Brainstorming is a proven creativity tool. But it's easy to miss great ideas when one person dominates the session, or when people are too afraid to voice their most creative thoughts for fear of being judged. We must allow everyone to contribute.
Imagine that we've gathered our educators together for a much-needed brainstorming session, focusing on the most effective way to manage the school. Bill, the most talkative and forceful member of our staff, immediately asserts that police and parent involvement are the best platforms to use. Staff would follow on to contribute ideas that go along with Bill's. Ten minutes later, the staff would be immersed in police and parent ideas. No one else would’ve submitted any other options, once Bill had set the direction.
It's all too easy to start a brainstorming session with good intentions, but then to overlook or miss potentially great ideas, simply because one assertive person sets the tone for the entire meeting. This is why at meetings I encourage around the table discussions or round-robin. I feel this method allows staff members to generate ideas without being influenced by any one person. We can then take these ideas into the next stage of the problem-solving process.
A possible idea at our next strategic meeting would be to have the staff around a table. Each person will receive some index cards, so that they can record their ideas on individual pieces of card in silence. Once everyone has written down an idea, each person will pass their idea to the person next to them. Everyone should now be holding a new card with their neighbour’s idea written down on it. Each person will now use their neighbour’s idea as inspiration to create another idea, which they will then write on a fresh index card. And continue to hand it to their neighbour.
Advantages and Disadvantages is that our staff will use each other’s ideas to generate even more ideas, without being influenced by assertive or vocal members of the staff. Another advantage of this approach is that it also ensures that everyone in your room gets an equal chance to present their ideas including shy staff members. A disadvantage is that it won't be anonymous. When staff pass ideas around the room, they might hold back simply because they know that the person next to them will see what they have written. Another disadvantage is that each person gets inspiration for their new idea from the ideas of only one other person, rather than from the entire group. We could solve this by gathering the ideas at each stage, shuffling them, and then passing them out again; rather than having staff pass their ideas to the person next to them.
Let’s give this a go at the next strategic meeting.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
Confidence! Got it?
Confidence is believing in your own abilities. You know you're the goods and you believe you can win or succeed. This is where I would ask the staff to look at themselves and their role in the school structures. Success is a truly wonderful feeling. But to gain more confidence, you need to understand one crucial thing and teaching is the one area which highlights the following:
Confidence is NOT a choice.
Most sport psychology books we ask the learners to read, tell you it is. They tell you that if you want confidence, all you need to do is ask yourself for it. You're supposed to repeat to yourself things like:
"I feel great today."
"I'm calm, confident, and cheerful right now."
"Elvin, go out there and be confident."
"The school is going to have a great day today!"
Sort of a 'fake 'it till you make it' approach. Rubbish ...because it doesn't work. You can't trick yourself. Let me repeat: You CANNOT trick yourself.
Here's why...
If you're not feeling confident, it means you're feeling fear, doubt, anxiety, or depression.
And when you're feeling these feelings, it doesn't work to pretend you're not. It doesn't work because 9 times out of 10, your fear is there for a reason. The learners pick up on that fear, doubt or anxiety. They feed off your emotions.
When your body is saying, "Awe! Wake up! Pay attention!” Your blood pressure is through the roof, you are short tempered, these are the signs that your confidence is low.
And when someone as important as your body is talking, the right thing to do is LISTEN.
Usually your body is making a request. Confidence is the gift that keeps on giving.
It keeps you motivated, passionate, and ready to compete.
Confidence is NOT a choice.
Most sport psychology books we ask the learners to read, tell you it is. They tell you that if you want confidence, all you need to do is ask yourself for it. You're supposed to repeat to yourself things like:
"I feel great today."
"I'm calm, confident, and cheerful right now."
"Elvin, go out there and be confident."
"The school is going to have a great day today!"
Sort of a 'fake 'it till you make it' approach. Rubbish ...because it doesn't work. You can't trick yourself. Let me repeat: You CANNOT trick yourself.
Here's why...
If you're not feeling confident, it means you're feeling fear, doubt, anxiety, or depression.
And when you're feeling these feelings, it doesn't work to pretend you're not. It doesn't work because 9 times out of 10, your fear is there for a reason. The learners pick up on that fear, doubt or anxiety. They feed off your emotions.
When your body is saying, "Awe! Wake up! Pay attention!” Your blood pressure is through the roof, you are short tempered, these are the signs that your confidence is low.
And when someone as important as your body is talking, the right thing to do is LISTEN.
Usually your body is making a request. Confidence is the gift that keeps on giving.
It keeps you motivated, passionate, and ready to compete.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Twittering tweeter
When some people hear the word "Twitter," they automatically think of wasting time. After all, how can you have time for work when you're telling people what you had for lunch, or spreading the gossip from your 2 p.m. staff meeting? It's true that Twitter can be a distraction. But it can also be an important resource for both personal and organizational growth.
Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to connect with each other and send short messages, or "tweets," about what they're doing or thinking. Imagine that! What if the school assigned a learner to an educator or vice versa, an educator assigned to an individual or number of learners to monitor their daily activities? Your "followers" would see your tweets in a rolling feed, called a timeline, when they log into the service on their arrival at school.
Each educator could decide what they want to tweet. Tweets can be trivial - "what someone ate for breakfast" example - or they can be significant and valuable, for example, when they highlight key news, or articles from the school.
Here are some tips to help you learn the lingo of ‘tweeeting’
Hashtag - (#) can help people track different topics to find information easily. Simply put the # symbol in front of your tweet's most relevant word, or use it to "tag" a tweet under a certain category. For example, #leadership or #football.
Followers - These are your friends or connections - the people who are following your tweets. Your tweets will appear on their timelines. But please remember, all tweets are technically "public" and searchable unless you decide to make your account private. Be careful what you say.
@ Replies - If you want to tweet to someone else, use @ right before that person's username. For example, tweet "@mary45 I saw your tweet. Interesting!" - and mary45 will get the message in her timeline (if she follows you).
If you put the person's name at the very start of the tweet, as in the example above, only you, her, and people who follow both of you will see the Tweet in their timelines. If you put her name elsewhere in the message, everyone who follows you will see the tweet. For example, this would happen if you tweeted "Me and @mary45 are working on a new matric dance proposal."
Use a strong headline - Most followers simply scan Twitter, so your "headline" should be effective and authentic enough to capture their attention. Keep it short -
Twitter allows only 140 characters, so your messages must be simple yet powerful.
Write clearly - Use the same good writing rules you would use when writing any professional document. Grammar and style - and proofreading - still matter with Twitter.
Keep it useful - If you tweet a link or share an article, make sure it's something that your followers will find useful or valuable. Get “tweeting”...
Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to connect with each other and send short messages, or "tweets," about what they're doing or thinking. Imagine that! What if the school assigned a learner to an educator or vice versa, an educator assigned to an individual or number of learners to monitor their daily activities? Your "followers" would see your tweets in a rolling feed, called a timeline, when they log into the service on their arrival at school.
Each educator could decide what they want to tweet. Tweets can be trivial - "what someone ate for breakfast" example - or they can be significant and valuable, for example, when they highlight key news, or articles from the school.
Here are some tips to help you learn the lingo of ‘tweeeting’
Hashtag - (#) can help people track different topics to find information easily. Simply put the # symbol in front of your tweet's most relevant word, or use it to "tag" a tweet under a certain category. For example, #leadership or #football.
Followers - These are your friends or connections - the people who are following your tweets. Your tweets will appear on their timelines. But please remember, all tweets are technically "public" and searchable unless you decide to make your account private. Be careful what you say.
@ Replies - If you want to tweet to someone else, use @ right before that person's username. For example, tweet "@mary45 I saw your tweet. Interesting!" - and mary45 will get the message in her timeline (if she follows you).
If you put the person's name at the very start of the tweet, as in the example above, only you, her, and people who follow both of you will see the Tweet in their timelines. If you put her name elsewhere in the message, everyone who follows you will see the tweet. For example, this would happen if you tweeted "Me and @mary45 are working on a new matric dance proposal."
Use a strong headline - Most followers simply scan Twitter, so your "headline" should be effective and authentic enough to capture their attention. Keep it short -
Twitter allows only 140 characters, so your messages must be simple yet powerful.
Write clearly - Use the same good writing rules you would use when writing any professional document. Grammar and style - and proofreading - still matter with Twitter.
Keep it useful - If you tweet a link or share an article, make sure it's something that your followers will find useful or valuable. Get “tweeting”...
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
My Athletic goal?
Every new season brings up the question: what are my athletic goals for this
year? And do I need goals anyway?
Your current desires represent the next stage in your evolution. What you want -- right now -- is moving you to the next phase in your development.
This is why winning matters. To attain your goals, you must become an athlete worthy of them.
To win, you must be a highly skilled athlete with excellent fundamentals.
You must have an intense work ethic. You must build trust and harmony with
your coaches and teammates. You need to know how to perform at your best under pressure.
Every time you fail in one of these areas, you question your abilities as a human being. You feel bitter, distrustful, and angry. Continued losing undermines your self-esteem and self-respect.
Most human misery stems from not realizing our deepest aspirations. There is much suppressed sadness in the heart over broken dreams and relationships.
There is a simple exercise that can transform your entire year in sport.
Take out a fresh piece of paper and record 10 goals for the next 12 months. Let yourself dream a little. What technical skills do you want to improve? Do you want to be a better leader or more gracious teammate? Do you want to shine in a final game or race?
Next, chose your most important goal,and place it at the top of the list. For the next year, protect this goal like you would your own child. It is a dream that matters to you,and deserves to be cherished. Take action every day towards it,
no matter how small.
year? And do I need goals anyway?
Your current desires represent the next stage in your evolution. What you want -- right now -- is moving you to the next phase in your development.
This is why winning matters. To attain your goals, you must become an athlete worthy of them.
To win, you must be a highly skilled athlete with excellent fundamentals.
You must have an intense work ethic. You must build trust and harmony with
your coaches and teammates. You need to know how to perform at your best under pressure.
Every time you fail in one of these areas, you question your abilities as a human being. You feel bitter, distrustful, and angry. Continued losing undermines your self-esteem and self-respect.
Most human misery stems from not realizing our deepest aspirations. There is much suppressed sadness in the heart over broken dreams and relationships.
There is a simple exercise that can transform your entire year in sport.
Take out a fresh piece of paper and record 10 goals for the next 12 months. Let yourself dream a little. What technical skills do you want to improve? Do you want to be a better leader or more gracious teammate? Do you want to shine in a final game or race?
Next, chose your most important goal,and place it at the top of the list. For the next year, protect this goal like you would your own child. It is a dream that matters to you,and deserves to be cherished. Take action every day towards it,
no matter how small.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Rattling your opponents cage!
Has a coach, teammate or rival ever been rude to you? Or worse, refuse to pass to you? If so, you know how much people can rattle your cage. No matter how mentally tough you are, you're still a human being...which means the energy of other people affects you. When Michael Jordan attended his first all-star game as a rookie, NBA star Isiah Thomas of Detroit froze him out.
Why?
Because Michael didn't say hello to him in an elevator. Actually, Michael was petrified of coming across as cocky.
The elevator was full of older, star players and Michael was intimidated. But Isiah, angry about being snubbed, tried to embarrass Michael by not passing him the ball. It hurt Michael terribly. He was completely disillusioned.
Finally he decided what to do:
"I knew that everything happened for a purpose and I could either learn from it or fight it. I decided to do both. The next night we played Detroit at home and I played like I was possessed. We beat the Pistons in a very physical game."
When people freeze you out, the first thing you need to do is find out WHY. If you were selfish, cocky, or downright narcissistic, you can apologize. But if you didn't do anything wrong - and they are simply being small - then you have a choice. You can crawl to them mentally. Or you can tap into your natural desire for vengeance.
See, underneath the athlete's competitive instinct is the desire for vengeance, to get even. It's totally natural.
Express it in a constructive way, like Michael did, and you can tap into it as a source of strengh. If you turn vengeance inward on yourself, you'll simply implode.
You'll get depressed and become passive. That's why when you are wronged, you need to harness your vengeance for maximum performance. Later, you can talk to this person, if appropriate. But I recommend taking care of business first. And that means winning.
You don't play angry.
Angry is out of control. You will not like your results if you play angry. Instead, you play determined.
Resolute and focused. With an iron will.
Why?
Because Michael didn't say hello to him in an elevator. Actually, Michael was petrified of coming across as cocky.
The elevator was full of older, star players and Michael was intimidated. But Isiah, angry about being snubbed, tried to embarrass Michael by not passing him the ball. It hurt Michael terribly. He was completely disillusioned.
Finally he decided what to do:
"I knew that everything happened for a purpose and I could either learn from it or fight it. I decided to do both. The next night we played Detroit at home and I played like I was possessed. We beat the Pistons in a very physical game."
When people freeze you out, the first thing you need to do is find out WHY. If you were selfish, cocky, or downright narcissistic, you can apologize. But if you didn't do anything wrong - and they are simply being small - then you have a choice. You can crawl to them mentally. Or you can tap into your natural desire for vengeance.
See, underneath the athlete's competitive instinct is the desire for vengeance, to get even. It's totally natural.
Express it in a constructive way, like Michael did, and you can tap into it as a source of strengh. If you turn vengeance inward on yourself, you'll simply implode.
You'll get depressed and become passive. That's why when you are wronged, you need to harness your vengeance for maximum performance. Later, you can talk to this person, if appropriate. But I recommend taking care of business first. And that means winning.
You don't play angry.
Angry is out of control. You will not like your results if you play angry. Instead, you play determined.
Resolute and focused. With an iron will.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Cheers, to your High Performance team!
A team needs to know where it is going, and why it is meaningful to get there.
A lot has been made of vision, purpose, mission etc.. but for me it doesn’t exactly fit what we now know about teams. Most sports teams will create goals for the season, ‘where they want to go’ – however very few will be able to say why they want to achieve that goal, and even fewer will have a meaningful reason attached to the goal. The why is critical as it raises the importance or specialness of the goal and that energy can be used to up the intensity and commitment in and out of game time.
To maximise the performance of any team, you need to understand team dynamics and how team dynamics can support or hinder performance.
Because every high performance team is unique, for me there is no generic unifying model of what to do, how to do it or any sorts of measurements that can be consistently applied. This area has been fascinating to me, and so currently we are looking to see if we can create exactly that - a high performance team model…. watch this space. (If there is already such a model, I would love to hear about it – please let me know) However if you get a handle on the things that affect team dynamics, it will help with your awareness of what is going on.
People – add one extra person to your squad or management team, or take one away and the dynamics shift and change – not always for the better. Some people in high performance sport believe that the one secret to success is having as many of your (fit) top players on the field together as possible, playing for as much time as possible. This makes sense, but the concept is often abused with star players playing through serious injury and underperforming or worsening their injury.
Leadership – a critical piece, a change of leadership or even the empowering of leaders within your side can dramatically improve team dynamics.
The work that is done – dynamics change from pre-season to in-season, to knock out stages, to tournaments. Understanding that means that as a coach or player your approach needs to be flexible.
The amount of team the team has been together – as team’s mature, things change. Trust and comfort is often a result of a team staying together, provided that strong leadership ensure there were no rifts or divisions in the team. What works for a team in its first year, may not necessarily work as well again. Teams need to be aware of what makes them successful, whilst at the same time re-examining their processes when appropriate.
The system the team is in (and the systems they create) – The people around the team, the other teams that are related to the team, the administration or club management, or even school administration all has an affect on a team. There are other systems: supporters, press, family, friends and loved ones, and so the list goes on. Sometimes the affect from a system is subtle, sometimes it is significant. Most of the time this affect is almost ‘accidental’ in that it wasn’t planned, so the chances of this affect being positive is a lot slimmer than if it was a purposeful affect.
For example a 1st team at school makes a point of visiting a junior teams locker room to tell them that they believe in them and support them fully vs the 1st team rugby players arriving late in the day, with plenty of time before their match, but missing a lot of their junior sides playing.
To your high performance team!
A lot has been made of vision, purpose, mission etc.. but for me it doesn’t exactly fit what we now know about teams. Most sports teams will create goals for the season, ‘where they want to go’ – however very few will be able to say why they want to achieve that goal, and even fewer will have a meaningful reason attached to the goal. The why is critical as it raises the importance or specialness of the goal and that energy can be used to up the intensity and commitment in and out of game time.
To maximise the performance of any team, you need to understand team dynamics and how team dynamics can support or hinder performance.
Because every high performance team is unique, for me there is no generic unifying model of what to do, how to do it or any sorts of measurements that can be consistently applied. This area has been fascinating to me, and so currently we are looking to see if we can create exactly that - a high performance team model…. watch this space. (If there is already such a model, I would love to hear about it – please let me know) However if you get a handle on the things that affect team dynamics, it will help with your awareness of what is going on.
People – add one extra person to your squad or management team, or take one away and the dynamics shift and change – not always for the better. Some people in high performance sport believe that the one secret to success is having as many of your (fit) top players on the field together as possible, playing for as much time as possible. This makes sense, but the concept is often abused with star players playing through serious injury and underperforming or worsening their injury.
Leadership – a critical piece, a change of leadership or even the empowering of leaders within your side can dramatically improve team dynamics.
The work that is done – dynamics change from pre-season to in-season, to knock out stages, to tournaments. Understanding that means that as a coach or player your approach needs to be flexible.
The amount of team the team has been together – as team’s mature, things change. Trust and comfort is often a result of a team staying together, provided that strong leadership ensure there were no rifts or divisions in the team. What works for a team in its first year, may not necessarily work as well again. Teams need to be aware of what makes them successful, whilst at the same time re-examining their processes when appropriate.
The system the team is in (and the systems they create) – The people around the team, the other teams that are related to the team, the administration or club management, or even school administration all has an affect on a team. There are other systems: supporters, press, family, friends and loved ones, and so the list goes on. Sometimes the affect from a system is subtle, sometimes it is significant. Most of the time this affect is almost ‘accidental’ in that it wasn’t planned, so the chances of this affect being positive is a lot slimmer than if it was a purposeful affect.
For example a 1st team at school makes a point of visiting a junior teams locker room to tell them that they believe in them and support them fully vs the 1st team rugby players arriving late in the day, with plenty of time before their match, but missing a lot of their junior sides playing.
To your high performance team!
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