Stretched Beyond the Learning Zone

video by Chrysalis Studios

I’ve been wanting to learn a new skill called Graphic Recording (watch the video to see a professional in action). I love to doodle, love listening for the essence of what a group is saying and enjoy trying to make the ideas and abstractions visual and concrete. I know that I am not a skilled drawer. I’ve never had a natural ability to draw real things (I do draw abstractions) and I’ve never practiced or taken a class to try and learn this skill. So off I went yesterday to a beginner’s graphic recording class to try and develop this new skill that I could integrate with an old one. At least that’s what I thought I was there to learn!

What I really learned about was the intensity of feeling overwhelmed, frozen, unable to act, stretched beyond my capacities to learn, inadequate, and unclear about where to start.

The first three fourths of the class I was doing great and enjoying myself. I was learning new things and loving that! We were going over basic lettering and drawing skills. The other participants in the room with me were 2 professional artists and 2 art history majors who work in other fields. My drawing station was sandwiched between the professional illustrator and the professional graphic artist. I was fine with that. As we’d draw various icons, I’d copy what the instructor drew, laugh at my attempts, keep trying, look around the room and learn from what others were drawing. I was humored by my products and inspired by those around me. Sometimes I was even impressed by what I drew. I felt comfortable with the fact that this was a skill that I currently didn’t have and that I was in the process of learning. I was mildly embarrassed at how un-people like my efforts to draw people were, but this was the time to learn and I was clearly showing up to learn so it was okay.

And then the last section of the class. We had two opportunities to do live graphic recording. First we listened as a brief article was read to us and we recorded. It was fast, confusing and my graphic was a mess. I could get words out but not images. I was flooded with information and stuck between trying to write down everything fast, create images, and fill my paper. Phew… it was done. My product was awful, but that was fine. To the garbage it went, a fine first experience. I learned how I had to slow down and really listen and not just try and write everything down (or I wouldn’t understand any of it).

Here we go, we’re doing it again. This time we’ve got a 10 minute lecture on dog training to graphically record. I know to save a lot of space, I know there is a lot of information (10 minutes worth) to get recorded on my 8 foot piece of paper. I’m going to go slow, listen to the heart of what is being said and record what moves through me.

Midway through this process, I reached beyond my stretch zone, beyond my learning zone and into a place where I felt frozen and inadequate. I was stretching myself on too many fronts and I was unable to find moments of success in any of them. The organization of ideas on my page was a mess, I wasn’t clear if I was capturing the main ideas, I had no idea how to even begin to draw a dog and there were many places where I wanted to, and I was trying to think of other images that would help my page not be all words. And all of these things that I didn’t know were effecting the things that I thought I did know. Even the words that I was writing were often too small, illegible and upon later viewing contained many misspellings. At one point the instructor noticed that I had frozen, that I was breaking down or giving up. She encouraged me to just keep going, record whatever comes through me. I felt a little bit of relief. Okay, just listen to what comes through you. The problem was that everything that emerged through me at this point was filtered through a feeling of inadequacy. I made it to the end. I spent the next 10 minutes along with my classmates ‘making it pretty,’ adding color, filling in details, trying to create a whole out of this mess. It was not fun. It felt pointless. There was no way to turn these parts into a decent final product.

As I shared this story with a friend, he kept asking if I was embarrassed. I was a little, but that wasn’t my strongest emotion. I was totally discouraged. All of the hope and possibility, all of my sense of ‘just keep trying,’ ‘you’re just learning,’ ‘just do what you can,’ ‘you’re learning a new skill’ had emptied out of me. I felt overwhelmed, inadequate and discouraged. And then, feeling all of that weight, I just wanted to quit.

The opportunity to experience paralysis and all of its accompanying emotions and responses was my greatest learning yesterday. While the experience itself was brief and passed, after the class I allowed myself to stay with that feeling of failure, the feeling that I couldn’t do it, the reality that I was stretched beyond where I had tools to help myself stay engaged. I slipped deeper and deeper into how little of a person I felt. It’s really hard for me to be asked to do something and then constantly be confronted with the fact that I can’t do it. There must be something wrong with me, right?

If I intellectually look at it now, I don't feel any of those things. However, in the moment, that is what captured me.

I think about a 5 year old friend of mine who at times expresses his emotions of anger and embarrassment by lashing out and hurting another person. I hear him, after the fact, telling me that he feels sad that he’s hurt the other person. I imagine that in the moment of lashing out and pinching another, there is a part of him that is aware that he’s ‘not doing it right’ and yet the other parts of him have no idea as to how to stop and act in a different way. Just like I haven’t learned the skills of drawing and graphic recording, he hasn’t learned the skills of recognizing his emotions, choosing how to respond and thus having a respectful engagement when he’s feeling a strong emotion. In those moments, does he feel the same sense of overwhelmed inadequacy as I did yesterday? Does he feel frozen with no ideas about where to successfully start?

In retrospect, there were many places that I could have started. I could have taken a deep breath. I could have picked one skill to work on instead of trying to accomplish all of them. I could have chosen to start with only paying attention to how I organize my page, or simply capturing the content, or just try to draw images, regardless of what they look like. Any of those would have been simple places for me to narrow this seemingly unapproachable task and find a place to make contact, to re-enter, to focus my attention. But in the moment, I didn’t see those doorways. I just felt paralyzed by this overwhelming flood of sensations, thoughts and feelings. And there was this non-stop voice of the lecture and the unyielding presence of this task I was supposed to be accomplishing staring me in the face.

I walked away from the experience with half of me feeling deflated, depleted, and quite down on myself. I was also frustrated and disappointed in that side of myself. I had kept such a great attitude, stayed so open to learning and so accepting of where I was in my skills and abilities. I had such courage to walk into something as a complete beginner with openness to learn. And then, once that place of being pushed beyond my capacities was activated in me, it was so hard to rediscover solid ground. Intellectually I was able to come back to the room, the group, and recognize the great job I did by just jumping in and trying. But experientially, it was like a toxic chemical had been released in me and it was hard to cleanse it out of me. On a small scale it feels like a dose of shock and trauma to my system. It was as if I had been stung by a bee. I wasn’t hurting that much any more, I was calm again. And yet the shock of being stung was still in my system and I could still feel the echo of the poison reverberating in my being.

And so the questions that I sit with: How do I recognize when others are stretched beyond their learning zone? How do I recognize and support them if they have hit a place of discouragement and despair? How can I offer children and adults opportunities to see places to start? And for myself, I hope that in the future I will recognize when I reach that break down place and will remember to narrow down my choices and find one place to focus my attention, finding a place to start.

Roots of Empathy on CBS

Another taste of Roots of Empathy

The Dalai Lama on Educating the Heart

In 2006 I attended the Vancouver Dialogues hosted by the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Below are some notes of comments made by the Dalai Lama on the topic of Educating the Heart. You can hear the full webcast here.

Dalai Lama speaking on Educating the Heart

We can learn from basic human beings, not sophisticated people. They sometimes create artificial abilities that give us confusion. I prefer more uneducated people in education. We can learn much from young children. They are still unspoiled… unspoiled is much easier to distinguish in the beginning of life – once it is dirty, it’s harder to clean up. Like water that gets dirty.

“Children are more capable of naturally expressing what is fundamental to human beings.”

The fundamentals – being playful, smiling, joking… not just knowledge.

“Sometimes we take more serious artificial constructs of the human mind at the expense of what is very natural to the human mind.”

“I’m just another contributor here and still searching. I’m not here to give answers. Now is time to establish a body or group that has experience and do more research and find out evidence. If we rely on religious belief, it further complicates – what religion to choose? So universal, humanity in general, needs the focus. Can’t promote universal values on religious basis. Must use secular basis. Nobody can dispute the point that compassion and love is good. Research is needed, educational institutes to carry on the work. Non-governmental programs are more useful. Teachers, communities, parents. I am like others. It is easier to see the faults. More difficult to find answers.

This is a moral crisis, the gaps between education and the poor. Younger people will face more problems in the future. We need to not take for granted the existing system. Reality is changing and we have to find new ways to deal with reality so education has to change. . . Focusing on honesty, self-confidence, determination…”

This stuff is natural and it is our duty to be courageous speaking about it. We need research and to prove to the world that social and emotional realm and the goodness in all of us is important. Teaching people to care about community and to give them the opportunity to excel in communities.

The Peril of Praise

This New York Magazine article, How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise has been making its way through the email circuit. I found it to be a great article, well worth the read if you are involved in the lives of children (and adults!). Also, here is a handout that you can download that complements this article.

For a few decades, it's been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.

[In a research study, fifth-grade students were] randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, "You must be smart at this." Other students were praised for their effort: "You must have worked really hard."

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control," she explains. "They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure."

[In another study, students were taught] that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.

Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents' pride in their children's achievements: It's so strong that "when they praise their kids, it's not that far from praising themselves."

What would it mean, to give up praising our children so often? Well, if I am one example, there are stages of withdrawal, each of them subtle. In the first stage, I fell off the wagon around other parents when they were busy praising their kids. I didn't want Luke to feel left out. I felt like a former alcoholic who continues to drink socially. I became a Social Praiser.

These are only some scattered clips... there's much more in the article!!

Ways To Care For Ourselves

Here are some ideas that emerged in a staff training while exploring ways that we can take care of ourselves... The really important work that is an essential part of being present with and caring for others.

• Sleep
• Listen to or play music
• Go out
• Exercise
• Sing
• Have alone time
• Do yoga
• Watch sit-coms
• Watch a movie
• Have sex
• Drink a glass of wine
• Talk to others
• Do nothing
• Do needle work
• Snuggle
• Walk
• Create, do art
• Dance
• Take a bath
• Read a book
• Meditate/pray
• Soak in a hot tub
• Pet your cat

Creativity, Education, Intrinsic Strengths, Innate Curiosity and Play

Some educational and parenting resources for you:

A MUST see, hysterical and insightful TEDtalk with Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson is author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, and a leading expert on innovation and human resources. In this talk, he makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.)

Thank you Christoph for directing me to this talk.

An interesting NY Times article, So the Torah is a Parenting Guide?

“Indulged, coddled, pressured and micromanaged on the outside, my young patients appeared to be inadvertently deprived of the opportunity to develop an inside,” she writes in her book. “They lack the secure, reliable, welcoming internal structure that we call the ‘self.”’ ...

There is a Hasidic saying that Mogel quotes, “If your child has a talent to be a baker, don’t ask him to be a doctor.” By definition, most children cannot be at the top of the class; value their talents in whatever realm you find them. “When we ignore a child’s intrinsic strengths in an effort to push him toward our notion of extraordinary achievement, we are undermining God’s plan,” Mogel writes.

Which leads me to aPsychology Today article on the Sudbury Valley School

At Sudbury Valley School, there's no other way to learn. The 38-year-old day facility in Framingham, Massachusetts, is founded on what comes down to a belief about human nature—that children have an innate curiosity to learn and a drive to become effective, independent human beings, no matter how many times they try and fail. And it's the job of adults to expose them to models and information, answer questions—then get out of the way without trampling motivation. ...

Play—it's by definition absorbing. The outcome is always uncertain. Play makes children nimble—neurobiologically, mentally, behaviorally—capable of adapting to a rapidly evolving world. That makes it just about the best preparation for life in the 21st century. Psychologists believe that play cajoles people toward their human potential because it preserves all the possibilities nervous systems tend to otherwise prune away. It's no accident that all of the predicaments of play—the challenges, the dares, the races and chases—model the struggle for survival. Think of play as the future with sneakers on.