The last couple of years has been challenging for me as a learner. You see, I enrolled in a doctoral program to pursue an EdD in Performance Improvement Leaders, and one of the results they forgot to list on the "program outcomes" was:
*Learner will experience massive amounts of cognitive dissonance.
What's led to this internal battle, you say? Beyond being a compulsive doubter, the degree has caused me to rethink my thoughts on performance quite a bit. Here's why. My basic philosophy as a mental performance coach centers around individual performers being themselves in a way that combines celebrating who they already are while embracing the idea of continual improvement. It's not really very radical at all in the mental performance world. Many would describe their philosophies similarly. So you could imagine my terror when, in the very first assignment in my program, we read the beginning of Thomas Gilbert's Human Competence, and within the first three pages or so, he wrote something to the effect of:
"If you have a performance problem, you probably have an environment problem."
What?! That can't be right! Surely he means, "If you have a performance problem, the performer needs to find a solution." Right? RIGHT?!! I kept reading, and he repeated it. Then again. Then, I saw his Behavior Engineering Model (BEM), and again, he recommended starting with the environment. What's hilarious about it, looking back, is I'd completely forgotten that his model does include the concept of individuals as well. It was that scarring.
Anyway, it really forced me to rethink how performance works. That was hard to embrace. I was starting my fifth year or so in the world of mental performance and had been excited to move out of a new practitioner mode. In hindsight, probably a bit of Dunning-Kruger effect on my part in thinking I'd started to figure out this mental stuff. It's continued to be hard to embrace as I've had to rethink, meld together, and decide again what I think is the best approach to empowering others to perform and enjoy (while also following assignment rubrics, of course). I say think because if there's one thing that I've become more and more sure of through the process, it's that anyone sure of what leads to performance is kidding themselves. There are way too many variables that factor in for any 5-step plan, no matter how many free universities you get your honorary degree from on Twitter.
That said, it's been fun too. I've enjoyed learning, exploring different topics, and applying what I learn to improve projects at school. I've even enjoyed the challenge of fighting internal second-grade Ben. He wanted to be perfect on every assignment and took criticism personally. Actually, that's a lie. That's been a brutal battle with every click of the mouse to submit an assignment. But I've made progress, I think. The improvement of projects led me to a recent idea to return to writing, at least for a handful of short posts. Great project ideas gone wrong were a significant factor in my return to school, and my hope is to share a few things I've learned from those failures that will help you avoid making the same mistakes. To do that, I'll be sharing "5 Reasons Why Your Great Idea Didn't Work" over the course of the next couple of weeks or so. If you're doubting me, I don't blame you. A brief look at my "recent" posts led to pain in seeing my idea to shift the blog to organizational learning a couple of years ago... and then proceed to write 2 blogs in 2 years. But hey, at least with one of the two, you could argue it did have something to do with organizational learning. That's the plan, though, and I hope you'll check back in to see if I do it. If not, don't blame me, of course. Blame my environment!
- Ben
