This week, my mentor is out because she was exposed to someone else who tested positive for Covid. Nothing to be done about it, and it means it’s just me and the other new teacher running the class for most, perhaps all, of the week.
I could take the victim mindset and say poor me and oh how horrible and I’m worried and stressed. But one of the things I’ve been listening to has been reminding me that victim mindset vs. protagonist mindset is a choice. The second option is a bit harder to name, perhaps because it’s less frequent. But it basically means everything that happens is for my good alone. It also means, how my life feels is my choice. Or, I’m the author of my own story. Though I may not get to choose the events, since it’s non-fiction, I can choose the character choices of my character, and I can choose how I interpret events.
Is this a tragedy, woe is me? Or is this an opportunity to learn, to test myself against a challenge, succeed some, fail some, and learn from he experience, to grow stronger and better. I think the only reason to think the victim point of view is more accurate is if you believe that failure is a bad thing. Which I suppose is a common thing to think. But the growth mindset would say every failure is an opportunity for growth, and all great achievements are made out of failures placed like stepping stones along the path to eventual victory. Take your failure, analyze it, and learn how to not make the same mistake in the future, and viola, the mistake becomes a step towards mastery or success.
A nice framing story for this approach is a baby learning to walk. They try and try and try, and fall and fall and fall. They don’t get upset when they fall, or if so, for a very short period of time. It’s a game, a play. They haven’t yet been taught that falling down is anything wrong. What if we could live that way? A passion, a drive, to learn, but with a sense of play in the learning process, and no emotional baggage attached to ‘falling down.’
It sounds amazing, I’ve had the experience with improv dance and some writing classes with a particularly good poetry teacher, and it was some of the most joyful times of my life. Why not extend that to more of life?
After my Cutting Ties work around time management, it is not seeming like such a gargantuan problem, and I’m thinking that my next big goal might be something along those lines: living my life in that state of passion, curiosity, detachment, engagement, and play that I touched on in those moments with those excellent teachers. There are many obstacles to living this way in all aspect of my life. With my job, with my relationships to others, there is often a heavy-ness to it. What I’m doing seems ‘important’ and failing at it seems… well, like I’m doing something wrong, or bad. That’s the emotional and mental baggage that’s holding me back. But there is no solid and unchangeable reason that I can see, that would make it impossible to play life full out, like it’s a great game I’m trying to win, but also playing for fun, win or lose. It sounds fantastic, and also fantastically practical. I don’t think I’ve ever been more prolific than when I was in those states. It was, just like the toddlers, the optimal state to learn things in.
Oooh, and here’s a fun idea, what if I then learned how to take my students into that state? Sounds pretty great, I think.
Time to go, but first let’s see if I can find a quote from Baba about this that I love:
-I Out
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