A Good Plan
I spent last week in the Bay Area so that my son could have the opportunity to work with Anat Baniel. Anat is the creator of the Anat Baniel Method, which is used across the United States to help children who have brain damage, cerebral palsy, or register on the autism spectrum, as well as adults with various physical challenges. Watching Anat work is immensely instructive and strangely entertaining. Her expertise and comfort with her method is akin to that of a concert pianist’s relationship to the keyboard. While working she is love and intelligence in motion, something I can never see often enough, whether in a concert hall of a therapy room.
Her work has helped thousands of people, including my son now. These results are due in large part to the brilliant simplicity of her method, which works with the brain’s ability to adapt and change. She does a better job of explaining this method in our interview than I could on this page, and I encourage you to watch that video if you are curious.
However, as brilliant as her method is, I felt that her first and greatest gift – beyond her intelligence, beyond her intuition, beyond even her experience – was her optimism. No, not optimism: faith. She has faith in fundamental human potential. This is extremely important when working with children who cannot walk or talk or look you in the eye. This is also extremely important when starting a book or querying and agent. Belief in potential is where all projects must begin.
At the end of our first session, Anat sat my wife and me down and discussed her plan for Sawyer. “I don’t make guarantees,” she explained. “I never know what exactly will happen with any child. But he will change,” she said. “He will change. That is our plan. That is God’s plan.”
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
