything I could get my hands on. I read Freud, Nietzsche, Chomsky, Piaget, Thomas Kuhn, Deepak Chopra, Stephen Covey, and Michio Kaku, to name a few. Joseph Campbell emerged as my favorite thinker, and he has influenced my work enormously. Campbell theorized that evolution-based social systems were embedded into human brain structures (before there were MRIs), and he called them “elementary ideas.” Humans have ritualistically lived out their common myths for thousands of years, and these myths invariably involve a journey of becoming. Humans all over the world since the beginning of civilization have encountered the same crises, changes, and losses. These common concerns create mythic cycles of separation, initiation, and return.
As I read Campbell’s (1972) Hero With a Thousand Faces, I was also learning about the evolutionary origins of our emotional brain structures from Ross Buck, and about relationship development through interpersonal communication from Art VanLear.