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Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against President Biden’s student debt relief program, his administration is still putting forth other efforts to support borrowers.
President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Dr. Miguel Cardona
These efforts come in the form of a rulemaking process for an alternative path to debt relief; a new repayment plan; and a 12-month repayment “on-ramp” – Oct. 1, 2023 to Sep. 30, 2024 – so that borrowers who miss monthly payments during this period are not considered delinquent.
There will be a virtual public hearing Jul. 18 about the rulemaking effort, where individuals can submit written comments.
The repayment plan, Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE), will half the amount undergraduate loan borrowers have to pay a month from 10% to 5% of discretionary income; make it so that borrowers earning under 225% of the federal poverty level won’t have to make monthly payments under this plan; forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments for those with original loan balances of $12,000 or less; and not charge borrowers with unpaid monthly interest.
The plan will be open to borrowers this summer before monthly payments are due.
As much as we tell ourselves that multitasking is productive, we know at an intuitive level that it’s not. The lie of multitasking is that, if we just do it well enough, we’ll be able to get All.The.Things done.
Unitasking forces us to accept that we’re not going to get to all the things we want or feel we need to. That’s a hard truth that we’d rather negotiate with than accept.
But even after we accept that truth, there’s another hard part about unitasking: holding boundaries.
This is coming up for me because, as I type, I’m on a family trip. After spending too much of too many days working during family trips in the past, this time, I decided that I’m not doing that anymore. I neither work well nor am the son/brother/husband I want to be. Nobody and nothing gets what’s needed, including myself.
Because of the nature of my work, being present with family includes not having devices on me. Yes, not having devices on me is about not mindlessly grazing and checking email and Slack, but even more important is it keeps me from starting to write or getting wrapped up in an idea so much that I’m half-hearing conversations and half-present — which means not being present.
To my left, Angela, my sister-in-law, and my mother-law are getting pedicures. They are oblivious to my presence because they’re in pedicure bliss getting their toenails painted, something which I opted out of, which gave me this little bit of focused space and time to write today’s Pulse.
Don’t get it twisted, though: I did get a pedicure.
They’ll be done soon, which means I’ll be done here soon, too.
In the table-setting portion of our last Level Up Retreat, we informed our participants that we would not have devices on us during the week and we had built the design of the retreat so that none of us would need devices. We let them know that, if it supported them, we would hold their devices for the week so they wouldn’t be distracted. Our rationale was that we wanted to be 100% present for our participants and wanted them to be 100% present for themselves and each other.
No one took us up on the offer, but most of the time, no one had devices on them. The exception was in the evenings because #IslandSunsets.
Many participants commented that they’d never really had a restorative trip before. They thought they had, but then they experienced real presence. One participant realized that just the thought of emails “being there” on her phone made her anxious; she removed her mail client from her phone and hasn’t added it back.
I’m sharing these stories because I hope they’ll get you to think about how you can be more present during the upcoming trips, vacations, and moments ahead of you.
What might you experience if you were 100% there? How would it feel to not half-do and half-be in the moments you’ve set aside to be with the people you love?
Yes, it’s hard to assert and hold that boundary. But it’s worth it.
My time’s up. I hope it helps you enjoy yours more.
The post Boundaries & Presence: The Myth of Multitasking and What It Costs Us appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
I’m equal parts excited and trepidatious to announce that I’ve started a new publication on Substack called Better Team Habits. As I mentioned in my first post there, the intent is to create a more focused and fresh space for content and conversations about teamwork, leadership, strategy execution, and organizational dynamics.
I’ve long resisted separating team topics and conversations from individual topics and conversations. Since the early days of Productive Flourishing, it’s been a both/and conversation in my mind. Since most people work in teams and many of our readers start as or inevitably end up in leadership and management positions, it’s made the most sense (to me) to keep it as one global conversation.
A few different forces came into play that prompted me to think harder and make the different and harder choice to split the spaces:
I often say “When in doubt, choose the simpler option.”
The far simpler option compared to all that repositioning, shoehorning, rebuilding, and segmenting was to let Productive Flourishing be what it’s become — a site that helps creative types thrive in their individual work and lives by focusing on foundations — and to build another space focused on thriving with and in your team.
In another post, I’ll talk about why I chose Substack over some of the other options, but as soon as I made the decision that this was the next step, I felt a relief I hadn’t felt since 2015. I don’t have to hold back in either space. I can go full-in to my body of work in the team, leadership, and org space on Better Team Habits and I can go full-in to my body of work in personal foundations here.
Better Team Habits is new and doesn’t yet have much content. Between the book, content from here that I’ll revise, and what’s coming up from my fieldwork every day, I have a lot I’m looking forward to sharing. If you like watching things evolve and don’t want to feel like you’re catching up, you can join the journey now.
And, as far as what’s going to change here on PF, expect more resources that will help knowledge workers, creators, and entrepreneurs do their best work. PF has always served the creative class and we’re going to get better at doing that.
It’s too early to tell how it’s all going to work out and whether I’ll wish I had done this a long time ago or if I’ll wish I’d never done it. But I’m most engaged when I’m actually exploring and figuring it out rather than wondering, hedging, and holding back. So it’s time to experiment. And I’ll be sharing what I’m learning along the way here and on Better Team Habits.
The post Launching Better Team Habits on Substack appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
“Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1819, comparing Xenophon’s work favourably with the “mysticisms” and “whimsies” of Plato’s dialogues. More recently, many philosophers have taken the opposite view; a typical verdict is that of Terence Irwin in 1974, who described Xenophon as a “retired general” who presented “ordinary conversations.” The idea that Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues entirely lacked the philosophical bite or intellectual depth of Plato’s had become a commonplace in a philosophical discourse which prioritised abstract knowledge over broader ethics.
Both Jefferson and Irwin were right in identifying the characteristics of Xenophon’s depiction of his teacher—his overwhelming concern with providing practical advice for living a good life, and for managing relationships with family and friends. But both missed Xenophon’s lively wit, and his use of the dialogue form to put Socrates in conversation with Athenians, both friends and family and more public figures whose identity adds some spice to the discussion. Xenophon depicts a Socrates who offers pragmatic solutions to the difficulties his Athenian friends face, from Socrates’ own son’s rows with his mother to his friend Crito’s difficulties with vexatious lawsuits targeting his wealth. Where Plato shows Socrates leaving his conversation partners numbed and distressed by their recognition of their ignorance, as if attacked by a stingray, Xenophon takes more care to show how Socrates moved friends and students on from the discomfort of that initial learning moment. He offers practical solutions and friendly encouragement, whether persuading warring brothers to support each other or finding a way in which a friend can support the extended family taking refuge in his home. His advice is underpinned by an ethical commitment to creating and maintaining community.
It is not that Xenophon’s Socrates is afraid to show the over-confident the limits of their capabilities; while he offers encouragement and practical advice on personal and business matters, he rebukes those who want power and prestige without first doing their homework. His Socrates demonstrates to the young Glaucon that he needs to be much better informed about the facts and figures of Athenian civic and military resources before he proposes policy to his fellow citizens in Athens or seeks elected office. Socrates’ forensic uncovering of the young man’s ignorance of practical matters is sharpened for readers who recognise that this is Plato’s brother, depicted in his Republic as an acute interlocutor, able to follow Socrates’ most intellectually demanding arguments. In the conversation Xenophon presents, Glaucon is reduced to mumbling one excuse after another:
“Then first tell us,” said Socrates, “what the city’s land and naval forces are, and then those of our enemies.”
“Frankly,” he said, “I couldn’t tell you that just off the top of my head.”
“Well, if you have some notes of it, please fetch them,” said Socrates. “I would be really glad to hear what they say.”
“Frankly,” he said, “I haven’t yet made any notes either.”
(Memorabilia 3.6.9)
Xenophon might be making a very ordinary claim here, that good leadership decision-making rests on a firm grasp of practical detail. But it gains depth when read against Plato’s argument in the Republic for handing over political leadership to philosopher kings, trained in theoretical disciplines. Xenophon argues that rule should be grounded from the bottom up; he is a firm believer in transferable skills, and that the ability to manage a household might equip someone to lead an army or their city.
Xenophon does not leave Glaucon quite as discomfited as Socrates’ interlocutors in Platonic dialogues become, such as the Euthyphro where the titular character hurries away rather than go through another round of being disabused of his opinions. He shows how Socrates moves on from the low point of the realisation of ignorance and starts to rebuild his interlocutors’ self-confidence, now underpinned by knowledge and self-awareness. Socrates offers Glaucon a careful recommendation for developing his management skills and gaining credibility before returning to public debates as a more impressive contributor. With another student, Euthydemus, Socrates switches from the argumentative mode familiar from Plato’s work—the Socratic “elenchus” or refutation—to exhortation and encouragement, as teacher and student become more familiar with each other and learn together cooperatively.
“Responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust.”
One reason that Xenophon was motivated to show a Socrates who encouraged his students to make useful contributions to public life was to rebut critics who presented him—not entirely without cause—as the teacher of some of the leaders of the brutal regime of the Thirty, which briefly overthrew Athens’ democracy after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Xenophon insists that these former students had abandoned Socrates’ teaching in favour of an aggressive pursuit of power.
Xenophon recognised the usefulness of a wide range of practical experience. A businessman might well make a useful general. But he makes Socrates insist that leaders must show practical knowledge and analytical skills in order to persuade others to follow them and to deliver successful outcomes, whether in business or in battle. The combination of knowledge and skill, which his students label basilikē technē, the “royal art”,” is an essential attribute of leadership. By responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust. In a contemporary context where trust in leaders and educators alike is low, perhaps there is a powerful and accessible case for the role of expertise in government and society, which Xenophon makes through his memories of Socrates’ conversations.
Featured image: “The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David via The Met (public domain)
Most daily stand-up meetings make whatever they’re trying to solve worse as a result of eating up team time and focus.
First, let’s look at real meeting math. The daily stand-up isn’t just the 15-30 minutes of the stand-up — when we talk about meetings, we also need to include the prep, post, and slack time. That stand-up meeting eats up at least one hour of teammate time — so if you have five teammates, that’s at least 5 hours of team time.
Five hours of team time per day per week adds up; given that the average knowledge worker makes ~$30 per hour, that’s $3,000 per month in wages for just this meeting, for five people.
Should you still decide to do daily stand-ups, despite knowing this, here’s what not to do:
Here’s what TO do:
As I write in Team Habits, most bad or counterproductive meetings are a result of other poor team habits. If your team’s habits around decision-making, prioritization, and collaboration aren’t working, you’ll end up having a lot of crutch meetings to address those issues.
But crutch meetings cost your team’s most precious resources: their time and their attention.
This means that often, the best way to fix bad meeting culture isn’t just to work on improving meetings, and adding new ones. It’s by starting with the root issue with your team habits, that is, working on decision-making, planning, communication, so that the endless unproductive meetings won’t need to keep happening.
I’ll turn it over to you: if you’re doing daily stand-ups, what are the root challenges or (bad) team habits that are creating the need for the daily stand-ups?
The post Does Your Team Really Need a Daily Stand-Up Meeting? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Unions and UCEA declare agreement ‘on terms of reference for detailed negotiations’ on pay and conditions
University staff have made a breakthrough in their months-long dispute with employers during which lecturers have gone on strike, worked to rule and refused to cover for absent colleagues across the UK.
A group of five higher education trade unions and the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) announced agreement “on terms of reference for detailed negotiations covering a review of the UK higher education pay spine, workload, contract types and equality pay gaps”.
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How much time do you spend each week working through the important, deep, and future-building work? How much time could have been spent on the significant, strategic change work that often gets lost — either in routines or in the swirl of urgent items that seem to appear out of nowhere?
Take a minute to look back at your schedule over the last few weeks if you really want to get a clear picture.
Chances are you’ve been caught up in a strategic-routine-urgent logjam.
If you’re seeing this play out on your schedule, consider the compound effect of this playing out across your team – those four to eight people you spend 80% of your working time with.
When you look at teamwork, you’ll find that collaboration mostly falls into one of three buckets:
Strategic work: work that is longer term and catalytic for an important objective or issue
Routine work: tasks that pop up regularly, such as weekly reports
Urgent work: time-sensitive and important tasks
We can’t control the urgent things that come up, and hopefully the routines we have in place are set up to support those moments when they arise. Where things tend to get slippery though is how we spend the time we have (or think we have) for that important, future-building strategic work.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the “father of flow,” once wrote about how, if you look at your schedule from two weeks ago, unless you make specific, instrumental changes during your week, your schedule two weeks from now is probably going to look the same.
We have this myth in our brains that two weeks from now is wide open. That we don’t have to worry about it now because in the future we’ll have the time.
Except… it’s not really that open, not when you think about it.
At the team level, you’re rolling in routine stuff, things you know are just gonna happen, but they still take up time to do. And there’s probably going to be something that’s urgent, right?
And that’s not even counting meetings, which usually fall into the routine bucket, but require urgency every so often.
So how much time do you actually have for the future building work? Time to:
When I’m consulting on strategic planning with a client, one of the first things I’ll come in and say is, “What’s our actual capacity for change here?”
I’m not talking about the emotional capacity, which is also important, but what is the actual capacity on schedules?
This is where the disconnect often comes in on teams. Managers and leaders expect a lot more of the strategic future building work to happen. That’s natural — we (hopefully) take pride in our roles and company vision, aiming to elevate what we stand for, and push our boundaries beyond the limits of success.
However, most managers and leaders don’t have a firm grasp of how the routine tasks and the urgent stuff dominates the team structure.
If the routine tasks and urgent work items are taking up 110% of people’s time, we have to do something different.
We can’t just assume that we’re going to put more units of stuff in a bag that’s already overfilled.
I was recently talking to a CEO who was frustrated that an important project didn’t seem to be getting the attention it deserved. I pointed out that prioritizing the project meant there is work that will need to live on someone’s schedule.
Which led me to ask “Is there any room for this to go on their schedule?”
And followed by:
Are there enough focus blocks to move this strategic work forward?
And if not, what are we gonna do about that?
This is where on the individual side, the five projects rule is super helpful. It’s the sort of thing that it’s really a gauge for what you can fit in and what your capacity really equals out to be. Projects have to move out before new ones can be moved in.
And at a team level, it’s especially important for managers and leaders, but it’s really all of us at a certain point. You have to honor that you’re not going to get everything done, and that something either has to be dropped or pushed forward in an imperfect state.
Understanding your capacity for change starts with understanding how much room in your (your team’s) schedule there is to take on strategic work. If it’s just filled with urgent and recurring work, take a look at all the routine tasks and projects and ask yourself the following:
From here, you’ll be able to build in space for strategic thinking that will expand you, your company, your team and more, to the next level of success — without compromising the essence of what makes you flow.
Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller. And if you’re curious about identifying your team’s strength areas, growth areas, and challenge areas, take our Team Habits Quiz, a free, customized report to help you understand how your team works best together and how together your team does its best work.
The post Change Work Is Strategic Work appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
When Congress voted in December 2020 to restore Pell Grants for incarcerated Americans after a 26-year ban, advocates hailed the move as an opportunity for 760,000 people in prison to achieve a better life through education. But now, as the July start date approaches, experts are warning that prison-imposed restrictions can prevent this expansion of Pell from reaching its full potential.
Dr. Deborah Appleman, the Hollis L. Caswell professor and chair of educational studies at Carleton College
“In the prisons where I work, they’re limited to no more than 10 books total,” she said. “They’re always having to make these heartbreaking choices about which books they’re going to get [and which] they’re going to give away.”
Faculty are also restricted in the number of materials that they can bring into prisons, as well as what type. Appleman, who often uses video in her teaching, was prevented from bringing discs into a prison because officials said that they could be used to smuggle in drugs.
Incarcerated students often don’t have much chance to use essential educational tools that people on the outside take for granted.
“Computer access is really atrocious,” said Appleman.
Demetrius James, program manager at the Bard Prison Initiative and a former incarcerated student
Once, when a fellow inmate wrote a personal letter on a computer that was supposed to be used only for schoolwork, all students were prevented from using computers for several months.
“People had to handwrite their papers,” said James.
James was ultimately able to get $300 from family members to buy a typewriter in order to do his work. He also encountered challenges with his senior project, a 60–80-page paper on the history of the urban novel. James found that his attempts to get the novels were often restricted because they contained violent or sexual content. One administrator, he said, would not allow material unless it was appropriate for a 12-year-old.
“It was hard for you to concentrate and dig deep in the research that you were most passionate about,” he said.
Additionally, according to James, prison rules forced inmates to choose whether to participate in higher education or to have a job. This made it very hard for inmates without much financial support to choose to go to school.
“I really can’t even speak on the logic behind it,” said James.
Sometimes educational programs can feel like a low priority, derailed by clerical errors and staffing issues. Appleman spoke of a time when an instructor who had been teaching a class for 14 weeks was turned away because of a paperwork mistake, and another time when classes were cancelled because a correctional staff member wasn’t available to check teachers in.
According to Appleman, many of the restrictions that interfere with prison education programs come from a view of the incarcerated as perpetually on the verge of violence.
“If you believe that they’re there to try to become better human beings, to try to get a second shot at life, then some of these restrictions may seem ridiculous,” she said. “I don’t want to be a naïve bleeding heart. I get that there are people who did bad things. But that doesn’t mean that every day should bring new limits and new punishments.”
She believes that, for the expansion of Pell to be as effective as possible, the restrictions should be re-thought.
“We need to use the reasonable person standard,” she said. “Educational materials in and of themselves are not necessarily dangerous. There’s no reason why newspaper articles about a drug bust should be kept from somebody who was writing a paper about it.”
Appleman and James were both optimistic about the prospect for some improvement in the future, in part because of the expansion of the Pell Grant itself.
“I feel like there is a sea change connected to the temperature of the country,” said Appleman. “I think that there is a national wave of humanity and mercy and [a] rethinking [of] the incarcerated and the fact that they are human beings.”
James thinks that the expansion of prison education programs that the Pell Grant is likely to create will help make rules more reasonable.
“It becomes a normal thing, just like a law library,” he said. “I think the more normal it is to have college in prison programs, the less restrictions that they may have on it.”
But, according to Appleman, prison and education may always remain in tension.
“There’s a way in which the mission of education and the mission of the carceral state are always at odds with each other. In fact, they almost contradict each other,” she said. “The project of incarceration is subjugation, and the project of education is to rewrite a narrative so that folks can feel like the intelligent and capable people that they can be. The culture of surveillance and security works against that.”
Jon Edelman can be reached at [email protected].
For most of its 50-year history, the Pell Grant has not covered summer classes, with two brief exceptions: 2009-2011 and 2017 to the present. Summer Pell, officially called year-round Pell, stands on uncertain ground, subject to the shifting priorities of Congress, which ended it originally due to its cost and a lack of evidence of its efficacy. Now, a new study from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University has shown that summer Pell has had meaningful benefits, improving retention, attainment, and even earnings up to nine years after college entry for students who received it.
Vivian Yuen Ting Liu, associate director of the office of research, evaluation, and program support at the City University of New York
Students with summer Pell in the 2009-2011 period were 29% more likely to enroll in classes the following fall, 13% more likely to have earned an associate degree within three years, and 7% more likely to have earned a bachelor’s degree within six, compared with students who did not have access to the grants.
“What we are finding here is pretty large,” said Liu, equivalent to hundreds of additional students staying in school and earning degrees. Increases for students with summer Pell between 2017 and now were even higher, which Liu attributed to the absence of the Great Recession, less confusion about the program, and the fact that the program has lasted longer.
The benefits of summer Pell didn’t stop at the acquisition of a credential—summer funding also affected the earnings of students who were able to take advantage. Students with summer Pell consistently made 6% more per year than students without, equivalent to over $1300 extra, nine years after entering college.
Liu was surprised about how long the influence of summer Pell seems to have lasted.
“A lot of policies, you expect to have an effect within that semester and then maybe in one year, but very rarely do you find consistent positive impact down the road,” she said.
Liu believes that the long-term benefits come because summer Pell incentivizes students to study full-time in order to qualify. (Part-time students can use leftover traditional Pell Grant money to take summer classes, so they don’t qualify for summer Pell.) She compared it to an e-commerce website offering free shipping to those who spend a certain amount of money. Students who enroll full-time are more likely to graduate and can join the workforce more quickly.
The findings are consistent with research showing that continuous enrollment improves persistence and completion. Students studying in the summer may be more likely to remain engaged with their education and can progress to a degree more quickly. They may also avoid summer learning loss. Additionally, summer students tend to take fewer courses but on a more rigorous schedule, which may help both learning and morale.
Summer Pell seems to offer particular help to disadvantaged groups. Liu found that the benefits were largely driven by African American students, who experience particularly strong barriers to completion. Availability of summer Pell increased Black summer enrollment by over three percentage points and led to a 1.3-point increase in their likelihood of finishing a bachelor’s degree within six years. African American students also had increased earnings in their sixth and ninth years from college entry.
Dr. Stephen Katsinas, director of the Education Policy Center at the University of Alabama
“If more students are from single-parent families and parents with lower intergenerational wealth transfer, which African Americans sadly have, that means that parents might be less likely to have that last $300 to lend [their child] so he doesn’t have to drop out. Summer Pell is providing a lot of that,” he said.
Another group that benefited especially was non-traditional students older than 25. These learners had higher rates of summer enrollment, a greater likelihood of earning an associate degree within three years, and larger earnings gains. They did not experience gains in bachelor’s degree attainment within six years, however, which might reflect a preference for shorter degrees.
Katsinas noted that these older students are more likely to have small children, and that summer Pell may have helped them defray the associated costs.
“Summer Pell is providing a consistent revenue stream that they can leverage for housing, food, and even childcare,” he said.
Katsinas is concerned, however, that Congress might deprioritize summer Pell in order to spend money on Pell Grants for short-term programs.
“In light of these findings, it would be tragic if Congress chose to fund short-term Pell by defunding summer Pell,” he said. “This is an important study, rigorously conducted, on a vitally important topic. It showed that summer Pell moves students through the system faster, which is what we want.”
Jon Edelman can be reached at [email protected].
A group of lawmakers have signaled their support for the Biden administration’s federal student debt relief plan in a letter sent to the president. Sen. Alex Padilla
The letter – signed by 126 members of Congress – was led by Sens. Alex Padilla, (D-Calif.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Reps. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.)
“We write to express our strong support for your efforts to provide student loan relief to more than 40 million low-to-middle-income borrowers as they recover from the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic,” wrote the lawmakers. “Today in America, tens of millions of Americans are drowning in more than $1.6 trillion in student debt, leaving them less likely to become homeowners or save for retirement.”
This debt cancellation would help advance racial equity, the lawmakers added.
“Cancelling student loan debt will help make progress towards addressing this racial wealth gap,” the letter read. “Further, under the Administration’s plan, about a quarter of Black borrowers and half of all Latino borrowers would see their debts cleared entirely. As our Nation recovers from the pandemic, your cancellation plan will provide critical relief to millions of families and help avert a sharp rise in delinquencies and defaults.”
26 million Americans have already applied for relief through the plan.
A new Maine legislature bill may make higher education significantly less expensive for Maine high school graduates who choose to go to the University of Maine (UMaine), WMTW reported.Sen. Mike Tipping
The bill – sponsored by Maine Sen. Mike Tipping – would waive half of UMaine tuition up to four years for full-time students who graduate from a state high school in 2023, 2024, or 2025.
UMaine’s in-state tuition this year is $11,640.
"Enrollment has been down, and student debt has been up," Tipping said.
And this waiver would also apply to students seeking to complete their degree if they've lived in Maine for at least five years and have only a year of less of courses left.
"If we want to have a state where students can go here and stay here, and if we want teachers and nurses and engineers, we need to invest in our future," Tipping said.
A new bill has been introduced in the Texas legislature that would revamp how the state gives its community colleges money, KXAN reported.Rep. Gary VanDeaver
House Bill 8 – filed Wednesday by Texas Rep. Gary VanDeaver, would alter the funding formula for money that the state gives its 50 community college districts, effective Sept. 1. This move comes after a recommendation for state funding based on “measurable outcomes” from a 2022 commission the Texas legislature created.
The legislation would allocate funding to schools based on “measurable outcomes,” such as number of credentials of value awarded; number of students who earn at least 15 credit hours and transfer to a university; and number of students who finish 15 credit hours or dual credit courses that are used toward academic/workforce program requirements.
Credentials of value include degrees, certificates, and other credentials from credit that prepares students for learning and greater earnings in the state economy, according to the bill. And additional weight is given for credentials in high-demand fields.
Currently, the state funds schools based on college performance in relation to one another, enrollment, course types, “success points” metrics, and a uniform amount of “core” funding.
The bill could also create a scholarship program for economically disadvantaged students in dual-credit courses.
The board of trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning in Mississippi has placed Thomas Hudson, president of Jackson State University, on administrative leave with pay, effective immediately. No reason was given for the decision to relieve Hudson of his duties. Earlier, this year the university’s faculty senate approved a vote of “no confidence” in Hudson’s leadership. The faculty senate resolution accused the university’s president of failing to respect shared governance, a lack of transparency, and accountability for the campus climate.
In 2020, Hudson was named acting president of Jackson State University. This came in the wake of then-president William Bynum Jr.’s resignation after he was one of 17 people arrested in a prostitution sting operation conducted by the police department in Clinton, Mississippi. Hudson was given the job on a permanent basis later that year.
Before being named president, Hudson had been serving as special assistant to the president and chief diversity officer at the university. He had been a member of the Jackson State staff since 2012. Earlier, he served as an equal employment opportunity specialist for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Hudson holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Jackson State University and a law degree from the University of Mississippi.
Elayne Hayes-Anthony was named acting president of Jackson State University. She currently serves as chair and professor in the department of journalism and media studies at the university. Before joining the Jackson State faculty in 2015, Dr. Hayes-Anthony was a professor of communications and chair of the department of communications at Belhaven University in Jackson from 1998 to 2015.
Dr. Hayes-Anthony earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Jackson State University. She holds a Ph.D. in organizational communication and broadcast law from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
The board of trustees of Illinois State University announced that vice president for academic affairs and provost Aondover Tarhule will assume the role of interim president, effective immediately. Terri Goss Kinzy, president of Illinois State University, recently resigned from her post after less than two years on the job. No explanation was given for the resignation. Dr. Tarhule’s appointment is effective through June 30, 2024.
Illinois State University enrolls nearly 18,000 undergraduate students and more than 2,500 graduate students, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Department of Education. African Americans make up 10 percent of the undergraduate student body.
“I am humbled that the board of trustees has asked me to serve as interim president. I accept this great honor with humility,” said Dr. Tarhule. “The university has a long-standing reputation for excellence, and I look forward to working with my colleagues across campus to further raise Illinois State’s reputation.”
Dr. Tarhule joined Illinois State University as vice president for academic affairs and provost in 2020. His immediate prior administrative appointment was vice provost and dean of the Graduate School at Binghamton University of the State University of New York System. Before that, he was executive associate dean and department chair of the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.
Dr. Tarhule earned a bachelor’s degree in geography and a master’s degree in environmental resources planning from the University of Jos in Nigeria. He holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in geography from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is now discharging student loans of borrowers alleging they were defrauded by their colleges after a federal judge recently ruled that a $6 billion settlement could proceed, The Washington Post reported.
The settlement stems from a 2018 class-action suit from people accusing ED of ignoring applications for loan forgiveness through a federal borrower defense program. First approved in November, the verdict was appealed by Everglades College, American National University, and Lincoln Educational Services, parent company of Lincoln Technical Institutes.
The judge of the case, U.S. District Judge William Alsup, denied a motion to halt the full settlement on Feb. 24 but agreed to pause loan cancellation for a week for applicants from the three schools to give the colleges a chance to seek a stay from the appellate court.
“Resolution of a lawsuit concerning monumental delay should not be delayed any longer by three intervenor schools who were not parties to the settlement agreement and who were not in the long, hard-fought litigation that preceded it,” Alsup wrote in his ruling.
A spokesman for Everglades College said the school has requested such a stay. The three aforementioned schools are among 151 institutions — many are for-profit — that ED said had engaged in “substantial misconduct … whether credibly alleged or in some instances proven.”
“Accountability and transparency require regulatory consistency, adherence to due process, and strict observance of the law that protects not only students and taxpayers, but also the institutions that serve them,” a Thursday statement from Everglades College read. “We believe that any student with a valid [borrower defense] claim has the right to have it fairly evaluated. However, the settlement ignores the law and grants relief regardless of the evidence or the merits of a particular claim.”
Objections include that the deal did not assess the validity of the borrowers’ claims and that ED was violating federal procedure. But Alsup argued that the schools lost no procedural rights and failed to show how the settlement poses them actual harm.
“The relief provided by this settlement … will allow plaintiffs to breathe easier, sleep easier, repair their credit scores, take new jobs, enroll in new educational programs, finish their degrees, get married, start families, provide for their children, finance houses and vehicles, and save for retirement,” Alsup wrote. “It will allow them not only to move on, but to move up, elevating others in the process.”
The agreement provides about 200,000 people relief, including refunds of money paid to the federal agency and credit repair. And approximately 64,000 more borrowers, who attended schools not on ED’s list, are entitled to receive application decisions on a rolling basis.
When the FAFSA Simplification Act begins to take effect this July, it’s expected to significantly affect the process of applying for financial aid, making the paperwork less complex and altering the formula for eligibility. However, there has been scant information on the specific impacts at a national level. Now, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) has begun to fill that void with the release of new data estimating changes in how student and family assets will be calculated and how much students will get.
SHEEO based its analysis on national and state data from the 2017-18 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, Administrative Collection. What they found was good news for potential aid recipients: estimates of the financial resources of students and families will go down for many. This is a result of changes in the formula for calculating what used to be called Estimated Family Contribution (EFC) but will be called Student Aid Index (SAI) when it is phased in during the 2024-25 academic year. Over 45% of students from the data sample would experience a decrease from EFC to SAI of $1,000-$2,500.
Rachel Burns, senior policy analyst at SHEEO
Lower SAI numbers will lead to a greater number of students being eligible for Pell Grants. SHEEO calculated that almost 43% of the students in their data who were originally ineligible for Pell Grants would now qualify, an increase of over two million students. That’s almost double the percentage increase in Pell recipients that had been estimated by the Office of Federal Student Aid. Nearly 85% of Pell-eligible students would see their award amounts increase by up to $8,800, with the largest segment seeing a $5,000 boost.
These increases in eligibility could lead to even more aid, according to MorraLee Keller, senior director of strategic programming at the National College Attainment Network.
“A lot of colleges, in their packaging strategies, direct the most aid to students who are Pell-eligible,” she said. “So if you were not previously Pell-eligible and now you are, that may bring additional forms of aid to help you meet the costs of higher education.”
Keller also thought that the improved Pell access could also increase enrollment at community colleges, which has been damaged by the pandemic.
“If you’re eligible for a full Pell Grant, that will cover, in the majority of the states in the country, your tuition at a local community college,” she said. “You may be able to go to community college, pay your tuition, have your books, etc. all covered by your Pell Grant.”
SHEEO’s analysis also revealed that the EFC measure was lumping together a large number of students in the lower part of the income spectrum. The lowest possible value for an EFC is $0, but SAI will include negative values, down to -$1,500. SHEEO found over 3.7 million students who had $0 EFCs who would have had negative SAIs under the incoming system.
“I was surprised by the number of students who had a $0 EFC that now have a negative SAI,” said Burns. “I think that really points to the fact that EFC was lumping a lot of needy students into one category and there wasn’t enough distinction between students who really needed more financial aid than that.”
This change could be helpful for lower-income students, qualifying them for more state aid under current funding formulae. States may respond by modifying their aid programs if they don’t want to pay more or cannot afford to.MorraLee Keller, senior director of strategic programming at the National College Attainment Network
Not all students will benefit from the new formula. Students in certain categories, particularly those in families with two or more members in college, students whose parents have a lot of assets, and students whose families have farms or small businesses may find their aid eligibility decreasing. SHEEO’s analysis found that, for 8.4% of students, SAI would be higher than their EFC. At least 7.8% of students would have a decreased Pell Grant, and 8,060 would lose Pell eligibility entirely.
Some students might also have a higher SAI than EFC, which could hurt their state grant eligibility. States may try to include these students nevertheless, but it may be challenging, according to Burns.
“I think the goal would be to try to grandfather in students who are currently getting the aid so that no one is losing it,” said Burns. “I think it’s likely that states are going to have to have very difficult conversations about what to do.”
SHEEO has developed a tool that states and researchers can use to explore their analysis. Users can see the data broken out by state, dependency, sector, gender, race, and number of family members in college. They can also download more specific data.
But while students and their families might find themselves eligible for more aid, Burns emphasized that the process is still onerous.
“There’s still just as many data elements. There are a lot of hurdles for students to go through. While a lot of it can come directly from the IRS, it is still is a laborious process,” she said. “It’s a simplified formula, but not necessarily a simplified form.”
Jon Edelman can be reached at [email protected].
I’d like to float the idea that self-worth is a fundamentally different thing from self-esteem or confidence.
People talk about these ideas as if they were each one and the same. But self-worth, I would argue, is our essential value as humans — our internal sense that we’re good enough no matter what happens on the outside. Ultimately, we need to be looking at our self-worth — our inherent value — if we want to fuel our best work.
This is also relevant when it comes to teams, even if folks may think self-worth is always a personal development discussion. Teams can also struggle with the gap between their abilities and the level they’re achieving at as a result of invisible floors and ceilings.
Over the years, in all the time that we’ve been running the Monthly Momentum Calls, I’ve often used the floors and ceilings metaphor for this catch-22 about our self-worth and ability to achieve at the level of our potential.
Ceilings are false limits that are imposed on us from outside, which we eventually accustom ourselves to, and which limit our ability to rise to the natural level we might belong at.
But the floors part is where things get interesting.
Floors equal our stabilizing force. We’re talking about the base of the house or structure you have built for yourself to live inside. That’s to say, what you built to keep you safe and comfortable, also limits you. (That’s a different take than the typical one on confidence, self-worth and limiting beliefs.)
It’s good to have stability, and to have safety, and especially if you had an experience where you lacked that, it will seem reaaally appealing to stay where you are rather than take any risks — except when that structure also starts to limit your growth and ability to do your own highest value work.
The problem with remaining just safe and comfortable is eventually, we forget that we’re the ones determining the confines of our lives. We wonder why we aren’t living and working at the level we are dreaming of.
Sometimes those limits are built for us by others, and sometimes we are the ones responsible for them. That can be a tough pill to swallow.
In a lot of cases, people have outgrown certain limits but still abide by those earlier limits without noticing.
Our issues with self-worth, and trust — and how this impacts our floors and ceilings — can arise no matter what stage or level of success we’re at in life.
Some people would probably call this “imposter syndrome.” Essentially though it’s all the same thing, where we haven’t done the necessary work to develop our sense of our intrinsic value.
Issues with our self-worth often show up especially when we run into big challenges.
Our courage to break through our floors and ceilings often shows up in relation to whether we let ourselves be seen and heard.
Big challenge moments, or leading through a turnaround, can change your life if you’re willing to embrace those challenges, rather than balking and backing down out of fear, and/or the desire for ease and security.
Those challenges can arise for us in different ways over time, depending on the point we’re at in our career, whether that’s as an individual employee, freelancer, leader or business owner. It can be uncomfortable to push your boundaries — which is usually a good thing — but the resistance comes when you don’t want to break the stability you’ve created within certain parameters.
For introverts this might become about protecting their privacy, or for many folks, we end up resting on the financial stability we’ve worked so hard to create — and in the process we end up having difficulty pushing beyond our comfort zones.
The point of course is that sometimes it’s the externally imposed ceilings that are holding you back, but other times it’s you that’s holding you back — out of fear of unmooring yourself from your stable ground.
If you’ve recognized that these forces influence you, and you’re ready to push outside your comfort zone (but maybe still encountering resistance), it may be worth asking yourself some questions:
What is hiding protecting you from? Is it a fear of burnout? Of being unmasked?
In order to break out of this pattern, we have to remind ourselves that there’s also pain or frustration — and often an even greater, deeper, and longer term sense of disappointment — in knowing what you’re capable of, but not ever reaching for it.
If you’re aware of what you don’t want to compromise on, it becomes a question of creating better boundaries.
You can think of your new boundaries as a new house, or structure with floors and ceilings YOU have chosen, rather than ones that have been chosen by other people or by your subconscious.
You’ll want to create boundaries in terms of how much space you want to give other people’s thoughts about you. You might not want to live within their idea of you anymore.
If you work in a particular industry, or with a particular type of client, for example, you might not immediately want to quit what you’re doing.
But you’ll want to ask yourself: What’s the floor? That is, what is the minimum amount of time or energy I can keep spending on X? What’s the ceiling? What is the maximum amount of energy I’m able to spend on it?
When you’re clear on your floors and ceilings, and you know you want to attend to all the things, you can also rest in the knowledge of what the limits are for the amount of time or energy that you are going to be able to put forth.
You’ll also need to know when to let it go and walk away. Knowing when to walk away is different than never standing up, and never letting your light shine.
For a lot of people I’ve worked with, the floors and ceilings we’ve grown accustomed to can be really difficult to shake, because they operate on autopilot. Even when you’re trying to change your behavior around self-worth and your boundaries, you might only realize two hours later, “Oh shoot, I did the thing again!”
Or sometimes you know in the moment that you’re playing it safe.
Sometimes you might be able to rely on someone else — a trusted friend or advisor — to see these dynamics with more clarity than you can yourself. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an adult you trust either.
Kids, for instance, are incredibly intuitive. If you have them, you’ll know that to be the case. And they pick up on everything. That means that when you’re planning and leading in your life, and through your work, you want to be thinking about what you’re modeling for them on the day to day.
Modeling often means showing them how they can live their hopes and dreams. So when you see the ways you’re modeling, try to consider shining as you really are. You don’t want to just pass down the stories that we got when we were kids, which might have been limiting — whether about our abilities, creativity, abundance.
When teams run into their floors and ceilings in terms of their performance, managers often look at what or who on the team is broken and needs to be fixed or replaced.
In my forthcoming book, Team Habits, I take a long hard look at that knee jerk reaction within companies. One of my basic assumptions is that people are not broken, incompetent or lazy.
Teams have the same capabilities as individuals when they dig deeply and help transform their floors and ceilings. If you have a rapport and trust with the four to eight people you work with on a daily basis, this is a conversation you might want to consider having.
Human talent can shift quickly when it’s given space to thrive. You teammates can rise to the occasion in ways you, and they, individually, could not.
The primary way you can start to shift your team’s floors and ceilings is through team habit shifts. Probably the first habit you might think about is how to increase team belonging and performance.
Belonging is the habit that most closely links to trust, which is the foundational issue when it comes to floors and ceilings.
Many teams will need to learn how to trust each other before they can perform. Their ability to excel beyond expectation will mean breaking through floors and ceilings that have been imposed from outside, or higher ups — or as a result of their individual doubts.
But trust and belonging is the key that will get them there. Once we start to figure that out, the bonding starts happening more, which means the performing starts happening. Then you get a reciprocal spiral in action. And that’s how you get on the road to having a great team.
Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller. And if you’re curious about identifying your team’s strength areas, growth areas, and challenge areas, take our Team Habits Quiz, a free, customized report to help you understand how your team works best together and how together your team does its best work.
The post Self-Worth and the Floors and Ceilings Metaphor appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has released guidance on implementing Higher Education Act provisions that allow the Secretary of Education to require leaders of private colleges failing to operate with financial responsibility to assume personal liability for unpaid debts.Education Secretary Dr. Miguel Cardona
The guidance clarifies when ED can require individuals to assume personal liability to allow their schools to participate in federal financial aid programs. This allows ED to pursue those people for liabilities not paid by the schools, including costs resulting from closed school and borrower defense discharges. ED expects it is most likely to impose such requirements on institutions with the most financial risk.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is canceling the loans of more than a million borrowers cheated by for-profit colleges. But too often, the owners and executives of these colleges escape liability,” said Under Secretary James Kvaal. “Congress gave the Department the authority to make college owners and operators personally responsible for these losses in certain circumstances and we are going to use that authority to hold them accountable, defend vulnerable students, protect taxpayer dollars, and deter future risky behavior.”
ED will now begin making such determinations when schools’ program participation agreements come up for renewal or they have ownership changes.
The guidance included factors ED may consider when making these determinations, including civil or criminal lawsuits, settlements, or disciplinary or legal actions related to federal student aid or claims of dishonesty, fraud, misrepresentation, consumer harm, or financial malfeasance; significant compliance issues; or an executive compensation or bonus structure that can significantly affect the school’s financial health.
In the face of legislation proposed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis that would violate academic freedom, erode tenure protections, and diminish faculty governance at the state’s universities and colleges (see a summaries here and here) the Florida Philosophical Association (FPA) has issued a letter to the leaders of those schools calling for them to “uphold and publicly defend academic freedom, tenure, and shared faculty governance in the educational institutions for which you are responsible.”
Objecting to DeSantis’ plans to prohibit the teaching of certain topics, they write:
The professoriate stands accused, by politicians, of “indoctrinating” students. Like Socrates (famously, and falsely, accused of “corrupting the youth” and “impiety”), we teach our students to think critically about common wisdom, to question authority, and to welcome fresh perspectives and ideas—even when doing so results in discomfort. We urge you to reject political edicts that prohibit the teaching of ideas on which we might disagree, that replace critical academic inquiry with pre-packaged state-approved lessons, and that demand fearful obedience rather than the courage to have difficult conversations about truth and justice.
Here’s the complete text of the letter (dated February 25th, 2023):
Dear Academic Leaders at Florida State Colleges and Universities,
As members of the Florida Philosophical Association (FPA)—faculty and students across Florida’s many colleges and universities—we write to university and college boards of trustees, presidents, provosts and other academic leaders regarding our professional commitment to uncensored inquiry and our responsibility to provide our students with knowledge and critical thinking skills spanning many areas and styles of philosophical inquiry.
Founded in 1955, the FPA is one of the largest and most active regional philosophy organizations in the United States, whose mission it is to facilitate the exchange of ideas among all those engaged in this field of inquiry, regardless of rank, age, status, gender, race, ability, or other differentiating characteristic. Our members include those who study classical Western philosophy and those who study non-Western, feminist, decolonial, environmental, and other philosophical traditions raising sometimes difficult and uncomfortable questions.
We write with a sense of urgency to implore you to uphold and publicly defend academic freedom, tenure, and shared faculty governance in the educational institutions for which you are responsible. We are alarmed by recent government overreach into the academy, including but not limited to the following: attempts to legislate what and how classroom instructors may teach material within their professional areas of expertise, attempts to eliminate faculty governance over the curricula, attempts to abolish or otherwise compromise tenure, attempts to eliminate faculty involvement in hiring their colleagues and leaders, and attempts to discredit processes of external accreditation by professional peers.
As philosophers, we have a special interest—and considerable training—in the analysis of concepts such as “objectivity,” “impartiality,” “freedom,” “responsibility,” and “fairness,” among other norms that the governor and legislature claim to uphold. Indeed, such concepts are at the core of philosophical work. They are also core to our understanding of the value of a healthy democracy. As anyone in our field—and, indeed, anyone with a doctorate of philosophy (Ph.D.) in any other field—knows, such concepts are complex, difficult, and frequently contested. As those historically entrusted with care for such concepts, we object to the ways in which they are being weaponized for political gain while demonizing those who have devoted their lives to careful study of them. This attack is not only on philosophers, but on the very idea of academic expertise and scholarship in all disciplines. And it compromises not only what faculty may do, but what students may learn.
The professoriate stands accused, by politicians, of “indoctrinating” students. Like Socrates (famously, and falsely, accused of “corrupting the youth” and “impiety”), we teach our students to think critically about common wisdom, to question authority, and to welcome fresh perspectives and ideas—even when doing so results in discomfort. We urge you to reject political edicts that prohibit the teaching of ideas on which we might disagree, that replace critical academic inquiry with pre-packaged state-approved lessons, and that demand fearful obedience rather than the courage to have difficult conversations about truth and justice.
Academic integrity and scholarly rigor depend on inquiry and debate guided by the norms of our professions, rather than political parties. Responsible teaching depends on pedagogical expertise and a willingness to experiment with new ways of reaching students with diverse experiences, aspirations, needs, and abilities. The Florida Philosophical Association joins the American Philosophical Association (APA), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in affirming the importance of shared governance in higher education, free from partisan political intrusion.
We urge you, as our academic leaders in the state of Florida, to uphold academic freedom and the ability of all instructors to teach and research responsibly and without fear of state censorship. We urge you to resist political intrusion into higher education.
Sincerely, The Florida Philosophical Association
There is also a copy of the letter at the FPA site, here.
(via Brook Sadler)
Related: “APA Issues Statement on Academic Freedom in Florida”
Recently I joined my friend Eric Zimmer on his podcast, The One You Feed, to discuss how to focus our lives on what’s most important to us, and what blocks us from achieving that.
Too many of us are still stuck looking for a way to really see and access the possibilities right in front of us. So that’s the first opportunity. How do we start where we are now?
We focus far too much on what we don’t have (instead of what we do), or on things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. We know our thought patterns are a huge piece of the puzzle, and that working on our negativity, and transforming it, has huge dividends to pay. But it’s not just about thinking, our actions matter, too.
“The One You Feed” makes reference to an old Native American tale in which a grandmother tells her grandson that two wolves are at battle within every person: a good wolf and a bad wolf.
“Which one wins?” the grandson asks.
“The one you feed,” she replies.
Whenever I personally find myself in a situation of uncertainty or discomfort, especially when it comes to other people, a question I often ask myself is: What’s the most abundant possibility we can co-create together?
If we start there — by focusing on the most abundant possibility of our co-creation, it gets us out of zero sum games. It gets us out of the cycle of feeding the bad wolf. Considering the most abundant possibility we can create moves us into a sense of partnership. It’s a way of guiding myself towards the good wolf, as it were.
Some of our readers may know that I am an avid motorcyclist. In motorcycle riding, as in driving, there’s a rule: You always look first at the place you want to go. You don’t look at what you’re trying to avoid, because that’s the best way to crash into it. When you ride a motorcycle, you look through the curve.
When I’m steering and navigating through life, I hear and feel the bad wolf. But I’m looking at the good wolf and say to myself, “How do I steer towards that?” And I might get it wrong. But in my experience, I don’t know that I have ever regretted steering towards the good wolf. I’ve never regretted at least trying to build the most abundant possibility with other people.
Ideally you end up in the place where you don’t have to ask the question anymore. You’re just always steering in that direction. It’s one reason to think positively about the future. Ultimately we don’t know the outcome, really, so why not imagine it in a way that’s empowering, versus a way that keeps me looking at the obstacles I don’t want to hit?
I’ve said it elsewhere, but it bears saying again: your planning and your schedule needs to include your dreams. If we don’t dream about what’s possible, instead we stay stuck in the world of: what’s the least bad thing that can happen to me right now? And how do I avoid the least bad thing?
So much of the work necessarily involves envisioning, and saying to ourselves: “This is what life could look like.”
You can’t just endlessly settle for what you know isn’t enough — instead, you’ve got to move to “it’s possible” first, and then “it’s plausible”. There’s a pathway to there.
More importantly, that shift does not need us to employ hustle culture to get there. It doesn’t require burnout and maximum effort or Dunkirk Spirit.
There’s a way for us to move where we want to go, but it involves first identifying what the story is that’s keeping us from seeing what’s possible. What can be actualized is often right in front of us, but that’s exactly where a lot of people get stuck.
People get blocked by all kinds of head trash. That’s why giving ourselves permission is such a struggle: it’s okay for us to have the abundance we’ve dreamed of. It’s ok to live in that world, and hope others can live in a more abundant world, where they allow themselves to dream, too.
If you get to that point of fighting the head trash, you may be on the right track. That’s the hard inner work that you have to get through to prioritize your dreams.
This came up with Eric, who, despite success with his podcast, has been wrestling back and forth with the idea of whether he can take a month off and travel when he’s got his own business.
There’s this sense for a lot of folks, when it comes to rest or time away: “That’s not something that someone like me does.”
My thought was, “Oh really? Let’s unpack that.”
If you fundamentally think you don’t deserve rest or a break, or that it’s not possible or not relevant for you, there’s a likelihood you’re going to keep creating a cycle of burnout and frustration. And it’s not because you can’t take a break, or that things would actually fall apart if you did, but it’s because you’re unwilling to permit yourself to take that break. That’s where a lot of the work to be done lies.
For Eric to be able to give himself that permission involved moving away from hustle culture: the idea that more is inherently better, that we need to go bigger, and earn more money constantly.
Instead he tried asking himself, in the context of his life, “What do I really want?” That’s how he realized what he wanted most was to take time off. That’s the one thing he had never felt he had time in his life to do.
I’ll also say that for some folks who may be reading this, it’s not in every case quite as simple as, “I give myself permission.” Yes it’s about acknowledging, “this is what’s possible.” But it’s also about: “This is what’s possible for me.”
Those two words, “for me”, become really powerful. Together knowing it’s also possible “for me” makes the difference in whether you might just start taking whatever your aspiration is, and turning it into a real project, that is central in your life — where you devote real time and energy to it.
When you start talking about something as a priority, or as a project, it has to live on your schedule. A lot of people might be thinking about an idea for years without it ever taking up space on their schedule.
But it’s those projects you’ve dreamed of that are going to create your future self. That’s what we’re talking about here — what really lights you up in a way that only uniquely you can do. Our best projects, as I wrote about in Start Finishing, are mirrors, and bridges. Mirrors reflect your internal landscape: what you think about yourself, what you believe as possible, who you think you are, but they also mirror what’s happening in your external world.
“I’m gonna do the thing.” And we decide to do the thing. But immediately we’re confronted with head trash, limiting beliefs, competing priorities. And thinking… I can’t do this new thing, I was already overloaded with the old thing. How am I going to do the new thing?
But the project is simultaneously the bridge towards your future self, that future work that you’re going to do. The great part about it is, the bridge you’re building can take you a whole lot further than you thought you were going to go.
You can’t imagine, when you really do this type of work, where it’s all going to take you. When you really commit to the path, it can take longer to get there than you thought, or a lot of people get there faster than they had originally considered possible. That’s part of why we created the Start Finishing Field Guide to help you along that path.
We need that spaciousness not just in our individual work and paths, for leaders or entrepreneurs, but in our team work, too. For Eric, when he finally allowed himself to take a break, he came back with a renewed spirit – where rather than dreading getting back to work, he was amazed out how much unfolded that had previously felt stuck or impossible.
So many clients and people in different contexts come up to me saying, “I want to do more, bigger, better.” Mainly because that’s the priming we’re getting from just about everywhere. I hesitate, since I don’t want to say, “sorry, I cannot help you do more.”
Instead, at Productive Flourishing, we’re more interested in helping you focus on the best and right things first, which mostly means doing and committing to fewer things. That’s the reason we have the five project rule. It doesn’t make sense to overburden yourself with more than you can feasibly do in a given time period (day, week, month, or year). If you really focus within limits, that level of commitment does a lot of the groundwork.
The worst case scenario is we end up constantly stuffing things in, and micro-crunching our days and weeks so much that it’s a highway to burnout. We may be ‘getting things done’, but we’re so stressed out about it, that we can hardly enjoy it. The question I always ask is: How do you structure this in a way so that you can actually breathe and enjoy it as you’re doing it?
If it’s always just about crunching it, and doing it in the minimum amount of time and getting the maximum return — all those things that we hear — that becomes really, really unsatisfying.
Like imagine this scenario about your favorite dessert: I say, I’m going to make your favorite dessert for you. I put it in front of you, then I pull out a stopwatch. You get 15 seconds, go. Enjoy it, maximize it. Get it right. That makes no freakin’ sense. We want a certain amount of savoring when it comes to so many things that truly matter to her life.
If you have a bit of autonomy in your day, which is actually many of us in the post-pandemic hybrid work world, there’s not necessarily someone standing over your shoulder observing your work.
But what I’ve seen time and time again, across our audience, is that work can still be too stressful. In that burnout environment, we end up in this state of distraction, with time wasters and fillers, just to give ourselves a bit of emotional reprieve.
If work wasn’t so stressful to start with, we likely would not have need of that reprieve, meaning there would be substantially less chance of ending up in time sucks on social media or email — or whatever it is for you.
More spaciousness, whether on teams or individually, opens up new possibilities in our work and in the range of possibilities for our (or our team’s) success. If you actually take a step back, the likelihood is, your chances are substantially higher to come back recharged and able to really think through whatever problem it is that’s facing you. Slowing down often leads to novel insights. We can quite literally be better humans with the people we spend our days with — our team members included. We wind up not so compressed and snippy.
When taken as a habit, as a practice, that sense of space dramatically changes the quality of your work day in and day out. It means not holding on through an endless slog of painful work — instead it’s about going to work, engaged, energized, filled with a sense of meaning and purpose. Let’s face it, that’s a win no matter what happens.
The chief issue with working on a team (also co-located teams) is that when we’re working with other humans, we end up with some amount of social overhead. You end up in negotiation with others. If I block off my schedule, that impacts you, because now I’m not available for different things.
At most companies, unfortunately, there are the stated values and priorities, and then there’s shadow values and priorities. There’s this other game that you’ve got to play to be successful.
In really well-aligned organizations and really high performance ones, high-performing teams know there’s not so much of the shadow game, like it’s just all on the table. People know how to win. Regardless of the dynamics in specific organizations, the first question in any kind of workplace ought to be: How do I ship the most valuable work that pushes my team forward?
There are two axes of approach here. One is to really reclaim the time, or consider the time you do have and use that more purposefully.
If you’re faced with too much stress, or too many projects, the usual management tip is that you ought to bring the matter to your boss’ attention, and ask, what do you consider the priority is, or where should I start? In the 21st century, because of the way self-managed work has evolved, I would add a slight tweak here.
Rather than saying, “I can’t do these in this timeline,” I would take ownership: “I think these are the five most important. Do you agree? Am I correct about that?” And if they agree, it shows you’ve done that work of translation of your reality to make it legible for them — you’re not just like, “It’s too many things, pick for me.”
It’s the same when it comes to managing something like performance reviews. You get to take the ownership, and say: “Here’s what I’ve done over the last six months. Here are some of the things I know I need to work on.”
Ideally, the lines of communication have already been open with you and your team members or leader on these points. So you can suggest, “Here’s my plan of action for doing that.” And that means you get to have a very short performance conversation. Unless you’re just wildly misreading things. But even if you are misreading things, it’s better to know that sooner rather than later, right?
On the team side of these issues, let me first get a few core concepts out of the way. When I say team, I’m talking about the four to eight people you work with, day in and day out. Most teams are about that size. If you’ve heard me talking about my forthcoming book, Team Habits, it turns out you have an incredible amount of rapport and influence with that smaller core you work with.
The nuance I’m talking about can really be seen when the team as a whole moves and operates in a certain way. That’s just how the team rolls. Then you have a team habit. This is where a lot of the magic unlocks.
But the interesting thing about our team habits is they’re often implicit or unconscious agreements we make with each other. Then we just sort of do them, like any habit.
When I’m out talking to people in the field, leading a workshop for a company, for instance, I might ask, “Hey, did you at some point choose that when the team has an open schedule, that means a team meeting automatically gets scheduled?” The general answer is, “Ah…” and if you go down the list, no one agreed out loud that’s the way things should be.
In a small team, let me give you a scenario for how it can work (especially if we’re wanting to create new habits of highly effective teams), and cover down on a task that keeps slipping. Take managing cc: threads. We can decide that Tim will be the person to read the cc: threads, and he’ll let us know if there’s actually something relevant in that jam. He can also speak on the team’s behalf, like, hey, my team is doing X, Y and Z today. He is the liaison for the team. Maybe Charlie will do it tomorrow.
That gives the entire team of four to eight people freed up capacity. That means only one person has to read this thread to figure out what’s going on, so that the seven other people on that team can get to work. It’s an easily available solution. But we just don’t think of these kinds of solutions often because of the unconscious way team habits work.
It turns out, and maybe this is a fact a lot of us intuitively know: Most change management programs have abysmal success rates. Especially when it comes down from the top down, between two thirds and three quarters of change management projects don’t work, they fail.
When’s the last time from high up, someone’s created a policy that’s actually made your life better? There’s a saying in organizational development, recruiting and workforce management that people don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad bosses.
The fact is that your small team is frequently better equipped to take better care of each other — to build that trust and belonging that can lead to improved performance and results.
As an individual I may love or really dig the people that I work with, but hate working with them. That’s a fixable problem.
What we have to do in that scenario is stand up and feed the wolf. Be better at identifying bad team habits, and creating better ones — actively thinking, what’s it going to take for us to not show up and have the same setbacks day in day out?
In the course of this conversation on how to focus on the most important things with Eric, we touched on the subject of productivity. There are a lot of words in the broader industry that we’re in that I don’t love. But there are useful ideas too, which can play out in how we move on successful team goals. For instance, a crucial insight we might take and apply directly to team performance, is about being proactive versus reactive.
Being proactive takes courage. You might pick wrong, you might spend three months or six months working on the wrong damn thing. But having that courage with your team and as an individual to really say, “Here’s where we’re trying to go, let’s organize ourselves to get there.” It makes such a dramatic difference, because you don’t end up in this place of resignation and quiet quitting.
With bad team habits, and with a lack of courage or purpose, that’s what happens in the workplace. When we disengage it creates an add-on snowball effect, and we disengage again, then others do, too. That’s the path that leads to bad cultures from bad bosses. I get that. I’ve done this work long enough to know that some of us, leaders included, have just not gotten to the place where we see the possibility that’s right in front of us.
Ultimately I’m a team guy. Because when we’re part of a good team, that’s where we have great performance and great belonging, it’s just one of the most sublime human experiences that hits us so hard, and is hard to beat. It’s for that reason I get nostalgia about being in the Army sometimes.
That’s the reminder I’d like to leave us with here — it’s the whole reason I wrote Start Finishing, which is now being played out in Team Habits in a different way. (P.S.: If you weren’t already in the know, Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller.)
And it’s that we’re here to help people get on a pathway to a way of working that makes work a sublime experience. That’s possible with teams, for any team, and we all have the ability to get there.
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