Tag Archives: improvement

Subtle regret

It’s a price I pay as an educator. It doesn’t matter how many positive things happen in a school year, I always feel a little regret at the end of the year. I wanted the year to be more. I wanted it to be better. I wanted to make a greater contribution. I wanted to have more impact.

Twenty five years into my career, and I’ve felt this every year. This year it stings a bit more because my health issues made me miss a lot of school. But I also know this is just me being hard on myself. I know that if things were 100 percent better and I hit every goal I had, I would still feel subtle regret that I didn’t set my targets high enough.

Yesterday a grad came by with flowers, and a card, and a card from their parent. Both cards shared thanks for four amazing years in a school that gave them an opportunity that they felt they couldn’t get anywhere else. That’s heartwarming. And yet this morning I’m lamenting about what else could have been done.

This isn’t me feeling depressed. This isn’t me fishing for compliments. It’s me wondering who else feels this at the end of the school year?

In reality, I don’t want this ‘subtle’ feeling to go away, (that said I also don’t want it to be more pronounced). I actually want this small feeling at this time of year. It doesn’t sadden me as much as it drives me. It makes me think a bit about the potential of next year. It fuels me and inspires me to think bigger, to be excited about what’s possible. It’s kind of like the feeling of coming in second in a competition, you aren’t thrilled, but you had a god season, and now you are excited about next season.

Maybe it’s possible to garner that excitement without the subtle regret? Maybe it could happen where you feel like you won the season and you want to create back-to-back winning seasons? Perhaps that’s possible. But unlike a sports season, a school year doesn’t have a trophy, and there are always things about the year that could have been better.

So, I’ll take the subtle regret. It won’t make me sad, but it will make me want to make next year better… and I really believe it will be.

Making adjustments

This week I was talking to a grade 9 who wanted to do some research on how students perform on video games depending on the kind of music they listen to. We had students do this in our early years, with a driving simulator done in silence, with classical music and heavy rock. It can be a well done experiment, or it can have way too many variables and not truly measure anything or provide meaningful results. It’s hard to measure only the thing you want to measure.

I recently received my bow back, and today I shot for only the 3rd time in a while. Nothing feels normal and while my scores aren’t awful, they aren’t where they should be. The challenge is that I’m needing to think of too many things and my thoughts get in my way. I need to be patient, make one adjustment, and then shoot several arrows before making another adjustment. I’m splitting my focus. I’m adjusting too many variables and it’s not helping me. And as a result, I’m not feeling like I’m improving.

It will get better, I just need to shoot 1,000 more arrows… that’s been my archery mantra for a while. The challenge is not making too many adjustments at once along the way. If I keep doing that, it’s going to take a lot more arrows to see the improvements I want to see.

Incremental Improvements

For about 5 weeks now, I’ve been recovering from a shoulder injury. It’s nothing too serious, and I think it was brought on by hours of shovelling snow then doing some wide-arm chin ups for my workout the next day… I put together two activities I seldom do, and I overdid it. I recently wrote about how my physiotherapist stopped weeks of pain in one session. I saw him a second time last week and he put me through a regimen of exercises that I’m to do over the next 3 weeks until I see him again. Although he was able to quickly stop the pain I was dealing with, he thinks that it will be another 6 weeks before I’m able to do everything that I could do before the injury.

This is the hard part of injury recovery. Progress is slow and nothing comes easily. But if I don’t put the time and effort in, I delay the recovery time. Day-to-day the results are not visible. Yesterday felt less strong than the day before, today will hopefully be different. When this is the experience, it doesn’t feel like I’m getting better. I have to put that aside, focus, and keep my regular routine up, including pushing myself to work my shoulder, while also not overdoing it.

We are often enamoured by the quick fix, the easy answer, fast and obvious results. But these quick rewards are not always available. Sometimes it’s the slow incremental changes that make us better, stronger, and more resilient. Sometimes we need to work through things slowly and properly in order to see the results we really want.

It doesn’t always seem glamorous, but the day to day grind of doing things well, with positive intention, and dedication can be the key to success. Sometimes it’s not about what we can do to quickly fix a problem, instead it’s about what we can do consistently over time that brings results. Staying positive and keeping the end goal in sight is important. This isn’t always easy to remember when the results we want come from incremental improvements.