Last week found me down with strep throat and fevers and I am glad it’s over. I especially missed golf and walking, but as I lounged around drinking tea, I thought about the relationship between walking and focusing. No wonder we create more when we walk. You could say that kinesthetic intelligence works in your favor - while you simply enjoy the ride, or more precisely - the walk.

Those who created the scholar’s walk, with 40 bur oak trees and monuments to celebrate innovation and success at the University of Minnesota, remind us that walking and accomplishments have a great deal in common. Have you found that to be the case?

To walk for focus is to gain benefits that research has barely begun to tap. We become mindful of things otherwise missed when we walk. Not only do the sounds, sights and aromas bring an awareness of things outside ourselves, but experiencing wind, sun, and sounds of nature stirs up new reactions that draw from different parts of the brain.

When your body’s in motion your mind grows more alert due to the extra surge of oxygen it gets from the exercise. Some people describe experiences that bring immense enjoyment when they walk - and that experience also triggers serotonin to the brain. When you consider that the brain requires 21% of the body’s oxygen, you see why we need that daily stroll just to focus in on daily challenges we all face.

If you are not used to walking, you might enjoy starting in an area close by, and walking briskly for about 20 minutes at first. Open spaces work well, and if you can avoid heavily traffic areas, that too is good for the focus you can expect here. After twenty minutes ask yourself this question…. What one insight did this walk bring, that could zip in some area of my life? The answer to that question will likely also add incentive to tie on those hiking shoes for another round.

Encounters with nincompoops or champions both bring life to good yarns, if you throw a little interpersonal intelligence into the mix. In fact, the best stories show folly in a star one minute, and champion the bravery in a scoundrel the next.

In his recent best seller, Prisoners, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote about people who humiliated and bullied him in a Long Island schoolyard, and, Nick Rennison’s new biography, Sherlock Holmes, takes readers into the ambiguities of the world’s most famous detective. Both show similar interpersonally strong storytelling skills in different ways.

What life experiences could you bring to a story about people you encountered? Would your story look like Goldberg’s admiration for people, and show his realistic colors of Israelis he admired? Or would it bring Rennison’s sense of adventure to the afterlife of a literary character?

Interpersonal intelligence grows a story when real people you know, end up in stories you write. Goldberg wove his 1990 experiences as an MP at the Israeli military prison Ketziot during the first intifada, into a story about a Muslim & a Jew across the Middle East divide. Rennison’s showed Holmes’ ambiguities as a reflection of his zeal for progress on one hand, and personal darker struggles with emotions on the other.

As witnessed in Goldberg’s and Rennison’s stories – an interpersonally alert writer tends to be part memoirist, and part reporter, because interpersonal skills increase an author’s ability to develop and interpret relationships as they relate to an interact with nincompoops and champs.

Your interpersonal intelligence guides you past the mundane, in behind the obvious – to capture an adventure through triumphs and tragedies of interesting people. Goldberg reached out to talk with Jewish and Arab prisoners and try to find out what they were thinking – and readers see nuances often missed in media reports about Palestinians and Israelis. In Goldberg’s favorite prisoner, a scholarly rogue named Rafiq, you see likeability and a sense of humor. Similarly, Rennison shadows Holmes through the ups and downs of the late 1800s in ways that show a Victorian era at war with its own skeletons.

A writer’s interpersonal muse holds insight from relationships all around you – those that work and those that don’t. Here are a few prompts to get your next story off the ground through activating your own unique people smarts.

From your right brain…

1. Interview your favorite hero and write three insights you learned
2. Create a post with a writer you admire, alternating sentences
3. Ask 3 people to tell you what they think of immigration, growing old, or AIDS
4. Tell your story idea to a child and invite a response

From your left brain …

5. Re-tell a recent dialogue between 2 people you know
6. Climb a mountain with a friend and relate the conversation sequentially
7. Play a board game for 4 with people and compare culturally different responses
8. Discuss a news article with friends and support opposing views

What prompt would you add to use more interpersonal intelligence as a tool to tell somebody’s best story?

One writer in a class I taught described himself “as riding the wind into a new adventure” in mid-life, after completing a Master degree in computer science. What metaphor in nature describes something you’ve accomplished lately?

Nature holds more fuel for your brain than most people realize. To see how, watch lights and shadows dance on woods or water and then write a sentence to show lights and shadows in your day.

Have you ever tried to write sounds you hear along a wooded path or have you compared nature’s fragrances to aromas that remind you of people or events from your past?

In the last article we wrote stories to activate your linguistic intelligence, now let’s throw another mental resource into the storytelling ring - Nature. If you’ve never thought of the natural world – as power to help you spin a yarn, you’re in for a surprise. Naturalistic intelligence can enrich your writing by activating parts of your brain that keep you young. It’s all part of the multiple intelligences you possess, that could enrich your world.

For the past 18 years, it’s been my privilege to know and exchange ideas about human intelligence, with Dr. Howard Gardner, who, at Harvard University, discovered naturalistic intelligence as one of eight intelligences that define all humans. As with any intelligence, naturalistic smarts grow with use.

Here’s a writing idea to activate your naturalistic intelligence and ratchet up your IQ at the same time. Still wondering what nature has to do with your brain… your life story… or a younger, healthier mind. Compare a person you admire to an animal you value… Or create a conversation between a tree and its nutrients to find a financial solution or answer question you’ve been asking.

Go for a walk, tend a garden, or sit alone beside a brook… and let nature play back its ideas in tender roots for a story that relates to your life. Tell your story to a friend and you’ll grow new dendrite brain cell connectors as a result.

If you know the person in charge of international holidays, I’d like to propose a yearly celebration to repair our aging brains. Call it “Reboot Your Brain Day,” or something similar, but it would show Mother Nature’s fountain of fixes for the human brain. We’d start with showcasing chemical and electrical systems that nurture and sustain brain cells.

For instance, I’d hire a few gifted musicians to show how favorite tunes can move and track your brain waves into better moods and creative adventures. Don Campbell could come to tell us how to …”Tap the power of music to strengthen the mind and unlock the creative spirit.”

I’d enlist sleep experts too. They’d show how we stay awake better during the day, by sleeping better at night. I’d enlist Gilio Tononi’s ideas from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to help the brain rewire during a good sleep.

My global holiday would also gather respected comedians to help us link laughter and intelligence to liven up a boring calendar. It’s easily done – whenever we laugh together to improve the chemical and nerve cell communications across the brain. Scientists see it like data flows between high-performance computers, routers and servers to fly magically across the internet. Laughter adds the high-performance parts to healthy brains.

Then, an Olympian star would lead us in a series of movements that draw from kinesthetic intelligence. The idea is to improve mental function in every area of our lives. It could be done from deep breathing exercises to taking up a fun new sport. Encouragement to take on a kinesthetic adventure to boost the brain’s output through a fun new routine that fits into what you already like to do.

Finally, an naturalistic expert would stop by to help unlock naturalistic parts for a healthier brain. It could happen through showing nature as the playground for the mind it was intended to be, to rethinking how rivers near you impact a fix for the brain.

By the way, who’s in charge of creating international holidays anyway? Think they’d go for in one day a year to reboot the brain for global benefits?