Laura K Spencer, Ed.D.

Tag: DD 2022

  • The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking

    The Antidote book jacketI have to admit, part of the reason I picked up this book at the library was to joke with my daughter. One of the things she will tell you about me is that I am anything but overly peppy or bubbly. It’s not that I am negative, or a “Debbie Downer.” I consider myself more of a realist who likes to look at all potential outcomes of a situation. So when I saw this book displayed on the bookshelf, I thought it’d be a great kick off to my 2018 reading list.

    And it truly was. Burkeman, a journalist and author, sets out in this book to explore the negative path to happiness. Motivational seminars and self-help positive affirmation books can actually lead to less happiness. Through his research of various psychologists, philosophers, and religions “…it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions—or, at the very least to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.”

    You know, maybe I should just let this video explain it:

    Some specific quotes that jumped out at me:

    “The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”

    “Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.”

    “Reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety: when you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won’t occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it. All to often, the Stoics point out, things will not turn out for the best.”

    “A person who has resolved to ‘think positive’ must constantly scan his or her mind for negative thoughts – there’s no other way that the mind could ever gauge its success at the operation – yet that scanning will draw attention to the presence of negative thoughts.”

    “But sometimes you simply can’t make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can’t make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can’t get down to work.”

    “Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.”

    What it means to me

    IMG_8773.jpgI just keep thinking about the anxiety levels of my daughter leading in to her high school final exams. She was a miserable human being. I saw more tears in a 7 day span than I had probably seen the past year. And I wonder if it’s because our current society focuses so much on positive thinking and goals and “you can do it.” Her fear of not doing “it” was crippling her. Had she been exposed to negative thinking, she would have been able to see that the worst-case scenario (failing the test) would have resulted in maybe a B in a class. And truly, in the grander scheme of things, is that B worth the anxiety she put herself through? (She passed, by the way, and maintained her straight A record…)

    Are we teaching students resilience? Are we teaching them how to cope with failure? Or are we just piling on the gold stars for everything they do? Embracing a growth mindset does not mean ceaseless optimism. It means wiping the dirt off our knees when we fall and looking for a plan B… or C.. or maybe even a Plan W.  But does it also mean asking students to consider what’s the worst that could happen if it doesn’t work out? Are we helping students to see that their life is NOW or are we always talking to them about “one day” and “in [next grade/school/etc] you’ll need to know this…” When we talk about goal setting, how do we frame it? “There’s a real benefit to finding ways to loosen our grip as goal driven people. When you look at successful entrepreneurs…you find they don’t follow this stereotype.” Instead, Burkeman says, we should remain ready to adapt where we are heading and embrace the uncertainty that scares us.

    Maybe that should be added to my one word 2018… can I commit to uncertainty? What are your thoughts on this?

    A full review of the book via The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman – review | Books | The Guardian

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  • The Waiting is as Important as the Doing

    Book cover of Grayson by Lynne CoxA few days ago, I publicly declared that I was reclaiming my love of reading in 2018, and to do that, I would be trying to read a book(ish) a week. The first step in this journey was dusting off my library card and making a trip to the stacks. Such fun to roam the aisles and pick up books I wouldn’t otherwise select!

    For my first official book read, I chose Grayson by Lynne Cox. It’s a short memoir from Cox, an American long-distance open-water swimmer. The story centers on her experience swimming with a baby gray whale who had gotten separated from his mother. Cox’s bond with the whale while attempting to reconnect him with his mother is touching.

    A few passages and my connections to them:

    Sometimes it's the process of doing that makes things clear.

    Sometimes the answers we find while searching are better or more creative than anything we could ever have imagined before.” When introducing new technology tools to teachers, there is often this desire to fully understand the tool before introducing it to students. But in doing so, we strip students of the opportunity to explore and create their own experience, their own learning.

    In our district, we are at the beginning of a five year plan called District Design 2022. Our vision, the unrelenting pursuit of the extraordinary school experience, is so that we can ignite genius and empower students to advance the world. It can be hard to remember that this quest won’t happen tomorrow, or next month, or even next year. It’s a five year plan, and even that may be ambitious. And even though we have yearly objectives, and ideas of what students need to become empowered, it will require humility and a lot of introspection to find the answers within the struggles.

    The struggle can be made even more complicated by the fact that not everyone understands why we are swimming against the tide. Our plan is ambitious, and it can be hard for some to justify the WHY for radical change when our district is already performing in the top 1% of the state on standardized testing.

    Cox realizes that the only way to help the baby whale is to set aside her own needs, and think, and behave, like a whale. There are moments of doubt, especially when she finds herself a mile from shore in the cold Pacific waters with no mother whale in sight. At times, the baby dives deep in to the ocean, and remains unseen for 10-15 minutes at a time. It’s during these times, Cox surmises, that the baby is getting away from the surface level distractions to listen for the calls of the mother.

    It’s in one of these moments that Cox reflects:

    Wait as long as you need to. The waiting is as important as the doing: it’s the time you spend training and the rest in between; it’s the reading and the thinking about what you’ve read; it’s the written words, what is said, what is left unsaid, the space between the thoughts on the page, that makes the story, and it’s the space between the notes, the intervals between fast and slow, that makes the music. It’s the love of being together, the spacing, the tension of being apart, that brings you back together.

    The waiting is as important as the doing…  So many times I have pushed ahead because I see the destination and I am eager to get there. I may not have given teachers time to move beyond the surface distractions and dive deep. But it’s these moments, this space between the thoughts, that builds capacity, builds commitment, moves the vision to reality.

    Thanks Lynne Cox for writing this gem of a book. I look forward to the next book on my list.

    Have one you want to add to my list? Please add it on my blog post titled “The Next Chapter”.