Category: Mindset

Detached, Distracted and Disillusioned? Regain Control Of Your Boundaries

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Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20

Detached, distracted and disillusioned.

There have been times in my life when my career was happening to me.

It seemed that the control over the direction, intensity and pace of teaching and leadership was out of my grasp. This lack of control and agency coincided with times when I suffered the most with poor mental health, and I was detached, distracted and disillusioned.

The change in my career — I became an education consultant and now run my own business — pushed me to develop boundaries around my work time.

These self-authored boundaries were (are) even more critical because I could work from anywhere, and it was easy to take the laptop into the kitchen and answer the email from the school excited to start a partnership.

Work did not have the same physical pattern as teaching, and it took on a different type of rhythm and cadence, unbound from a timetable.

Work did not have physical premises, and to this day, I have always worked from home. The lines and thresholds intertwined.

Looking back on my teaching life, I can see that the distinction of boundaries was just as blurry. I took work home, and there was always something more to do, weekends engulfed in planning and other spreadsheet related leadership responsibilities.

Do What You Love Until It Kills You

There is that phrase that you are lucky if you can do what you love because it doesn’t feel like work. The downside people don’t speak about is how boundless this can become.

A never-ending vista of possibility that excites terrifies and induces tension, in a heady mix of simultaneous endeavour.

We are victims of Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.

To counter this, establish clear boundaries that give you cues to align with.

  • What is essential?
  • What are my priorities?
  • When am I overstepping the mark?

Here are some strategies that resonate with me you might have a go at adopting.

Strategies To Help You Regain Control Of Your Boundaries

Say No

This strategy has been a work in progress for me for a decade, but I improve all the time. The key is to understand the most fulfilling work to make a better decision when opportunities arise.

It is much harder to say ‘ no’ if you are unclear about your Northstar, how you have the most significant impact, or what you truly care about.

“You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage — pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically — to say ‘no’ to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.”

Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Shut The Door

One of the first pieces of advice about working from home after leaving the classroom was from serial educational entrepreneur Ben Barton.

“Find a place that allows you to shut the door on your work.”

We have all noticed the physical location as work has come home during these troubled times.

By creating a physical boundary at home, I could walk away, take a break, move to another place for a different activity and ultimately close the door on ‘work’ at the end of the day.

“No is a complete sentence.” — Anne Lamont

Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20

Control Your Calendar

I block out periods in my calendar for writing, research and sometimes for reflection after workshops or intense periods of client work. For this weekly email, I often block the time.

A difficult tactic for teachers and educational leaders to apply because there is so little scope for change in work patterns.

Once again, though, we can abstract a deeper insight about purposeful time and intentional work to help and instruct us. Try on some of these questions for size:

  • Which time of the day or week are you most open to new ideas and insights?
  • How do your disposition and mental energy change throughout the day?
  • For every face to face meeting, do you have an equivalent amount of time for reflection and to process the experience?
  • When do you get to create?
  • Look at the time you spend at home or work and consider the categories of activity. What proportion is operational, relational, creative, research, exploratory, learning, teaching, preparation etc.?

A critical insight I have learned is that we need to be intentional and proactive in organising our time.

Wrestle back control of your calendar.

Share Clear Expectations

You see this all the time with the email Out of Office reply — I will be slow to respond until I return if it is urgent.

The opportunity is to use the auto-reply email strategy when we are in the office to help set clear boundaries for focus and communication.

There is, of course, this strange assumption with email communication about the response time and what is deemed polite and acceptable. Our appetite for instant messaging does skew this expectation considerably.

One of the best examples I have seen with email expectations was in the signature line. It stated the times of day when the responder checks their inbox.

I only check my emails at 930am and 330pm

Whether it is in meetings, emails or how you speak with colleagues, setting clear expectations about what is appropriate for you is proactive — you control the pace and timing of your activity, not someone else.

Your Talking Points

  • What opportunities do you care about the most?
  • Reframe your situation to understand what you can control.
  • You cannot hold people to expectations that are not shared.
  • What are you saying no to, so you can say yes to what motivates you?

Time To Move On From The Battle Between Productivity and Presence

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The collision of commitments caused by COVID restrictions highlights our priorities. What we once thought was important dwindles in our estimations. 

The structures of life are stressed and challenged, which reveals what we value and what remains true.

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Photo by travelnow.or.crylater on Unsplash

I know you grapple with the ‘great struggle’ of our times, the ‘ultimate juggle’ of professional and personal commitments intertwined. Or perhaps it is the equilibrium between productivity and presence, as Maria Popova describes it.

Of course, we are talking about our work/life balance. I endeavour to update my mental models around this concept, and I want to share some progress.

You will be pleased to see we begin on a practical footing. Your first step to updating your mental model for professional and personal commitments is a ‘find a replace’.

Find what: balance

Replace with: cycle

Yes, replace all.

The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way. ~ David Whyte

Let’s move from seeing this as a binary or opposites to a cycle of change and inquiry.

What could a cycle of inquiry look like?

Here are five phrases to reflect, adapt and take action (repeat). I summarise and adapt the work of researchers Ioana Lupu of ESSEC Business School in France and Mayra Ruiz-Castro of the University of Roehampton in the UK.

Ioana Lupu and Mayra Ruiz-Castro

1) Pause and denormalise.

  • What am I sacrificing?
  • How are they impacting my personal life?
  • What is currently causing me stress, unbalance, or dissatisfaction?
  • How are these circumstances affecting how I perform and engage with my job? 

2) Pay attention to your emotions.

  • Do I feel energised, fulfilled, satisfied?
  • Or do I feel angry, resentful, sad?

A rational understanding of the decisions and priorities driving your life is important, but equally important is emotional reflexivity — that is, the capacity to recognise how a situation is making you feel. Awareness of your emotional state is essential to determine the changes you want to complete in your work and your life.

3) Reprioritise.

  • What am I willing to sacrifice, and for how long?
  • If I have been prioritising work over family, why do I feel it is important to prioritise my life in this way?
  • What regrets do I already have, and what will I regret if I continue along my current path?

4) Consider your alternatives.

  • Are there components of your job that you would like to see changed?
  • How much time would you like to spend with your family, or on hobbies?

Before jumping into solutions, first, reflect on your work and life aspects that could be different to better align with your priorities.

5) Implement changes.

Ioana Lupu and Mayra Ruiz-Castro describe two different action settings.

  • a “public” change — something that explicitly shifts your colleagues’ expectations
  • a “private” change — in which you informally change your work patterns, without necessarily attempting to change your colleagues’ expectations.
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The key takeaway is not the phases — you can create whatever suits you — after all, it is a simple inquiry sequence. You know this cycle already.

What is critical is the change in your mental model from balance to cycle.

Change starts with your mental models and the language frames you use. It is not a balance +/- it is a continuous reflexive process of review and improvement.

Your Talking Points

Beyond the critical questions highlighted above, here are some further provocations:

  • What assumptions are you holding on to?
  • Why does the balance mental model not work for you?
  • What will it take to shift to a sustained level of practice?​
  • How do other people’s expectations of you create pressure?
  • What are you going to stop doing to make this work a priority?

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Change your thinking, change your mindset

Mindset, ThinkingPublished onUpdated on3 Comments on Change your thinking, change your mindset

A maxim that I have been testing, applying and thinking about a great deal over the last few years is that “nothing changes unless mindset changes.” On reflection, admittedly it is a little extreme, however it does present an urgent (and often much needed) provocation regarding the way we are thinking about learning in schools and other organisations.

Einstein has become a veritable one man maxim generator as people mine his missives and printed articles for quotable quotes. His reference (in the image) to the need for changing our thinking, altering the routines and habits of thinking that were present in creating the problem, to perhaps solve it, makes a lot of sense to me.

Thinking Wild and Free

In fact it gives us license. Changing mindset takes time, for many it is a long process of practice change coupled with ongoing coaching and reflection binding it all together. We don’t just wake up in the morning with a new mindset. Those habits and dispositions are baked in. I read today how long it takes to create new learning habits, on average at least two months for new habits to become automatic behaviours.

Thinking routines and activities can be picked up and used more flexibly. Although someone may have a particular mindset or disposition, thinking routines can still be practised and activities used. Rinsed and repeated.

Changing our thinking might just change our mindset.

To underline the importance of mindset or disposition on the work we embark upon and the relationships we have Bill O’Brien, the late CEO of Hanover Insurance pointed out:

The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.

Perhaps he is referring to the disposition or thinking condition of those present, their mindset. We can have all the plans or ideas we like, but unless the mindset is synchronised, nothing changes, or we are at least limiting our chances of success.

Otto Scharmer refers to the lack of awareness of this interior condition (mindset) as a leadership blindspot. Something to explore further, not simply how reflective we are as leaders, but also how well we know the influence of our own disposition, and those of others around us, on our projects and ideas,

Get Out of the Swamp

Another logical and confronting part of Albert Einstein’s challenge is the conclusion that we know more now than we did when the problem was generated. We need to change our thinking to adapt to this new information. Dr Terry Cutler piqued my interest with a reference to conventional wisdom being the enemy of an innovative culture:

William Blake reminded us – in chilling words – that the person who does not alter their opinion in the face of new knowledge is like a “stagnant pool which breeds reptiles of the mind”

So if times have changed, we need to ask ourselves some key questions:

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I recently asked my newsletter subscribers about their biggest challenges in changing other people’s thinking habits. One of the biggest obstacles was resistance to change, people actively choosing not to engage in new thinking routines, persisting in defence of a particular problem generating mindset.

Let’s not beat around the bush, these ‘reptiles of the mind” are very much part of the problem itself. This touches on some of the intricacies of the work of culture change and relationship centred development. Learning is a complex and wonderful thing and sometimes it is hard to discern how much influence people have on the conditions for learning (+/-).

Don’t Expect A Paradigm Shift

An example, just as a thought experiment, might be that a class of Year 6 children are poorly behaved during lessons with a particular teacher. The behaviour has formed a discernible pattern and seems to be associated with, and in reaction to a highly prescriptive and didactic approach to teaching from the teacher. There is a mindset at play here. The notion of planing creative learning activities, and spending less time talking at the kids is an alien one for the teacher. Something to be guarded against. “Why change?” comes the defensive play. What would you do to help the teacher and the class?

Start with empathy.

  • How much do we understand the mindset of those in this situation?
  • How can we move to a closer appreciation of the truth of this experience for those involved?
  • What situations are similar to this and how might we draw on those experiences to inform our decisions here?

Dig deeper. Complex problems like this one are rarely anything to do with the surface signals. 5 Whys is a great activity to explore to help dig deeper when used in support of other data gathering.

  1. Why are children behaving poorly? They are not engaged in the lessons.
  2. Why are they not engaged in the lessons? They are not doing enough thinking for themselves.
  3. Why are they not thinking for themselves? There is too much teacher talk.
  4. Why is there too much teacher talk? Lessons are imbalanced towards lots of a didactic teaching method and this is poorly differentiated
  5. Why is there this imbalance and poor differentiation? The teacher has been designing learning on their own for a long time and has not had the same chance to work collaboratively with others, and have their work critiqued and reviewed.

A couple of things to share about this scenario. First of all the disposition (of the teacher) is not suddenly going to change, we don’t get out of bed and suddenly all is reversed remember. So maybe we need to defer the paradigm shift expectation for one associated with the way we are thinking about the design of learning. Sure these overlap, but by changing the thinking routine, in this case through more collaborative planning, perhaps the situation will change.

Intentionally Creating Problems

My son pointed out that maybe when you create maths problems it is an exception to what Einstein is saying. This was affirmed by fully grown adults too on Twitter who shared a similar opinion. I wonder if it is something to do with how intentional the genesis of the problem was, along with the level of complexity the problem has.

Complex or wicked problems rarely involve single answers and are the product of a similarly complex, turbulent crucible of conditions. This would be true for coral bleaching as it is for poor collaboration in an organisation. In my book what Albert, let’s call him Albie, is referring to is the level of thinking needed for complex problem solving. Problems that are created in conditions defined by disparate and multiple dispositions pulling in different directions perhaps.

I wonder how much our intentions play a role here as well. We rarely intentionally create problems at work and at home (hopefully) and so it is with a lack of awareness that problem conditions set in. An increased awareness would be a good example of a change in thinking that might lead to a solution. For the teacher example above this may also be true, just increasing awareness of too much teacher talk may help to resolve things (in the short term at least).

Intentionally creating problems suggests a level of awareness of choice, causality and consequence. You might expect this awareness when solving such problems too. So maybe we need different types of thinking when we didn’t intend for the problem to occur.

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If I return to my original reference, “nothing changes unless mindset changes”, through writing this post it has helped me explore the notion that changing our thinking in aggregate might change our mindset. It has been good to define those key questions for unpacking problem conditions which I hope you find useful.

Second hand courage is still courage

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Have you ever felt like you might not be able to face it? Sometimes you just don’t have all the energy that you need to get through. It is OK not to have all the answers. There are times when we fall short of the line or just lack that spark we need. That’s OK. It was during 2010 and early 2011 that I realised I was suffering just such a deficit.

My career seemed to be happening to me and I felt helpless to some of the issues I was facing. I tumbled from one urgent/important item to another. I was out of balance. During my time in schools I had never had to deal with compromise. And here it was. With such an energy deficit I had to ration where I put my efforts. I wanted to be the best classroom teacher I could be and at the same time develop as a school leader. But compromise stretched its tendrils around both endeavours. This toxic time eroded my mental health and I suffered.

There were days when I had to stop the car on the way to work and take a few deep breaths.

It wasn’t my own courage that pushed me on. It was the second hand courage of people close to me. Their unwavering support helped steady my nerves, their energy topped me up. Also through some teary discussions I managed to get some distance and realised that it wasn’t me. It was OK. The situation I was in could change and I could change it.

If you are in that struggle consider these things I learned. Surround yourself with people who can share their energy and courage with you — their courage is still something that can carry you. Find perspective by discussing things with someone who will understand your experience. Plot your way out, find a course that puts you back making decisions about what is next.

Learning in Perpetual Beta

28 Days of Writing, Learning, MindsetPublished onUpdated on1 Comment on Learning in Perpetual Beta

 

For today’s post I thought I would explore a little more deeply the themes and overlapping thinking surrounding my previous post about a Mindset of Failing. In particular I’d like to unpack this concept that learning is and always should remain in perpetual beta.

It is actually a considerable challenge to get perspective on the completeness of our work with students. I am not referring to when projects end or when we have finished that piece of artwork with them – the year long (sometimes much longer) development of learning relationships is often hard to wrap ourselves around. Since leaving the classroom I have experienced quite finite projects that have a short timeline and stuff you have to get done. I still find this refreshing.

Perpetual Beta = Prototyping Disposition

vIn an earlier post this month I referred to the mindset we need to take towards the things we create and the way we learn. It is not just about junk modelling or computer aided design or 3D printing or physical building – a disposition towards prototyping means we:

  • Are committed to the expertise and ideas we might gain from others and don’t just simply rely on our own perspective.
  • Believe in the value of feedback and how critique can move our ideas forward.
  • Engineer as many opportunities for feedback as we can as, early as we can.
  • Are willing to share what we create when it is extremely, painfully incomplete.

When a piece of software is being developed it has various stages it goes through, depending on the scale of the product of course. Beta is a time for testing, as defined below:

Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. It generally begins when the software is feature complete. Software in the beta phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performance issues and may still cause crashes or data loss. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing. The process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release and this is typically the first time that the software is available outside of the organization that developed it.

Perpetual beta is when this state is extended, sometimes indefinitely, a web service or software product remains in constant development with feedback and testing driving new feature releases. A product remains in perpetual beta.

What does learning in perpetual beta mean?

The links here with the way we think about learning and feedback in particular are quite strong. In my post about the Mindset of Failing I pondered on the mental resilience of tennis players compared to other athletes. Losing points is regular and failing is part of the back and forth of a tennis match, very different to other sports. The post was commented on by Pam Hernandez who remarked that:

This made me think about how we traditionally provide feedback on student learning which is not unlike the analogy to football. I’m thinking American football in this case and getting an A on assignment is much like scoring a touchdown. It’s not uncommon to see teachers use sports analogies and comment “Homerun” or “Touchdown” on good work. I like the idea of rewarding effort along the way and making it okay to make mistakes along the way and be rewarded for the learning. It’s a different mindset for parents, teachers and students. (Pam Hernandez)

And it is here that we have the biggest opportunity to shift the way people are thinking about failure and failing. It is no small feat mind you. There are cultural and ethical stances people have that influence their perception of mistakes and failure in learning. We need to help the whole learning community appreciate this positive prototyping disposition. Learning in perpetual beta is all about continuous improvement with an emphasis on engineering as many opportunities for feedback as we can.

Take a look through some of these other posts from my this blog about assessment and feedback and plan to take some action:

Pic: failure is cool by Steffi Reichert