Tag Archives: choice

Our Big Event

Today is our school’s annual open house. We have about 150 people that reserved seats. After 11 years we still rely on this event to get students and their parents interested in applying to attend our school. It’s amazing to me that more students don’t want the Inquiry Hub experience for high school.

I know a tiny school doesn’t meet the needs of some students who want a big high school experience. However I also know the format of the school with self-directed inquiries and way more unstructured time for working independently and in groups is ideal for so many students. I know that our students find the transition to university easy, and that they don’t only feel prepared but also thrive in post secondary environments, since they have practiced being inquisitive, self-directed learners.

Yet, without hosting this big event, after visiting our middle schools to introduce our school as a viable choice beyond their catchment high school, we would struggle with enrolment. And so tonight is a big event for our school. More than half of our students are participating in or helping to run the show. They did the majority of the planning, and they will be amazing ambassadors.

I love their enthusiasm, and it makes me proud to see our students excited to promote our school. It’s going to be a great night.

Greater choice

In a conversation with a friend today we were talking about healing and therapy. We came to the conclusion that if therapy prescribes a specific outcome then it’s probably unhealthy and unsustainable. But if it empowers you with more choice, and if it provides you with new and better choices, and better still, if it creates the conditions that make it easier for you to choose better choices… well then that’s good therapy.

Empowered choice is where healing really begins.

You can’t have both

Sometimes you have to choose. You reach a fork in the road and you have to make a choice. Too often kids try to take two paths at the same time. They want the benefits of two competing options and so they try to do everything. Two sports with game times on the same day is a perfect example, but there are many more ways they try.

The hardest thing to tell a kid that wants to ‘do it all’ is to just pick one. Sometimes it’s a good life lesson to have them try both paths, but sometimes it’s better to draw a hard line and say ‘you have to choose’. Sometimes trying both means being successful in neither.

Successful people don’t spread themselves too thin. They don’t try to be the best at everything. They don’t half-commit to more things than they can handle. For a kid, sometimes a guiding hand is needed, and an ultimatum. As an adult it’s about drawing those lines yourself. It’s about being able to say ‘No’. It’s about understanding that you can’t always add more and still add value.

Sometimes the choice needs to be either/or, not both.

Unfashionable

I don’t have a lot of fashion sense. I never have. My sisters used to ask me if I was really going out the way I looked. When I got married I’d be heading out the house to go to an event and when I’d get down the stairs with my outfit on, my wife would just point up the stairs. Up I’d go to look in the mirror to figure out what wasn’t right and change. Sometimes she’d come with me to make suggestions. I’d listen and try to learn, but it was and still is a slow process.

Combine this unfashionable eye of mine with my complete dislike of shopping, and now, 24 years into marriage, I don’t own too many things I’ve purchased myself and my wardrobe is much nicer and easier to coordinate. But I still make choices that my wife and daughters suggest I change… and I usually do because they aren’t wrong.

I’ve seen this trend where people buy uniforms for work. They basically buy one colour of pants, then a single or up to 3 similar shades of shirts to wear every day. They just completely remove the guesswork from what to wear and they have just one outfit that they wear every day.

I would be happy doing this. I’d eliminate a choice that I don’t find easy to make. But that would involve shopping and I’m probably not going to do this any time soon. However if some time in the future you see me in the same clothes 3 or 4 days in a row, know that I’m not being unhygienic, I’ve just finally taken the plunge and reduced my wardrobe to a single or a few very simple options… but then again, my wife will still probably choose something else for me to wear. 😁

Priorities Versus Motivation

“Get your priorities straight.”

That’s a term you’ve probably heard at some point in your life. But more than likely it means, ‘your priorities don’t match mine.’ The thing is, it’s hard for people to all have the same priorities at the same time. Sure sports team members all want to win a game, but a player in a defensive position moving too far forward trying to score could jeopardize giving up a goal.

Even when the goal is the same people in different roles need to have different priorities. It’s easy to project your priorities on other people, much harder to recognize other’s priorities when they don’t match yours. Even when the motivations are the same priorities can be different. At this point, what’s more important, the priorities or the motivation? I think more often than not people look at what they think others prioritize and lose track of what the motivation is for their actions, and that creates unnecessary conflict.

If I could turn back time

My oldest daughter leaves for France this morning. She’s going to teach English for 8 months in two very small neighbouring towns on the west coast of Bordeaux. I’m so excited for her, especially since she was supposed to spend a semester abroad in her third year of university and that was cancelled due to the pandemic. She is finally getting the trip she was hoping for 2 years after planning to go. It will be a wonderful adventure for her.

When I did my first university degree, it was in International Development and I told myself, “I’m not going to consider this degree complete until I travel to a developing nation and experience what I’m studying.” That didn’t happen. I ended up spending two years working as a lifeguard, and coaching and playing water polo 6 or 7 days a week, then I moved from Toronto to Vancouver. I didn’t end up doing any major travel until about 18 years after graduation, when I went to live in China.

I live a pretty content life with very little I regret, but if I could turn back time and do one thing differently, I would have travelled more when I was younger. If I could give advice to a younger me, that’s the big thing I’d share… (well, that and buy Apple stocks😀).

I see some high school students excited to head to university and they know exactly what they want to do. To them I think, ‘go for it, good for you!’ But I also see kids that just don’t know what they want to do. For them I think, ‘take a year off!’ Still apply for university if you want, then differ for a year. In both cases, travel and see a bit of the world before settling down in a job.

I didn’t become a teacher until I was 30. I have told both of my kids, “If you finish your degree, travel for 2 years, work for a year, do a whole other degree, and then do a year’s work at something you really wanted to try before finally starting a career… you’d still be ahead of my timeline.” When I’m done my career, I will still have had close to 30 years as an educator. I tell my kids there is time for a career after you try doing a few things you really want to do. And who knows, maybe the adventures you go on lead to a career you truly love.

I’m lucky to have a family and a career that bring me joy, and I know that if I had travelled more, I might never have met my wife and had my two wonderful kids. So I still actually don’t regret the choices I’ve made. But looking back at my younger self, I’d say ‘travel more’ would be the advice I’d give if I could whisper to myself half a lifetime ago.

Making good choices

Sometimes there are big choices to make, and they are hard. Some things aren’t cut-and-dry and easy to determine that, ‘this is the best choice to make’. These big decisions are often literally about cutting away possibilities. The good and right choice isn’t always clear.

But there are other choices we make that don’t demand a lot of choice and energy. They are tiny moments of little thought, not big decisive moments… yet they can make a huge difference.

A car slows down in front of you causing you to break, then they put their indicator on just before turning. Do you aggressively attack your car horn? Do you swear and call the driver a foul name? Or do you take a deep breath, and go on your merry way.

You have an exchange with a coworker that doesn’t go well. Do you gossip behind their back? Stay angry all day? Go back to try to resolve the issue? Seek advice? Or even just move on, not allowing a small issue to grow larger in your mind?

You wake up and your morning doesn’t go as planned. Do you decide it’s just going to be a crappy day? Do something to make yourself feel better? Or just decide that it’s still going to be a great day despite the small issue that didn’t go as planned?

We spend a lot of time thinking about the big decisions in life and often don’t realize the 1,000 little decisions that we don’t think as much about matter just as much or more.

Often we build up habits of mind that make these decisions for us. I don’t want to curse at the idiot driving in front of me but when I pull up behind someone at a red light, in the left lane of a two lane road with no left turn lane, and then they put their left turn indicator on only after the light turns green, profanity escapes my mouth. I don’t even think about it, but then I drive away angry.

This isn’t a good choice to make, but it’s like it is made for me… decided in the moment without choice. Times like this are when good choices are hard, but healthy. Good choices sometimes need to be intentional. Good choices take effort when the choices in similar situations beforehand led to less than desirable choices.

We can build a good life by focussing on choosing better small choices throughout the day, and interestingly enough, this can help us choose the right path when the bigger, harder choices come our way.

You can’t pick 7

The next time you ask someone to rate something out of 10, tell them they can’t pick 7. Seven doesn’t give you enough information. If it’s an eight, it’s desirable; If it’s a six, it’s not. Seven may or may not be worth it.

So instead of letting the person come back to you with an un-definitive 7/10, force them to bump it up to worthy or bump it down to un-worthwhile.

Not sure if this is helpful? Then let me ask you: On a scale of 1 to 10, what’s this advice worth to you? … and of course, you can’t pick 7!

Actions, not words – Derek Sivers

I’m a fan of Derek Sivers. He’s someone who seems to have really figured out how to live life meaningfully and I think he lives a joyful life. Other people I follow live good lives, but I’m not sure they are truly happy. I think Derek is a rare kind of person that finds joy wherever he looks. He does what he wants to do, when he wants to do it, and is brutally honest with himself about what he really wants to do. I don’t think he spends a lot of time thinking, I really want to do ‘this’. He just decides to do it.

I’ve written specifically about him a couple times:

And I’ve mentioned him a few more times.

I listened to him on a podcast and this really hit a chord with me (related to his idea about goals, shared above):

“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.”

How often do we have goals or plans that we never get to?

‘I’m going to start this project after…’

And no matter what we say next, something else comes up to delay us.

Or, ‘I really want to do this but…’

And after the ‘but’ comes an excuse about not having time, money, resources.

Do you really want to do it, or is it just wishful thinking?

I wanted to do a daily blog for years. I started this ‘Daily-Ink’ in 2010, but I didn’t really decide to do it until 2019. For 9 years it was wishful thinking. Then I decided: it’s not that I want to be a writer, I am a writer… and the way to be a writer is to write every day. So, it’s not even 6am yet, and I’m done my daily write.

Actions, not words… Or in my case the action of consistently writing words. 😃

Negative conjecture

Part 1: The world is out to get me

I was fairly new to administration and I was dealing with a student who had parents who seemed to believe the entire world was out to get them. Everything that happened to them and their child was not by mistake or circumstance, or by choices made by their kid or themselves, these things were planned and designed to make their life difficult. In my dealings with them I too was part of the problem, I was an extension to the system trying to knock them down. So were the teachers and youth worker. We were all, in their eyes, conspiring to make their lives miserable.

Imagine living your life thinking and believing that you were a victim of the world. How would that impact your daily life? What would your thought process be when something, or in your eyes everything, doesn’t go your way? Imagine believing that everything that happens today is simply evidence of the continuation of everything bad that has happened before.

Part 2: The things we didn’t do

I spent a lot of (younger) years wishing I had taken up karate. My uncles and an aunt trained and I watched them. Now decades later they are instructors and leaders in their club back in Barbados. I was a tiny 7-year old kid when they started, and my mom didn’t want me getting hurt. Later, in high school, I took up water polo and that led me to some amazing experience that I wouldn’t trade for the world. Coaching water polo is what inspired me to become a teacher. I’m not sure I would have followed either path had karate been my thing as a kid. I no longer look at this as a regret.

How many people do you know that define the world by what they didn’t do, on what they missed out on… on what could have been. How many people imagine the life choices they didn’t take, and see that life as so much better than their own?

I remember an English teacher in Grade 10 who told us how he was good friends with Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, and how Jim asked him to join along on this new venture. This teacher told us he didn’t regret his choice, but it was late enough in the year and we knew him well enough when he told us this, that we could hear the regret and disappointment in his voice. Strange that this is just about the only thing that I remember from this class.

Regret, disappointment. These thoughts define some people. People who live in a world that could have been, and never will be.

Part 3: The things that never happened

How many scenarios have gone through your head after you dealt with a scenario poorly? There was the thing you did and said, and there were so many other things that you could have done, could have said. ‘I wish, oh how I wish I could have handled that differently’. But your imagination doesn’t stop there. No, you go over the scenario again and again. Each time something different, something better happens in your mind. Your mind is filled with events that never happened; un-lived experiences; fictitious, more successful experiences.

Epilogue

Today is a new day, with new choices and new opportunities. We are shaped by our past, but our past is not our present. We learn, we grow, we make new choices. The world does not conspire against us. New opportunities will present themselves. Our choices we make can be different and better than the choices we made in the past. We are better off living our lives with positive conjecture… The world will conspire with us, not against us.