I’ve been doing some advisory work with the Education students at St. Mary’s University.  This week, many of them have been completing their final practicum; a ten-week placement.  This is the culmination of two years of studying and student teaching.  Over these past two years I have had the luxury of being a witness to their growth as teachers.  This week, as I was completing some of my final observations it dawned on me that these students have provided me with the perfect lens through which to do some observing of a model of growth that has long intrigued me.

The model is one that deals with the stages of competency.  When student teachers step into their first practicum classroom, they are excited and ready to teach.  They have studied methods courses for two months, they recall being in a classroom when they were a student and they think they know what teaching entails.  The first few weeks fly by, one great experience after another.  They busy themselves with learning student names, working with individual students and small groups.  Each interaction feels like a success and they honestly feel like they are ready to take on a full class of learners.  Even when they teach their first lesson, this feeling usually continues.  Although I never mention it to them, most of them are in the first stage of competency:  Unconscious Incompetence.  They really do not know what they do not know.

Flash forward almost a year.  These same students have now been studying for a full year and are stepping into their second practicum.  Inevitably, at this stage I hear the students mention that the second practicum is not quite as easy; not quite as fun.  They comment that the students are more difficult, the classrooms contain students with many more challenges, it is more difficult to come up with intriguing lessons etc.  Hmmm.  The truth is that their students have not really changed, but the student teachers have entered the second stage of competency: Conscious Incompetence.  In other words, they are now aware of how much they do not know.  They realize that they have just begun to scratch the surface of the intricacies of teaching.  They know that there is much more to teaching than just being nice and presenting material.  The problem is that they also realize that they are missing a few tools.  The good news is that most of them adjust and begin to really grow their knowledge and skill set during this practicum.

Flash forward one more time to the spring of their second year and their final practicum.  This time, the student teachers enter the practicum with a much more expansive mind set.  They understand that they have a tool box that is starting to fill, but that there are many, many more tools to acquire.  They have learned that every class will have challenges and that they have the ability to figure out how to manage these.  This practicum is not nearly as scary as the second one but it requires very deliberate thinking.  For the most part they have reached stage three: Conscious Competence.  This means that they can be quite successful in their work, but they need to be constantly thinking about what they are doing.  When they are presented with a situation that requires a quick decision, they still need to take time to consciously weigh out the options. 

These past few weeks I have been witnessing some fourth stage competency: Unconscious Competence.  I was watching a young teacher as the children were coming in the classroom one morning.  She had some work on the smart board ready for them, she greeted each by name, she smoothly redirected some unwanted behaviours, another teacher came to her door with a request and she dealt with it, and she collected some field trip forms.  It really was flawless.  I was smiling to myself as I recalled a similar teacher on her very first practicum – saying hello to the children while being completely oblivious to all of the structures that had been put into place by the regular classroom teacher.  In less than two years, these students moved from Unconscious Incompetence to Unconscious Competence.

I’ve been thinking about how these stages apply to so many of the things we do in life.  In a structured program like Education, we expect that the students will walk through these stages in some kind of organized fashion.  The program is set up this way.  However, in our own lives, we also pass through these stages regularly and often beat ourselves up because we do not achieve stage four as quickly as we like.

When I did my very first performance with my dance group, I experienced first hand, these stages of competency.  I arrived at a senior’s centre, in my prescribed outfit, ready to dance.  Just like I had learned in class. The problem was, I didn’t know that the music for our performance was not the same music that I had learned the dances to.  Unfortunately for me, I had been using the cues of the music to remind me of the steps of the dances, when really, I should have been using the names of the dances to cue myself about the steps.  There I was, all lined up, standing in perfect Unconscious Incompetence!  I did not have one clue that I did not know what I needed to know.

You can imagine the look on my face when I heard an unfamiliar Spanish song come on!  Talk about moving quickly to Conscious Incompetence!  I was extremely conscious of how incompetent I was looking.  By the middle of the song I had managed to move my face from a look of sheer horror to one of deep concentration and I figured out that I really did know the steps.  But I really had to focus hard because my usual cues of the music were missing.  I knew that I had moved into Conscious Competence when I got the steps right after about three repetitions of the step sequence, because one of the senior men, who must have been watching me struggle, finally gave me a ‘thumbs up’ and a smile!  Oh dear!

These days, after many similar performances, I am often able to smile at the audience, sing along with the songs and have a great time while I dance.  In these moments, I am in Unconscious Competence.

Whenever we choose to make a change in our lives, or when a change is thrust upon us (for example when we sign up for a new group or we volunteer for a committee) we can rest assured that we are likely in either in Unconscious Incompetence (we don’t have a clue what it will involve and we don’t have the skills) or Conscious Incompetence (we realize we are in over our heads!).  However, if we stick with it, we find we move nicely through the next phases until we find ourselves at a place where we are training the next set of group members!

Knowing this, understanding that this progression is natural, can help us relax and appreciate the gift of incompetence.  It is when we recognize our incompetence that we should also recognize that we are being given an opportunity to grow.  This is when we are using muscles that we do not usually exercise and when we are expanding our minds.

Take time this week to notice where you land on this competency continuum in the many areas of your life.  Hopefully you will be amazed at how many things you do with great competency; and hopefully you will learn to embrace the feeling of incompetence in other areas as you begin to see it through the lens of growth.

My inquiry for you this week is, ‘Where am I on the competency continuum?’
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Learn more about using competency thinking to live bravely.  Book a coaching session for you, for your workplace or for a group of friends.  It’s time to quit being afraid of being incompetent!

This past Monday marked the 121st running of the Boston Marathon.  I LOVE this event!  I love to simply watch the runners, I love to hear the inspirational stories, I love to think about the dreams carried in the legs of each runner and I love to witness people achieving one of their life goals. I PVR the race and I sit, often with tears, watching it from start to finish.  Apparently, it holds some passion for me.

I ran Boston three times.  During those years of long training hours, of trying to qualify (Boston is the one marathon for which runners have to achieve a certain time in a different marathon to qualify), and of competing, I started to study the stories of Boston, and I became familiar with some of the legends of the race.

One such legend is about a woman named Kathrine Switzer.  I heard about her the first time I went to Boston to run.  Kathrine was the first woman to ‘officially’ run Boston.  She ran it in 1967, at a time when women were not allowed to run marathons.  It was widely accepted that they were not capable of pushing their bodies to such limits.  Kathrine was a student at Syracuse university, she loved running and she was pretty sure she could complete the marathon distance.  She wanted to run Boston to prove that she could do it.  Her coach did not think she was capable; he did not think that any woman could do it. (even though Bobbi Gibb had unofficially run it the previous year – hiding in the bushes and then jumping out on to the course).  In his words, “No dame ever ran no marathon”.  The coach struck a deal with Kathrine:  If she could run the full distance in a training run, before the race, he would take her himself.

Of course, she did just that, and that is how she found herself on the start line in 1967, registered under the name of K. V. Switzer.  If only the race had gone so smoothly.  A few miles in, one of the race directors realized that there was a woman on the course and he actually ran on to the course and tried to push her off.  Her boyfriend fended him off and 4 hours, 20 minutes later, Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon.  History of course had been made, but so much more was set into motion on that third Monday of April in 1967.

This year, fifty years later, Kathrine Switzer once again ran this difficult and prestigious race, this time surrounded by a team of women, celebrated by the media, cheered on by millions and flanked by a field of runners made up of roughly the same number of women as men.

Although she did not set out to be, Kathrine Switzer was a disrupter.  With her one rather simple action of running 42.2km, she disrupted the world’s view of the athletic abilities of women.  She disrupted women’s beliefs about themselves.  She disrupted men’s beliefs about women.  She disrupted the medical view of women in endurance sport.  And the entire world’s thinking grew.

As part of my coach training, I studied a model called TILT.  One of the leaders in our course, Jeff Smith, one day said, “Know thyself, disrupt thyself, grow.”  It really changed my thinking.  Prior to this, I had not given a lot of thought to how we make changes in our lives.  This one comment opened my eyes to the realization that when we do not disrupt ourselves, when we simply go along with our usual routines and business, we do not make change; we do not grow.  It is only when we are brave enough to disrupt our own lives that we experience growth.

In our lives, disrupters often appear.  Any time when plans unexpectedly change, when someone is ill, when a job ends, when we receive news that we are not expecting, when a baby is born, when a relationship begins or ends you can be sure that a disrupter is at work.   Some companies actually hire disrupters and they call them such.  Their job is to disrupt the routine of the company to provide opportunities for growth.

Most often, we do not welcome disrupters.  Many men, and no doubt many women, did not likely welcome the disruption of Kathrine Switzer in Boston in 1967.  She was a pain in the neck.  She forced people to make changes they did not want to make.  She forced them to think in ways they did not want to think.  But looking back, I am very grateful that she was courageous enough to be disruptive.  In our daily lives too, we can begin to see disrupters as positive influences.  They provide us with an opportunity; an opportunity to decide who we need to be in order to grow from their influence. 

Kathrine Switzer gave the world an opportunity to decide who it wanted to be.  The decision was not made quickly, but over time it began to choose being more inclusive, more equitable, more open-minded and more accepting. When I ran Boston for the third time, in 2010, step by step with my son Greg, I felt nothing but gratitude that Kathrine Switzer had shown up in my lifetime.

This week, notice the disrupters in your life.  Notice who they are asking you to be.  Welcome them.

Your inquiry for the week is, “Who is this disrupter asking me to become?”
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Learn more about the power of your disrupters by booking a coaching session for you or for your team.  If you haven’t done so, check out my coaching video and my group coaching video and contact me to help you get started.  Disrupt thyself and grow!
 

Under Christian belief, Easter is the time of renewal; of new life; of new beginnings; of new growth.  In Canada, this happens to coincide with our season of Spring when we are also surrounded by new growth, beginnings and life.

Jim and I have a tradition of trying to find as many signs of spring as possible.  We’ll go out of our way to drive past a farm that used to be on our regular route home just to see if any calves have been born yet.  We look for bald eagles by the river and Jim has a very keen ear for the sound of the first robin.  Yesterday he noticed that our tulips had popped through the soil.  I’ll drive quite a distance out of my way if I think there could be ducklings at the edge of a pond.   We don’t limit our search for spring to nature; we also notice bicycles on the road, motorbikes on the highway, convertibles with their roofs down, the smell of hamburgers on the barbecue.  We see optimistic people in shorts and flip flops and notice the work crowd on patios and students with cold Slurpee’s in their hands.

This feels like such a hopeful time of year.  There is a sense that we can open the windows, air out the winter doldrums, and accomplish things that seemed overwhelming in February.  It is a perfect time to not only look at our physical surroundings and notice what needs a little attention, but also to look inward and notice what parts of our life need a bit of new life breathed into them.

It is possible that over the winter months you may have neglected more than just the lawn.  There may be friends in your life who, for no particular reason, you have not made time to connect with.  You may have spent too much time memorizing the schedule of your favourite reality shows and not enough time creating your own reality. (Although I must say that this week’s episode of Survivor was EPIC!)  You may have followed the Masters, the World Curling Championships, NFL football and now NHL playoffs, while thinking that someday soon you will get back into your own exercise routine.  And you may have woken up and trudged off to a job that has either become mechanical or that you have outgrown and thought, someday I’ll look into something different.  And you may have watched others participating in clubs and groups and thought that someday you would like to do that too.

It has been said that action is the enemy of resistance.  For those of us who have spent the winter resisting doing something that we know would improve the quality of our life, now is the time for action!  The good news is that the action does not need to be monumental.  Even the smallest action, in the right direction can change our life in unimaginable ways.  We are always one decision away from a new beginning.  One decision!

We may find ourselves in the middle of what could be a heated discussion and make the decision to speak kindly instead of with anger.  We may be invited to go for a walk and say a quick yes; perhaps initiating the beginning of a healthier spring.  We may choose to spend five minutes seeking out new activities to join instead of perusing Facebook and watching other people live their lives. We may decide to create a new definition of success for our days by measuring something other than how well we did at work.  New success for us can be how we took time to notice and connect with others.  Such a simple change, with potential life changing results.

Your challenge this week is to decide in which part of your life you need to breathe some new life.  Make a commitment to take one small decisive action in this area.  Don’t wait for someday.  This is the perfect weekend for new growth, new life and new beginnings.  And chocolate eggs.

My inquiry for you this week is, ‘How am I bringing new life to this?’

Happy Easter!
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Learn more about the power of your coaching and how it can help you embrace new life.  Check out my coaching video and my group coaching video and contact me to help you get started.  Your someday is now!
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If you happen to have driven past me while I was driving this past week, no doubt you would have seen me singing my heart out as I cranked up the radio and joined in with whatever artist happened to be playing on my playlist!  The warmer days of spring seem to bring this out in me.  Rest assured, I do keep the windows up all the way, so there is no danger of offending anyone!

As I was grooving along on an unseasonably warm day on Thursday, I thought about the other voices that I crank up or sometimes turn down in my life.  Let me introduce you to a coaching tool that I will call ‘Voices’.

If we think of ourselves as a ship that is navigating its way through our life, it is easy to imagine that the ship has a crew.  Each crew member has a very specific role and can be called upon at any time to help steer the ship.  Our ship, if it is a good one, will have a Captain.  The Captain holds the most important job of making choices about where the ship sails, deciding what routes are safest, or most scenic, or most interesting or fun.  The Captain decides how long we will stay in any one port and she decides when we might need extra crew members aboard.  The best Captains, sail their ship with confidence and integrity.  The Captain of your ship is wise.   She knows that your life is, at this moment, exactly as it should be, and at the same time she holds the paradox of wanting more for you.  Your Captain believes in you completely and she has all the skills needed to make sure that you have the best life voyage possible.  Although she may take opinions from other crew members, ultimately, she knows what is best and she acts accordingly.  The voice of the captain is sure, clear, reassuring and supportive.  The Captain never steers you into danger.

There are many other crew members aboard your ship.  In previous posts, I have introduced you to one of your crew members - your Saboteur.  He is a crew member who can have a VERY loud voice.  The Saboteur delights in coming up on deck when we think about making change.  He is the voice telling us that our idea is bad, that we could fail, that someone could get hurt, that we don’t really want something.  If we let him up on deck and turn him up loud enough he will happily take over the steering of the ship.  He doesn’t have to steer for too long before we decide that the change we had considered really isn’t wise.  And we abandon it.  And the Saboteur voice becomes quiet and he goes below deck and back to sleep.  His work is done.  The ship sails on in the same way it always has.

In addition to the Saboteur, we have many other crew members, all of whom also have voices. 

One voice that can be very important and powerful in our life is The Appreciator. When the Appreciator is on deck, her job is to look around and to notice everything that there is to appreciate about our life.  She can find the gifts in even the most difficult situations.  She helps us realize that there is something to be appreciated in everything.  She does not always steer us away from heartache and challenge, but she does help us to find and appreciate the gifts within these situations.  Her voice is kind and caring.  She is full of wisdom.

A crew member who may be needed in your life could be that of the Doorman.  This crew member opens doors for us in our life.  Sometimes she opens them only wide enough for us to peek inside; other times she encourages us to walk right through the door as she holds it wide open.  If you invite both the Doorman and the Saboteur on deck at the same time, the Saboteur may run about closing as many doors as the Doorman was trying to open!  The Doorman has a voice of encouragement and confidence.  She believes that opening doors is easy and important work.

There is an endless number of possible crew members that can be found on our ship. Your crew members may include The Curious One, The One Who Takes Action, The Listener and The Rebel.   While each of them can have an important voice, it is up to us to decide which of them we want to invite up on deck and which of their voices we want turned up the loudest at certain times in our lives.  Each of them is available to us all the time.  No doubt, as you examine your life, you will notice that you have made better friends with some of these crew members than with others.  Some, who have had the potential to be wonderful crew members for you, you may have kept below deck for too long.

During this week, I challenge you to notice which crew member is steering your ship.  Which voices do you choose to crank up, and which you choose to turn down.  Only invite crew members onto your deck who are willing to work with your Captain on her mission of creating your best possible, fulfilling life.

My inquiry for you this week is, ‘Whose voice am I cranking up?’

Learn more about the power of your Captain and Crew during group or individual coaching.  Check out my coaching video and my group coaching video and then contact me to help you get started.  Your voyage awaits!

I just finished reading a book for my book club.  It isn’t one that I would have picked off the shelf for myself.  Not being a history buff, I struggled to keep all of the events and characters straight – often because I had no frame of reference in which to place them; the 1700’s has not been a fascination of mine!  However, at the end of the book, the author tells a bit about how she created the characters.  It turns out that while doing her research she had discovered the date of birth of a little girl, Marie Anne Therese Dundas,  born to a wigmaker and his wife.  The story of the book told the fictional story of this girl’s life.  It is only at the very end of this “about the characters” part, that the author reveals that the gravestone from which she took the girls birthdate and name, also revealed that the child had only lived for six days in real life.  The author wrote that she did not like that ending, so she wrote a different one; a better one.

This concept of writing our own endings got me thinking about life, and about how we often simply resign ourselves to the fact that the trajectory for our life has been set, and we are simply along for the ride.  I often hear people, when asked about things they might like to do in their life, respond with a carefully rehearsed list of why changing the course of their life is close to impossible.  They give plenty of power to their saboteur and he is more than willing to help them with the list!

A young mother or father might say that they would love to go back to school but they cannot because … after all they now have children to raise.  A middle-aged person might lament the fact that they are not in the shape or health they wish they were but …. after all they’ve never been athletic.  And it’s hard for them.  A person in an unhappy (or even unhealthy) relationship might comment that they would do it differently in another life but…. after all they have too much invested to walk away.  The list goes on and on.  A student might wish they were getting better grades but mentions that it is too late for this semester…. after all there is only a month or two left.
There is, of course, some truth to what each of these people is saying.  There is also a lot, lot, lot of unrealized purposeful living.

I can think of several examples to illustrate choices that people have made to create different endings for their lives.  One is from the book, “What Makes Olga Run?”.  In this book, we meet real life Olga Kotelko, a retired school teacher.  Olga, at age 77 took up running just for the challenge.  Twenty years later, at 97, she was still running, and had set 26 World Records.  Talk about writing a new ending for her life!

Our daughter Kaitlyn had a successful career as the editor of an online news agency.  Her glamourous seeming life had her living in the UK, and then in Sydney, Australia, where she jet-setted between Australia and New Zealand for work.  After more than 6 years of this, she couldn’t shake the thought that she might want to teach.  She did not want to get to the end of her life having not found out.  She bravely quit her job, moved across the world back to Canada and embarked upon a new degree.  Listening to the tales from her classroom, it’s clear to see that not only has she created a new ending for herself, she has also opened the door for new endings for some of her lucky young students.

Sheri Bruneau, my friend, was also an experienced, talented teacher.  During a 15-minute practice coaching session I had with her when I was getting certified to become a Life Coach (my very first practice client), Sheri mentioned that she had always wanted to become a professional organizer.  She even had the name for her company picked out:  Get it Together!  That fifteen minutes soon became the inflection point for a huge life change for her.  It was not an easy decision.  She had always wanted to teach, but she felt like something else was calling her.  She had two children still at home.  She did not have training in this new field.  This week, 7 years later, after morphing from a Professional Organizer to a Certified Interior Designer and Home Renovator, she is listed as one of the top three interior designers in Calgary!  What a fantastic new ending Sheri is writing. 

My final example is a young girl in Kenya, Naomi.  I have come to know Naomi through the Building Hope Society Project that I oversee.  Naomi was raised in a small Maasai village.  It was her destiny to go to the local school until the completion of grade eight, at which point she would be sold for marriage to an older man who likely already had several wives.  Naomi found out that the top girl and top boy at her school would be given a sponsorship scholarship to go to high school and she set about studying and preparing to do her best.  She achieved the highest marks in her class, went on to high school, and just this year was accepted into, and was sponsored to start a university program in teaching.  This girl could not see any more than a slim hope for a new ending, and yet she made the difficult choice to aim for it.
Most of us are not, and do not have to be, an Olga, Kaitlyn, Sheri or Naomi.  We do not have to make huge life changing choices.  We do, however, each have the choice to decide upon the endings that we want in our lives.  In fact, we have this ‘endings’ choice many times every day. 

How many times do we find ourselves in a conversation that is not going how we had hoped?  In this moment, we have the choice to write a new ending for ourselves.  We can change our tone, our words, our facial expression, and completely alter the outcome of the conversation.  How many times do we need to be frustrated in traffic before we decide to create a new ending?  We can put on our favourite music, stop for a cup of tea to sip on the way home or even call a friend. 

Each day is made up of dozens of beginnings and endings.  Every little task, every conversation, every phone call, every meal, every workout, every visit, every shopping trip, every transaction, has an ending. We hold the power to create the kind of ending for each of these that best reflects the kind of life we are choosing to live.  When enough of these endings are put together and a pattern emerges, we see that it is us, and us alone that writes the big ending for our life.  In the making of each of these small decisions about how we want to ‘be’ we build the muscle for how we ‘be’come.
At the end of our book club book, A Desperate Fortune, the male lead, Hugh, who becomes the husband of Marie Anne Therese Dundas, is asked by her, “How did you make the journey from a man who likes to fix things, to a man who kills?”  His answer speaks volumes about how new endings are made: “Step by step”, he replied. 

My inquiry for you this week is “What ending am I creating?”  Ask it often.

Finally, I am helping to give a brand-new ending to a local Calgary family by participating in a Habitat for Humanity all-women’s build, on May 4th.  I love the idea of helping a family find a way to make a new beginning.  I am so excited to spend a day building their new home.  My goal is to raise $500 to donate to this project.  I am getting close!  To sponsor me please go to my fundraising page.
Begin your new ending with some coaching sessions! I provide coaching, group coaching (see video here), workshop creation and facilitation.  Contact me to help you get started.
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