The One to One

Each semester, I meet with every student in my class for an hour per student. It's about 30 extra hours outside of teaching the class and (much like the singing exercise) I ask myself if I really have it in myself to keep doing it each semester. The one-to-one is a time when I ask students questions about who they really are, what drives them, what makes them come alive, and where their true purpose lies. It is also a time when I tell them what I have been thinking about the semester: my general observations and questions I have about their choices or non-choices as the case may be. I have gotten a reputation among the students for having the courage to say things that others do not say to them, but sometimes I forget the basic rule of invitation.

Peter Block in his book, "Community: The Structure of Belonging" (2009) states that "Invitation is the means through which hospitality is created. Invitation counters the conventional belief that change requires mandate or persuasion.  Invitation honors the the importance of choice, the necessary condition for accountability" (p.113).   When I forget to invite students into the one to one in a way that asks for their permission to share my thoughts and to ask them hard questions, I have not honored the importance of choice.

When I attended the Powers of Leadership Training created by Sharon Parks and Larry Daloz at the Whidbey Institute (http://www.whidbeyinstitute.org/conversation/id/dbd7b8/about), I learned about a way to invite students into these hard conversations that is both simple and effective.  When I sit down to do a one-to-one with a student, I ask "At what level would you like my feedback -- extremely gentle,  moderately gentle but with pushes here and there, or no holding back?"  Extremely gentle doesn't mean lying.  It means telling them things that are absolutely true, but in ways that put my relationship with the student first and the feedback second.  No holding back doesn't mean verbally being harsh, it means I dig deeper into their default first responses and I use gentle, but powerful phrases as "I wonder what life would be like if you let go of that thought?"

The one to one is an art and has taken a while to learn to do effectively, but it makes life in the case-in-point classroom so much more effective.  Through genuine invitation, challenge, and support my students and I learn to lean in to the discomfort of naming things publicly, questioning assumptions, and   building public powerful relationships that can effect change. 

Fear Mongering is Not Leadership: How to Handle Fear Mongering in the Moment

Doubting and questioning systems and/or authority are all integral parts of leadership and healthy discourse for a democratic society.  Fear mongering, on the other hand, has no place in healthy leadership.  The fear mongering that is being mistaken for leadership in the media, in the board room, the classroom, and even in conversations among friends is manipulation disguised as leadership.  The insidious nature of fear mongering is that it triggers its audience at a biological level to bypass reason, common sense, and one's own truth. 

The objective of fear mongering is not truth, but control.  It's outward message is usually some variation on the same theme: Don't do X because bad things will happen, They shouldn't do X because bad things will happen, You're/they're doing X hurts others. And because so many of us doubt our power and truth, these overarching, unexamined exaggerations trigger the shame, doubt, and fear that live within us.  When unexamined shame steps in, we generally keep our eyes and heads down or worse, we become agents of the fear mongering and work to shut others down.

Lately, there have been several strategic fear mongering campaigns against higher education.  People have written editorials and articles that have pulled half truths and raised them up as fact the way the leaders of a mob in medieval times raised superstitious symbols above their heads and cried "Witch!"  I don't know how the general public reacted to these calls to fear toward higher education, but I know some of my comrades and colleagues responded with their own fear.  "Keep your head down. Stop doing innovative work. Don't do what you know to be right because it could be seen, misconstrued, and published in the paper." The really interesting thing about this case of fear mongering (the fear that higher education is misspending money) is that  it went from a shot in the dark to running the daily decisions of people engaging in research to ending poverty, cancer, sex trafficking, etc.-- people who are experts in what they do and how they do it.  In this way fear mongering is like an opportunist thief.  It goes for the easy targets and will continue on to the next and the next, not preferring one target over another as long as it is easy. 

Fear mongering is ancient.  It will conceivably be around as long as the world is.  But let's be clear: Fear mongering is not leadership, it is merely an invitation for leadership. People often use it when they have slipped into fear/shame themselves and don't want others to notice.  For example, a fear monger-er points fingers, whereas a leader does the harder (and more risky work of)  proffering solutions.  A fear monger-er may then poke holes in the proffered solution while still having put nothing on the line of himself other than more fear mongering.  How would a leader respond to such continued fear mongering? By naming the strategy being used, and pushing back with questions that lead to clearing thinking and more innovation. 

If you are reading this blog, then you have the power to end fear mongering in your corner of the world.  Contrary to popular mythology, leadership does not start with an epic moment.  Leadership starts with tiny moments -- it happens one courageous conversation at a time. 

How to Change Fear Mongering

1. Be on the look out for it.  The first battle is to notice when it's being used.  This lowers your chances of being triggered by it and allowing it to move you into a place of fear or shame yourself. 

2. Engage the person who has become a vehicle for fear mongering in a healing conversation.  Be sure that your first objective in the conversation is to seek to understand how they ended up being the vehicle in the first place.  Be genuinely curious and use reflective listening ("It sounds like this issue/article/piece of information has caused some concern for you."  "I wonder where they go their information?" "I wonder if there are other perspectives or conclusions?") 

3.  Question your thoughts.  Fear mongering is powerful only when it remains unexamined.  If you have a colleague/friend who can help you examine the thoughts and feelings someone's fear mongering has triggered in you, do that.  If you can't, it on paper.  (See Byron Katie's work "Loving What Is" for four questions that will help you do this on your own: http://thework.com/thework.php)


The world needs people who can not only hold steady during these hinge times but who can help those who have succumbed to the fear that abounds to find their way through.  Let that person be you.

When Teaching, it Pays to Think Like a Novel Writer

Let’s face it, we enjoy learning from people who are funny, engaging, celebrate our failures, and who build an experience that unfolds like a story.  Thinking like a novel writer supports effective learning by engaging the needs of students’ psychologies throughout the semester. It forces the instructor to facilitate related experiences that build one another. It also allows the instructor to slowly and responsibly build to a higher level of intensity necessary for transformative learning.  Much like a novel writer needs to bring the reader along, so an instructor needs to lay the foundation before jumping into the climax. Although it’s a horrific image, we have long used the metaphor of boiling frogs within our program to help new instructors understand this idea.  In the late 1990’s a story circulated via email that if you threw a frog into a fully boiling pot of water, it would jump out to save its life; however, if you put it into cool water and turned up the heat slowly, it would allow itself to be boiled alive.  This may not be true for frogs, but it serves as a powerful reminder for us to think like a novel writer. In Parks’ and Heifetz’s language (Leadership Can Be Taught, 1995) this would be akin to turning the heat up slowly so that students can tolerate the tension enough to benefit from it.  

Another purpose of thinking like a novel writer is that much like a good novel, a good class draws our attention in a way that keeps us up at night thinking about it; our identity gets wrapped up in it and it haunts us as we think about things we have not before. As Sir Ken Robinson so aptly points out, “An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak, when you are present in the current moment, when you’re resonating with excitement at this thing that you’re experiencing, when you are fully alive.  An anesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what is happening,” (http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html). 

Creating exciting, aesthetic experiences opens students to learning in ways that cannot occur in ordinary classrooms. Isn't that what we are all looking for? Moments of wonder, surprise, and mystery? Why should the classroom be any different?