Tag Archives: education

Are you a Lifelong Learner?

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Interesting question. You may reply that your employer keeps you up to date with industry developments, legal and practice changes that influence or dictate how you work. That is, indeed, training. But I am not writing about training to which you are directed on pain of death. I am writing about self-directed, self-financed (if necessary) and possibly self-interested education. I am referring to off-the-job training.

There are countless options for most of us to learn something that isn’t job-related – for example, we might decide to learn to play a musical instrument, to scrapbook (now a verb as well as a noun), to reorganise flowers or to cook. Community Education is a big area. And I recommend you do some research about that.

But available through the same route, but more competence-focused, are courses provided outside your work but which would enhance your ability to do that work.

No, I have no odea what that might be – I’m not in your industry.

But let me provide my example. I was a serving police detective, but outside of that I trained as a legal executive (lawyer) for 4 years, obtained a qualification that allowed me to teach adults in further education, and di other courses related to both of those. They weren’t provided by, nor funded by my employer – I funded part of it, grants funded the rest. Ker-ching!

On the face of it you may ask what legal training in probate law, land law and contract law had to do with policing, but I assure you the benefits to me as a Fraud Detective were amazing – the number of cases I could deal with because of that knowledge rose, as did the number of cases we passed back to complainants. Cases passed back because we knew they were trying it on – for example, solicitors, rather than dealing with a probate dispute, would point their clients at the police and scream ‘FRAUD!’ so that we would get all the evidence and they could use it having had it gathered gratis. I, on the other and, could show why it wasn’t a fraud (at least at that point) and make a perfectly good legally-sound argument for that decision. And we had one man alleging a commercial fraud that I sent back pretty much annually for 10 years because I knew about contracts while not one of my colleagues had the foggiest.

The Second Resolution states:  “To overcome the restraining forces of pride and pretension, I resolve to work on character and competence.”

Competence in the workplace is obviously covered by that statement, but I argue that such competence can extend, indeed should extend outside one’s professional obligations. In fact, I suggest it should include your societal and familial obligations, too.

Be a better citizen, be a batter parent, be a better child. It’s all there in that simple sentence. Be (character) a better (competence).

There are many facilities available for training, and in areas you might thing weren’t catered for. For example, parenting training is available from many charitable foundations, including Care for the Family. You might think parenting comes naturally.  Lucky you if it did.

Identify and seek out training in respect of the competencies you lack – and identifying and admitting that lack is an example of good character, by the way.

As they say, admitting the existence of a gap in your education is the first step to closing it and reaping the rewards that follow – both financial and personal.

What will you seek to learn after today?

Age = Wisdom, Youth = Vitality. Let the young have both, instead.

12 Thursday Mar 2020

Posted by in Character and Competence, Discipline, Uncategorized

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A few weeks ago I wrote this blog on why I thought material of the kind espoused in The Seven Habits and my own book was ignored by so many for so long, suggesting that people tend to arrive at an age when they suddenly seek meaning rather than stuff.

Today, I put a new spin on this not by looking at why the older ‘do’, but on why the younger ‘do not’.

Reading Stephen Covey’s anthology of first drafts and first thoughts, from the book ‘Primary Greatness’, I read this sentence.

“I maintain that humility is the mother of all virtues, because humility helps us centre our lives on principles.”

Young people are – or want to appear to be – confident individuals. They are fit, recently educated, fashionable, invincible. They tend, therefore and without judgment on my part, to be incredibly egotistic. They are finding their way and have yet to realise that life isn’t one long party – or that if it is a party, it eventually ends when they discover the responsibilities they didn’t possess in their teens and twenties.

Perhaps this is as it should be. Perhaps later wisdom is intended to be delayed until people are ready for it, or until their proverbial wild oats are sown. I have no idea, because I am not the font of all wisdom. By any stretch!

This is why, perhaps, the young resist the wisdom literature. They don’t need it because they know better. They see things ‘as they are’ through interested, open eyes – whereas we old fuddy-duddies see things through experience gained by making mistakes. And having made mistakes we older ones seek to redress them, whereas the young are still learning from theirs.

But imagine if the young were taught that you can be humble and still have fun? That you can leave a legacy of forty or fifty years foundation rather than just for that night or weekend? That they are still learning, and that they could direct and control that learning if they just gave more thought to the longer-term. To their whole lives instead of the now.

Covey goes on to add, “I would then say that courage is the father of all virtues.”

Of course, another influence on the young is the peer group. Which means that Covey’s second quote reveals something which the young tend to lack. Not physical courage – they seem to have that in abundance, as a rule. But courage born of a properly considered and congruent values system, where they act in accordance with their conscience and what they know, deeply, to be true – and yet what those around them are trying to convince them is just ‘boring old stuff’.

This is what should be taught in school, not environmentalism and ‘social justice’ and ‘rights of the individual’ (without responsibilities of and towards the individual).

Kids need to be shown that courage does not mean lack of consideration. That wisdom is not a downer but a path to ‘better’. There are schools out there that do this, but they’ve had to initiate and fund this training themselves.

Wouldn’t it be better if it was a state-funded part of the curriculum? Instead of Welsh.

Leadership, schmeadership.

10 Tuesday Mar 2020

Posted by in Purpose and Service, Uncategorized

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In 2013 I was honoured to be approached – I was going to say headhunted but perhaps that’s a bit self-indulgent – to provide a service to schools via a homelessness charity whereby I would train teenagers in (essentially) the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. It was a Win-Win-Win for trainers, the charity and the schools involved and it was through them I enjoyed teaching a hall of 106 13-year-olds in one go.

I no longer fear crowds.

Anyhow, despite the headhuntedness, there was a selection process in which prospective trainers would give a lesson (tick), be interviewed (tick) and socialise with other people (tick). But the source of this article was the result of a round-table exercise the applicants underwent, where we discussed how we would focus on teaching the children leadership. So me being em, I took a tangential view.

I said (and I paraphrase) “It’s laudable that we teach children how to lead themselves and other people, but what about the less able kids who may never be in charge of anything? Why don’t we also teach them how to be great followers?”

I got the gig.

Leadership has become a buzzword for hierarchical management. One LinkedIn correspondent said it all when he described how administration became management became ‘leadership’ – all while teaching exactly the same ‘stuff’. It was only a slight exaggeration. Today I read about ‘leadership in a remote environment’ as an opportunistic (?) take on the magic word, but it essentially meant ‘how do we manage the production of what we produce, remotely?’ Management.

But there are books on another, related subject – Followership. They are rare and, oddly, can be very expensive.

But that’s missing a trick because once you strip away the layers of leadership, everyone else is a Follower to varying degrees. And that subject doesn’t get the level of attention it deserves.

In my training of the 106 kids from a relatively poor area of Wales, some of them expressed what ‘we professionals’ might mis-interpret as a lack of ambition. They wanted to be mechanics, taxi-drivers, and the like. Albeit their ambisions may change up a gear as they aged, instead of planting in them some long-distant dream, I just said this.

“Whatever you want to be and do, just be or do the best that you can while you’re doing it. Work hard for your bosses and enjoy what you do.” Followership, in a nutshell.

Of course, when new employees are trained they are often given the pep talk and the warning chat. I think it would be better if they were educated about what they were doing in the context of those they served, with imagination used to identify stakeholders outside the organisation as well as within. We’ve all heard the story about the bricklayer ‘building the cathedral’, but how often is that translated into the average workplace?

Incidentally, why is the Labour Party having a dig at the expression ‘low-skilled worker’? What is wrong with having a low level of skill if what you are doing has a noble purpose and provides value to others beyond your activity? A streetsweeper is ‘low-skilled’ but imagine if he wasn’t there doing his best for us? A low-skilled care worker changing your Nan’s bed – valuable and noble work. Noble service does not necessarily require high pay. And high-paid people are not necessarily providing noble service.

It’s about time we showed as much appreciation those who follow rather than just those who lead – because without followers, what would the leaders actually be for?

 

For more on the subject of Followership, I write about that very subject in my book, The Three Resolutions, available at Amazon now.

Book Cover Front

Education, schmeducation. Focus on quality, not quantity.

04 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by in Character and Competence, General, Time Management

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“Knowledge will bring you the opportunity to make a difference.” – Claire Fagan

I love that advert for a major stationer, where Andy Williams sings ‘It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ as parents escort their children around aisles teeming with paper, pens, books and other essential tools of learning. After 6 weeks (or 104 days in the US, according to the theme from ‘Phineas and Ferb’), parents have had enough of dealing with their first priority – family – and now want to pass babysitting duty back to their kids’ teachers. Tomorrow (subject to one of those Teacher Training Days that always appear to occur just after a week off), millions of kids will excitedly don their school clothes and trot quickly off to school.

That enthusiasm lasts 24 hours, by the way.

On a serious note, just as for us goal-achievement-failures who start a new project every New Year/Birthday/1st of the month/end of term/start of term, tomorrow is a great day to start teaching your children not only that education is important, but also that not all education is important. (Eh?)

We, as parents, have tendency to demand that our children excel in every single subject they study. If they have eight As and two Cs, we demand to know why they are failing in RE and Drama. The strange thing is that the reality of the UK education system is that we take 12-14 subjects at 16, and narrow that down to 3 or 4 at 18 – then down to one, or for the particularly clever, two subjects at University.

There is no question that we should encourage our kids to do their best in everything they do. But we should allow them the leeway that we allow ourselves and acknowledge that Einstein probably wasn’t a great biologist, Sir David Attenborough isn’t famous for being an expert on woodwork, and David Beckham is not the greatest English scholar ever known to man.

And our kids will generally be great at one or two things, good at some more, and rubbish at others.

They should, as early as possible, be encouraged to discover their strengths and to focus on those, while also managing any weaknesses and finding ways to deal with them.

I was absolutely overjoyed many years ago when my son, who was at the time an undiagnosed dyslexic, was asked to read something out at the primary school ‘graduation’, another American import to the UK we could do without. Did he read it? No. He learned it, and spoke without reference to the card in front of him. Word perfect. He can read, but at his own speed. He has since qualified in a field he loves – farming (not hereditary, I assure you) and is an absolute star mimic. He is happy.

But imagine the potential for someone who can learn quotes by rote and then has to speak in public. He is already well ahead when it comes to learning Public Speaking, something a lot of people dread and yet something they will all have to do at some time in their lives. He has a self-taught life skill because of a challenge.

At the same time, I am also the proud uncle of some kids who have done exceptionally well in their exams, this year. Learning suits some, but not every talent is necessarily served by the state’s syllabus.

Encourage your kids to learn well, to do the best they can, but to focus more of their time on the things that will matter to them. Utilise the Three Resolutions to instil within them the discipline to do what needs to be done to become competent in their chosen vocations so that they can serve their chosen clients to the best of their ability.

Instead of creating well-educated but exceptionally bored professional drones.

For more on the Three Resolutions, get the book at Amazon here.

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