Our Wisdom is within us
How a messy way of learning leads to your hidden gifts.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ~ Howard Thurman
The tragic shortcoming of a perfect education
Oh, how we love to create the perfect education. But many improvements seem to make matters worse. Take tech. Many companies are so happy to sell improvements to measure and steer progress in schools more and more precise. It’s a promise that’s too good to be true. Even worse, I’m convinced it will decrease learning and increase pressure, depressions, and suicides among students. Education, learning needs a big portion of messiness. Especially students need room to make a lot of mistakes and try random stuff to learn.
It’s sad governments and even students distrust messy play. We take an education to prepare us to be adequate at the moment we do something for real. We don’t want to be embarrassed when we try. Never mind we once learned to walk with a 1001 falls. And so school offers us test after test claiming that’s proficient. Then after school we discover that giving the right answers to test questions isn’t life, let alone being professional at all.
Our governments tell us diploma is proof of capability, except it isn’t. Coaches and business trainers, like me, earn good money to teach you what school forgot. Social skills, life skills, networking skills, entrepreneurial attitude are often lacking. And on a deeper level, listening to self, to know what you really long for, what your biggest gift is, is mostly a complete blind spot. The lack of personal insight creates major issues both for individuals and society. Many addictions, burnouts, anxieties and lifelong lying to self and others can be seen as the price we pay for that. Thus we need to evolve beyond mere professional education. We need to open our eyes to the importance of developing our deeper self for a healthy society and a stronger us.
The case for messy learning
Just imagine yourself learning to walk again. But this time with first learning models, theories of balance and motions, and you fearing badly to fall especially when your parents are watching. You are required to prepare your stepping plan, and be able to express this clearly enough before you are allowed to take steps. And they’ll tell you, you’ll need to do the theory all over when you fail the test. Which means another period of class before anyone will trust you to walk by yourself. Isn’t that crazy? Then why is school organized like this on way too many topics?
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent, and original manner possible.”~ Richard Feynman
We have forgotten that messy play is how nature invented learning. We confuse insight with capability. We think by limiting the amount of failing we speed up learning. We think pouring cognitive knowledge outside in is education. We forget that the richest form of learning happens through experience and expression from the inside out. You discover so much by allowing yourself more and more that you already can do something. That has nothing to do with knowledge and everything with courage and trust. And messy play is such a great developer of that and so much more.
Starting my journey of self-development.
This is my personal story on how messy learning worked as a personal journey of self-development. I used to be super shy. I’d blush very easily. Especially with girls and being in front of groups. Seeking to overcome that I chose to become a teacher in the expressive arts. I admit this was also to overcome my personal weaknesses as much as liking theatre. This journey proved to be much more than a professional training, it also led to my biggest gifts and spiritual development.
When I started this education, I even avoided some shops where the contact could be too personal. And I lied to myself, ‘Hey a supermarket is easier anyway’. So joining the very personal development oriented theatre school was a huge step. I forced myself into a corner I could only get out of when I’d really learn to act ‘normal’ in this world. The self-development, the confronting myself, the attention I gave myself to work on this were more important than the actual lessons. They were the excuse I needed to go for it.
The gift of messing things up… a lot.
So there I was training to be a teacher in expressive arts. I clearly had chosen outside my comfort zone. For a while, I felt my talent was to ‘die in front of groups’. I turned out to not only be shy, I was also not so good at facilitation. I blundered myself forward, my only asset being sorry a lot and try again. I cursed my talent even. Why wasn’t I a great mathematician, musician, artist, sportsman? Why didn’t I have a talent you can easily point at? No, my talent was to fail and fail again. I’d stumble over words, wonder why I even tried to stand in front of groups, felt embarrassed with resistance in groups and die within myself for lack of capability to make it fun. At times I was ready to give up becoming a drama teacher. The fate I feared that would await when I’d stop however, felt so much worse than torturing myself through facing groups again and again.
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”~Helen Keller
One important moment was when I decided I needed to challenge myself. I hatched a small little plan concerning my school director. He was a big man everyone looked up to. The day I saw him pouring coffee in our shared kitchen I acted out my plan. “Hi mister director”, I said while rubbing his head. My whole system freaked out, blood rushed up to my head like crazy. How stupid I had been. “Hi Floris.”, he replied calmly and left the kitchen coffee in hand. Only then I realized all my projecting about what people could think of me was the big stupid. Most people do not even consider my behavior at all.
The few other things I seemed to get out of it, at first, were two lessons. I learned to say sorry, as I was failing my way forward. I also learned to listen to feedback. One of the most important compliments I received was, “Hey Floris, you’re a bit rough, but at the least, you’re willing to listen to what comes back at you.” Feedback helps me see and improve. To this day I take pride in staying true to that attitude. Such decisions about what we choose to stay true to, are an essential aspect of personal growth. Schools can be so much richer when they’d bring that awareness into their programs.
The rewards of messy learning
“You teach what you have to learn.”~ Saying among teachers. And actually teaching something you struggle with is an excellent way to learn deeply. It forces you to understand the subject well, be willing to seek and learn by doing. I’m deeply grateful to my drama school for the way they trained teaching. They taught that good teachers bring in their own curiosity and learning in how they teach. Once I learned to embrace my own messiness it helped to make my lessons more fun, playful and explorative for me and the participants. It set me on a long journey where experimentation became part of all my work.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”~Albert Einstein
One day I noticed I got hired regularly by companies to create a creative chaos so that frozen structures or mentalities could get unstuck. I also found myself more and more being able to adapt programs on the spot. And creating a mess with groups also made me better and better at both sensing a group on an intuitive level and even structure better, so the chaos became constructive. And because I was not afraid of the little chaos, I found I could host big management games, and deal with many perspectives within groups. Creating chaos in processes I facilitated had thus become a gift.
It’s weird how long it took to see the other gifts in it as well. I found the willingness to die and die again in front of groups had brought me courage. Blushing like a lighthouse very easily every time I expressed myself, meant every act in a group meant crossing a boundary. It was only years later I noticed the anxiety to step in front of groups was gone. Even the blushing was gone. I found my willingness to fail openly, helped others to experiment more also. And I found I dared to express my creativity in many directions, took on assignments as DJ, illustrator, actor, event designer, trainer and much more.
The wondrous gifts are hidden within weaknesses.
Thus trough messiness I learned things no clear-cut program could have taught me. I helped design educational programs making use of this, like chunks of the curriculum of Knowmads Amsterdam Business School. This school is full of messy learning, self-directed projects, and space to fail. The core of the school is to wonder who you are and what you feel needs to be done in this world. And then to create either a job or business out of your answers.
The unseen hidden mirrors within inform our lives more than the ones seen and understood. ~Spiritual wisdom
Then one day I wondered why we always hear we need to strengthen our qualities and or overcome our weaknesses. I felt I got paid for my weaknesses a lot. So I invented a workshop called ‘How to make money with your weaknesses?’ Turns out hidden in our failures lie treasures waiting no school seems to explore. Starting with the question ‘How can I do this easier?’, laziness can become creativity. Under insecurity hides often a huge amount of sensitivity. It hurts me to see how often people with insecurity start to feel inadequate and think they are not strong enough. Our world needs more sensitive people, not less.
So I found whatever weakness you have, there’s a gift within. Rather than judging weaknesses, education can become much more enriching when it starts to help explore the hidden gifts within what people actually struggle with. My experience is also that ‘we become experts at what we struggle with’. And that means we should allow struggle, not repress it so much by expecting good scores on tests as the core of education.
Is that a crazy idea? Evidence says no. It’s what parents want too.
Towards life-affirming education
And then I found an even deeper layer underneath all that dying in front of groups.
“To be willing to die over and over again.”- Pema Chödron
I found that many people fear expressing their true self. Which is painful, because it turns out this is actually one of the biggest regrets of the dying. Many people try too much to live up to expectations or stick to what they have learned. Thus their truer gifts are weakened or lost. The willingness to try and mess up thus gets an added depth. Life means being willing to die. And failing a lot is essential dying a lot that helps to truly live. Aliveness starts with stepping into the unknown and being playful about it. Thus when education pushes for fixed answers, good scores, show of quality at every corner it may squash the true expression of life and deeper qualities.
And this leads to my deepest conviction and experience. When you are able to find, live and express your deepest gifts, your expression of them will almost always be a contribution to society and life on our planet. Both our biology and our spiritual aspects are rigged to be part of society and the web of life. But when young people are pushed to cut out their deeper expression and aliveness in order to fulfill expectations, they may end up as terrible bosses, managers and workers with no care about the consequences of their actions. Because self denial often leads to denying others as much as expressing our own gifts and insecurities.
Conclusion
To conclude, normal education seeks to socialize its students. It seeks to reach targets set by a government. It seeks to hand you a paper that confirms you are able to meet external expectations. But I fear that kind of education mostly succeeds in creating more of the same. It produces professionals who make the same mistakes as our previous generations. It fails to train students who want to be part of the solutions we need to end the ongoing destruction of our ecosystem. If fails to unfold the more hidden personal qualities that lie hidden within each of us; qualities that can so enrich our society beyond a clear job title.
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”~ David W. Orr, Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World
Thus too often traditional education ends up harming both individual lives and our planet. Self denial, feeling inadequate or false trust in grades, lack meaning and purpose, and lack of unfolding our true gifts should never be the outcome of education, neither should ambition willing to take part in destroying our planet. I found my life became so much richer, because I embraced the the chaos of life and allowed myself to fail a lot by playing with possibilities. It has led me to a much deeper understanding of my true gifts and being able to turn them into rewarding work. I found that facilitating processes that boost self discovery are so essential for a more real education. The gift in that is that when we do this, feeling alive and meaningful becomes a daily experience in ways we can’t predict or plan. That is how life unfolds anyway.
Article on how to change education to make this all happen. Article on the power of play. Article on why to stop the pressure to compete in education.
Then I highjacked this a Facebook post by Christopher Chase, which shows how enriching this can be in action. Proof of concept:
“Finland’s education system encourages freedom and play, avoids standardized testing and provides equal education funding to all neighborhood public schools…
Finland’s education system encourages creativity, freedom and play, avoids standardized testing and provides equal education funding to all neighborhood public schools. Finnish teachers and students describe their system to Michael Moore in this excerpt from his last documentary… Why Finland has the best schools in the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHHFGo161Os
“An American teacher in Helsinki questioned the national practice of giving 15 minute breaks each hour — until he saw the difference it made in his classroom.”
Source: How Finland Keeps Kids Focused Through Free Play https://www.theatlantic.com/…/how-finland-keeps-kid…/373544/
“Children spend far more time playing outside, even in the depths of winter. Homework is minimal. Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said a school principal. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?” It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socialising.”
Source: Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?https://www.smithsonianmag.com/…/why-are-finlands-schools-…/
“Forget the Common Core, Finland’s youngsters are in charge of determining what happens in the classroom.”
Source: The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland https://www.theatlantic.com/…/the-joyful-illiterate…/408325/
See also:
Top 10 Reasons FINLAND Has the World’s Best SCHOOL SYSTEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmG4smezeME
Should The World Adopt Finland’s Education System?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_W2oS6HvTo
