Tag Archives: reflection

Big rocks

I remember a story about a professor who teaches students about dealing with all the problems and pressures in their lives. He brings a glass jar to class with some sand, pebbles, and slightly larger rocks. He describes these items as all a person’s problems and challenges, and the jar as the person. He tries to put all these items into the jar, starting with the sand, and they don’t fit. Then he starts with the pebbles, and again they don’t fit. Then he starts with the slightly larger pebbles, puts the smaller pebbles in afterwards and shakes the jar so that the smaller pebbles fall between the larger ones, then pours the sand in, which fills the empty spaces. Everything now fits. The lesson is to pay attention and take care of the biggest problems first and you make room to handle all your problems.

I think it’s a neat story, but I never really agreed fully with the message. I don’t think it’s healthy to always be trying to deal with the big problems you face first. Sometimes if you ignore the little problems for too long, they become bigger problems too. “Kill a snake when it’s small,” my grandfather used to say. And sometimes it’s in dealing with smaller issues that the insight comes as to how a larger issue can be solved.

But sometimes it’s easy to avoid the ‘big rocks’ by staying busy tending to smaller issues, and actually avoiding the bigger ones. That’s when the professor’s advice becomes wise. Kill a big snake before its too big to ever deal with… before it’s too big for your jar.

So when do you deal with the big rocks first? I think it’s an upside down bell curve that should drive your attention.

Imagine an attention graph on a scale from not thinking about something at all to always thinking/worry about something. When you are stuck worrying about a problem too much and, on the other extreme, when you are altogether ignoring that problem, that’s when it should be dealt with swiftly, putting aside other smaller issues. But you can’t spend your life only taking care of your big problems and feel like these big rocks are all that matter. No, they should only be a priority when they are bothering you too much, or when you are trying to escape them. At these points it’s time to face the big problems head on.

That doesn’t mean that you ignore them at all other times, it simply helps you determine when they should be the snake you kill… no matter how big it may be.

the spaces in between

I’ve never been to a session at a conference that has taught me more and been more engaging than the ‘spaces in between’ the sessions.

Connecting with distant friends and colleagues; Engaging conversations about teaching, learning, and leading; Topical discussions and meetings over coffee and meals; And getting to know bright people who have similar jobs but unique life and work experience that open my eyes to things beyond what I tend to learn and in my scheduled blocks of conference time… these are the moments that make a conference a rich leaning experience… it’s the spaces in between.

The happiness scale

Imagine a happiness scale from Depressed at the bottom to exhilarated at the top:

– Exhilarated

– Very Happy

– Happy

– Content

– Wanting

– Bored

– Unhappy

– Depressed

I think too many people get stuck expecting most of life to be spent on the high end of that scale and so when everyday life doesn’t meet that expectation, they end up unhappier than they should be… and this can spiral into disappointment and depression.

If you aren’t content with everyday events, then you are left wanting more. If your hobbies and interests only bring you joy when you accomplish something, and not in all aspects of the experience, including the challenges, or prep work, or practice, then the joy is fleeting.

In this TikTok, David Bederman describes ‘the surfer’s mentality‘:

Some people only find joy when riding the wave, and not also the paddling out to catch the wave. Some people compare their daily life to the best life of others shared on Facebook and Instagram. Some people don’t consider a chat with a friend, a laugh at a social media post, or an hour spent lost in an engaging activity as happy times. They perceive happiness as more than that. Happiness is fleeting.

Finding happiness in your everyday life is a way to tip the scale in your favour. A way to spend more time on the upper end of the scale, to not measure yourself as less than happy, wanting more, and feeling like less. Expectation of more than this leads to seeking greater peaks, like holidays, adrenaline rides, and unsustainable nights out of entertainment to pull yourself out of wanting more.

Are you waiting for special moments to be happy, or are you looking for happiness in every day life? Are you comparing yourself to others and what they share publicly, or are you seeking moments in the now that can move your daily life to being content with happy moments interspersed throughout the day?

Because the happiness scale isn’t sustainable if you always desire to move up the scale, that expectation leads you further down the scale more often than not. Instead, the happiness scale is sustainable when you find ways to simply be content, and let happiness find you when you are doing the small things that make life interesting, challenging, enjoyable, playful, and fulfilling.

Update

I found this: Why Having Fun Is the Secret to a Healthier Life | Catherine Price | TED

And I was reminded of this recent post: Big lessons from little ones

Press Pause

Ever wish life had a pause button… Wish that you could just pause the entire world and step away for a bit… then come back refreshed, and ready to deal with the day.

Just hit pause and go for a nap, catch up on email, take a long walk, add a half day to your weekend.

Would you rather a pause button or would you prefer a rewind option? Mess up an conversation with someone? Just rewind and try again. Maybe pause first, then rewind.

There are no dress rehearsals for life. No pause button. But we can still carve out time for the things we care about. We can find moments to pause; moments for pause.

If we don’t find those moments, then the days, the weeks, and even the years can disappear. We don’t have a pause button, but every day there are moments that we can seek out or extend. There are moments we can spend intentionally. Moments when we pause to think, to reflect, to laugh, to step away from being busy, so that the day doesn’t just get away from us.

We don’t have a pause button, but we do have reasons in the day to take pause.

A Quote on Judgement

“We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.”

I saw this quote and wondered who said it? I was lead by my search to Stephen Covey, “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.”

This made me think about all the things I have the good intention to say and to do, but I don’t follow through. Looking at this from the outside, there is no action, just unrealized intention. For example, I wanted to show my appreciation or write a thank you card, but never got around to it; good intentions, but to anyone else, no action. In fact, lack of action could actually be judged as lack of appreciation. My intentions were good but…

We very often don’t know another person’s intentions. We judge their behaviours and actions (or lack there of) and assume their intentions. And we know our intentions and don’t always see that our actions don’t represent what those intentions are.

This quote is a reminder not just to think about what another person’s intentions are, but also for us to think about how our actions truly represent our behaviours and actions to others. Are we living a congruent life where are actions demonstrate our intentions? Because good intentions are not enough if we aren’t expressing them.

Big lessons from little ones

We can learn a lot from being around small kids:

• The delight and joy they find in the smallest of things.

• The ability to adapt rules to find greater joy in a game.

• The freedom to use a toy or a tool in an unintended and imaginative way.

• The way they can be completely honest without malice, shame, or ill intent.

• The comfort that they feel with their bodies and their appearance.

• The easy way in which they share love and affection with people they care about.

• The curiosity and desire to know, to understand, and to question.

It’s a shame that as adults we have let some of these little life lessons slip away.

Updating my profile picture

When you live it, you don’t see it. Maybe you feel it… we are all getting older. I had my photo taken for work recently and realized that I look quite a bit different from my online profile pictures I have been using.

The one on the left is not from too long ago (2018 or 2019), but long enough that I’m no longer that guy. More grey, higher hairline, a few deeper lines. These things are beyond my control.

What is within my control is that I’m fitter than that guy. He had about 15 unwanted pounds on him and yet weighed less than I do now. I’ve lost the unhealthy weight and added muscle.

I can’t stop time, and my face will show my age in the coming decade much more than it did in the past decade. I accept that. But I’m working on being Younger Next Year, and slowing down the ravages of time on my physical and mental health. Part of that is not pretending I’m something that I’m not… so a new profile picture is something I plan to do a bit more frequently than every 3-4 years.

Moments in the day

Do you ever go through a day where every moment seems like you are getting ready for another moment?

You aren’t doing a morning workout, you are starting your day off with exercise. You aren’t working, you are checking things off your ‘To Do’ list so that you can get to the next item. You aren’t enjoying a meal, you are eating on the go because it’s lunch time and you know that you need to eat.

Take a moment… breath deeply… more than once… be still.

Now plan a moment in your day that is about that moment and that moment only:

A long hug.

A walk outside.

A phone call with a loved one, or a good friend.

A delicious snack.

A favourite song played just a little too loud with headphones.

A moment to breathe, to meditate, to fully appreciate your surroundings.

Take a moment, rather than just letting moment after moment slip away.

Unrealistic expectations

It has been over 2 months since I shot an arrow. No surprise that my session today went a little rough. It was going to be a total bust until I decided to halve my usual distance and start shootings at 10-ish yards rather than my usual 20 yards (18m). Then I was able to relax a bit more and focus on the finer details of my shot rather than trying to hard to shoot well at a longer distance.

I lowered my expectations of what I could do and suddenly I shot better… still not what I used to be able to do, but I could hit the 10-ring consistently enough to relax my focus on the target and pay attention to my shot process. When expectations are too high only disappointment prevails.

I realize now that I need to think of my workouts the same way. Recently, while cleaning out my garage, I spent some time looking back over old photos. These included ones from the Maccabiah Games in Israel back in ’93. I trained the hardest I’ve ever trained and was the fittest I’ve ever been.

Seeing these photos, I looked down at the small donut ring below my belly button and it got me feeling crappy. I was literally thinking over the past few days, “I’ll never look like that again!” And honestly, it was getting me down a bit.

But the archery session has helped me reframe this. I don’t need to be the fittest I’ve ever been at 54, I need to be fit for 54. Big difference. It’s not about having low expectations, no, it’s about not having unrealistic expectations. I’m not going to be 26 fit. I’m not going to shoot a great round in archery after taking more than 2 months off.

I will have fun with my archery and make myself a little better each time. I’m going to keep working out and taking care of my aging body by keeping it fit and healthy… and again, have fun doing it. I’ll set goals for myself, but I won’t set myself up for failure with unrealistic expectations.

I teach leadership not followship

It was my second year as a teacher and my Vice Principal pulled me aside late in Semester 1 and asked me if I’d be interested in teaching a couple leadership classes instead of Physical Education as my electives in Semester 2. I think another teacher was slated for this and it was a change he wanted to make. He told me that it would be a great opportunity for me because I would co-teach it on Day-1 with an experienced teacher, and then on my own with another class on Day-2. He made it seem like I’d be doing him a favour saying yes, but I thought I was the one getting a golden opportunity offered to me. And it was!

The teacher I got to work with was Dave Sands. Dave became my first mentor, and to this day one of my most valued friends. We meet weekly for walks and today we were talking about old times and I brought up how much this opportunity transformed my teaching career. I ended up doing my Masters thesis on Student Leadership, and a large part of my leadership philosophy was developed from this opportunity.

“I teach leadership, not followship.” 

This was a quote Dave often said to students. It was the mantra of the course, and something not just said, but lived. Dave would run activities and lessons that encouraged students to pull the lesson out on their own. And whenever there were activities run by the class, they were authentically student run. There would be a prompt, “Here’s what we need to do,” or “Let’s plan this event,” then students would design the activity or schedule, then after then event there was always a reflection afterwards.

Students ran the events. Students stepped up, tried new things, succeeded and sometimes failed… but they always had ownership, and always learned from their experience. When Dave left, it left a void that I felt I couldn’t fill on my own. I distributed the leadership of student leadership across other teachers and we developed an out of the schedule leadership program that about 1/3 of the Grade 8’s signed up for each year. As it grew, so did the distributed model of giving others leadership over different aspects of the program.

From my Master’s paper:

“Leadership is getting others to do What the group needs to get done, Because they want to do it.” …

A Working Definition of Leadership

Before being able to investigate what meaningful student leadership is or can be, there needs to be some consideration as to what leadership itself is. It is evident that any currently usable definition of leadership would in fact be very different than a usable definition from only thirty years ago. Senge (1990) sees the traditional leader of the past as the charismatic decision maker and/or the hero. In this view, myths of great leaders coming to the rescue in times of crisis perpetuate the view of leaders as heroes, and “they reinforce a focus on short-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systemic forces and collective learning” (p. 8). Senge sees current leaders in a different light, he sees them as, “designers, teachers, and stewards. These roles require new skills: the ability to build shared vision, to bring to the surface and challenge prevailing mental models, and to foster more systemic patterns of thinking” (p.9). These new skills require leaders to be thinkers and learners.

The quote I started this paper off with is an adaptation of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s quote, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” I adapted this quote several years ago to better fit with the times as well as to fit with my own ideas of shared leadership. The focus on a ‘top-down’ leader in Eisenhower’s quote was very appropriate for its’ time, however, today it is more fitting for a leader to be concerned with the group’s or team’s goals.

The quote, subtly but poignantly reworded, states, “Leadership is getting others to do, what the group needs to get done, because they want to do it.” Within this quote there is: a suggestion of influence, getting others to do a task; a suggestion of service, aiding the group rather than just the leader; a suggestion of inclusion, doing what the group wants; a suggestion of teamwork, working within a group; and, a suggestion of motivation or inspiration, getting people to want to assist you or the group. A lot of literature on student leadership focuses on the first three points, influence, service and inclusion. Literature focused specifically on either teamwork or motivating others, as principal themes, tends to relate to managers, primarily in the realm of business and not nearly as much in education.

In considering a definition of leadership that functions well when considering student leadership in a middle school, I think that leadership pertains to getting students to be of service to others, while teaching them to effectively influence and motivate others. This can be successfully accomplished when students work in inclusionary groups or teams that create and take advantage of opportunities to act as servant leaders.

Creating leaders, not followers. That’s the underlying lesson. Too often leaders run activities such that they are the lead and those around them follow. “Students we need to… and we need people in the following roles… and here is the ‘to do’ list… and …and …and.”

It’s more than just a subtle shift to change this to providing students with an authentic leadership opportunity.

Prompt: Here is the task/activity/opportunity. How shall we do this?

Activity: Authentically planned and organized by students.

Reflection: How did it go? What went well? What could have been better? What would you do differently if we did this again?

Empowering students. Letting them lead. Teaching leadership, not followship.