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Top 5 regrets of the dying

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I was doing my morning tweet practice of inspirational quotes, and I came across a quote, which I posted:

“The same view you look at every day, the same life, can become something brand new by focusing on its gifts rather than the negative aspects. Perspective is your own choice and the best way to shift that perspective is through gratitude, by acknowledging and appreciating the positives.” 
― Bronnie Ware @goodreads

I noticed that the quote was from a book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departed (book here), and I quickly found a summary HuffPo piece here.  The insights come from Bronnie Ware’s work with the terminally ill.  The five regrets are expressed as wishes, and I reproduce them in capsule form below:

  1. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
  2. “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”
  3. “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
  4. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
  5. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

Many of these regrets or wishes are part and parcel of coaching work.  Authenticity, work-life balance, emotional awareness & expression, connection, and the realization that happiness is a choice of guided by the quality of our awareness and framing of our thoughts and feelings about what happens are the text or sub-text of many, if not most, coaching conversations.  

Seeing the five in such stark relief has me wanting me to go grab my journal and reflect on the five wishes and my own life.  Which of the five regrets would be yours if you were suddenly to find yourself at death’s door?

5 Smooches of MOOCs

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I just posted a piece (here) about massive open online courses or MOOCs on www.bigbeacon.org.  The piece is entitled MOOCs, Moola, and Love: 5 Smooches of MOOCs, and in it I consider why students are signing up in droves for these courses and how these ideas connect to the emotional/cultural emphasis of the Big Beacon and ThreeJoy.  I identified the central question as follows:

Why are hundreds of thousands or millions of students signing up for “bad” old boring lectures taught to thousands or tens of thousands simultaneously when the future of education supposedly lies elsewhere?

The 5 answers to the questions I call MOOC smooches.  In short, students love MOOCs because they love (1) good lectures, (2) high status lecturers, (3) choice, (4) novelty, and (5) community.  The article connects these things to the pillars of the Big Beacon: joy, trust, courage, openness, and connection.

Read the full post here.

Getting to the Heart of the Educational Matter

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In my work with iFoundry (www.ifoundry.illinois.edu), Olin (www.olin.edu), and now ThreeJoy (www.threejoy.com) and the Big Beacon (www.bigbeacon.org), I’ve progressively moved from thinking about education as starting from the head to increasingly feeling and believing that it starts from the heart.

Educational theorists and devotees start to get at this when they talk about the various X learnings (where X is an element of {active, experiential, project-based, challenge-based, problem-based, etc}), and experiences and projects and problems and challenges elicit emotions and discussion of human motivation more so than the usual pedagogical approaches, but the various X learnings are particular practices or techniques and invoking one or more of them doesn’t really get to the core of what it is that we are trying to achieve or the fundamental processes that might achieve it.

A recent Huffington Post article (here) takes a different tack by identifying trust, courage, connection, and joy as the pillars to successful educational transformation.  If I were to focus on one of these as primary, I would suggest that educational transformation is about moving from educating a student who shuts up, listens, and obeys to one who has the courage to take initiative, even in the face of resistance (see this article here).

These four largely cultural and emotional variables are rarely discussed, but once these distinctions are made and introduced, it is hard to stop reflecting on them and how we can enhance their presence in educational settings undergoing change.