Monthly Archives: May 2022

If it’s important

I love this quote, “If it’s important, you’ll find  a way.  If not,  you’ll find an excuse.”

It’s similar to this Derek Sivers quote I recently shared,

“I have a concept that says that your actions reveal your values better than your words. So no matter what you say you want to do, your actions show what your values really are.”

Eight years ago I created an image for a presentation I was doing:

Here is the blog post on my Pair-a-Dimes blog about the slide and the presentation. The concept is simple: If something is important to you, you will find your way and if it’s not important enough, you’ll find reasons not to change. The greater the challenge to change, the more important it needs to be to find your way rather than finding an excuse.

A couple days later, I added two more images and shared them in a post: Leading Change – 3 Images

I think I used these three images in every presentation I did for the next few years. I wasn’t thinking about forced changes like the pandemic created, I was thinking about changes we want to create. I was thinking about the potential we envision, and how we fight the systems and habits that make excuses easier than change.

It’s easy to be a cheerleader for change. It’s much harder to spend the time removing barriers and working with the resistors of change to make it as important to them as it is to the rest of your team.

It can’t just be important to you.

Problemize the learning

Yesterday I heard Warren Woytuck from The Critical Thinking Consortium present at the ACE Conference. Here is one of his slides about problematizing a question:

Note how by adding value descriptors, by specifying the intention of the question, the question changes to one where students need to compare and contrast, to qualify, make judgements, and/or explain their answers. And more than that, students need to ask more questions to come to an answer.

To me, that’s the key to a problemizing a question… How can you change a question so that it provokes more questions? If you ask a question and either:

A) Google can answer it; or

B) You already know the answer students will come up with; or

C) All students come to the same conclusion…

Then you didn’t really pose a good problem. You didn’t promote critical thinking.

When your questions are problematized, students need to interact with the question in a more meaningful and engaged way.

Profit and greed

Watching the price of gas top $2.30 a litre and knowing that big oil companies are making billions in profit is maddening. Never waste a good crisis. Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a company taking profits, but I really wonder where the world is headed when company shareholders care more about increasing profit than anything else.

I think too many people confuse democracy and capitalism. They think a free world should include unfettered opportunities for business and profit. But a model where corporate value is tied to how much returns shareholders can get for their investment is not designed to make the world better or more free. It’s designed to put more wealth into the hands of the rich, who can afford to buy stocks and shares in companies.

Greed is the underlying driver of such a system. Not democracy, not freedom, greed.

‘This approach isn’t as good for the environment, but it is more profitable.’

‘We could pay our employees a better living wage, but that would hurt our profits.’

‘If we lay people off and increase efficiency, we can meet our targets and get our bonuses.’

There are stories like this one, where a boss decided that every employee will get at least 70k a year, and the company is still thriving 5 years later. And there is a local company run by Paul Macdonald that donates 50% of corporate profits to charity.

But these stories are anomalies. They shouldn’t be. There shouldn’t be a reason that the world we live in is driven by profit and greed. I hope to see more people doing what these guys are doing. They are earning a good living, and making the world around them better. That shouldn’t be a novel idea, it should be what drives us.

Master the art of showing up

The biggest change I’ve made to taking care of myself in the past few years is this:

“When determining the size or complexity of a new habit ask yourself, “What can I stick to—even on my worst day?”

Start there. Master the art of showing up. Then advance.” ~ James Clear

I’m not in the mood to work out today, but I’ll go get on my row machine for 10 minutes. That would be it, but I’m also going to run the weight club this morning and I’ll do a bit of weights. Then one of our students ends the session leading us through 15 minutes of yoga.

I could skip the row machine, I’ve got an excuse, I’m doing weight club. But how hard is it to do 10 minutes on the row machine listening to my audiobook? It’s faster than 20 minutes on the bicycle or treadmill. These are the minimums I allow myself. I know I can do these things even when I don’t want to. I know that I don’t have to go all out, I just have to put in the time. That’s what I can do on my worst day… I can go through the motions for 10 or 20 minutes.

Sometimes that’s all I really do… go through the motions. But more often than not, after planning to do just the minimum, I end up pushing myself just a little harder than expected. The plan is to show up, but I do more. That’s what happens when you master the art of showing up.

So just show up, and maybe you’ll do more. You just need to commit to showing up and doing the minimum, and being ok with when that’s all you do. Be happy with this low bar on your low days… and you’ll be amazed how often you achieve more.

Just do it… just show up!

A dad’s secret

I love this.

I saw this TikTok last night and it really warmed my heart. A dad kept a childhood secret from his kid until she was 32 and had her own kids. Her dad would take her and her siblings to the beach to go shell fishing, but would go to a souvenir shop first and buy pretty shells. Then he’d throw them in the ripples of waves to be found.

How did she finally find out all these years later? Because he started doing it for her kids, his grandkids. Here is the video.

I grew up on a tropical beach. I still remember the joy of finding a beautiful, unbroken shell. I wish I did this for my kids… and one day I hope to do this for my grandkids.

More rain

There hasn’t been a torrential rainfall, in fact it hasn’t rained hard in weeks. But the weather has been cold and damp and yet again it’s drizzling this morning. May has felt as cold and wet as February usually does.

I set up the pool last weekend, and at this point I think it will be a solid month before it’s warm enough to get in. I wore a turtle neck to school on Friday, and I’ll be wearing layers again today. It’s cold.

Part of the price of living in the Vancouver Lower Mainland is that November and February suck… days of endless rain and low temperatures. But May is usually amazing. Sometimes we get to June and it cools down, but May is a month I usually always look forward to. Not this year.

In my 20’s I ran away from Toronto because I hated the winters. Now in my 50’s I’m wondering why I chose to live near a rainforest? I think being born on a tropical island and spending my first decade there spoiled me. I just want to see a bit of sunshine for more than a couple hours at a time… and I really hope I don’t have to wait until July to get it.

Guess I’ll just keep taking my vitamin D pills and bundling up. Summer will get here… eventually.

Don’t share their names

It’s so senseless and sad. A radicalized idiot with a gun in Buffalo has taken the lives of innocent people.

I saw this response on TikTok, and the title of the post is ‘Don’t say their names’. I’ve said this before, and explained myself in a footnote:

*I referred to the person who murdered children and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown last Friday as ‘Idiot with a gun in Newtown’. It would be a whole other blog post to speak of how horrible our news media is at iconicizing (not sure if that’s a word) murdering, evil, or deeply disturbed people who commit violent acts. On this principle, I do not name this murderer here. I chose to convey him as a nameless ‘Idiot with a gun in Newtown’. If that offends you, sorry.

When someone like the idiot with a gun in Buffalo commits such a senseless act, part of their desire to follow through with this is to be known. They know that their manifesto will be shared. They know newscasters will peruse their Facebook and Instagram pages and put images of them on the news. They know their name and face will be mentioned and shared.

They don’t deserve the acknowledgment. They deserve to remain nameless. They don’t even deserve the image of their face to be shared. Idiots with guns, that’s what they should be known as. Idiots. Nothing more. Let anyone thinking of doing this in the future know that they will be forgotten. That’s what they deserve.

Everything is an 11

I don’t know what has changed but it seems that whatever the concern is that people have, on a scale of 1-10 that concern becomes an 11. Anything bigger than a 6 out of 10 just skips on by 7-10… if it’s more than a 6 it’s an 11.

No nuance, no compromise, no quarter.

Miscommunication? No they lied to me!

Apology? Not enough, I want retribution!

Compromise? No, full concession!

‘Why aren’t you following up on this right now, can’t you see that this is the most important thing in the world? This… This is an 11/10.’

I’m not saying it isn’t important, but I am saying that escalating concerns like this doesn’t often get the result people want. Animosity doesn’t enhance cooperation. Anger doesn’t promote resolution.

I’m reminded of the saying, “When you have one eye fixed on the destination, you only have one eye with which to find the way.”

Further to this, I think that when things escalate to 11, the chance of reaching that destination that was the original goal moves farther away. Reactionary, angry, point-for-point volleying of minutiae doesn’t allow for solutions to be found.

I have two friends that I’ve known for decades. One of them is always having to deal with incompetence around her. It’s unbelievable how much the people around her screw up. And if you ask her how her day is going, the idiot that screwed up is what she’ll tell you about.

I have another friend who always has things go her way. She’ll have an issue with something not going well and the first thing she’ll say is, “I’m sorry, I’m really trying my best not to be a Karen, but this doesn’t seem right.” She’ll specifically say things like, “I don’t need you to fix this for me, I just thought you should know.” And she gets thank you’s in the form of gift cards, free food, upgrades, etc.

For the first friend, everything is an 11, and she has to deal with 11’s all the time. For the second friend nothing is over a 7, and by the time things are done, they are actually a 2, or not even an issue anymore.

Maybe, just maybe, short of losing life or limb, nothing is an 11… And if you believe that, maybe, just maybe, you will find that life is a little easier, and happier, when you don’t ramp things up so much.

What’s the end goal? How can you get there in a way that makes you and the other person feel good about the outcome? I doubt you can do that while you are at an 11.

Undoing the pandemic

It takes a long time to build a culture of a school community, and a relatively short time to undermine it. The pandemic has been a major dismantler of school culture.

Next year our Grade 12’s will only have had from September to March of their Grade 9 year in a normal pre-pandemic school. The new Grade 9’s will have experienced their last pre-pandemic school experience at the start of middle school in Grade 6.

So, next September instead of our Grade 9’s being invited into a new school culture that has been well established, they are entering a school culture that only the Grade 12’s have a vague memory of. They are entering a school culture designed by maintaining ever changing Covid-19 safety precautions.

Next school year will be a critical rebuilding year. This has a lot of promise if it’s done with thoughtful intentions. If next year starts with a ‘business as usual’ expectation, the post pandemic culture will feel more like the pandemic shaped the school. If the year starts with a sense of community building and fostering the culture you hope to see, the afterglow of the pandemic can fade rather quickly.

Cultures don’t rebuild themselves.

So what about your school do you miss? How do you get it back?

What about your school has changed positively? How do you keep these things?

What can you do to start rebuilding in June rather than waiting until September?

If these things aren’t talked about intentionally, if they are not shared by staff and students, the effects of the pandemic on your school culture might linger for a long time. Either intentionally build the culture, or accept what is built out of the ashes of a 2.5 year disruption to what your school culture used to be like. Because whatever your school culture was back in January of 2020 is highly unlikely to be rebuilt by itself in September of 2022.

Do it for yourself

A simple challenge:

Do something nice for someone today. I’m going to buy my secretaries a coffee. What are you going to do? It doesn’t have to be anything that costs money.

Leave a note in a love one’s lunch for them to find. (I think I’ll do this too.)

Spend a little extra time with your pet. (I say this with my cat purring on my lap.)

Tell someone you appreciate them in some way.

Call a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while.

Here’s the thing, it’s a nice gesture that will make someone else feel good… but it will make you feel good too. Do it for the other person, but know that you are doing it for yourself too (and that’s ok, enjoy the good feelings you get).