Digging Deeper

Yesterday I was getting some work done in a public place at school and a colleague walked by to chat. How was your weekend? Did you see the game? I always find it fun to catch up with this colleague.

Then I had an inspiration to ask a deeper question: what did you learn about yourself this weekend? I didn't think it was a great question at the time, but I knew I wanted to ask something meaningful and it's the only question that came to mind.

He and I then talked for 45 minutes about self-understanding, the nature of our experience, religion, God, and spirituality, and what we see possible for ourselves and others. I didn’t get the prep work done that I had planned on doing during that time, but I got something else that I really needed: I was plugged back in and reconnected to Source.

There’s nothing wrong with surface-level conversations. It’s how most of us connect with each other and it satisfies an important need. The territory is safe and we feel some level of confidence (well, if we saw the game anyway). But maybe every once in a while we can go deeper, even if only to explore a little bit. We might just find ourselves waking up a little more to awareness, life, and love.

Below are some questions to help us go deeper. It’s okay to start by saying, “I’ve got a strange question…” Perhaps even start by considering these for yourself:

• What have you learned about yourself recently?

• What are you working on about yourself?

• What’s a small thing that gives you a lot of satisfaction?

• If you could change one thing about yourself or your perspective, what would you change?

• What inspires you?

• What do you think is your biggest gift to the people around you?

• If you could give one gift to humanity, what would it be?

• What are a couple ways of being that you’d love to embody?

• What are some things you're grateful for?

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

Two Ingredients for Making Magic

There are two key ingredients to magical teaching, and these ingredients can be applied well beyond the field of education.

The first ingredient is that the magic isn’t in the teacher, it’s in the student. The more we recognize that there’s a creative, loving, and passionate genius within each of our students, the less our job becomes about getting somewhere in a lesson and the more it becomes about supporting students to unleash this genius. Once we realize that we all already have everything we need to thrive in life, we can simply respect, honor, and support the perfection already within ourselves and others.

The second ingredient of magical teaching is to adjust to the terrain in front of you, no matter what the map says (I’ve found this principle to be true with life goals as well). Teachers have objectives, intentions, and goals in mind when working with students, and these goals are like a beacon in the distance. When we create a lesson plan, we have expectations that the class will follow the plan as designed and we’ll arrive at the beacon of understanding together.

However, the actual terrain of the journey can surprise us, and we’ve got to be aware and willing to adapt in the moment. We need to adjust to the bumps, sinkholes, mountains, and rifts that show up along the way. All it takes is to be aware and willing.

Try these ingredients in your own relationships, whether you're a teacher or not. Trust me, they're magical.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

Curiosity Is an Access to Genius

Wil (not his real name) is likely the most inventive and intelligent person I’ve ever met. He's an engineer out of MIT who stayed home to raise the kids, and he volunteered to work with me in the engineering lab after school. For more than five years he would show up and provide engineering guidance and training to students (and me!).

The lab would be full of students working on various projects: robots, human-powered vehicles, CO2 cannons, electrolysis tanks, and particle accelerators and bubble chambers. Wil and I would talk and laugh and have fun together with the students.

Wil looks at problems from a completely different angle from the typical way of seeing things. Where my engineering solutions would often take the obvious path, his would be upside-down and backwards, and ultimately more simple, effective, and elegant than what I’d come up with. It was genius.

Eventually, Wil’s approach rubbed off on me a little bit, and I realized that though his approach was still genius, it didn’t take his MIT engineering degree to pull it off.

Wil shows up. Students would come with a question or a problem, and Wil would hear it out, ask a few additional questions to get clear on the challenge, and then guide students to seeing their own solution by asking even more questions.

In other words, Wil is exceptionally curious. He approaches every challenge as if he has no idea what is going on, and he builds a fresh new perspective on whatever shows up in front of him.

When we’re curious and engaged like that, the problems and challenges we face become much more interesting, and we’re also able to be much more creative.

It’s funny now to think about it - I always thought that Wil’s genius came from what he knew, but it actually came from his pretending in the moment that he didn’t know anything. When we don't already have an answer, we have a lot more room to be curious and creative.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️