Instagram or Well-Being?

In the midst of an electricity lab in class last year, a student and I somehow got on the topic of social media addiction (I can never remember how these conversations come up in class, and I’m grateful that they do). She shared that she finds Instagram not only a big waste of her time, but that she feels sad using it.

When I asked her what was sad about it, she gave the answers that we could all probably guess: her life doesn’t seem as interesting or worthy of documenting, people seem to often be inauthentic, and she’ll blink and a half-hour has gone by while she’s been staring at her phone.

Then I asked her what she would do with her time if she weren’t spending it on Instagram: what does she really want to use that time for? Practicing her instrument or sleeping. And the way she said it, I could tell that she thought it would be a really positive thing.

I’m sure I then made some suggestion about experimenting with giving it up, because, of course, we’ve all got our advice monster and I’ve only begun the journey to taming mine (I highly recommend this 14-minute TED talk on taming your advice monster).

I then forgot about our conversation, and a week or so later, she came into class excited to tell me that she had given up Instagram and it was great. She was sleeping better, practicing her instrument more, and she found herself generally a little happier.

I was blown away. Here’s a 14-year-old kid grappling with addictive behavior that she knows diminishes her well-being, yet with what seems like a snap of her fingers, she was able to transform the detrimental behavior and positively impact her own well-being.

I recently chatted with the student, now a sophomore, and she said that she uses Instagram occasionally, but that it doesn't have the grip on her that it once had.

How long has it taken me to be able to handle my detrimental habits and behaviors? How much suffering do many of us adults still go through when giving up a bad habit or trying to foster a good one? And this 14-year-old is taking her first steps into the realm of adulthood with a very real experience of the before, the after, and the how of shifting away from an unhealthy habit.

Last summer, my wife and I together read Atomic Habits by James Clear. We both found that the book offers very effective perspectives and strategies to form healthy and productive habits. We both had the thought while reading it, “Why didn’t we ever learn this before?”

Thanks for reading ❤️.

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3 Steps to Living with Integrity

Imagine being so clear and honest with yourself that the words you speak honor who you are at all levels of your existence, the intellectual, the physical, the spiritual.

Now imagine forming such a clear connection between your actions and who you truly are that each action you take is a tribute to the wonder of your existence and the existence of life itself.

That, to me, is the power and possibility of integrity, and I want all young people to learn integrity as a foundational tool in creating a world that works for all of us.

In my last post, Empowered and Unbounded, I shared my perspective on what integrity is and what it makes possible. In this post I share three steps to support you and your students in living life with integrity:

1. Get profoundly related to the present moment

2. Set an intention

3. Align your actions with your intentions

This post is longer than usual, and I hope that you'll hang with me until the end.

Step 1. Get profoundly related to the present moment: be honest about what’s actually happening.

Our experience in the present moment comprises two major parts: thoughts and sensations. Getting profoundly related to the present moment means separating what's actually happening from how we're interpreting or judging what's happening.

Getting profoundly related to the present moment means noticing whether we’re interacting with the person actually in front of us or if we’re interacting with our thoughts, judgments, expectations, or fears about that person.

It means noticing whether we’re responding to our kids, spouse, siblings, or students from a place of self-righteousness or a place of compassion and understanding.

It means being honest with ourselves about the pains, discomforts, desires, joys, and fears that we’re feeling in the different parts of our bodies and minds.

Integrity means staying in touch with what’s actually happening, inside and outside ourselves, here in this moment.

When I'm about to walk into class, I'm usually bringing in feelings and emotions either from my last activity or from my memory of how this class went last time. If I don't take a moment to feel out what's happening physically and to observe my thinking, my students are going to get a teacher grounded in the past, and my best teaching happens when I'm grounded in the present.

Step 2. Set an intention: give your word to something you care about.

Our word can be given to something big and global, or it can stay close to home and be very personal. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have identified an intention for ourselves, something worthy of our attention, focus, and energy.

Broad commitments to give our word to:

• Who or what do you care about?

• What matters to you?

Or short-term intentions that we could give our word to:

• How do you want to grow today?

• What are you intending for today for yourself or for others?

Just prior to class, once I've gotten connected to my present experience, I can now pick a couple words that serve as my intention for the class. Recently, I’ve been using the words engaged, compassionate, and at ease, or relaxed, curious, and in love. Sometimes I’ll focus on my broader commitments or goals: the well being of life. With students, unbreakable, untarnishable, and perfect has also been coming to mind for the last year.

Setting intentions is also a powerful thing to do before entering conversations or meetings. I don’t do it nearly as often as I could, but when I set intentions before specific conversations, those conversations always go better.

By the way, to give our word to something, we don’t actually have to speak our word for someone else to hear it. It can be in a journal, on a sticky note, or even just clearly in our minds. However, speaking our word to others can really add to our ability to honor it.

Step 3. Align your actions with your intentions: honor what you’ve given your word to.

Wherever I end up in class, it's so helpful to get back in touch with what matters, that thing that I gave my word to. When we have integrity, we treat the word we've given as a touchstone, a reminder of who we really are and what we're really committed to in this moment.

Acting with integrity means that our actions are consistent with the intention or goal that we've spoken. In this way, we honor our word, what we’ve given our word to, and the people and creatures whose lives will be impacted by it.

Following through and aligning our actions with our intentions can be really tough though. There are shelves of books at the library focused on habits and diets and motivation and goal setting and mindset and communication. That's so much more than we can explore in what I already hoped would be a shorter post! Fundamentally, though, living with integrity requires us to align our actions with our intentions and what we've given our word to.

Integrity can be a heavy term for some of us, one that implies discipline, sacrifice, service, and doing the right thing no matter what. When I remember that integrity is an access to well-being for me and others, though, the load really seems to lighten.

I LOVE teaching Physics and Computer Science, but I can think of few lessons more valuable than integrity for high school students to integrate into their lives.

Thanks for reading ❤️.

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Empowered and Unbounded

A student of mine has been engaging with my writing, and she asked me what I meant by integrity in a post from last week. While integrity is less a direct focus for me in my teaching than it used to be, it's still my foundation for living empowered and unbounded, especially in the classroom.

To me, integrity can be both a powerful access to fulfilling on my visions and goals as well as a daunting and boring topic that I'd rather ignore to talk about something else.

The exciting part: imagine having such a powerful level of integrity that the universe itself aligns around honoring your word. To say "I am well" and then to be well. To say "I am content, empowered, and unbounded" and then to feel it. To say "All people are at ease and in love with life" and to have it be so.

The first time I ever thought about the word integrity, I was about 12 or 13. We were at a school function, and an adult was wearing a jacket with "INTEGRITY" embroidered onto the back. Having observed how this person treated his own kid from time to time (as any of us can treat our own kids from time to time 🤦‍♂️), it occurred to me then that integrity was something you put on when you're out there in the world, but that how you acted behind closed, private doors wasn't as important.

Other than conversations about honesty and trustworthiness, I never came across any conversations specifically about integrity until my mid-20s when I took the 3-day Landmark Forum workshop. It was this workshop that introduced me to integrity as a powerful tool, and that workshop's perspective on integrity remains a strong influence on how I see integrity today.

Though I can talk about someone having integrity, I see integrity much more in our actions than as something we can have. A person has integrity when their actions have integrity. So integrity comes down to how we engage in the present moment, with our lives and the people and objects around us.

If a person has integrity, that person can be trusted to reliably act with honesty and courage in any situation. A person with integrity can be trusted that their words match the person's underlying values, commitments, and intentions. A person with integrity speaks words that honor who they are, then acts consistent with the words they've spoken to the best of their ability.

Integrity is a necessary condition to effectively align my actions with my goals, intentions, and passions.

Integrity is something that teachers so often poorly model for our students. It's not our fault, since most of us didn't get the best integrity lessons growing up either. But integrity offers us and our students the potential to positively impact our well-being and the well-being of others, so I think this is a worthy conversation in education.

In my next post, I'm going to offer three steps to becoming someone who has integrity.

Thanks for reading ❤️.

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Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.