When we started Zeumo about three years ago, we believed “we can do better.” And, we still believe that we can do better at communicating with and engaging high school students than P.A. systems, posters, flyers, and emails they never check. We believe we can do better than having all of a student’s in-school and out-of-school activities using different communication platforms, leaving a student with 6-8 logins and passwords just to remain up to date and involved.
After a few pilots and a year-and-a-half struggle to turn interest into contracts in a crowded, “freemium” education technology market, someone in the healthcare industry saw our product. “Hey! We need this for physicians!” As a startup trying to survive and build a viable business, we thought perhaps “we can do better” in another industry. (Anything is better than dying slow death.) We spent 8 months navigating a joint venture with a large healthcare company. Days before rollout, and with the joint venture not finalized, things began to devolve as the details of their go-to-market plan and pricing became clearer. This wasn’t going to be a good deal for Zeumo. So, our team had to step away. Even though we were burning cash and still trying to make a full pivot into healthcare, we had to believe “we can do better.” And, after many more months, some additional investment, and several pilots of our own, we understood more clearly the challenges of the healthcare market. The sales cycle is long. The bureaucracy is deep. The leadership dispersed. Not to mention, no one on our team is a healthcare expert! We believe in our technology and still believe that with the right healthcare partner “we can do better.” For that reason, I am pleased today to share that Zeumo is now part of the Advisory Board Company whose healthcare expertise, consulting, and other technologies mean we will do better. It is funny how this refrain has resurfaced to summarize the moves and the motivations that have driven our little startup, now 7 people strong, hustling every day trying to make it, trying to do better. And yet, as I consider it further, this belief that “we can do better” is surely core to all innovation and a driver of critical thought and creativity regardless of context. It is the belief that sustains persistent, decades-long legal battles for justice and equality. It is the belief that drives the teacher who transforms her classroom from a space for education to a laboratory for learning. It is the belief that gets you up in the morning and says that there is something new to be accomplished today. It has been a crazy three years. Exhausting. Stressful. Eye opening. And, I still believe we can do better. I hope wherever you are and whatever you do, you believe it too.
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At the playground the other weekend, my 3-year-old and a couple of “big kids" were running around and climbing on everything, as you might expect. Then, out of nowhere, one of the big kids, maybe 7 years old, came flying off the “bridge” right at me. He landed from the 4-foot drop just next to me with a big, proud smile, and looked up and said: “I not scared of hypes.” Off he ran. I smiled at his use of “hypes” for heights. The joy of words and kids! But, I was also happy at how proud he was and that he was willing to show it (not to mention he had already been kind to my daughter, which, of course, made me like him immediately!). I was curious about the fact that, while this young man wasn’t scared of heights, he knew, for some reason, it was worth telling me. He knew the concept: that being “scared of heights” is “a thing.” So, some adult had clearly introduced it, but it didn’t bother him. And, he was proud of that fact! Did he know somehow that I am scared of heights? Did he know that I am also scared I will pass this along to my daughters? Was he showing me that it was possible to talk about it, but not pass it on? Looking deeper, however, I realized this wasn’t the prompt for reflection this young man was offering at all. Heights…yeah…maybe… …but, what about hypes!? What about a fear of hypes? Is that “a thing”? Social hype? Political hype? Media hype? The list of hypes goes on and on… It turns out that, as a father, I am scared of hypes! How do I keep my daughters from internalizing a hyped-up social, political, media-driven culture of fear? Of violence? Of more…more…more? Of never good enough? Of self loathing? Of manufactured beauty? Of fake “reality”? Of real fakeness? How do I instill the tools to resist such self-destroying bombast when its sales and promotion attempt to consume them at every turn, trying to convert them into consumers of it? Somehow, I must teach my daughters to look critically at media hyperbole and its political and economic beneficiaries. They must understand there is something more than endless escalation of conflict, whether interpersonal or international, fiction, “reality,” or reality. They must see beyond the false images of self and need and desire and womanhood they will be sold when I’m not looking. How do I arm them with the nonviolent weapons of an independent mind? A critical eye on the world? A loving eye on themselves? Will they learn that they can find no peace in their world without first finding peace in themselves? Every day, this feels like the heaviest burden and greatest opportunity of being a parent. So, as a father, for my girls, hypes scare the shit out of me! But, for now, I have to just love and hope and work like hell that maybe someday my daughters, standing high, high (like crazy high!) upon a precipice (seriously, right at the edge!), grounded firmly in who they are, looking out over the beauty of the world, feeling its reflection deep within will say: I’m not scared of hypes. We have all heard about work/life balance. Most of us have probably read a book about it or even sat through some sort of seminar or workshop on the topic (probably called something like “7 Easy Steps to Balance Work and Life”) by some guy who has it all figured out. He has a framework. He has a picture. He has 7 easy steps. Maybe he wrote the book. But, the paradigm is corrupt. As presented, work exists on one end of a continuum; life happens on the other. And, our goal is to find the balance and personal nirvana that is supposedly somewhere in between. Here are a few critical problems to consider: Problem #1: The work/life duality is zero sum and linear. The nearer I am to work, the further I am from life, and vice versa. One side takes from the other. As such, it promotes identity schizophrenia, anxiety, and even guilt. In other words, the diametrically opposed forces create potentially paralyzing external pressures rather than generative, internal motivation. Problem #2: Life, in and of itself, is entirely non-linear and is its own “balancing” act of an endless number of variables, one of which is work! Work and life aren’t distinct, but rather collectively come from and reinforce (or, worst-case, dismantle) our sense of self. Problem #3: Work and life require different energy and different types of investment and skills. One doesn’t really take from the other, but they all do come from the same source (the self). So, cultivation of the self is the source of balance, if such a concept actually applies. Who we are and who we are trying to become is complex. It’s messy. It’s emerging. It evolves over time in all kinds of (broadly defined) work and amid the relational and existential craziness that is often called life. However each is defined, work and life (not to mention play) are just different contexts for who we are and what we are becoming. It is about us (not about them). If we are focused on cultivating our best selves, then we will recognize when our current work becomes a barrier rather than a facilitator of that process. Alternately, we will acknowledge when things happening in our relationships, or otherwise in our personal lives, are inhibiting us from becoming who we want/need to become. We then must have the discipline and courage to adjust our course as needed. But, our goal should not be work/life balance. Our goal should be finding life in our work and work in our life. Every year, my family watches the Music City Marathon from our front porch. It’s humbling and inspiring to watch 5000 strangers pass you by, 20 miles in with 6 more to go. I always tell people I am not a runner, so part of me thinks these 5000 people are crazy. On the other hand, watching them makes me question my “I am not a runner” statement in the first place. Watching these “runners” pass for hours, you realize there is no such thing as “a runner.” These are just people. These are people challenging themselves. These are people reaching for a goal. It’s a 90-pound, 70-year-old woman, and a 270-pound, 20-year-old man. It’s a graceful Kenyan, and a rickety man with scoliosis. It’s the parents pushing their physically disabled children in strollers, and a fallen soldier’s Mom running in boots. It’s a survivor “running for a cure,” and a loved one running in memory. Some take long strides, some shuffle. Some have bodies that remain still and calm. Others seem held loosely together by thread, body parts clacking and crashing with every stride. Some ignore our cheers; some are in a zone; some cheer back. As with most of my experiences, I wondered if there were a lesson to learn here about education, about community, about life. Surely, there is a metaphor in this profound example of human endurance. Surely, there is a reason that watching this marathon is so emotional. Here’s what I’ve got: Each has his own motivation. Whether we are talking about marathons, relationships, education, or careers, we are all motivated by something – and our motivation is unique to us. Even those we deem “unmotivated” are simply motivated to do nothing. Either way it is motivation. And, if we want to engage them, relate to them, or educate them, we must tap their motivation. Each has his own style. Running, learning, or communicating, our “style” is a combination of our nature and our nurture. It is in some ways developed and managed by our motivation and our opportunities, and in other ways by things beyond our control or beneath our consciousness. So, if we want to relate to others, to love them, to learn with them, we must be open to their style. We must see style as part of who they are. Each has his own pace. We live in a do-more, be-more society and our culture tells us that winning is the goal. Winning, however, doesn’t have to be externally defined or culturally recognized. It can be individual and internal. Self-actualization comes when I can define what winning is for me. So, if we believe in each other and that each of us has purpose and power, we must broaden the parameters of success and celebrate each at his own pace. In a marathon of 5000 runners, there are 4999 losers, and none of them lost. I had the pleasure of sitting and talking a few weeks ago with Bill Milliken. And, among the countless gems that began to flow when he started getting into the rhythm of the conversation, he dropped this: “If I am on an operating table, I don’t want collaborators. I want an integrated system!” With his sharp wit and wily twinkle in his eyes, Milliken is relentless in pushing us to “get it right” in our collective work for and with young people. This is what he has done and advocated for decades (it’s what makes him Bill Milliken!). His charm aside, I thought this quote was worth exploring a little further. So, I started thinking about the difference between collaboration and an integrated system. And, while there are certainly many specific differences to consider, I believe that, at its core, the difference is that of shared strategy (not to be confused merely with a shared strategic plan, strategic vision, strategic alignment, or any other narrow bastardizations of the concept of strategy). As collaborators, we typically bring 1 and 1 together and celebrate how we “strategically” made 2. To use another analogy, in collaboration, I have my puzzle piece and you have yours and we navigate around the edges a bit to see if we can “strategically” fit them together. But, collaboration is too often just that – around the edges – and generally happens downstream of our truly strategic organizational and institutional decisions. In other words, the critical decisions (who we serve, how, when, where, etc.) are already made by the time the collaboration tries to fit them together. Collaboration becomes a reactionary tactic attempting to overcome the lack of an actual integrated system! In an integrated system, we co-create in an ongoing manner our collective strategy, which guides and determines organizational and institutional decisions, key roles, responsibilities, and tactics. I work in this area or on this issue because it complements (not simply adds to) what you do and how you do it toward our common objective (also an element of strategy). An integrated system, therefore, requires constant communication, reflection, and learning so that together our 1 + 1 achieves the proverbial 3. Cynically, then, an integrated system comes at a cost: our work must actually be about our work, not just our organization or institution. Our work must be about the young person, for example, not whether or not I work in a school setting or an after-school setting. Let’s be honest, in most of our communities, the “systems of support” (or lack thereof) we have created for young people have been created because they work well for us as adults and the organizations we lead. Even in some of the best cases, our efforts represent an attempt to add things up for young people, but never really ask us to change what we are doing to make the system more complete. We generate plans of systems but claim expertise or blame funding for why someone else needs to change or do more, and not us. We rarely, if ever, achieve an integrated system at the level of shared strategy. We rarely, if ever, achieve the sort of integrated system that would actually work for our young people. Unfortunately, no amount of collaboration can overcome this reality. And, even more unfortunately, collaboration can obscure the weaknesses within the system by averaging them out. This, in turn, makes future efforts at a more integrated and strategic approach that much more complicated because we appear to be better than we actually are. It also makes it more difficult to identify and address where we are falling short. If I am on the operating table, I do hope my surgeon is part of an integrated system with the nurses and the doctor who diagnosed me. And, once there, I certainly hope the stellar work of my surgeon doesn’t obscure or average out the marginal work of my anesthesiologist! So, Bill, thanks for the analogy, the push to work smarter, and for ensuring the next time I have surgery that I will be completely scared-to-death! A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of spending a couple of days with staff and youth of the Youth Activation Committee of Special Olympics Arizona. I was proud to have the opportunity to support their work by having the chance to facilitate a part of one of their meetings. For my work, our main goal was to get back to an understanding with the youth and adult coordinator of how working with Special Olympics and particularly Project UNIFY is not just something we do, but something grounded in who we are and core to our values system. It is something we live every day and go to sleep with every night. So I started the meeting by simply asking everyone what values being a part of Project UNIFY helped them live out. Why was the work so important to them? We went around the room and, of course, I was inspired by the sense of love and friendship and equity and justice articulated by these teens as well as the commitment of the adult staff. Incredible, really. However, one athlete, part of her school’s unified flag football team, who had been quite vocal up to this point had not yet responded. So, I stopped and asked if she had anything she would like to offer. Without a verbal response, she dropped her head and began writing, slowly and deliberately. The room was silent. She kept writing, slowly, deliberately. (How long do I give her? I have never worked with this young woman. This could go on for hours for all I know!) She kept writing, slowly, deliberately. (Are any of the other youth giving me an idea that it’s time to move ahead? Should I move on and come back to her? We really don’t have that much time!) No cues. The other youth were quiet and patiently waiting. So, I sat down and did the same. I tried not to watch for fear of her feeling any sort of pressure to hurry, but she was in a zone and really working with her thoughts. It wouldn’t have mattered. As she approached the end of the first page of notes, I again began to wonder just how long this could or should last. But, I waited. Finally, at the end of page one, she lifted her head. She started to speak and then got timid and lost her thoughts. Her previous confidence was suddenly gone. She was nervous, a bit confused. Her partner, also from her high school, softly reminded her to look at the notes she had just written. “Oh yeah.” She picked up her pad and began to read. She spoke of the value of friendship and sports and about how it helped organize her days (which was a very clear way she processed and understood the world, by her weekly calendar). She talked a bit about unified football; it was her first season. And then, after a small pause, she said something profound: “Project UNIFY is an action thing to do and includes students and teachers and other people.” Project UNIFY is “an action thing to do.” Project UNIFY involves everyone in her school. She nailed it. It was beautiful. It was real. It was also a statement that may never have happened in the pace and noise of our usual way of doing business. How many times have you been in a meeting when there were two or three good minutes of silent thinking? When no one giggled nervously? Looked around? At their watch? Checked their phone? When people sat there in the presence and fullness of silence? When was the last time you were in a class or a meeting or anywhere for that matter when your opinion was so valued that your peers were willing to sit silently until you could formulate your thoughts? However long it took!? And yet, it was this silence that gave this young woman power and voice. It was this silence that gave the rest of us humility. It gave her a chance to process and express her world with the skills that she has, not based on the rules and skills of everyone else, and not defined or minimized by the skills we all say she doesn’t have. And, it was this silence that allowed this gift to be shared with us. A gift from a young woman whose perspectives are too often dismissed because of intellectual disability, her profundity and spirit lost in the noise of activity when she was all about action. She was about action that included others in her work and in her sports and in her life – this was her core value. I am not sure how to write about silence, and I am not sure how and if I can convey the power of the moment and my appreciation of the young people who showed me the way. I will have the image forever in my mind of watching this young woman write her thoughts, and no amount of time spent waiting could have been more valuable than waiting. If only we could find the silence in our daily lives and relationships to be open to the genius around us and to create the space for all forms of love and life and genius to come in. We may even find that this silence is the path to becoming our best selves. We might just learn that silence is itself “an action thing to do.” Supply and demand: it’s probably the one relationship any of us remember from some sort of economics or even government class we had in high school or college. The point where supply meets demand is the equilibrium; it determines price. It is the basic idea of our economy and it’s as fundamental to our daily experience as the air we breathe. It determines what most of us consume and how much, what we get paid for the work we do, where products we consume come from, the brands we choose, where we consume, how far we have to drive to get there, and how much we pay when we do. Despite its ubiquity in our lives, most of us don’t pay too much attention to this fundamental relationship.
But, what would happen if supply and demand suddenly acted independently? Or worse, what would we do if they acted in actual opposition to each other? What if supply never met demand? Well, this is the economic reality for our community-based nonprofits that are serving our most vulnerable populations and providing basic services for our communities. At the time when the demand for services is growing, the supply of philanthropic investment has diminished. The data related to our recent recession demonstrate this effect most clearly as demand continues to tick upward in the nonprofit services arena and the supply of philanthropy, particularly for crisis and lifeline services, has continued a downward trend. Here is a glimpse at the current supply reality (There are a bunch of references below if you want to start digging deeper and countless more via Google. I’m just trying to make a point here.):
On the other (demand) hand:
Hopefully you get the sense of where we are today, but the longer term picture tells an even more unsettling story. While the good news is that philanthropic giving seems to be on a modest rise this year over last, the bad news is that the gap experienced over the past three years cannot easily be undone. The recession will leave a lasting and longitudinal gap. Put simply, when the economy does recover, the wealthy are more resilient than the poor, so the impact lasts longer the poorer you are. Therefore, when the economy starts to grow again, we also experience a perpetually expanding equity gap. The poor stay poor longer and the rich recover faster. The rich rebound fully. The poor rebound minimally. As this gap widens, the generational impact takes deeper root and the apparent shorter term economic shock of the recession becomes a long-term driver of poverty and instability. It becomes a cycle, and one that is not just bad for the poor, but is bad for the long-term health of the economy as a whole: “The adverse effects on lifetime earnings are most pronounced for unemployment episodes experienced by young people…In a recession, young workers tend to take worse jobs than they would during better times. And as they settle into family life and become less mobile, it is hard to recover from this “cyclical downgrading.” - “The Tragedy of Unemployment”, Finance and Development, December 2010 “There is consensus that macroeconomic instability is harmful for both growth and equity…In particular, episodes of instability disproportionately affect vulnerable groups in the short run, and…economic recovery rarely brings back poverty and equity to their pre-adjustment levels…In addition, it also acts as a deterrent for the determinants of growth, since they affect the process of savings and investment and thus, reduce long run growth and the potential for productive job creation.” - “Social Dimensions of Macroeconomic Policy: Report of the Executive Committee on Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations”, December 2001, p. 11 So, ultimately, unless philanthropic giving levels de-couple from the performance of the economy as a whole (not sure how this would happen), nonprofits will always fail to meet the needs of our communities. And, as every economic downturn occurs, those needs will grow and sustain long after philanthropy and the economy pick back up. The shock to the economy is temporary and the shock to our low-income communities perpetual. Something’s gotta give. References and Readings: “Employment and Unemployment Among Youth – Summer 2010”, Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 2010 “The Steep Decline in Teen Summer Employment in the U.S. 2000-2010”, The Center for Labor Market Studies, April 2011 “Social Dimensions of Macroeconomic Policy: Report of the Executive Committee on Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations”, December 2001, p. 11 “The Tragedy of Unemployment”, Finance and Development, December 2010 “The Other America’s Philanthropy: What Giving USA Numbers Reveal in 2011”, Nonprofit Quarterly, June 2011 “Nonprofit Finance Fund: America’s Nonprofits Struggle to Meet Fast-Climbing Demand for Services”, Nonprofit Finance Fund, 2011 “The Tragedy of Unemployment”, Finance and Development, December 2010 “Giving USA 2011: Unpacking the numbers LIVE”, Philanthropy Daily, June 21, 2011 Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, www.philanthropy.iupui.edu Giving USA, www.givingUSA.org A few months back, I had the opportunity to work with the National Association of State Directors of Special Education and the IDEA Partnership. Our focus was on “self-determination and youth investment” for young people with all sorts of abilities. The group included the deaf and hard of hearing, the physical disabilities community, the autism community, the mental health community, and the intellectual disability community.
Beyond any strategic facilitation purpose, I like to start with conversations about power because it is already in the room with us, and we rarely talk about it. Everyone has it. Everyone has lost it. Everyone has used it. Everyone has been used by it. Everyone intuitively knows what it is, but few know how to talk about it. We opened the session by having participants (adults and a couple of youth) picture themselves as a youth and then recall a time when they felt that they had power during their youth. Going around the room, you can just imagine the stories, the inspiration, and relationships that were shared among these complex lives. Responses varied from having the chance to drive a car to being told as a young woman that she is “just as good as the boys”; from the first experiences of saying “no” to a parent and making her own decision to holding his first position of formal leadership; from being genuinely listened to and supported by an adult as he overcame his physical challenges to experiencing accountability and ownership of her own mistakes and of her own education; from holding that first job to staging a walk-out to protect and save a school for the deaf and hard of hearing. These were powerful people. We all are powerful people. Power is not something we do but underlies what we do. It has no innate value, good or bad. It is not a choice we make but is reflected in the choices we make. It is not the substance of our relationships but defines the nature of our relationships. And while we don’t talk about power very often, we talk around power in most of the work we do. As I listened to the stories of these leaders, I began to write down some of the language we were using and its relationship to power. The following is the short (incomplete) list of words I captured in my margin: Inclusion: sharing and/or balancing power Actualization: living into one’s power Self-determination: choosing how to use one’s own power (requires the power of true choice) Voice: expressing power Leadership: acting on power This is just a start from my notes that day and I invite you to look for the other assumed, unspoken and/or unacknowledged power underlying our language, our actions, and relationships. At the end of the day, we cannot individually enforce inclusion; we cannot singularly define actualization; we cannot provide self-determination; we cannot create voice; and we cannot prescribe leadership. We don’t have the power. The power to achieve any of these is within each of us and is manifest through powerful relationships. As I was driving to work today and listening to NPR, I was caught a bit off guard by a streak of frustration that flooded me as I listened to yet another economist talk about the jobs market and “uncertainty”. Uncertainty is to blame for slow hiring (or no hiring). Uncertainty is to blame for a lack of lending. Uncertainty is to blame when it comes to consumer spending. Uncertainty is to blame for everything that is currently “wrong” with our economy, went wrong with our economy, and ever will go wrong with our economy. I have been listening to and reading this word for several years now, but today it rubbed me the wrong way.
The problem is that uncertainty used in this sense implies that there is some other world that is actually certain that we will one day return to. Guess what! It never was certain, never has been certain, never will be certain. There are just “good” times when people who craft the stories and promote the state of things were comfortable with the uncertainty and likely being fed by it. So, they call it certainty. Was the housing market certain in 2006? Of course not. But, in 2006 were we certain that housing prices would continue to rise? Of course we were. Were we once certain that unemployment rates could and should stay at 4-5%? Of course we were. Are we certain of that now? It doesn’t look like it. Were we once certain that every next generation in America would be better off than the previous? Of course we were. And now? Not so much. Can I go ahead and blame uncertainty for the flat tire I had last week? Perhaps if I do that I won’t have to go looking for nails in my driveway from my new roof. Maybe it can be blamed for the strange pain I had in my leg the other day while running. If so, I don’t have to consider that I do not stretch sufficiently. Surely it is to be blamed for that strange stain I found on my shirt while ironing it this morning. No way I could have done that! It was just uncertainty! Uncertainty has no real meaning. To use it as the opposite of certainty is a lie, because certainty doesn’t exist. Uncertainty is life and life is uncertainty. If we are rebuilding our economy for a more certain time, we are not really rebuilding our economy. If we are preparing the next generation for a more certain future, we are certainly not preparing them. My name is Anderson Williams and I am a recovering cynic. Like any recovery, mine is a daily battle. I do, however, believe that cynicism has its place in a healthy society and my recovery is about learning to use it properly as a tool and not allowing it to become a way of being. It needs to be a skill, not a habit or a mindset. My recovery began slowly and I estimate it began in about 2002. Paradoxically, this was the same time that my cynicism also expanded and reached new heights perhaps never previously recorded in human history (I suppose I inversely reached my proverbial rock-bottom). It was the time that I moved back to the community where I grew up. It was the time that I began working with young people. My cynicism protected me; it softened reality. It tempered my anger and frustration about the educational and community circumstances my young people faced every day, the same conditions I had one foot in growing up, but was privileged enough to have one foot out of as well. During this time: Racism became more real to me than it had ever been when once diverse neighborhoods were calling the police to voice concerns about a black kid walking home from school on their sidewalks in front of their houses – perhaps his pants were sagging too low (see there it goes again!). Classism was more real than I had ever understood when I struggled to convince a bank to open savings accounts for my youth who were part of a financial literacy program, demonstrably working a job, and had the capacity to save. Justice as a universal concept quickly showed itself as variable justices when I knew students who were removed from their school in handcuffs and charged because of a fist fight when my private-school years told me this was at worst a cause for demerits. One student entered the justice system, the other went to Saturday school. Institutional and internalized oppression became frames for understanding what was really happening when my high schoolers were reading and writing at middle school levels (and making straight A’s) and when they realized this, assumed it was their failure, and just another example of the failure of their family, their neighborhood, and even their race. As my anger and cynicism grew, my hope for something else was honestly less real than it had ever been. And yet, my job (and the frame of my entire upbringing) was to help change these systems and to help engage young people in an awakening of sorts to demonstrate that the status quo was not their determination, that they had power and choices and could take action on their own behalf. How in the world could I do this and have cynicism rule my own perspective and outlook? Better yet, how dare I! Over the last eight years, my recovery has been slow and I have relapsed consistently (in fact, writing this is pushing me that way!). A couple of wars, widespread profiling of immigrants, an economic collapse, Hurricane Katrina, and the suicide of my father haven’t helped. But my commitment stands: I will learn to control my cynicism. A few weeks back, I received some subtle reinforcement as I listened to someone presenting about the concept of optimism. My cynic, of course, dismissed this immediately, but in a momentary display of control over my habit, I continued to listen. You see, I understood optimism in terms of a “sunny” outlook on things, a sort of spit-shined and easily packaged version of hope perhaps. And, if you really knew about the real world and were courageous enough to face it, optimism was just a little too Pollyanna for reality. But, in this talk, optimism was described to me as a skill, something to be practiced, something that got easier with practice, and something that was required for one to have any genuine sense of personal efficacy. Additionally, optimism even appears to have the potential to change brain chemistry and improve things like cognition, memory and attention. In other words, optimism is far more than a sunny outlook on things. Optimism is systemic change for the self, at least for my self. As such, it begs the question, how do we achieve systemic change in regard to race, class, educational equity, justice and so forth, if our own individual wiring and attitude reinforce the woeful status quo over an optimistic vision of a better future? Perhaps it is time to deepen our understanding of optimism as a skill and not merely a transitory attitudinal condition, or worse an opiate that helps us avoid harsh reality. How can we deliberately practice optimism as a skill? How can we assess mastery? How can we ensure that optimism, with its multivalent physical, social, and emotional benefits, is something we teach and commit to as we would literacy or mathematics? What if we treated it with the same concern as our health and nutrition (or not - sorry, my cynic just jumped back in on this one)? But, you get the point. If I am ever going to manage my cynicism and, in turn, use it effectively as a strategy, I realize I must also become a disciplined and skilled optimist. As I battle with myself every day, with the push-pull of cynicism and optimism, at least now I know that it pays to be optimistic that I can actually win. |
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