Brock { Abroad }

Jun 30

on energy and ‘doing’

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Doing is what I came to Knowmads to learn.

Energy is what I’m constantly exploring in myself and the world around me.

After a not so recent walk along the beach in Tel Aviv with a friend and spiritual mentor, Tsi-la, I learned a very beautiful metaphor for approaching each day. It is about energy renewal and the recent feeling of leaving a certain honeymoon period with my new company and school that I’ve spent the last two months getting started up.

Tsi-la says it’s about being an egg.

It’s wrapping yourself in blue, or whatever color you’re feeling, and filling yourself with gold. What does she mean by this? She explained to me that you must start with creating a solid and centered core filled with a gold that holds you strong so that you won’t fall, but also a gold strong enough to push out into the world; keeping in mind that gold must shine through the colorful filter that you wrap around yourself.

I asked her why you need a filter and why must it be colorful? She told me that the filter helps protect all that gold that you’ve filled yourself up with, strong for the day. It allows everything that helps the gold grow stronger, all the positive energy you’re given, and screens out any sign of something viral that may arouse feelings of fear, anger, hurt, resentment, jealousy, guilt, etc. All the lousy things, basically.

After learning this, I also came to the conclusion that the filter can also catch things and keep them stuck– like cheese in a cheese grater. Your filter should be strong enough to shelve these feelings, and look at them later when you are able to handle them. Even better, perhaps these feelings will melt away after awhile, using a little soap and hot water, the filter might be able to wash these things out once you realize that it’s not worth the battle later.

If I just take one day at a time, stress seems to cross my path much less frequently. There is one thing I’ve recently stopped doing that has reduced about 80% of the negative energy that sucks my day up. That one thing has been making to-do lists. The past few months have kept me so busy doing things that making a list of them just didn’t seem practical anymore. I attached so much negative energy towards these lists that never seemed to end, so I finally just stopped doing them, and man does it feel great!

Instead of to-do lists, I now make have-done lists instead. It was a piece of advice given to me by quite a few people and I like them much more. The things that you have done today rather than a list of things to-do. When it comes to time management, I’ve found To-do lists the most impractical things ever at this point. I always end up disappointed with what I didn’t accomplish that day. I first tried three important things a day, prioritizing my to do lists by size, and numerous other ‘to-do list techniques,’ but in the end I think I’ll stick to these have-done lists. It makes me realize just how much I have accomplished instead of what I haven’t. I think it’s a much better way to end each day.

It reminds me of what my most hospitable host, Gili, wrote to me in my notebook upon my departure from a great visit to Israel that marked the start of a new friendship:

I give thanks for this perfect day.

Today is a day of completion.

Miracles shall follow miracles,

and wonders shall never cease to exist.

to today, everyone!

Jun 22

fear, according to Stephen King

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I had a great picnic in the park with my friend and fellow Knowmad, Marianne Slegers, last week. It was the day before we left on a Knowmadic team-building retreat . It was the end of a rather scattered month, to say the least. As a matter of fact, the reason Marianne and I got together in the first place was for a meeting that wasn’t scheduled for a week later. Nonetheless, we had a great Monday off talking in the park about motivations, fears, and life in general. She shared with me her love for Stephen King’s horror books that she had been reading from a very young age. Later that day, I got this email from her about his theory on the different types of terror:

The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm.

The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm.

And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. “It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”

What are your biggest fears? I actually made a list and realized:

What have I got to lose?

What’s the worst that could happen?

Jun 07

Two More reasons “Art School” is the next “dream” school:

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In a recent blog post, Three Reasons I think “Art School” is the next “Dream School,” I wrote about why I think creativity, essentially, is the biggest factor that determines the (personal) leadership styles required in 21st Century Education. Recently, I read a tweet that states that creativity is the most needed leadership quality required in 2010. I didn’t open it, but I don’t think creativity is not just a fad of the current times.

Creativity is required for the present and future as we catapult into an emerging era of excess and abundance of resources of multi-dimensional degrees.

Two questions emerged from these thoughts as I put together that blog post:

Who is the artist?

What is the role of art and the artist in the 21st Century?

After exploring who I perceived as an artist, I determined three qualities essential to the thriving century nouveau Picasso:

“feeling,” or rather, giving meaning to
“creating” an authentic and balanced life in order to navigate through the required
“transformation,” or ability to flow, along the basic priciples of Liquid Modernity.

To further explore the story of these qualities, I pose two more traits:

Read the rest of this entry »

May 13

Is “art school” the next “dream school?”

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When asked to write a piece of text for the Knowmads blog in the upcoming “what our students say” section, this is what I wrote:

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain one once he grows up.”

“Picasso said this and Knowmads attempts to solve the struggles an individual has in creating a life of purpose by giving them the necessary experience, creativity, and individual responsibility needed to succeed in a world that is changing at an extremely rapid rate. Because of this, the traditional four year degree is outdated within a year of graduation. As a student with a background in experimental, experiential, and artistic education, conforming to the typical university system just wasn’t an option for me. For a true individual seeking to transcend conformity and give more meaning to life, Knowmads is for you. Because It’s not about creating parts to your life; it’s about creating your part in life. Welcome Home!”

So, your first question may be:
Who is the artist? In my eyes, the artist is a human being who combines passion, work, and playful learning. The artist has a spiritual core, a fearless exterior, and uses their creativity, or imagination, to make a difference in the world they’ve created.

The next question I’m attempting to gain more insight on is: “what is the role of art and the artist in the 21st Century?” I believe that the artist can be used as the perfect analogy of what is required of educating leaders in this era of socio-economic complexity. Here are 3 reasons why: Read the rest of this entry »

May 10

Notes on a Pilgrimage: “everything is “alleged” here.”

*travels{abroad}, Israel, palestine, {abroad}journey 1 Comment »

If I could give one theme to my life, Pilgrimage would be it. I see it as a broad way to view life as one long learning journey. I see it as a slow accretion of details; of knowledge and experience. I believe that by going slow, being present in each moment, lies the key to going “fast,” if you will. By taking the time to reflect and discover more of who you are and what you want to get out of this lifetime, dreams can be realized.

My dream is to live that sort of “life on pilgrimage” approach; to view each moment as bringing with it a new possibility.

Easter Sunday in Jerusalem brought with a new possibility, but not the possibility I has hoped for, exactly. It was a disappointing experience, to say the least. Perhaps I didn’t prepare enough for what I expected would be one of the most moving days to visit such a sacred site. Did I attempt to give it enough meaning for myself? To be honest, I really couldn’t find a way to make it “special”. Besides, I think to myself, what is “special” supposed to mean, anyways?

Perhaps, there were just too many shiny objects in the way for me to see what was really there. I was completely blown away by the amount of commercialism I found. Entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcre, people fought past each other mercilessly in an attempt to rub personal amulets against a rock where Jesus was “allegedly” crucified on.

It was a huge church; constructed around a rock. Enamored with expensive gold objects and artifacts telling the story of a simple man who loved the world so much, he made the ultimate sacrifice of letting go. Observing the masses of mourning pilgrims, a feeling comes over me. A tingle that slides down my spine bone. It’s the same sort of tingly goose-bumpy feeling that I got upon entering the grounds of the Vatican City. As my mother describes it:

“it’s the sort of feeling you get when you know you’ve come “home”, to a place that has been touched.”

Touched by what, though? What’s wrong with just having a rock in the middle of a room? What’s wrong with letting that be “enough?” What does “home” actually look like, anyways? Would Jesus have created this sacred space in the same way humanity has attempted to? Someone, or many people, have said:

“there is just enough religion in this world to create hate, but not quite enough to create love.”

Perhaps that’s true. The whole experience has left me feeling off balance, jaded, and questioning everything I ever thought travel, life, and belief was supposed to mean. In Jerusalem, international territory, finding co-existing means police barricades, weapons around every corner, and vendors hawking goods and services in your face; I can’t help but feel that there has to be more.

Within the narrow confines of the old city, women in hajibs wander between bare-shouldered babes from the Western world as old orthodox men ogle past to wail their wishes to the wall. Colorful scarves, tapestries, and t-shirts billow in the wind, from the light entering the labyrinth of the old city. Something seems eerily ersatz with the scene. Read the rest of this entry »

May 06

21st Century Leadership; styles

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Building on a previous post, 21st Century Leadership, leadership styles in the past, present, and future are explained by Pieter Spinder at Knowmads.

When it comes down to traditional leadership, bureaucratic and autocratic leadership styles come to mind. Involving hierarchy, power retention within “manager-style” positions, all decision-making is given on a vertical style of bureaucratic leadership where only the highest positions are involved. Staff, within organizations and corporations, do not consult staff and are typically not given the opportunity to provide input. Without explanation, they are expected to obey orders. Usually, they do so without ever given a second thought. This is typically due to a structured set of rewards and punishments that are involved if they fail or succeed. In other words, if they obey or disobey.

Autocratic leaders are especially reliant on these threats and punishments to influence their staff, which they don’t trust or listen to for input, anyway. Bureaucratic style is a bit more managed “by the book,” so to speak. Everything is done according to procedure or policy. If not covered by the book, it’s passed on to the hands of a higher level without further regard. It’s this behavior that places a police officer as simply a rule-enforcer instead of a leader, for example.

What are some qualities of other present leadership styles that are valuable and what are the leadership styles of the future? Some valuable qualities that can help make a group of people collaborate more creatively involve just that type of attitude. These qualities get everyone more involved, they create a community dialogue and discussion. They are an easy entrance to expanding your network in order to open up to a wider audience, within a differently structured format, involving like-minded educators of a similar skill level. Here are the styles of the today and tomorrow we explored:

Transformational Leadership

Make change happen in self, others, groups, and organizations. Charisma is a special leadership style commonly associated with transformational leadership; extremely powerful, extremely hard to teach.

Transactional Leadership

Emphasizes on getting things done within the umbrella of the status quo, which is directly in opposition of transformational leadership. Using a “by the book” approach, this leader works within the rules and is commonly seen in large, bureaucratic organizations.

Creative Leadership

Ability to uniquely inspire people, generating shared innovative responses and solutions to complex and readily-changing situations.

street art, Tel-Aviv

Corrective Leadership

Empowers staff to facilitate collaborative behavior and creates a synergism by working with and through other people instead of bowing to authoritarianism.

Change Leadership

Endorses alteration, is beyond thinking about individuals and individual organizations, and single problems with single solutions. Rethinks systems to introduce change on parts of the whole and their relationship to one another.

Intelligence Leadership

Is able to navigate the future by embracing ambiguity and reframing problems as opportunities. Takes a proactive stance in taking their organizations into uncharted territory.

Multicultural Leadership

Fosters team and individual effectiveness, drives for innovation by leveraging multicultural differences. Teams are able to work more effectively in the atmosphere of understanding and mutual respect.

Pedagogical Leadership

A video from 21st Century Pedagogy attempts to answer the question: How do we involve new technologies to meet the changing needs of students in the 21st Century classroom?

The literature from the presentation reads:

Technology will never replace teachers. However, teachers who know how to use technology effectively to help their students connect and collaborate together online will replace those who do not.

There is a paradigm shift from leader/teacher centered “orientation” to an interactive, connective organizational system using more democratic learning with a more dynamic communicative approach. This is seen as an alternative to instructional leadership by enabling the learning and intellectual growth of those led. Read the rest of this entry »

Apr 28

21st Century Leadership

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As we enter completely new and complex socio-economic times, new leaders need to be built to navigate the turbulent ecology of a rapidly-changing planet. I believe that this planet is built on community. Within this community, I see leadership as horizontal or circular, perhaps a combination of the two. This is why I see (personal) leadership not just as a crucial tool to strengthen the circles of tribes within this world; I see it as a necessity to build a lateral community these circles are built upon. I envision this community as a globally unified tribe, a tribe of leaders within each and every single one of us. This is the importance of a tribe- a well functioning human control system.

In a presentation given to us by Pieter Spinder, the tribe-cheerleader himself, he describes his vision of what leadership could mean in the 21st Century: Leadership can refer to: The process of leading, the entities performing one or more acts of leading, or as wikipedia puts it, “the ability to affect human behavior so as to accomplish a mission designated by the leader”. According to him, a leader is an individualized and responsive person that can make an impact because he or she feels a sense of interconnectedness within the world and believes that change can be built from the bottom up, inside to outside. He believes that to lead you must be able to follow. Because without followers, there can be no leaders. Leadership qualities that he firmly believes are integral to be a successful leader both for yourself and the world include: humility and integrity. Integrity, he believes, is the bedrock of leadership. “If you lose your integrity, you lose everything.” A leader must be decisive and a risk-taker. Even if it’s deciding when a consensus has been reached and it’s time to act, sensing when the time is right to both lead and follow is crucial. Even more important is having the courage to fail and learn from it is essential to being a successful risk-taker. The emotional resonance, or capacity to understand what motivates others and to inspire individuals into action is necessary to what has become what I believe to be the most important tool for a leader to develop: the talent to build a team. Leaders create productive teams that draw the best from people. The 21st Century leader can coach teams in collaboration, consensus building, and conflict resolution. In regards to the individual leader, the necessary self-knowledge to protect you from overreaching and understand your personal passion bring him/her to lead.

“If you are passionate about something, that’s where you will lead.” Building on this passion requires a conviction that believes in what they’re doing to the very core. It also requires a dedication, spending whatever time and energy is required to get the job done, rather than giving it whatever time you have available. It’s making the time for what matters. Further qualities Spinder addresses include magnanimity and openness. A 21st Century leader is gracious in defeat and allows others who are defeated to retain their dignity. They are able to listen to ideas outside their own beliefs and are able to suspend judgement until after one has heard someone else’s ideas. Spinder concludes the topic by adding that performance, vision, initiative, commitment, and character are crucial elements to what an organizational leader needs to have in order to, as the man himself always says, “make things happen!”

on the book, Power in Creation, given to us at a recent round-table discussion at De Baak, a leader is described as the following: “A leader must have vision, must engender respect, be determined and honest, must be able to bind people and analyze, inspire and motivate, must be able to listen but take decisions. A certain degree of charisma is also desired. It’s a combination of vision and perseverance on one hand, and modesty and openness on the other. “ Perhaps the most interesting theory I’ve read comes from Paul Nobelen. The author of About Leading, he states “The younger generation of leaders seems more principled than previous ones.”

So, what are your principles?

Apr 25

face painting; Palestine

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Apr 21

Time as Ritual

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Around the new year and after my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, I decided to take my life in a different direction. I decided to be more aware of what was happening around me and what was hapening to myself. I felt changed, literally transformed from the experience and I knew that by beginning Knowmads, where their motto is “we educate change-makers,” I had to be prepared to flow with the necessary changes to better myself, and in turn better the world around me.

I wanted to make it fun for myself.

I called it the Pilgrim Project and I encouraged anyone who read to follow my adventure. Maybe someone out there was inspired by this personal quest, I don’t know. What was more important for me was doing something I needed to do for myself and by posting it for the world to see, knowing that I was being held accountable. I had three rules for this year of planting seeds and some inspirational and concentrational words I really wanted to focus on. Read the rest of this entry »

Apr 15

Knowmadic Notes, from the field

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To conclude our week at the IDEC, we had a very busy last day facilitating three workshops that built on each other to create we deemed a ‘Knowmadic Dance Around the Fire”. After enjoying the conference and all the new people we met, we felt the best gift we could give back to the experience was a sort of conclusion space, a Knowmadic environment we could share with others to reflect on our time at the conference sharing tools and lessons learned while continuing to explore what we could do to continue bring the Knowmads to Israel again. We looked at the dance around the fire as something happening in a sort of playground. We realized that for a Knowmad, home is on the inside, and the world is our playground!

Presenting Knowmads to the groups, we expressed a felt need in a conflicted place for a new type of school based on socially innovative entrepreneurial behavior. Looking at it as a creation developed from achallenge that exists in the world rather than as a reaction to a problem of the Industrial age. Using the Start-up wheel as a tool to bring into the space combined with tools and experiences brought from participants, we developed three different workshops based on the following three forms:

1. Harvesting; ideas, thoughts, feelings, experiences from individuals from the IDEC and the world as a whole.

2. Prototyping/Modeling; using three different groups based on three different ideas, we brainstormed what sort of experience a Knowmadic bus touring around Israel would look like. We explored the value a semester of teachers and students could provide, and finally what a Knowmads ‘crash course’ would do over the summer break.

The results? Stay tuned once I return back from the field after analyzing the data with our team. As for now, I’m off to enjoy my last day in Tel Aviv.

This is brock, signing off from my notes from the field. Looking forward to bringing my new dance moves back to my tribe!