Author: Dr. Jennifer Fox Eades

Alexander technique teacher, writer, researcher, education adviser, member of Third Order of Society of St Francis. Interested in the Alexander technique as a source of well-being, contemplative education, stories and storytelling, and embodied learning and praying
Character Strengths, Well-being in education

character strength of the day: humility

Dr. Jennifer Fox Eades

DSCF1916Humility, according to Seligman’s research, (2004), is bottom of the list of most American’s character strengths and is generally not a popular strength to possess. When my colleague, psychologist Carmel Proctor and I, were writing our character strengths based PSHE programme, Strengths Gym www.strengthsgym.co.uk, we decided to use the word modesty rather than humility, as we noticed that teenagers have negative reactions to the word humility. They link it in their minds to humiliation.

I now wish we had used the word ‘humility’ instead because the more I work with this character strength, the more I read and think about it, the more essential it seems to me for our busy, rather driven and perhaps over independent modern way of life.

Humility means acknowledging that I need other people, for example. It means allowing myself to make mistakes and to be human. It means being honest about my strengths and my weaknesses and knowing that I can’t save the world single handed.

In an education system that puts teachers and pupils under pressure to be ‘outstanding’ and to give ‘100%’ effort, 100% of the time, humility says that everyone needs to rest sometimes, everyone has off days, not all lessons are outstanding, some are just good enough. Pupils, it seems to me, need to know that their teachers are human sometimes, not superhuman all the time. Otherwise they are presented with an impossibly high standard of being adult to aspire too and some of them, understandably, look at what is on offer and seem to opt out.

I have been reading a book called ‘Lectio Devina, The Sacred Art’ by Christine Valters Paintner. In it she writes that humility means giving up, ‘unrealistic expectations of how things ought to be for a clear vision of what human life is really like’ and ‘remembering our human limitations’. As a driven, perfectionist over achiever, I find humility lets me breath, lets me admit that I’m not good at everything and that, sometimes, I need help.

Personally I find humility to be an immense relief. I’d like to recommend it to the education system too!

Paintner, V.P., 2012. Lectio Devina, The Sacred Art. London: SPCK

Peterson, C. & Seligman, M. E. P., 2004. Character strengths and virtues: A classification and handbook. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Character Strengths, Well-being in education

Character strength of the day: patience

Dr. Jennifer Fox Eades

I have based my education work on character strengths on the work of Peterson and Seligman (2004). I am an educator, not a psychologist, and I have adapted Peterson and Seligman’s list to fit the context of schools and classrooms. I made small changes to language here and there, but the biggest change I made was to add a strength – in response to comments from many teachers and from my own reading and understanding of learning and teaching – I added the strength of patience.

Patience is an inherent part of TEACHING – we have to be patient with ourselves and our pupils, we have to allow ourselves to be human and allow them to be human too. It is an inherent part of LEARNING – we have to be patient and allow ourselves not to understand, not to grasp at easy solutions, not to settle for the quick and obvious answer and to do that long enough for deep learning to happen.

This week I was privileged to help an excellent teacher of the #AlexanderTechnique, Sue Fleming, http://www.suefleming.co.uk to run a group in Manchester who are learning the Alexander Technique, mostly to help prevent or improve aches, pains and bad backs. They were learning to pause and notice – their bodies, their feelings, their thoughts, how they sit, how they stand, how they breath – and learning to do those things with more awareness, more lightness, more thought. For those who’ve never heard of the Alexander Technique it is a ‘psychosomatic’ discipline, a ‘movement-based embodied contemplative practice,’ (Schmalz et al 2014), a way of tuning into your ‘whole self’ and how you react to your environment, to the stresses and strains of life. It is subtle, it is gentle and it takes time to learn it.

And fresh from the state school system of education in the UK, where I work as an adviser on ‘well-being’, I was aware of how slowly Sue was taking things, how much time she was giving to reflection and noticing, to questions and questioning – and I was impressed and challenged.

Because in schools right now, everything is FAST, everything has PACE (and it’s FAST pace, not slow pace!), everything is EFFICIENT. But some thinking and some learning can’t be done quickly. As the Nobel Prizewinner Daniel Kahneman points out, (2011) some thinking needs to be done slowly, some thinking needs PATIENCE! And efficiency and speed are not the only goods in life, sometimes kindness, gentleness, beauty and ‘what is right’ are more important.

So, here’s a tip for cultivating patience, for letting things take the time that they take…..

‘Pause at Doors’

You go though doors many times every day. When you come to a door just press your internal pause button

Pause….notice your feet and the feel of the floor beneath you; notice if you are breathing; notice what you are thinking, feeling and sensing, seeing and hearing; pause and think about wanting to go through that door lightly, cheerfully and with a twinkle in your eye …and then release your pause button and move on.

pause-button

Tiny pauses in your day can ground you, calm you, slow you down, de-stress and unwind you …and cultivate the ability to wait, to be patient, to let things take the time that they take …..

Kahneman, Daniel, 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow

Schmalzl, L., Crane-Godreua, M. A. & Payne, P., 2014. Movement-based embodied contemplative practices. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience , Volume 8, pp. 1-6, London: Penguin

Peterson, C. & Seligman, M. E. P., 2004. Character strengths and virtues: A classification and handbook. Washington DC: American Psychological Association

Character Strengths, Well-being in education

Character Strength of the Day: Kindness

Dr. Jennifer Fox Eades

I saw a good post about the #character strength of #kindness on linked-in this morning, here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140929011501-36792-put-kindness-first-on-your-to-do-list

It made me stop and think – about the fact that kindness is one of the first victims of ‘busyness’. Kindness takes time…time to stop and think…time to notice other people…time to be creative about how I might be kind….time to go out of my own, important way for somebody else…

Because kindness is often about little things and little things are easily overlooked, buried under an avalanche of ‘urgent’ or ‘important’ things – emails, texts, to-do lists, meetings, economics….

Kindness is often free…perhaps that’s why it isn’t valued much in Western society? And it takes time….but it passes the death bed test. I suspect more people think, on their death beds, of the people who were kind to them and wish they had been kinder in return, more often, than regret an unsent email…