Too often we feel like we’re not good enough. In an age of social media, this happens even more because people tend to share their success more often than their struggles. It can make you feel inadequate and question whether you belong or have something worth sharing. If these sentiments feel a bit too familiar,…
I never considered the relationship between trust and performance until I watched this portion of Simon Sinek’s powerful video. Watch it and then let’s continue the conversation. He defines performance as “trust them with your life” while trust is defined as “trust them with your money and wife”. It was intuitive that we would want…
Have you ever noticed that negative feedback weighs much more heavily in our hearts than positive feedback? For example, we might get feedback from a supervisor and while it may be overwhelmingly positive, it may include something we need to work on as well. While we should be happy about the overall positive feedback, we…
I love magic tricks. They often make my brain race, straining for some explanation of how the impossible was possible. Most of the time that’s where it ends: with wonder and amazement. Sometimes I cheat though. I occasionally go to YouTube and search for a video to explain what I saw. What’s interesting is how…
I’ve often heard the words “fearless” and “courageous” used interchangeably. Recently though, I learned about a significant difference between them and in 2020, it’s giving me a powerful framing for what many of us are experiencing. Fearless is defined as the absence of fear. Courageous involves doing something despite feeling fear. As an example, very…
If you’ve ever felt like you don’t get the attention or respect you deserve from the people who know you well, you’re not alone. Maybe you’ve even heard the saying that no one is a prophet in their own land? The phrase has its origins in Luke 4:24 meaning that this phenomenon is by no…
Have you ever realized that so much of our job as educators has nothing to do with the content we teach? Much of it is how we share what we know or about relationships between:
teachers and students
teachers and parents
teachers and other teachers
teachers and admin
teachers and other school staff
I originally wrote the text below as part of a UCLA class I taught for in-service math teachers. Many of them were going through what I had also gone through: the uncomfortable feeling of realizing that you are finally making sense of math combined with the reality that for so many years you hadn’t. I always wanted to share this online but never did because I didn’t know what people would think. I came across it again recently and realized that it was hypocritical of me to encourage people to be vulnerable and go outside of their comfort zone during trainings, yet not do the same myself.
So, here it goes…