Who Am I Talking With?

A handful of years ago, I was asked to give a chapel talk at my school on bullying. One of my friends suggested sharing about how there are actually 6 people present when we’re in a conversation with another:

Well, it might feel like there are 6 people present in that conversation. Actually, there are just two people present, and the more we’re focused on what we’re thinking about ourselves and them, the less aware we are of either of the two people actually in the conversation.

Thought is infinitely creative, powerful, and beautiful, and at times it can distract us from the people we’re actually with or the world of life and color and shape and beauty always all around us. It honors others and ourselves when we focus more on the people actually there instead of the people we've constructed in our minds.

One trick that helps me is to repeat in my mind what the other person is saying; it puts my focus on them and their words instead of my own thoughts. It usually just takes a sentence or two to bring me fully engaged in the conversation.

As far as getting more in touch with who the people in that conversation really are: in addition to the subjects we already study in school, education can also be about developing an understanding of who we really are, fundamentally, beneath all concepts and thoughts about who we are. One goal I have for this summer is to develop and pilot a program for adolescents that does just that.

In the meantime, breathe a little bit, repeat their words in your thoughts, and grow to appreciate the people you’re with - this is an ongoing practice, and it's worth it in my opinion. After all, our thoughts will always be with us, but the people in our life may not be.

I hope you have a great day. ❤️

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The Gift of a Gap

In my first year teaching, a student of mine had been working on some organizational tasks in our class workshop during his lunch period. While I sat with a couple colleagues eating lunch in the faculty room, the student came in and asked a question; I had an immediate response for him and the kid left right away. One of my colleagues with me, my department chair, said that he was impressed by my decisiveness.

There’s something about decisiveness that feels and looks powerful to me. There seems to be value in knowing the right response, and there seems to be value in acting on it immediately, with little space between the stimulus and that response.

Recently, a different student of mine finished Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and he reminded me of a quote:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

In a high-stakes, high-speed situation, quick decision-making is very important. In a classroom, or when with our kids or spouse or other people that matter to us, quick decision-making can actually be detrimental.

The more in tune I am with my created intentions (described in Living with Integrity), the more quickly I can safely act. But we all nearly always have competing intentions within us, especially if we haven’t consciously created what our intentions will be in our interactions with others.

The remedy to this common problem of our actions not aligning with our best intentions:

1. Take a moment each morning to create your intention(s) for the day. This can take less than a minute, and I suggest writing these intentions down somewhere so you don’t have to keep them in your memory.

2. Take a moment prior to scheduled activities to create your intention for that activity. Before a meeting, before a class starts, before spending time with your kids, before any specific activity, think for a moment of who you’d like to be for others or what talents, skills, or commitments you’d like to foster or live from in these activities.

3. Take a moment, and put a gap between stimulus and response. Maybe take a breath, maybe count to 3 in your mind. Whatever it takes, put a gap between things that happen and your response. Allow yourself an opportunity to then respond from a worthwhile, created intention, and not whatever default intention your psychophysiology awakened in that moment.

In case you're looking for ideas, here are some of my go-to intentions: compassionate, curious, enjoyment, engaged, at ease, in action, patient, unconditionally in love, and fully alive.

Have an intentionally profound day. ❤️

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Our Invisible Intentions

A couple years ago, I spent a summer’s evening in a retreat with two friends. Through the exercises we participated in, I got deeply in touch with my emotions in a way that I never had before. I felt the fullness of love, anxiety, joy, and sadness, and words haven’t been able to get very close to describing those feelings completely.

Despite their limitations, words and other non-verbal communication are what we’ve got. So we communicate the best we can, we put in effort to understand each other, and some people we can really understand quite easily, and others are much more of a struggle. But we’re always communicating with more than the words coming out of our mouths.

This is part of the breakdown in the “do as I say, not as I do” method of instruction. And of course we teachers, out of good intentions, put care into the words that come out of our mouths. But what about the other things we're "saying" to our students?

Many momentary objectives can arise in the spirit of a teacher to usurp our intentionality, and we are often oblivious to these ulterior objectives. Here are just a few:

• Avoid looking bad. Most adults don’t like to show our ignorance, and adults “on stage” in the classroom are no exception. Many of us also want to look like we’ve got ourselves together, that we’re organized and always know what we’re doing. Many of us, since we were 12, have been committed to avoiding looking bad, and we’re not even aware of it.

• Force an outcome. We try to manipulate students to get them to conform in behavior or understanding so that we can move on with our lesson plans. We’ve got X amount of material to cover in Y number of classes, so pay attention so we can all move on!

• Make it and survive. Jobs can be tough, and no teacher training can prepare us for the wide range of personal and professional challenges that we face in the classroom. Making it through this lesson, this class, this block, this day, this week, this month, or this school year becomes a driving intention sometimes, and before we know it, we’re living only for weekends and vacations.

Ultimately, whenever our intentions deviate from a more noble intention that we’d be willing to share with others, what we’re really doing is avoiding responsibility.

We’re doing whatever we can to "make it," and we end up sacrificing the most important thing in our lives and ignoring (or harming!) the most important thing in our students’ lives: well-being.

The words that come out of my mouth are not the only communication that I’m making to my students in the classroom; we are always communicating non-verbally too. And among the abundance of classroom strategies to engage students, among the various conscious or unconscious intentions we can be operating from, there’s one intention, one focus, One Thing that stands paramount to our professional obligation as educators: foster well-being, our own and our students’.

Act from a place of well-being. Speak from a place of well-being. Live from well-being and with an intention to foster well-being. That’s what we adults need more than anything else, and that’s what our students need us to model and provide more than anything else.

Side bonus: teaching and learning content is much easier and enjoyable from a place of well-being.

Have a great week. ❤️

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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.