Here I am for the latest round of this reviewing thing: still having faith that the process is helping; still struggling with how to make it more helpful; still getting around to it grudgingly and by pressure only.
I have two visions gradually forming of my possible future. In one, an array of previously untapped potentials has been unleashed. All my work is pursued with the gusto that I often find in my R&D projects. Well maybe not all – there are distasteful yet necessary things in life. But the necessary things get done to an adequate degree and with manageable costs, particularly time, such that more often than not there’s time left over for whatever matters to me. I don’t feel a need to “steal” that time first to prevent the rest from bureaucratically expanding to consume all available resources.
In the other, the costs of the reacting-to-pressure approach have added up and come to dominate my life. This week I had the stroke of bad luck of falling ill while having conference presentations to prepare; the other direction that cut was as a stroke of good luck that I recovered speedily, was able to get the prep done and take advantage of Diana Coman’s scrutiny on the main one. This kind of luck cannot be relied on. She’s also been very patient with my almost-total blogging failure this week, a kind of thing I don’t take for granted and can’t expect from the world outside the classroom as the ratchet turns.
How to attain that first vision is far from clear to me – and how could it be, at this stage? I know it will involve struggle with my weaknesses. Probably a whole series of struggles. Then there’s the choosing the right problems to solve and setting myself up properly. One way or another, I’m looking forward to refining these understandings further and taking on this next leg of the journey.
Starting with the start: so far and as they are/have been – do/did those reviews help? How and in what ways?
The two visions seem a good start too, for instance:
1. Take one of those R&D projects and dissect a bit how it went – what made you want to work on it, how did that enthusiasm change/maintained/increased as you progressed/hit blocks/got sidetracked/whatever, what’s the final status of the whole project and how+why did it stop there rather than going anywhere further?
2. Make a list with what you know & acknowledge as your weaknesses and have a good honest look at them – what do you enjoy about them (because you do get something you like one way or another out of them, if only of the “the known evil is more comforting than the unknown good” sort or you’d have gotten rid of them by now), how do they support one another, what concrete habits/actions are they linked to/result in and so on. This is simply a dissection again, so cool and steady, aiming to *see* and understand what is there, not getting in any twist about it at all.
Comment by Diana Coman — February 17, 2020 @ 10:02 am