on accompaniment, attentiveness, and contribution
Recently, I read a study finding that two things wildly diminish our brain power.
One was notifications (ding!) from a smart phone (or computer applications or whatever).
The other was moral outrage. (Which is different from being principled, generous, and willing to engage the world…)
And it makes sense, right? The former fragments the attention until it is difficult to focus deeply. And the latter cuts the roots off of our curiosity.
Beware the brain’s kryptonite.
In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle describes that, far and away, the most productive, cohesive, and enjoyable groups have a member that is a “good apple.”
“Good apples” maintain stability and safe connection among the members of the group, so that group energy can focus on doing the work instead of (often anxious) relationship management. With small behaviors, they defect negativity and drain danger from the room. By subtly communicating that the group is safely connected, they create the conditions for others to perform.
We have each known these good apples, and they are marvelous to work with.
Being a “good apple” takes a certain amount of emotional intelligence and social skill, but it is also a generous choice.
When I was coaching teachers, the centerpiece of writing a good lesson plan was called the “Mastery Response Narrative” (or MRN). It was the narration of how one arrived at the completion of the task to be mastered.
So, take a simple example: Say, in Spanish class, the students were to learn how to conjugate a regular “-ar” verb.
The “target task” to be mastered would be: “Write ‘I speak’.”
The “mastery response” would be: “Yo hablo.”
And then the MRN: “I know that the infinitive of “to speak,” in Spanish, is “hablar” which is a “regular” verb… the base form of the verb does not change when I conjugate it. And the first person (Yo) verb ending is “-o.” So to conjugate it, I remove the “-ar” from “hablar” and place the “-o” on the end of the root (“habl-”) to make “hablo.” Then I add the first-person pronoun (Yo) to form Yo hablo…”
Ok – so kiiind of tedious for a simple task.
But! The MRN is indispensable for the teacher-in-training as they are welcomed back into a “beginner’s mind” for the task at hand. The teacher also sees, through the MRN, all of the steps that they must help the students to practice in order to master the task.
I’ve been thinking about the MRN as I think about less straight forward tasks that we desperately need to master.
How can a busy person cultivate solitude?
How can someone build empathic relationships with people who think much differently than they do?
How can an individual connect with others to address climate change?
How can someone who wants to follow Jesus not become lukewarm or discouraged or a hypocrite and follow the Master anew each day?
For whatever challenge we want to master, we might seek a person who is thriving at this challenge despite having similar constraints as we do. Then, ask them for their MRN… How did they come to master this challenge? And then sit and listen.
Any invitation for someone to give their MRN opens up a series of gifts. The person you admire begins to see themself as a teacher. (Gift!) And you get a narrative to emulate and share. (Gift that keeps on giving!)
One final thought: What have you mastered that we desperately need you to share about? Consider doing an MRN today and see how much you have to teach. You may be the one we’ve been waiting for.
Five years ago this week, Audacious Ignatius was born.
With joy, gratitude, and lots of mailing tape, I packed up all these boxes on our kitchen counter and brought them to the local post office to share with folks who believed in the project from the moment we shared it on Kickstarter.
And what a brilliant first five years it has been… What has made this project so rich is the partners and companions that generously lent feedback and enthusiasm to the effort of sharing the book.
And so we are delighted that Audacious Ignatius has been adopted by Loyola Press, so that we can share the book more widely and efficiently.
Audacious Ignatius is now available at Loyola Press’ website and (for the first time!) on amazon.com.
Thanks, as always, for being a part of our books’ journeys.
Everyone has someone with whom it is difficult to get along.
What if we were to live as though this person holds the key to some knowledge that our life depends on? What if we knew we would learn a crucial lesson if we could just quiet the story about them in our heads long enough to actually see them in their fullness?
I believe that our life together *does* depend on this type of seeing.
It’s time to get curious about that person and to learn something through the process.
Solitude allows us to slow down and consider how very small and needlessly complicated are many of the stories we rehearse within our heads.
(“Small” and “complicated” seem, at first glance, to be opposites, and yet, that is exactly what these unworthy stories are.)
Letting go of these stories frees us to receive the gift of the story of how profoundly we are loved.
Viktor Frankl named “the last of the human freedoms” as the ability “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances… to choose one’s own way.” (Man’s Search For Meaning)
And, of course, he has serious authority. This assertion was made as he reflected on his time in four different concentration camps.
His point is universally important and applicable: how we face the day is a deeply moral and creative act.
Every moment offers us the possibility to change the story to be more constructive, more loving, more curious.
I am rereading the remarkable Religious Potential of the Child, and was stopped short by this sentence which begins the third chapter.
“The adult who accepts the silent request of the child: “Help me to come closer to God by myself,” must choose the way to give the child the help [he or she] asks for.” (page 33)
Whoa!
And, I wonder if this is actually the silent request of all to show up in a given faith community.
What would it mean to prioritize attentiveness to this longing? How would the church change?
I think we would become like a network of spiritual directors, with individuals becoming deeply curious about the silent request of their neighbor and responding with excellence to it.
In college, I recall discussing “human free will” as a sort of a given, an endowment that we are born with, like our bones and muscles.
The mystics and behavioral economists, though, show us that this is hardly the case. The freedom of our will is only a potential within us and something that, with grace and intentional work, we can slowly actualize.
That is, so much of what I think are “my actions” are only reflexive reactions, based on my mental and physical makeup, my past conditioning, my environment. I have been programmed, by nature and by nurture, to do certain things. The path to freedom, then, consists in accepting the (occasionally brutal) grace of seeing the particulars of this reality, and accepting this “learning to see” as a daily process and discipline.
Then, when we are able to love in ways that do not compute, we can know that we are on the path of freedom.
Sorin Starts a School is turning two!
It’s been a pretty fun two years, making connections with communities for whom the book is a gift and receiving the news of its Moonbeam award.
To celebrate, we’ve made a curriculum guide for Sorin Starts a School in order to make it easier for educators at Catholic schools and parishes to plan lessons that lead to the heart of our tradition and to the charism of the Congregation of Holy Cross.
Here is the link to download the guide. Please share it with your educator friends!
And below is an intro video for the guide.
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