Prompts
People prompt Ai… why not prompt yourself?
We do it every day with the questions we ask: “Why is this so hard” tends to be a common one for people who have a difficult time with things.
“I wonder what will happen next” is a common prompt for the adventurous humans.
And the most creative? Well, It’s pretty straight forward; “What can I create out of this?”
Don’t leave the prompts for the robots- we are capable of far more than we think.
Space between
“I believe if there’s any kind of God, it wouldn’t be in any of us. Not you, or me…but just this little space in between,”
–Céline, Before Sunrise
How to get quicker
How to get quicker: minimise decisions you need to make.
Each choice we make is a bit of brain power spent. I recently had about 180 documents to process and I began by picking and choosing which to process next.
This felt more efficient because I could create some structure to what I did and in what sequence… but actually charting my journey on the fly was massively slowing me down. All the little decisions were stealing time and brain power.
So I made ONE choice that eliminated all the rest: just work my way down the list.
It meant when a particularly tricky part came up, I couldn’t skip it for a less tricky one- I had to do it because it was the next one on the list!
It felt harder initially but once I got over myself and just committed to my choice, it was fine.
Eliminate decisions- make one to get rid of the rest.
The infinite power source
The golden goose of any initiative is implementation.
Starting out, it’s up to us to get ourselves to follow through on the work we know needs to get done. We have to work out what it takes for us to do the hard thing.
We find that ‘pushing through’ isn’t sustainable. Eventually we find a reason that drives us.
Whether it’s a diet, a new skill to learn or a formidable project- we each find our own way in to get it done.
When we lead others, we come up against the same challenge- how do we get people to follow through?
How do we get others to own outcomes and claim autonomy in their work? There’s a lot of things that help, sure; clarity of objective, clear milstone tracking, step by step systems, authority to make choices… all of these things contribute to the work getting done.
But those are all the tools- just like when we were doing it on our own we all needed tools. But if all it required were tools it would be easy.
Like you discovered on your own, you need heart. What do I mean? Well it needs to hook onto the thing that we value most. That’s how we bring heart to our work.
Why do I teach? I teach because I love bringing possibility to life for young people. I love learning and I love growing and I love contributing to something bigger than myself. Those are called values, by the way. Values are a steam train zooming off into the sunset and our outcomes are the things we hook on the back of that train.
Values are our own power source. The same is true for those we lead. It’s not enough to give excellent tools, protocols and outcomes- we have to hook it to their steam train.
What does this person value most? Don’t guess, get in conversation and ask them. It’s in the language; “My work is about X” or “The most important thing for this is Y”.
Find their values and align the job to that.
This is the never ending power source that gets the job done and has them fulfilled in the process. And that’s WAY better than merely implementing something.
We all want to work for a meaningful cause. Implementation… sure.
But doing meaningful work in the world with people that care?
That’s where it’s really at.
Does making learning fun trivialise the learning?
There’s a belief I’ve battled with in the past that if we make learning fun, it undercuts the seriousness of the subject.
Whenever I have an internal conflict like this I always come back to outcome. What is this really about? What are we trying to do?
Well with the learning I deliver, my big bold outcome is to bring it to life for the kids. Words can also betray us a bit here, because you hear a word like ‘fun’ and that might conjure images of a hectic classroom, a ball bouncing off a window and no one listening to each other.
So maybe the word ‘fun’ isn’t the right word.
What I’m really looking for is life.
There is life in a kid’s eye when they are transfixed by a giant digger doing construction next door. There is life in their eye when they notice an adult is in a bad mood. And there is indeed life when they are learning something they love.
The only thing that can trivialise learning is a trivial intention.
If you’re looking to make ‘fun’ of something, yeah you’re probably going to be a bit disrespectful.
If you’re looking to bring something to life, though? Well now you’re playing a game I like. And there are a million and one ways to bring something to life. There are quiet ways, big ways, busy ways and gentle ways.
Let’s take seriously our job to create vibrant, living connections to the learning we share.
That sounds fun to me
Your masterpiece
Actors choose verbs to play in scenes.
They might ‘press’ another character. Or they might ‘interrogate’ them.
It occurs to me that we unwittingly have verbs in life too. The words we choose dictate how we show up in the world- just like an actor in a scene. Actors are very intentional about it, but in normal life we aren’t.
Are you ‘getting through’ the day or ‘dancing through’ it?
Are you going to the office to ‘slog it out’ or are you going to ‘play’?
There’s power in this kind of intention. Don’t leave it to the actors; make your life a masterpiece of a play, written daily by you.
Memories
Isn’t it amazing that we can revisit, reanimate and re-experience memories whenever we choose?
When was the last time your stomach and face hurt from laughing?
Do you remember feeling so nervous you could hardly move?
When did you feel complete bliss?
All of these memories are there for us. It’s like a dormant library in our brain, waiting for us to stroll in and choose a book.
Its easy to never access these. Or to access just the same handful over and over.
And it’s also easy to simply ask the question:
“Remember when…”
It’s all relative.
Your worst day could be someone else’s best day. An ‘average’ win for you now was once life changing.
What was once a dream may well now be your reality.
It’s all relative to our perspective. So with that being the case, we’d do well to pick a perspective that empowers us, right?
Time doesn’t fly when you can’t wait
Remember how LONG it took for Christmas to come when you were an excited kid?
Or maybe you remember a time that a month flew by in what seemed like a day.
I love how time stretches and squishes based on our experience, expectations and focus.
Here’s a little trick I’ve been playing with recently to capitalise on this. My goal with this is to make time stretch when I want that and make it zip by when I need it to do that. So here’s the what you do: begin a task that you really care about completing, that will take a few weeks of necessary hours (no short cuts) and that won’t get done if you don’t put in the time.
We’ve just described a task that requires all the time you can get.
So we want to make sure we perceive as much of that time as possible, so we get it done, right?
So the next step is to put something REALLY exciting at the end of the deadline. A treat, an adventure or an experience you cannot WAIT to get to.
Now you’re playing with your time perception: it’ll take forEVER to get to the treat so now you can use all that perceived ‘extra’ time to complete the project.
Weird and magic, aye?
Co-exist
The brain and the heart.
The craft and the trance.
The mathematician and the magician.
Sometimes it seems like experience can be one or the other. Sometimes each minute accounted for and other times experience washes over you in a never-ending instant.
I’m guilty of spending a lot of time as the mathematician, in a world of graphs and exacts… but how great that we are constructed with infinity inside us too.
Don’t forget to let it all go (sometimes). There’s magic in both, sure, but only when you let both co-exist.