Photograph by Wesley Law
Former Pulaski Bank CEO William Donius has found a new calling. His new book, Thought Revolution, proposes a deceptively simple act: answering pointed questions about the direction your life is heading in writing, using your nondominant hand, to pull insight from the neglected side of your brain.
So how does nondominant-hand writing work?
I ask people probing questions and what we’ve learned is that when they write their answers with their dominant hand they get a logical response, and then with their nondominant hand, they consistently come up with a different answer.
What sorts of answers are we talking about?
Sometimes the answers are metaphorical, not literal. Someone who did this once wrote the word “nurse,” and then she wrote, “you have the talent as a writer to ‘nurse’ others writers’ creative projects along.” Very shortly after, she set up a business to do that, and in just a few days she had two clients. She had gone around for a year trying to figure out what her next thing should be, and it hadn’t jelled for her until that point. I can rattle off the names of people who have had big insights and changed jobs and things like that as the result of this process.
How does this work, do you think?
By putting that writing instrument in the nondominant hand, it activates the right hemisphere—“our higher consciousness,” as some have described it—a place of intuition and creativity. It can be difficult to access for most of us, because 90 percent of us are right-handed, and we’re governed by our left brain, the logical, linear, managerial brain, which serves us well.
You learned about nondominant-hand writing from a famous book, Recovery of Your Inner Child by Lucia Capacchione.
That was what sent me forth on the process. I first read it 12 years ago, and discovered that it worked. I’m not inventing something that’s never been done before; I’m using something that’s worked well in the therapeutic and art worlds and applying it to the mainstream.
What have been some of the insights you’ve learned about yourself from this process?
That I don’t think there’s anything else I’d rather be doing with my time; I love to help people.
