Just Start!

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. 

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” –Goethe

I believe that we let obstacles and excuses get in the way of our dreams.  This first statement may seem odd from people who enthusiastically sign up to have 20+ obstacles put in their way on any given weekend.  The obstacles we face whether real or imagined can be conquered just like a Tough Mudder course.  


You may get KNOCKED OUT going through the wires but you get back up.  You may fall off of the Funky Monkey but you keep swimming out and you conquer it the next time (or in my case you swim again).  You may fail scaling Everest and fall back down but you find a way to get back up.  The honest truth is that if you cannot go through an obstacle you always have the option of going around.  On our team you will never hear the end of it if you go around but it does technically remain an option.  We have changed a lot on this journey and some of these lessons can be translated into leadership and education arenas.

Pay close attention to conversations about change.  The focus is typically on "what could be?" or "why we cannot do things differently".    Very little time is spent on the actions that need to take place.  We can debate the change that should occur in our world, lives, education, etc.  The unfortunate thing is that nothing changes unless someone is bold enough to begin it.  I have a couple of questions to ask as we wind down the present school year and plan for the next.  

1. What are you bold enough to change?
2. What actions are you willing to take to accomplish the change?
3. How can we change conversations to focus on what truly matters?

The most important thing is that we opt to be bold, take action, and enjoy the moments that follow.  Conquering your biggest obstacle typically leads to moments like the ones captured in the pictures below.

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What to Learn from Getting Knocked-Out?

The most memorable part (and I say this with all kinds of irony intended) of the two laps at Mid-Atlantic this past weekend was getting knocked for a loop on Electroshock Therapy on Saturday.  I'd heard stories about people who got knocked unconscious from a shock, but I figured that was hyperbole and that they just got knocked down.  Well, I can tell you, there's no hyperbole involved.  I was legitimately out of it for a second.

Since Miami was so intense, I knew that I wasn't going to simply go charging in and hope for the best.  Rather, I decided to stand at the starting point and watch a few other people as they went through.  I figured this would help me gauge how bad the shocks were.  If no one else was falling, then I thought it wouldn't be too bad.  There was a guy standing next to me looking very skittish about going through, and after I had watched about a half-dozen people make it through with no real problems, I turned to him and said something like "It's okay...it doesn't look too bad today" and went in.  The next thing I remember is opening my eyes, wondering where I was for a second, and realizing I was on my hands and knees about 2/3 the way through.  I tried to get up, but got shocked again, so I stayed down and crawled my way out.

If you haven't had this kind of thing happen to you, the best way I could describe it is to think of any movie or TV show you've ever seen where a robot has to be shut down and then restarted at some point.  In some cases, the restart will be shown through the eyes of the robot, and you'll get a chance to see the eyes open, everything come into focus, and then the robot comes back online.  Sometimes you'll even see a data scroll, like the Window's start up screen. The same thing happened to me.  I remember opening my eyes, and for a split second not knowing how I got there.  Perhaps it's because I'm a technologist, but the best way to describe it is as if my mind had been "reset" for a second, and I had to power-up.  It wasn't nearly as scary as you might think - particularly since I quickly realized that I still had other things to worry about at that point (namely, I had to get out of those damn wires).  This, of course, became fodder for lots of humor throughout the weekend, and I have absolutely no doubt that Danny and Brian will chime in with their well-placed two cents on the topic at some point (more than likely, this will become a running gag).

I started thinking about what kinds of lessons could be learned from this experience for educational practices (I know, it seems unlikely, but with enough time to reflect connections can be made).  I realized that some of our current school practices would benefit from this kind of hard-reset. It would be a great way to clear out some of the institutional inertia that takes place in educational settings.  Powering down and then restarting the system might be just the time to re-examine all of those places where things are "done that way because that's they way they've always been done."  We might be scared of the shock that causes the restart, but I would guess that the benefits would outweigh the costs.  If it's anything like my experience, I would guess that the really important things would come into focus most quickly.  After all, when I got reset I was much more interested in getting out of those wires than in how cold my beer was going to be at the finish line.

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