A beautiful day is all you need to motivate you to get out into the garden and today was a bright sunny day - the light just filled my head and it felt great. I resolved to have another go at the pathway I am making in the woods (its been a couple of weeks since I made a start on it) and spent several hours chopping at brambles and cutting branches off trees. But manual labour creates great space for thinking and amongst the scratches I thought what a powerful metaphor for living making pathways is. I am designing it as I build it. I know roughly the direction I want to go 'working with the grain' of the woods but the detail emerges as obstacles are encountered like half buried tree trunks that make me alter my route. I can't do it without the tools I have - spade, saw, pick axe. It involves a bit of pain and discomfort but opening up the lovely new spaces make it all worthwhile.
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For a long time I have pondered setting up a Linked-In Group for Lifewide Education but never got round to it even though I know it is in the interests of LWE that I do it. 'Pondering' seems a more comfortable word than 'procrastinating' which according to Wikipedia means the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of lower priority, or doing something from which one derives enjoyment, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time. Sadly, I think I'm often guilty of this.
According to Freud, the pleasure principle may be responsible for procrastination; humans do not prefer negative emotions, and putting off a stressful task until a further date, is enjoyable. So as someone who seeks out joy that sounds plausible. The concept that humans work best under pressure provides additional enjoyment and motivation to postponing a task. Some psychologists cite such behaviour as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. Other psychologists indicate that anxiety is just as likely to get people to start working early as late and the focus should be impulsiveness. That is, anxiety will cause people to delay only if they are impulsive. Again, if I'm honest I do put things off until I can't put them off any longer and I start to get a bit agitated. Sadly, my post does not fall into the three criteria for behaviour to be classified as procrastination Schraw, Wadkins, and Olafson namely it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying.[4] Similarly, Steel (2007) reviews all previous attempts to define procrastination, indicating it is "to voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay." Procrastination may result in stress, a sense of guilt and crisis, severe loss of personal productivity, as well as social disapproval for not meeting responsibilities or commitments (I like to think that none of these things applies to the level at which I procrastinate). These feelings combined may promote further procrastination. While it is regarded as normal for people to procrastinate to some degree (well that's a relief) it becomes a problem when it impedes normal functioning. Chronic procrastination may be a sign of an underlying psychological disorder. Such procrastinators may have difficulty seeking support due to social stigma and the belief that task-aversion is caused by laziness, low willpower or low ambition. I like to think that a degree of procrastination can be an advantage. It must be the case when you are trying to juggle many balls and keep progressing along many fronts simultaneously. Time spent in doing something that enables you to make a contribution or make progress on one front might be viewed as procrastination from another angle but actually it all contributes to the bigger picture of achievement. And perhaps at the end of the day its the way we maintain our positive emotional spirit. A little digression can help stoke the fires for another tussle with something that is tough and not so enjoyable. I find procrastination can be overcome with a trigger and this week I was talking to NC about marketing LWE and I felt I couldn't defend not having a Linked-in group so I did it. And what's more we have seven members within 24hrs. Far more than our facebook page!! LIFEWIDE EDUCATION LINKED IN GROUP Now I enter the other reason for procrastination - I know its going to consume my time and energy to make it work! Schraw, Gregory; Wadkins, Theresa; Olafson, Lori (2007). "Doing the things we do: A grounded theory of academic procrastination". Journal of Educational Psychology 99: 12. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.99.1.12. Wikepedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination#cite_note-3 A few weeks ago I drew attention to a new book I had read called The
Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, written by husband and wife team Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer. Their book discusses how even seemingly humdrum events can make huge differences in employees' emotional and intellectual well-being and their involvement in and enjoyment of their work. According to their research, the single most important factor is simply a sense of making progress on meaningful work. Their research also shows that people who feel good and positive about their work are also likely to be more creative and to take more risks in trying out new things. How we feel about our work has a strong influence on our inner work life - 'the confluence of perceptions, emotions and motivations that individuals experience as they react to and make sense of the events in their workday' (Amabile and Kramer 2011:20). 'Inner work life is inner because it goes on inside each person. Although it is central to the person's experience of the workday, it is usually imperceptible to others. ...part of the reason [for this] is that people try to hide it' (Amabile and Kramer 2011:21). According to psychological research, the three processes that affect performance (and influence inner work life) are: perceptions about what is happening (thoughts - maybe impressions or well developed theories), emotions (or feelings - both sharply defined reactions and more general feelings like moods) and motivation (a person's grasp of what needs to be done and their drive to do it). What struck me about these ideas about our perceptions, feelings and motivations at work, was their relevance to our daily lives that are not necessarily to do with work. We do have an inner life that for the most part we keep hidden from others and that inner life does affect the way we see the world and interact with it. And that sense of making progress is something we want to do whenever we take on something new or we want to achieve something regardless of the context. That sense of making progress also inspires us to try to do more and to try and be more adventurous and creative. Amabile and Cramer identify seven major catalysts for making progress and when looked at from a lifewide perspective they seem to be relevant to any achievement or goal driven activity in life. These factors are listed below together with some commentary relating it to lifewide development. 1. Setting clear goals: People have to understand what they're doing and why they are doing it. Lifewide development is predicated on the goals that people have in different parts of their lives. The personal development activity plan invites people to identify their goals and to say which aspects of themselves the person would like to develop in order to achieve their goal(s). 2. Allowing autonomy: People need to know have to the autonomy in order to enable them to reach their goal in the way they believe is necessary. Lifewide development is predicated on the idea that individuals are responsible for their own development. In their own lives they have the freedom to chose how to react to the situations they encounter or create so personal autonomy lies at the heart of the developmental process. 3. Providing resources: The resources have to match the project and have to be available when they are needed. Lifewide development requires individuals to create their own resources or structure the environment to enable them to achieve their goals. Alternatively, people put themselves into environments where the resources are more likely to be secured - for example into a formal education or training environment to access teachers and learning materials. 4. Giving enough time—but not too much—to complete a project. Deadlines are important, but only if employees understand how the deadline benefits the mission. "Extreme time pressure is bad for creative productivity, but low-to-moderate time pressure is good." Lifewide development involves learners managing their own lives and prioritising the times they have for different projects. They have to manage their own time and allocate sufficient time to achieve their goals. How time is used in a flexible but productive way is one of the important dimensions of self-awareness cultivated through the lifewide development award. Setting time scales in open-ended life projects is often not possible - by their nature they go rolling on. But setting timescales around particular tasks that have to be accomplished (like searching for and booking a holiday) is something that we have to do all the time. We call it 'prioritising'. Juggling lots of balls and deciding the timing of when we have to focus on a particular thing. Here the ideas of 'deciding what to do' and 'making a start' would seem to be relevant. 5. Being able to find help with the work. People feel inhibited if they don't feel comfortable asking for support or, worse, if they feel that others are deliberately blocking necessary information from them. One of our most important resources is the help that other people give us be the family, friends, work colleagues or anyone else who we feel has the potential to help. Lifewide development is formed around the idea of a community that helps other people to learn - 'it takes a village to raise a child' - it takes a community to help an adult develop themselves. 6. Learning from both problems and successes and not being blamed for trying and not succeeding Lifewide development is all about learning through your own life experiences - good or bad. Often the more challenging experiences we encounter do not work out as we thought they might work out and therein lies important learning. The reflective process that lifewide development promotes, and the conversations it fosters between mentors, peers and members of the community are all intended to encourage people to learn from their experiences and to share their experiences so that others might offer their perspectives. Trying things that are not successful can lead to negative emotional states that can restrict our ability to learn. The importance of being able to change such states - perhaps through rationalisation or analysis of what went wrong might help to mediate negative emotions. 7. Allowing ideas to flow: Good managers know when to shut up and listen and not interfere. Valuing your own ideas and finding ways of bringing them into concrete existence is an important part of being and becoming the person you want to be. Lifewide development values participants' ideas and encourages and supports them to make them flow and overcome obstacles that stop them from flowing. The book also details the four nourishers necessary for a healthy inner work life: respect and recognition, encouragement, emotional support, and, finally, affiliation—any action that serves to develop mutual trust, appreciation, and even affection among co-workers will nourish a healthy inner work life. These nourishers are all important to the concept of lifewide education, learning and personal development and we actively search for recognition and feelings of being valued, we enjoy being encouraged and trusted, and we seek affiliations through our need and desire to belong to family and friendship groups and communities. Lifewide development respects and values participants' commitment to their own development and through the Lifewide Development Award (LDA) provides recognition for their efforts and the capabilities they demonstrate. 'Encouragement' 'lies at the heart of the LDA and also the mentoring conversations and the idea of a supportive community. Similarly, the role of mentor and peers is to provide emotional support and the very idea of lifewider community is all about engendering the idea of belonging to a social group that is supporting personal development. Amabile T and Kramer S (2011) The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press My activities this week have been mainly focused on three areas of my life - my family, my work (ChalkMountain book project) and LifewideEducation (launching our Award).
1 Chalk Mountain - Last week I talked about how difficult it is sometimes to make a start. The chapter I have been writing has been a struggle over a long period of time. I put it off and put it off. I did bits here and there and generally hated doing it which is very unusual for me when the task involves writing. But eventually, when I couldn't put it off any longer, and having missed my own deadline twice, I did knuckle down and did it and the result was okay. At least it got us to the stage where we can see where to go next with it. This was in complete contrast to the experience I had writing another chapter the week before which was a joy and just flowed from my mind... I am not sure I learnt much from this struggle but I did get valuable feedback on both chapters which means I can now shape them to make a better fit with what the institution wants.. So the learning is reinforcing what I already know about the need for feedback in order to produce work that is useful. 2 Lifewide Education - My biggest achievement this week was to launch the Lifewide Development Award on the 28/09. I spent time preparing a slide show for the introductory talk and gave the talk to students on the MA Human Resources Management course at Southampton Solent University. I have worked for a long time to reach this moment and done much work to create the guidance and the website infrastructure. It gave me a real sense of satisfaction in talking about what we are doing and explaining the strong positive ideas that underpin the practice. 'Making' the slide show was enjoyable and I felt creative. It resulted in some useful materials to help me explain the background, purposes, structure, process and tools underlying the scheme. I realise that this slideshow is an important tool and I can see how I might produce a podcast for the website from the materials. I think this was an example of 'learning by making a tool'. It's always hard to judge what participants are thinking but my sense is that they found it interesting and I am hoping they will want to participate. In putting the materials together I came across the old African proverb - it takes a village to raise a child and recognised the wisdom in this and its value to LWE as a concept. It is a great metaphor for thecommunity-based enterprise that will have to underlie the Award if it is to be successful. I'm delighted that the on-line Community Forum I established two weeks ago is working really well and I hope that we can draw in the learners to share their experiences. 3 My third area of activity relates to my family.. At the weekend my wife and I took our daughter to university. Not surprisingly she was apprehensive and anxious moving away from home for the first time. We had prepared her as best we could and she had prepared herself by spending three weeks in France - her first independent holiday. After an emotional farewell we left her to get on with it. A week later she tells us how hard it's been - surprisingly she is 'having to juggle loads of things' and 'it's been so frustrating spending three days trying to get logged on to the university system' and 'everywhere is so big and it's easy to get lost' and 'the buses don't come and I spent an hour waiting for one in the rain'. This is why going to university is good for you - it's a nice (protected) wake up call to the real world after years of timetabled familiarity.. My oldest daughter is very much in the real world with one child of 5 and two month old twins and a husband in America.. So I spent some time trying to help.. I was even left for 2 hours by myself with them - that was quite an experience and only filled me even more with admiration. But at least I can feed them both at the same time now and I am growing in confidence and experience of how to look after them.. Incidentally, she is also two thirds through on OU degree trying to fit in the assignments around babies and no sleep.. Its quite humbling... So an interesting week in which I think I have achieved in three areas of my development plan.. Learning in passing -I clicked a Linked-In Learning without Frontiers link to a blog by Gaurav Gupta http://agoodschool.blogspot.co.uk and discovered a lovely little blog site called the Good School site..In it I found the it takes a village to raise a child proverb and I contacted the writer (an Indian) with an invitation to write a short piece for Lifewide Magazine which he is doing.. I feel its a good example of useful knowledge and relationships emerging by just following links. Putting the first mark on the paper is a scary thing but I know once I get going it's not so bad. The psychological barrier we have to confront when we make a start can be very hard to overcome. I recently spent 6 or 7 weeks prevaricating over a
chapter I had to write that I knew was going to be hard. Sadly, when I eventually started it was hard and I find it very easy to put it to one side and start (and finish)something else. Not a good habit I know but I have managed to convince myself its part of my creative process and that because it's at the back of my mind (actually playing on my mind!) I'm still working on the ideas. So my question is do other people suffer from this problem and if they do have they learnt any strategies for dealing with it. Generally once I get going my attitude changes and I become more positive so something obviously happens in the mind once a start has been made. Saturday 15/09 - my mums birthday- 86 today Today I have a good example of making a start. One of my goals in my current development plan is to create a memorial garden for my first wife Jill. Immediately after she died in 1999 I spent 3 or 4 months building a water garden. It gave me a lot of comfort and the physical toiling under a hot sun helped me work through my grief.. Since I moved house I have felt guilty that I have not created a physical space for her. But it's one thing saying you are going to do something and another to do it. Anyway its a lovely sunny day and I have been in the garden chopping down trees. I decided to move one of our benches into the woods.. We have 3 acres of woodland and apart from the paths it just runs wild.. As I was carrying it down to the woods I decided I'd like to put it in the middle somewhere and as I started looking the idea of the memorial garden came into my head again.. There is a sort of drainage channel through the middle with lots of reeds and in spring there is a swathe of forgetmenots.. which flowers in early May - the time Jill died... I know my daughters also share my delight in the forgetmenots so I decided that the naturalistic 'garden' just had to be there.. so rather than prevaricate any more I worked out a route from the existing path, cleared the bigger logs and drove the tractor in to make a start on the pathway.. Standing back from the particularities of the situation I think my goal is to create something that I, and my children will value. I had a vision of what it will be like- pretty and natural like she was and surrounded by wild woodland but in the more open spaces where the light comes shining through and the wild flowers grow in spring. While my vision and enthusiasm was still in my head (and ignoring the other jobs I was in the middle of) I began creating a pathway towards achieving the vision.. I know its just a start, and there will be a lot of hard work ahead, but it feels already as if I am a significant way towards my goal. I took some photos before I started so I can see the changes I make. I feel quite positive about it having made a start. Sunday 16/09 Knowing I had a busy day ahead of me I got up at 7am and went down to the woods and spent several hours laying out the pathway. It was laborious work cutting through fallen logs, lugging fallen trees to line the pathway and trying to dig through the chalky rubble to fill in some of the hollows. I fell over several times as my foot caught in the brambles and got stung by nettles. Altogether it was a sweaty exhausting process but I could see the progress I was making so that spurred me on. I could see that although I had a rough idea for the direction of the pathway and the detail was designed as I went in order to miss trees and stumps that I hadn't at first appreciated were there because they were overgrown. It made me feel bad when I realised that the 4' wide pathway was going to destroy a lot of plants in the middle part of the new pathway. After thinking about if for a while I decided that I would only use the lawn mower in the middle part and have a narrow pathway through the reeds and bracken. I recognised that this was a better solution. Monday 17/09 I should have been doing other things but I spent a couple of hours in the woods. It was hard work filling in valleys and fissures in the path and there is a lot of this to do before I have anything like a proper footpath. When I'm walking in some out of the way place I often think of the people who must have made the path originally. Making paths for future generations of people to follow seems to me to be a special task in life and it can be used as a metaphor for leading others. Today my woodland work was inspected by my mother and father in law who are visiting us. They love walking and they could see what I was trying to do and they recognised it as a good thing. We talked about how gardeners don't just make things for themselves they are creating something that other people can enjoy in the future. My insight today was to do with design - now that I have done what I have done I can see much more the potential in what I'm doing. Its only after you have got someway into a project that this potential can be appreciated. Tuesday 18/09 Well I think I have found a solution to my bumpy path problem. I went for a walk around the garden and behind some fir trees I found a pile of builders rubble which I had put there 4 years ago when we had a garage conversion done. The only snag is it's a long way to hump it down to the woods. So I have to convince myself the exercise will do me good. I spent a couple of hours humping the rubble down - altogether I made 4 trips with a full barrow.. fortunately its downhill and the last one I got a puncture and ended up having to pull the barrow. This is the slogging part of the process with little joy. It took me two hours to grade 2 meters so I can estimate that there is a couple of weeks work if I try to stick to my two hours a day. It was sunny though and paused to imagine several times what I could do when I start to create the woodland garden.. The results are good and I covered up the rubble with woodland soil so it looks fairly natural. Today's reflection is on the role of 'sustained slog' in trying to accomplish anything of significance. Once the initial enthusiasm of starting is over there is usually a lot of labour which is not very rewarding emotionally. I'm going to use John Cowan's idea of finding two hours a day to keep chipping away at the 'problem'. I probably won't make any more entries until I get to the next stage. I didn't intend to do this today - it just happened. So this is my reflections on how and why it happened. Working
backwards from the provisional outcome - the outcome was an email invitation to John Cowan to share his expertise and wisdom in mentoring through a Guide on how we might mentor learners on the lifewide learning award which we are planning to start with a group of students in 3 weeks time. In framing this invitation in an email I had to think through the dimensions of the problem - they won't be complete but they do represent a significant chunk of the problem. The story began 2 hours earlier when I sat down to update the front page of my website. From this action I went to my blog and felt it needed updating but wondered what I would write about. I decided I needed to amend my Personal Development Activity Plan to include the URL of my blog and this took me back to the Lifewide Award Guidance Document. I re-read the Guidance and made a number of amendments including a summary statement on the front page explaining what someone had to do to participate in and achieve the award (a recommendation that had been made by my daughter who is trying out the tools). Having updated my own PDAD and lifewide activity map and the Guidance I decided it was time to get final feedback from the team on these documents before we start using them. Also we are going to expose them in an online seminar in two weeks time. So I emailed John who emailed back saying 'Good to hear from you and be given something to do'. I always get a nice feeling when I sense that someone enjoys doing the things I like doing, so seeing an opportunity to involve John further I put my invitation email together. Through this unfolding process I feel I've made a bit of progress towards achieving one of my goals and more importantly I have tuned in again to the continuous development needs of the LWE project, drawing it from the back to the front of my awareness again. So not only do I feel good because I have made a bit of progress, I am re-engaging with the challenge and as a biproduct I have an example of emergent learning for my blog!!!! Looking back over the last eight months I can see that I have learnt quite a lot about the use of technology to desig and build websites. I have also learnt quite a lot about the use of some well known social media tools. My learning and development has been partly planned in the sense that decisions were made and a strategy was developed - like the design of my website and the planning for five twitter exchanges. But it has also been partly reactive to the situations as they arose - like NB's invitation to get involved in Twitter and seeing an example of an organisational facebook page and thinking that this would be a good thing to do.
This journey has involved: 1) creating my own website using weebly tools - then applying my learning to develop five other websites for different purposes using the same tools. 2) creating and maintaining a blog on my weebly website 3) opening a twitter account and participating in four twitter exchanges as well as behaving as an individual 4) setting up a 'scrapbook' to enable me to provide supplementary materials for twitter 5) opening a facebook account and with the help of my daughter setting up a lifewide education facebook page and making postings to the pagehttp://www.facebook.com/LifewideEducation 6) setting up a Lifewide Education Twitter account and linking it to the Facebook pagehttps://twitter.com/#!/ 6) setting up a lifewide education organisational page and promoting discussions on linked in. What I have learnt through this process of participation? I realise I can make effective use of these technologies - I am not scared of making postings and I can see how they work in terms of attracting an audience or following. I'm also beginning to understand how I have to behave in order to attract a social network. These things have been learnt through 1) trial and error - just trying them out 2) being guided by people who were already experienced in using them 3) observing how other users use them and copying them 4) trying to involve other people. I have been experimenting with twitter and discovered that the 140 characters were very restrictive. In the past I linked any substantial and personal thoughts to my blog but I decided that this was inappropriate. So I set up a scrapbook which allows me to record my thoughts on specific topics. It is effectively an extension of this blog. The first topic I used it for was the Olympics. http://lifewidescrapbook.weebly.com/ After years of resisting Facebook I fnally succumbed and decided that we 'Lifewide Education' had to have a presence. It was infact triggered by a long discussion with the team on the merits of twitter for engaging people in conversations. It didn't seem to be working for many people.So with the help of my daughter we set up a page and posted our first discussion item on the Olympics. Only time will tell whether it will be useful or not but it is all about learning how to do it. The interesting thing though was how it has stimulated discussion with my children about the use of social media and facebook and twitter in particular. Because I have experience of both of these technologies I feel I have more understanding about what they are saying. http://www.facebook.com/LifewideEducation My sister Bev has reached the age of 60. I felt that my brothers and sisters should do more to recognise the contribution she had made to our family so I had the idea of a birthday card that illustrated scenes and stories from her life.
I coordinated the contributions from my brothers and sisters and worked with Kiboko..Thanks to my new weebly skills I puit the card on line. She was given the web card at her birthday celebration and really liked it. really liked it. http://ourbev.weebly.com/ |
PurposeTo develop my understandings of how I learn and develop through all parts of my life by recording and reflecting on my own life as it happens. I have a rough plan but most of what I do emerges from the circumstances of my life
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