You always have a choice
I’ve been through some pretty hellish travel logistics the past 48 hours
It reminded me that we always have a choice about the way we are. You can be tired, hungry, out of ideas and for all intents and purposes utterly ‘had it’.
Even then you can choose the way you are with people. Choose to be kind. Choose grace and choose levity.
You get what you ask for
Careful the questions you ask- your brain will give answers!
Why am I really bad at this?
VS
How can I excel at this and have fun?
What story are you telling?
Which ever story you tell yourself about anything is the one that’s true.
You can shift the narrative in a heart beat. Are you completely exhausted or have you been tested and come through stronger?
Choose wisely, but most important of all choose.
Don’t be a victim of a bad story.
Entertain, Engage and Educate PT 5
In the last post I talked about freeing the expectations we put on the people we are working with.
Today, we move on to ‘engage’. Are the people I’m talking to listening? Are they comprehending and making meaning of what I’m sharing?
I offer a simple exercise we use in acting to keep our performances ‘alive’.
In acting, we have objectives. I might want my scene partner to leave the room. Or I may want to make them understand something. These kinds of objectives are great because they activate actors and take us outside of our own heads. The test is in the other person. At any given point I can look to the other actor/ character and ‘test’ (using our senses) am I closer or further from my objective?
This same test can be used to test engagement. You can ask yourself, what would these people look like if they were engaged? This may seem contradictory to our last idea of loosening the grip, but what we’re really after is simply being alive and aware to what you’re receiving from them.
Are they really looking at you and seeing you or are their eyes glazed over? What ever you notice, you can make the assessment as to whether you’re closer to or further from engaging.
This puts us in a very powerful position because we are no longer wed to the action (how we get them engaged) but only to the outcome (whether they are they engaged). This unleashes us to a world of possibilities of how to bring about high levels of engagement.
So as we work through these steps of entertain, engage and educate I invite you continue to test externally whether you are closer or further and change your approach endlessly until you get to the desired outcome.
Entertain, Engage and Educate PT 4
Loosen the grip.
In the last post on this subject, I talked about how a key step to entertaining is to loosen our expectations about what the group of people we are working with need to be like.
They say great parents have few rules. This doesn’t mean that they let the kids run rampant, but it means that they give more space. A parent with more rules might see a rowdy group of kids, get stressed and yell at the kids. Not fun for anyone.
A parent with fewer rules might see the same group and decide that this is a highly energised group of kids. They might then make some new decisions about how to work with that rather than fight it. There’s less yelling and (most excitingly) less stress for the parent.
Instead of feeling stressed that the kids aren’t acting the way they ‘should’, they become interested in how they might work with the way they are.
As an actor, I also find this an effective way to entertain. To go on stage with a preconceived notion of how an audience should react, how they should listen and (worst of all) where they should laugh, is a death sentence. Not only will you go out there and not be ‘in the moment’ but you’re also in danger of beating yourself up after the performance.
The same is true for teaching or delivering any information to a group of learners- there’s no right or wrong in the way they should be. Here’s a belief I invite you to adopt as you experiment with entertaining to engage:
New Belief: Any behavior my learners display is perfect. Everything is an opportunity for me to explore new ways to engage.
The alternative of course is that there is a ‘right’ way to be and there is a ‘wrong’ way to be. This is the kind of rigidity that makes entertaining difficult and certainly is the antithesis of empowering anyone.
Really, every day?!
There is a fantastic life planning system that I learned from Tony Robbins called RPM.
It’s designed to change the focus from ‘to do’s’ to outcomes. What’s the difference? Well I find that to dos can become a never ending list you work through for the rest of your life (or indeed that you never get through). I also find that if I’m a bit underenergised and I look at a list of things I ‘have to’ do, then I’m very prone to procrastination.
Tony’s system helps you re-align with the purpose- or the “why the heck am I even doing this?”
I know I can easily forget the WHY behind anything when I’m in the flow of my work day. I had a mini breakthrough today while using the RPM system that I think is worth sharing.
It may seem tedious at first, but a crucial step in the RPM system is to look not only at outcomes but the reason you want it. I sat down to plan my day today and thought twice about whether I would use RPM for my film a day habit. This is something I decided to do this year to make a little movie each day to share online.
The reason I didn’t want to do it went something like this “Well look, I know I need to make a movie anyway, so I can just put in on the calendar or carve an hour or so out of my day to do it, what’s the big deal? I don’t need some fancy system for that”
WRONG.
I decided to do it anyway and I’m glad I did.
As unnecessarily time consuming as it seemed, I followed the process:
What’s my outcome? To have a film that I’m proud of that I want to share with the world and shows me at my best. Hmm pretty good start, certainly glad I wrote that down, it hadn’t been that clear in my head…
Why do I want that? Well… I want to act! I love acting and creating, I want to use my hard earned skill and entertain some stranger. I want to cast a vote for the type of creator I am- one that works every day. I want to make something I’m proud of that will exist forever- this one time investment will keep working for me and entertain people for years to come! Woah, where did all that come from! I couldn’t believe how much I had to say about why I wanted this outcome. The best part was, the more I wrote the more associated I became with these reasons. I felt them more in some symbiotic loop.
It was only later that some old thoughts came back: Well I want to make a film every day… what am I supposed to do write that out every day? Come on what a waste of time, I can just get on a make the thing rather than spend time doing all that…
And there was my breakthrough. I do have to do it every day. That’s the difference that makes the difference I think. If I take the time remain connected to my purpose each day, I will have more access to the resources of someone who is inspired.
Yes it’s work, but that’s the point. I don’t think it comes naturally to do hard things. And if we just schedule it and expect the ‘why’ to be searingly clear for us, we may run out of steam. This is especially true when it comes to the important non urgent stuff, it’s easy to cast it aside in your day to make way for the inevitable day to day things that need our attention now. We have to make them urgent otherwise we’ll never get around to the things that make the real difference.
Take the extra couple of minutes before you engage with these tasks that really matter. Engage with your why each time; make it a habit. Go on, do the hard thing. Every day.
Entertain, Engage and Educate PT 3
So we have our objective so now it’s time to take a step toward that.
I think the order of entertain and engage can be interchangeable. I put entertain first because it comes the most naturally to me. I also think it’s possible to entertain and not engage and indeed to not extend that to something meaningful on the otherside. I’m in the business of meaning; I don’t want to entertain for fun’s sake. I’d like to entertain in order to engage.
How?
Well, that’s an interesting. The word entertain might have a connotation of silliness or of kids being off task. Of course nobody want’s that, but I think it’s important to ask what ‘off task’ really means or what does that actually look like. I think an important first step in how to entertain is to loosen our expectations of what your student’s ‘should’ be doing.
More on that tomorrow
Entertain, Engage and Educate Pt 2
I forgot one:
Empower.
All three contribute to the fourth. To light people up, to allow them to apply themselves and to deliver knowledge are three acts of empowerment
Entertain, Engage and Educate PT 1
The three E’s of effective teaching.
This seems to be the way I teach and I think it’s because of my background as an actor.
Objective: I think the objective of teaching is to deliver information in a way that is meaningful to the receiver and that it sticks. Furthermore, I think the receiver of the information should be empowered to use the information in new ways to create value for others in the world. So if that’s what we’re trying to do then we have to engage them first…
Trust is efficient
When people trust us, it means they can get to the work sooner.
Trust then isn’t a ‘nice to have’, it’s a necessity. Humans are ineffective when they feel unsafe. We cannot do our greatest work when we are in fear of being rejected or when there is the niggling feeling that our best interests aren’t taken care of.
We simply want to have a sense of certainty that the people we are working with have ‘got our back’. It’s as simple as that.
And simplest of all is how to build trust:
Simply have the persons best interest at heart. Give them good reason to trust you, not by telling them- but by believing the things about them that will build it. People can feel that.
Build trust not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it helps us all do our best work.
And it’s also the right thing to do.