Tag Archives: perspective

The June rush

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I want to say that I’m not going to miss the June rush, but I will. I always chuckle a little when people who are not in education say things like, “You must be winding down to summer now.” It’s much more like ‘ramping up’ than ‘winding down’. There is so much going on in a school in June, and adding retirement events to this just makes it feel a little overwhelming.

Today is a crazy day for me. We have next year’s incoming students visiting for the day, followed by our final PAC meeting, followed by a district retirement dinner. From the moment I hit the gym at 6am until 8pm tonight I don’t have a moment to spare. That said, it should be a really fun day too.

That’s the thing about the June rush, it is simultaneously great and exhausting. It’s a month of dichotomies. It’s I time of event-after-event, but each one of those events is a bit of a celebration. There is excitement about graduation, and ending the year, and there is the sense that the pace is all too much. There is the excitement of changes to come, and the sense of sadness of things ending.

Here’s the thing about the June rush, it’s easy to get stuck in the busyness, in the rush and the planning of event after event, in the checking off the last time you have to do something, and in the melancholy of knowing things are coming to an end. Meanwhile, each event is a gift. Each event is an opportunity to spend time with students and colleagues, and to celebrate the year that was. Yes, June is really busy, but within that busyness is hidden many moments to appreciate.

Cultural perspective

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I shared a few stories with a colleague yesterday about my time living in China. I spoke about the T.I.C. moments we had there… an acronym that we foreigners created for the term, ‘This is China!’

TIC moments had one of two distinct qualities. Either it was something that we experienced which would have been simple to do back home, but seemed impossible to get done in China, or vice versa, an experience that would never happen back home but was surprisingly simple to do in China.

Some of these things led to being flabbergasted and frustrated, others led to delight, laughter, or joy. I’m not going to share any specifics now. I have shared some in the past and I’ll share more later. Why I’m bring this up is to reflect on how valuable that experience was. To move to another country and to experience these unexpected moments of delight and frustration provided a perspective of how different cultures are.

It allowed us put some perspective on our own culture in a way that made us less judgmental and more open. It helped us realize that differences are to be celebrated, and that common sense is not always common, but kindness is. TIC moments were eye-opening experiences. Sometimes they made us feel like we entered a whole new world, other times they reminded us that deep down we are all the same.

Travel in general does that to you. It opens your eyes to how others live, why they believe what they believe, and yet helps us see the commonalities we all have. Cultural perspective requires experiencing the world from constructs outside your own culture. Travel allows you to recognize your biases, your norms, and even your privilege. And in the end your perspective on the world and all its inhabitants gets richer, along with your appreciation for others who come from different cultures.

Time gaps

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I saw a social media post that was addressed to Gen X. It shared that:

The movie ‘Stand By Me’ came out in 1986 and it was about life in 1959. If ‘Stand By Me’ was made now, in 2026, it would be about life in 1999.

What??? That seems crazy to me. They would both about life 27 years before, but the gap from ‘59 to ‘86 seems so much greater in contrast compared to ‘99 to 2026. I couldn’t imagine someone trying to write a script about the nostalgic times of ‘99. Other than the panic around Y2K, what would the young friends in the movie experience ‘back then’ that would differentiate them from now, except maybe smart phones?

Is it only my lived experience that makes me think this way. Would someone my age back in 1986 feel about 1959 the same way I feel about 1999? I’m not sure, but I’d say ‘No’. The time gap of the movie seems so much longer than it would if we went back from today.

Just fish in a pond

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Last night I was looking at some koi in a pond and I had a little epiphany. I was watching them swimming around and I realized that they are probably aware that there is a world beyond their pool, but they have no idea how big that world is? That’s when I realized… We are all just fish in a giant pond.

We are blissfully unaware of so many things beyond what our senses show us. As an example, there are frequencies of light and sound we can not see or hear. Our eyes have blind spots, and there are animals that can react to danger far faster than we can to the world around us.

Beyond of our limited hardware, there is the issue that we can’t find where in that hardware our consciousness lives? Far further beyond that, we live in an expanding universe and we’ll never get to know what lies beyond the visible universe.

Our pond is bigger than a koi pond, but the unknowns ‘out there’, beyond the metaphorical pond we are aware of, is significant. And while scientists discover things what we can see and touch, we really are just like the koi… living in a world that we know has so much more than what we are limited to observing by our hardware and our perspective.

Leadership blindspots

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We all have them, things we don’t see, even when we are looking right at them. We all have things that, over time, we get comfortable with and accept, that we would not accept if our perspective was fresh. We even have good habits that make our team better, but which also leaves us with blindspots because we focus on the progress we are making and miss the (hidden) costs of that progress.

This leaves us with two challenges:

The first being that we don’t know what we don’t know…. We don’t see our blindspots.

The second challenge is that when a blind spot is revealed, it’s often hard to accept. There’s guilt felt in not being aware of it earlier, and there is also the realization that you’ve got to move out of your comfort zone to deal with it… or ignore it and face even more guilt.

It’s an unglamorous aspect of leadership. No one is perfect, there are always things to improve, and whether you see them or not, whether you deal with them are not, you know there are blindspots… and having to face them is not easy.

Unzipping my lips

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After writing my last post, I recognized something that I haven’t thought about in a while. Being in a role as a principal of a public school, I’ve held a responsibility to ‘hold my tongue’. There are many blog post ideas I wanted to share but couldn’t. There are many points of view I would have loved to have expressed that I chose not to. I’ve had a responsibility to my position that has prevented me from being controversial.

Not too long ago I learned that a tiny reference to something that wasn’t even central to the point of a post I wrote was brought to the attention to one of my superiors. That person mentioned it to me, to make me aware, but did not ask me to change my post. I appreciated both the heads-up and the fact that I wasn’t asked to change anything I had written. In fact, I’ve never been asked to change my words on a blog post (though admittedly I was for both a Facebook post and a retweet many years ago).

While I’ve never been asked to change a blog post, I have on this blog, and my Pair-a-Dines blog, written posts that have ‘walked a fine line’, but I don’t think I’ve ever crossed that line. I didn’t cross that line in my last post either, but I did write something that could be interpreted as showing a patronizing attitude of superiority, with no real attempt at being humble. That’s not usually my writing style.

Reflecting now, I recognize that retiring and no longer having a role in a school, and a larger district, I am probably going to be able to be a bit freer in my choice of topics, and the stances I choose. No, I’m not going to be taking my metaphorical gloves off, but I am going to be able to unzip my lips a bit where I might have kept them zipped in the past.

I’m not sure how this will unfold yet, but at this moment I’m looking forward to being a little freer with my thoughts and ideas than I have been in the past… with less concern about my words misrepresenting others whom I might represent. Don’t expect instant controversy, but after retirement don’t be surprised by me being a little more loose lipped about things that I might have been more careful and cautious to share in the past.

Missed the point

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One of the most challenging things about being a leader is watching a simple miscommunications lead to big issues that could have easily been avoided. It’s watching people come from different points of view, all with the same objectives, all wanting the same goals, but approaching the issue believing that the end goal is something they want but others don’t. Or just failing to see a similar perspective from a vantage point other than their own.

I’ve tried to live by the mantra, ‘The meaning of your communication is the response that you get.’ …Putting the onus of responsibility on myself when my message was not received the way I intended it. Yet I too still mess up. I have to take a step back and question where my error was? And when I don’t see an error in thinking, I can still often see an error in my communication.

But ‘error’ might be too strong of a word. It might only be a mistake after the idea was shared and received. Only after an unexpected response am I able to look back and see how my words could be misunderstood, how my message could be perceived differently than expected. This is the work I try to do.

However, when the miscommunication happens before I’m involved my entrance is even more delicate. When the temperature has risen before I enter, it’s often hard to get others to see that their communication did not align with their intended message. It becomes an issue where even to suggest some responsibility for miscommunication can seem like blame, rather than a means to reach a resolution. And so my communication becomes even more challenging. If my point is missed then I’m not being supportive, I’m not helping the issue, I’m missing the point.

And if that’s the message I’m giving off, then that’s the meaning of my communication, and the undesired response is my fault. If I’m not willing to take that responsibility, then I’m not modelling what I’m expecting of others.

How you react

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Epictetus wrote:

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”

The phrasing I prefer is:

‘It’s not what happens, it’s what you do that makes the difference.’

This isn’t original to me, it’s simply the way I prefer to think of the same idea. I think I got it from an NLP course or book back in my early 20’s, and it has been a bit of a mantra ever since.

Yesterday was a great example of this. Driving home, we were an hour away from the border in northern Washington, after heading down to Seattle to watch my daughter’s boyfriend play in his first professional Ultimate game. The game was great, and everything went wonderfully up to this point. Then my engine light went on. Then I started to feel a vibration in the steering that quickly developed to a full front end vibration. The next 5 hours didn’t really go as planned.

We pulled off the highway at the next exit and there was a bit of smoke coming out from under the hood. I’m about 1,000 kilometres overdue for an oil change, so we checked the oil, which was very low. After adding more we headed back on the highway and two short exits later we pulled off again and called our road side assistance insurance number.

The call took almost an hour, no local mechanic shops were open, none of them had Sunday hours, we got ripped off paying way too much for some roadside vendor burritos, we had no way home, the first shop our car got taken to was closed, out of business. And I would definitely be carless for most of the coming week, not even knowing the cost or timeline to get my car back until some time on Monday… if we are lucky.

Here is the thing, all four is us, me, my wife, my daughter, and her boyfriend, took everything in stride. I didn’t even notice this until the drive home when my daughter mentioned it. She said, “Considering everything that happened, we all handled it pretty well.” And we did indeed.

Tempers didn’t flare even when we disagreed on what to do next, or when we waited two and a half hours for a tow truck when we were told it would arrive in an hour. When we changed our order for food and the math of the new price didn’t math, we all greed we were hungry and we’d just enjoy the food even if it was overpriced. Whatever came our way was dealt with, no whining or complaining, simply dealing with things, in a neutral or positive way, as they arose… and in the end, a few things did work out for us.

The tow truck driver problem-solved for us and ensured our car got to a reliable place that he vouched for. The burritos were delicious. We got picked up by my sister-in-law who drove over an hour to pick us up, and longer to drop us home before going home herself. And while contemplating riding my bicycle to work tomorrow I remembered that my daughter was picking up a used car she purchased today and her current car is in working order, so I’ve got a car while we figure out what will happen to mine.

Still, this was a less than ideal end to the day and week. We didn’t get home until after 11:30 last night. I still have a car to pick up that’s at a shop I’ve never been to, an hour into the US after getting to the border. I have no idea what the cost will be? But we could have had a miserable experience and instead we had a bit of an adventure. Hopefully my car repairs won’t be too costly, but I’ll do my best to take that in stride too.

High contrast lives

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It’s amazing how differently people live in the world. Growing up in Barbados and moving to Canada in the late 70’s, I faced a fare bit of culture shock. This is quite a different experience than a student at my school who has only ever left the province to go one province over, and hasn’t even been to the USA, just a 30 minute drive away.

But even that contrast isn’t comparable to a friend who grew up in a village with no electricity or running water, who now lives in a gorgeous home a couple towns over from us. She shared how her first husband was embarrassed by her when they went to a big city for the first time and she was frightened to go on an escalator. She’s younger than me and she has lived in worlds that seem 100 years apart.

This exposure to different worlds extends beyond travel. I spoke to a 91 year old man today and he shared how his father never once hugged him, and so he made sure that his kids always got hugs. Some people break the trauma cycle, others get stuck in it. Again, the contrast can be so extreme.

We walk around blindly unaware of what challenges people have faced or are currently facing. We see kids acting out and blame them for their outbursts, unknowing of what challenges they face at home. We fall into patterns in relationships that are affected by past relationships both in positive and negative ways.

Some people are exposed to experiences you or I could not imagine. Some of them do so with poise and grace. Others struggle and deal with more than we could handle, and might not be able to handle it themselves.

People do the best they can with what they’ve got. We don’t always know where they have come from, or what they’ve had to deal with. We don’t see the contrast, and so maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to judge.

Simplify rather than shrink

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I don’t remember where I heard this, but the concept has been on my mind recently:

Simplify rather than shrink.

The idea is that retirement doesn’t necessarily mean becoming less, but rather doing less. No I won’t be going into work anymore, and the titles and responsibilities will be less, but that doesn’t mean who I am will shrink. It’s way better to perceive the changes as simplifying my life. I’ll be able to wake up later than 5am, I won’t have to rush my morning workout, or race to get my writing done. On the contrary, I can work out for longer and write more.

I don’t have to rush the making of dinner, or choose a meal based on speed of preparation rather than preference. I won’t have to give up the quality and healthiness of a meal for convenience. I can also commit to some projects mid-week rather than waiting for the weekend.

This isn’t a shrinking of what I do, it’s expanding the things I want to do, while also simplifying my life. It’s removing the commitment to a job that can sometimes take 10 hours of my week day and creep into weekends, (if not in workload then at least in mental energy).

This frame of simplifying rather than shrinking is one than I think works for me. It’s a metaphor that allows me to get excited about my upcoming retirement. It allows me to see retirement as a wonderful opportunity to expand the use my time on things that allow me to be more of who I want to be. There will be no shrinking, there will definitely be some simplifying.