Lately I’ve been scheduling tweets from the Refreshing Wednesday archive. I pick a random Wednesday in the not-too-distant future, write and schedule the tweet, and move on with my day. I was inspired to start doing this by an automated element in Word Press.

Whenever I publish a new post, click on it, and scroll to the bottom, Word Press shows me three related posts. For example:

I have no idea how the selection criteria works, but it’s a delightful little trail for me to follow. Sometimes it leads to a post I haven’t thought about in a long time. Sometimes what I find is embarrassing in that my thinking has evolved. Sometimes I feel like I’m involved in some kind of connoisseur level navel gazing. And sometimes, the best times, I’m reminded of a person that I wrote about and maybe haven’t been in touch with for a while. (Hello Owen and Drew and DBA and Pearl and Eric and Keri.)

At any rate, I don’t mind this particular human-machine tango. And the tweet that follows is based fully on my judgment of what I find, so I’m still in control. Machine-inflected, maybe, but mostly human still!

Often, you become a school leader (or leader of any kind) because other people notice that you’re good at solving problems. They promote you because you’ve demonstrated ingenuity. You’re more than happy to accept the role because, at the end of the day, solving problems and demonstrating ingenuity makes you feel good.

And then, inevitably, a more seasoned leader helps you to understand that too much of a good thing can actually tip over into negativity. Over time, in the case we’re considering, if you solve people’s problems for them, you don’t help them to build their own problem-solving muscles. You reduce their agency. You take away opportunities for them to develop.

You can actually end up developing yourself, and your own agency, at some cost to those you were originally asked to lead.

Ed Batista has a long history of coaching leaders, and I turn to his blog often. He’s not afraid — and/or he’s well equipped — to dig into the nuances of leadership. Here, he deepens the basic idea I’ve been exploring both in this blog and in my own practice. He’s asking leaders to be radically honest with themselves. That’s not an easy route, but it’s one that leads to the opportunity to make different choices.

Emotion Regulation

It’s essential to understand and regulate the emotions that underlie our helping impulse. Logical analysis can influence our behavior, but our actions inevitably have an emotional dimension, although at times these feelings may lie just beyond our conscious awareness. Comprehending the emotions that motivate our desire to help can allow us to sense when they’re causing us to inflict help, slow down our reflexive helping responses, and create opportunities to make different choices.

We’re driven to diminish our negative emotions and enhance our positive emotions, and helping relationships can trigger powerful feelings on both sides. When we feel the need to help we perceive a problem that we want to alleviate, and its persistence can trigger discomfort, anxiety, anger, and fear. The task here is to gain a greater sense of comfort with our discomfort, to simply notice these feelings and sit with them without being compelled to take action in order to soothe ourselves.

On the other side of the emotional spectrum, when we feel the need to help we perceive an opportunity to distinguish ourselves while being of service, and this can trigger excitement, enthusiasm, and even joy. The task here is to calm ourselves in the face of these stimulating emotions, to simply notice these feelings and, again, sit with them without being compelled to take action to maintain this pleasurable state.

As colleagues, friends and family members, we’re asked to help in almost every sphere of life. Leaders and those of us in the helping professions may have even chosen our career path because it allows us to respond to such requests on a consistent basis. But being mindful of the difference between providing help and inflicting it is what allows us to truly make a difference.

Source: Ed Batista’s blog.

This summer, Reshan and I have been developing a theory that can be concisely summarized as “everything is teaching.” With that on my mind, I answered some questions from Thrive Global about my podcast, Inquiry to Insight. The full interview can be found here. But I’m copying below the part where I focused on the ways that, I believe, successful podcasting is just like intentional teaching.

Podcasting is Teaching Excerpt

As I’ve said, any success I have as a podcaster comes from my training as a teacher at a school that takes the training of teachers very seriously — it’s almost like a teaching lab. And, in my own writing and research, I’ve thought a lot about how teaching practices apply to fields outside of education. In fact, at the close of Make Yourself Clear, my last book, co-authored with Dr. Reshan Richards, we wrote a chapter called “Think Like a Teacher.” That invitation holds true for podcasting, as well. Successful podcasts do what successful teaching does, with one caveat. I’m not talking about the kind of teaching that most of us grew up experiencing, wherein a “sage” (teacher) offers lessons on a “stage” (the front of a classroom). I’m talking about teaching that puts the student at the center of the action.

So here goes…

1. First, successful podcasters, like successful teachers, practice active listening — they don’t listen until they get to speak or enlighten, they listen with the intention of helping the speaker (student) to articulate their understanding and enlightenment. Their job, as listeners, is to show the speaker that they are fully hearing them or to ask questions in order to promote successful discovery and communication.
2. Second, successful podcasters, like successful teachers, practice preassessment, helping them to understand where their interviewee (student) is situated at the start of the conversation. Preassessment yields information that preps the ground for a successful interaction.
3. Third, successful podcasters, like successful teachers, use formative assessment. They’re not listening to their interviewees with the intention of judging them or forcing them into a box. Instead, they are listening in order to adjust their own plans, their own questions, their own posture, their own view of the interviewee (student).
4. They may have an idea about where they want the interview to end up (which is the fourth teaching move, called understanding by design), but they are willing to follow the needs of the interviewee.
5. Fifth, successful podcasters, like successful teachers, attempt to create an experience for their interviewee that is meaningful, relevant, and personalized. If you’ve ever been in a classroom where those elements were not present, then you understand why they are so important. Your interviewees will engage and share to the extent that the conversation is in service of transformation for all involved rather than a mere transaction. If it feels meaningful to them, and it’s obviously meaningful to you, then together you will make something that could only be created in that particular circumstance — like a great class.

All of these practices — active listening, preassessment, formative assessment, understanding by design, and meaning making — make for a successful classroom or podcast. Podcasting is teaching.

At Refreshing Wednesday, the mission isn’t R&D. It’s more like N&D (that’s “Noticing & Documentation”). Here’s a masterclass.

H/T to Craig Mod.

I’ve been dipping in and out of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. It is challenging me in some important ways.

Here’s a typical insight. It comes from this interview with Burkeman but is repeated almost verbatim in the book.

I’m perpetually fighting an email backlog, but I’m more at peace about the inevitability of that than I once was. I try to allot a certain amount of time to going through email, and then at the end of that time, I say, Okay, I labored for an appropriate amount and then move on, instead of holding on to the thought that I might finally get to inbox zero.

Acknowledging both one’s efforts and one’s limits is good for one’s relationship with email, sure. I’d argue that it’s also good for one’s relationship with all work (and probably one’s soul). Squeeze, then release. Focus, then unfocus. Work, then relax. Attend to, then forget, blur, widen, walk the margin. At least for a little while.

This line of thinking-doing reminds me of a quotation from Emerson, illustrated nicely by Austin Kleon.

My father and my uncle served in Vietnam. When they came home and in the years that followed, they never would have received a message like the one below. Honestly, I’m not sure what they would have done with it if it did arrive. It was a different time.

What I love about this particular outreach is that it encourages talking, meaning making, and connection. It acknowledges lived experience. It suggests that distress is “normal.” Last, it offers additional resources. It’s a different time, and leadership responds accordingly.

Reading an old WITI, I came across a beautiful idea: dazzle camouflage. Typically, when we think of camouflage, we think of designs that enable people or machines to blend into an environment, so as to avoid being seen. Dazzle camouflage was developed when being seen was inevitable. Its intended effect was not to hide the object but to confuse the observer of that object.

Here’s an explanation of the origin of the practice.

How to camouflage ships at sea was one of the big questions of World War I. From the early stages of the war, artists, naturalists and inventors showered the offices of the United States Navy and the British Royal Navy with largely impractical suggestions on making ships invisible: Cover them in mirrors, disguise them as giant whales, drape them in canvas to make them look like clouds. Eminent inventor Thomas Edison’s scheme of making a ship appear like an island – with trees, even – was actually put into practice. The S.S. Ockenfels, however, only made it as far as New York Harbor before everyone realized what a bad and impractical idea it was when part of the disguise, a canvas covering, blew away. Though protective coloring and covers worked on land, the sea was a vastly different environment. Ships moved through changing light and visibility, they were subject to extreme weather, they belched black smoke and bled rust. Any sort of camouflage would have to work in variable and challenging conditions.

[Norman] Wilkinson’s innovation, what would be called “dazzle,” was that rather than using camouflage to hide the vessel, he used it to hide the vessel’s intention. Later he’d say that he’d realized that, “Since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer – in other words, to paint her, not for low visibility, but in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as the course on which she was heading.”

Later in the article, Professor Roy Behrens explains the concept’s efficacy. Apparently, when aiming a torpedo at a submarine, even a small miscalculation could ruin the attempt and save the submarine. Dazzling or confusing the torpedo launcher would be just the cover that a submarine needed. So the idea of dazzle camo was not only beautiful, but also practical.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Something to keep in mind when designing products, services, or experiences for others:

Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory . . . starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase.

Source: cdixon. H/T FS Brain Food.

I love the way precision gives way to excessive generality in this description of the Barcelona days of Lionel Messi.

There’s the touch, the ball treated gently. The vision, seeing the pass no one else can. Playing the pass everyone else can, but doing it so well it can’t be stopped. The way he doesn’t so much kick the ball as watch it dash alongside him like a faithful, enthusiastic puppy. Everything really.

It’s as if the writer, trying to wrestle Messi into mere specificity, finally gives up. Messi’s greatness, they assert, was Blakean: eternity seen in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower. I should add that the pacing of the passage is lovely, too, as the form follows the function, as the great player is both described and embodied.

Source: The Guardian.

One of my goals this (school) year is to find a few new teachers. Part of this goal, I’m already realizing, is to acknowledge the teachers in my life. They are everywhere.

And unexpected. I took my dog Moxie on her first post-vacation walk this morning. We chose our usual route around Anderson Park. Apparently I was planning for us to spend our usual amount of time on this usual walk. Even though I didn’t have anywhere to be, I noticed a frustrated feeling rising in me when Moxie put on the breaks . . . after our first three steps.

She sat and sniffed and sniffed some more and I was pulling and she was pulling and the walk was going terribly for both of us. But then I started following her nose with my eyes and my brain started following my eyes and her nose with questions. What was she sniffing? Did different nose crinkles mean different things? What made her tail wag? As usual, curiosity was the right salve for what ailed me, and in turn, for the ways I ailed the world.

Moxie wanted to re-smell everything, every square foot of park. She wanted to explore new plantings (that I would have missed) and plop her whole body onto her favorite patches of thick grass (that I hadn’t noticed). She wanted to chase slices of light and shadow (that I would have missed). She wanted to say hello to old dog friends (that I would have hustled past). She wanted to put the squirrels and the birds (that I would have missed) on notice. “I’m back,” she wanted to proclaim — slowly and with relish.

I wanted to get home. Wanted to clean out my overflowing inbox. Weed the garden beds. Clean the garage. Tie up some boxes for recycling. Pay some bills. File a box of papers near my desk. Replenish the refrigerator.

All these tasks were necessary and practical, sure. But all these tasks were leading me back to the old me. They would have me locked into my old habits in no time. Did I really need to check my inbox ten times before lunch? Were there any bills I could renegotiate or even eliminate by cancelling certain services? Would I receive and collect less paper if I digitized some transactions? Did I need the same — or as much — food in the refrigerator? After a substantial break, I want to re-choose my habits. I want to be intentional as I restart the school year. I want, both literally and figuratively, to unsubscribe from a lot of the old channels and inputs and only resubscribe to what adds value and joy. Moxie, one of my new (or rather, newly acknowledged) teachers, helped me to slow down enough to see all these angles.

A few others, too…

Good teachers are existential breaking system. They say, “let’s try it this new way.”

To be committed to learning is to be committed to seeing the world in a different way, to diverge from the usual in service or search of positive change.

Frustration is a strong signal that a teacher has arrived.

After a break, sniff around a bit before you get started again.

You think you’re the one walking the dog, and the dog’s okay with that. It helps her to teach you what you need to learn.