Tag Archives: perspective

Facing a mismatch

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I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday morning. It wasn’t great. I had a vision for something I had planned to do in the future and I was suddenly faced with the reality that it wasn’t going to live up to the hype I had built up. I envisioned it completely differently to the reality of what it was. Now it has me questioning my plans I thought I had set. It’s not a huge deal but when this kind of reality sets in, it’s a bit of a wake up call.

It reminds me of a video I once made. It was called Brave New World Wide Web. I started building the slideshow and I had a Cure song, Just Like Heaven, in my head. It was going to be perfect, the long lyric-less intro was going to be an ideal opening. I would play the song in the car to and from work, and I couldn’t wait to put the video together.

Then it was finally time to sync the slides to the song, and it… just… didn’t… work. It was awful. I remember walking out of our little home office absolutely dejected. I’d built it up in my mind as the perfect marriage of song and slides and it wasn’t to be. A few hours later I found a song that couldn’t have worked better and all was good.

Yesterday morning I had another one of those unexpected moments. In the end, it’s not going to be a big deal, but in that ‘it just isn’t going to work’ vision-doesn’t-match-reality moment I felt like I was slapped in the face. It was a wake up call I didn’t know I needed.

It’s time to start thinking about a plan B. I’m metaphorically looking for the next song, one that will work. I found one for my video, I’ll find one for this… I just didn’t know until yesterday that I’d have to have an alternate plan. The great news is, I’ve got time. No rush, just a wake up call that there’s a mismatch between my vision and reality that needs to be sorted out. I’m glad that I see it now, and not a year from now.

Time under tension

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One of the principles of exercising to develop muscle is time under tension. How much time are you working the muscle for?

Learning is similar. For how long are we challenging ourselves before giving up?

Resilience is similar. We cannot strengthen our resilience unless we face things that are challenging us for longer than we could previously tolerate.

I think sometimes we focus too much on making experiences easier, when what we really need is to create greater time under tension.

Fuelling my disillusionment

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A few months ago I wrote the following in response to a LinkedIn post, and then saved it in my drafts. The problem is, I didn’t copy the link to the original post properly. Furthermore, if I recall, it didn’t really answer the question that was posed. It was tangentially connected but not completely on topic.

I’ve edited my comment slightly, and I want to share it since I’m wonder if ‘it’s just me’ feeling this way?

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

It’s the doing more with less that fuels my disillusionment.

  • Greater and often unrealistic expectations of parents and universities.
  • Greater student social-emotional as well as educational needs.
  • Greater demands to prevent litigation (more documentation, more protection of data, more health & safety requirements… all ‘necessary’, but time consuming.)
  • Greater demands and expectations from the Ministry of Education, and Worksafe BC.
  • Greater costs – pay hikes, heating costs, perishable supplies. Even with no cuts to education, less money gets to the classroom.
    I could go on. I’ve watched my role shift from educational leader to middle manager of an educational machine. I feel like a shield trying to redirect and manage the above impacts away from teachers so that they, rather than we, can do great things with kids.

Still an important role but a lot less personally rewarding.

Am I the only principal feeling this?

Appreciating time

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As I approach the age of 58, it’s not only clear that I’ve lived more than half my life, I’m approaching the point at which, if I’m lucky, I’ve got about 1/3 of a life left. That’s not a sad statement, it’s just the reality of the genetics I’ve been dealt.

It’s a wonderful reminder of how precious life is. It’s as wonderful reminder to pause, to appreciate tiny moments, to find a reason to smile, to laugh, and to share special moments with others.

When we find moments in our day to appreciate, the day has been worth spending. When we go through the motions of the day in order to get the day done, we’ve simply wasted the day. Are 100 wasted days worth as much as 25 meaningful ones?

And so counting the days is not as important as valuing them. We need to appreciate the time we have such that if today was going to be our last day, we can say that it was well spent. Stack a few hundred or a few thousand well spent ‘last days’ together and you’ve stacked up a life worth living, no matter how much time you’ve got left.

Little shifts for little things

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She never puts the cap back on the toothpaste.

He never puts the toilet seat down.

The kids never put their shoes in the front hall closet.

I could go on, there are so many little things that family members do that can irk us. None of them are a really big deal, but they rub us the wrong way and perhaps even anger us. We might think them as thoughtless acts. We might even think they are doing it just to bother us… the thing is, they aren’t.

My wife, Ann, has a problem shutting cupboard doors. We joke that it’s genetic, her sister does it, and one of my daughters does it too. I’ll walk into the kitchen and one or two cupboard doors will be left open. It’s not an occasional thing, it’s a very regular thing. And when I see this, do you know what I think?

Ann was here.

That’s it. Nothing else. There’s no anger, no need to correct the behaviour. No lecture.

Sometimes it gets a smile out of me. Sometimes I try to guess what she went into the cupboards for?

What it’s not is an anger point, or a reason to lecture or correct the behaviour. This might seem like a little thing, but like I mentioned, this happens all the time. Just imagine what my life would be like if I let it bother me?

So what are some little things that others do, that you let bother you? How much better would your life be if you just let it go? That little behaviour isn’t being done to bother you, so if it does bother you, who is the one that has the problem?

The many lives we don’t live

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After an argument with a loved one doesn’t end well, you re-live the argument with alternate endings.

After an angry exchange at a traffic light, you yell a profanity while sitting alone in your car. No one heard you, but you are now two lights away and still thinking about the incident. Replaying the anger, and the things you’d like to say to the other driver’s face, as if it mattered now as much as when the exchange actually happened.

After a witty exchange with a coworker, you think up other funny quips that you could have said. Nothing you will actually say later, just things that would have been great to say in the moment.

How many lives do we live in our minds, which never transpose to reality? Re-imagined scenarios, re-lived moments, re-invented futures. None of which will ever come to pass. Never lived in the real world… yet very real in our minds.

Echoes getting louder

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The idea of being in an echo chamber suggests that you are surrounded by people, media, and information sources that are constantly reinforcing your beliefs… without exposing you to opposing viewpoints unless arguing convincingly against those viewpoints.

I’ve discussed, a number of times, my concerns that we are living more and more in dichotomies, where sides or factions are so diametrically opposed, no one can hold a stance in the middle without being considered to be from the opposing viewpoints. You either live in an echo chamber or you live in an opposing echo chamber. Because the voices in the middle are ‘othered’ and so not part of any stance or view that can be snuck into an echo chamber. The voices of the middle don’t get to echo. And so the echo chamber narrows, keeping exposure to outside views securely away.

The echoes are getting louder and it’s getting easier to listen to them and nothing else… which ultimately leads to us spewing the same echoes we hear. So it’s up to us to seek diverse stances and viewpoints. It’s up to us to actively extend our searches for reliable information. And it’s up to us to question the reliability of our sources. It’s either that or voluntarily be just another voice echoed in a narrow echo chamber that seems to be getting further polarized and biased every day.

Adversity and memory

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Last year we took students camping and it poured rain for most of the night. I recorded the sound of the rain from inside my tent around 2am and it sounded torrential. This year the weather was perfect: Hardly a cloud in the sky, warm, windless, and rainless.

I just came back from the trip. It could not have been better. It was well planned, the weather cooperated, and the students were awesome. The only kid ‘issues’ we had the whole trip, and I use the term ‘issue’ loosely, was speeding the slower kids up on our walks. That’s hardly an issue to deal with. There were zero discipline issues.

Looking back on the two trips, students getting flooded out of their tents, and getting soaked to the bone on our walks last year are things our students think back fondly on. The adversity didn’t ruin the trip, it emboldened the memory, and our students look back fondly at it.

Here’s the interesting thing. If I had to choose, I’d absolutely prefer the amazing weather we had this year over camping in the rain again. But for the students that went both years, I’d bet that in a few years they will remember the stormy night much more than they’ll remember last night.

No one wants to voluntarily go through adversity, but sometimes adversity is what galvanizes a fond memory. And getting wet on a camping trip, while uncomfortable, isn’t trauma inducing. In fact it can be character building. All that said, isn’t it interesting that I’d still pick a night like last night over a repeat of the rain storm we had last year.

Walk the talk

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Question to ponder: Would you hire a fitness coach that wasn’t physically healthy?

I had an interesting conversation today with a buddy. It was about the dance between personal bias and expectations that isn’t an easy conversation. Reflecting now, the main issue was a question of how important it is that someone helping you is ‘walking the talk’.

Question to ponder: Would you hire a swim coach who can’t swim well, but really knows how to coach?

Where is the line that you personally draw when it involves coaching and advice, when it comes from someone that doesn’t necessarily follow the same advice?

Question to ponder: Would you hire a marriage coach who has been divorced twice and was not in a stable relationship?

I think these are messy questions with no clear line to be drawn. Ultimately it comes down to personal biases. I’d sooner accept a swim coach who has a crappy stroke and doesn’t swim well themselves, before I’d hire an obese fitness coach or a marriage coach with a poor relationship history.

Question to ponder: Would you hire someone to help you quit smoking if they smoked? Would your answer change if they had a 90% succeed rate when most other strategies and coaches max out their success rate at under 50%?

In the end we need to recognize our biases and follow our instincts. Whatever line we draw in one area of our lives might not be the same line we draw in others. It’s not a question of if we have biases, we do. It’s a question of where we draw the line, and are we happy with our biases? Because in the end, if I’m putting time, effort, and/or money into a coach, or counsellor, or taking advice from a friend, I’m the one that needs to feel good about it… given the biases I hold.

Question to ponder: How important is it that the coach, counsellor, or confidant giving you advice walks their own talk?

So vast

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This morning I watched a video that explained that to get to the next galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, it would take 2.5 million years travelling at the speed of light. Imagine that, travelling 300,000km per second for millions of years. And then you’ve only reached the first of trillions of galaxies… Not billions, but trillions of galaxies in our universe.

It’s so hard to make sense of these numbers. I understand what they mean, but I can’t really comprehend the scale. For example, let’s break down the idea of traveling 300,000km in a second. That means travelling 18 million kilometres in a minute, or 1,080 million kilometres in an hour, or 1 billion & 920 million kilometres in one day.

And at that speed it would still take 2.5 million years to get to the next galaxy.

I understand what the numbers mean, I just struggle to fathom the scale in a way my brain can grasp beyond saying, ‘That’s really far,’ and ‘The universe is really, really big.’ No matter how much I cognitively try to grasp how ‘really big’ our universe is, I know that in reality it’s magnitudes bigger than I can comprehend. This is truly mind boggling.