April 29, 2024
Too hard to explain, you’ll just have to keep reading…
A true story about how your mind has a sense of humor you don’t even know about
Hello, how are you, and thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter. You rock. This letter is very brief, because I am a bit swamped with work at the moment so I’m stealing a few minutes in a Panera in Waterbury before I have to leave for my next meeting. Not complaining! What I do is fun and interesting and (I think) important, so I am time poor but rich in all other respects.
I just thought it would be cute to use this funny thing that happened at the last NIC meeting to illustrate the point that I have tried to make several times before—that our conscious minds are frequently not aware what the rest of our brain is up to while we’re not looking.
At the last NIC meeting in East Haven (oh, how I love the NIC! Working on recruiting districts for a new NIC starting next school year—email me!) I asked Bridget to create a slide with a QR code to the web page we have with the instructional (and other) routines that we are currently testing. Which she did, promptly, being very skilled at such things. Then she asked me if I wanted anything else on the slide. “No, I don’t think so,” I said, then quickly changed my mind and said impulsively, “a zebra.” So she added a zebra.
Then I thought about what I had just said and why zebra was what had come to mind. “It must be that the QR code reminded me of a zebra,” I said. Perfectly rational explanation.
Then, a few minutes later, I noticed what Bridget was wearing.
And then, of course, I felt very silly, because at that point it seemed very obvious that what I had noticed, without realizing that I had noticed, Bridget’s striped sweater. Just to be super clear, I am not suggesting that Bridget looks like a zebra. But my request for a zebra on the slide no longer seemed anything like as random as it did when I first said it.
But the kicker is that, despite the fact that I had been with him for three or four hours at this point, it took me another 10 or 20 minutes to notice what Andrew was wearing.
At this point, I felt like a complete idiot.
It is a great photo of Andrew, however, and it gives me the opportunity to mention that he will be joining Partners full time in July. This is great news—for me personally, because I have learned a ton from Andrew over the last three years we’ve been working on projects together, and for Partners, because he has such rich experience and expertise in evaluation and continuous improvement. He is a brilliant and strategic thinker and deepens our bench considerably.
So anyway, here endeth the lesson on how your conscious mind does not know what your unconscious is up to, and therefore we should never assume that we notice all there is to be noticed, even when it is totally relevant to the setting and time we are in. Nor do we necessarily—in fact, we frequently don’t—have insight into how our minds work or what is stored away up there or how they influence our thinking, biases, assumptions, expectations, or actions. You think you know, but you don’t.
And while I have you here, in addition to expanding our NIC work thanks to the addition of Andrew, we are also adding a community of practice for central office instructional leaders—curriculum directors, instructional supervisors, math/reading/other subject specialists, special education coordinators… We’ll be marketing both the new CoP and the NIC soon, but in the meantime feel free to reach out if you want to talk more. We’re particularly interested in pulling together a group focused specifically on high school instruction… woo hoo!
First SII book study session tomorrow—very excited about that! Book launch party coming up—hope to see you there! And thanks to all the people who cannot travel to Connecticut just for a party (I know, right?) but who have written or called or texted. I appreciate you. Let me know if there is anything I can help you with. Best wishes, Isobel
Isobel Stevenson, PhD PCC
860-576-9410
@IsobelTX
Author of The Coaching Letter
Author with Jennie Weiner of The Strategy Playbook for Educational Leaders: Principles and Processes Routledge, 2021
Author with Sarah Woulfin & Kerry Lord of Making Coaching Matter: Leading Continuous Improvement in Schools Teachers College Press, 2023
