Today’s graduates face a new breed of challenges as they enter the workforce. They will confront messier, intractable problems such as climate change, global terrorism, antibiotic resistant diseases and persistent market weakness. The same technologies that empowered them as learners at the same time also multiplied the potential for global havoc.
And this has changed the definition of an appropriate education.
Teachers know this
Teachers appreciate that handling the new, intractable problems requires a new skill set. They require empathizing, imaginative citizens –in touch with their own creative impulses, confident individuals who can imagine totally new solutions. Teachers want to facilitate their students’ growth as artists. But teachers know something else as well.
Tomorrow’s managers must also be literate and numerate. As well as being creative leaders, reaching out and finding fresh answers to the problems of the future, they need to know everything we graduated knowing. And they need to be firmer in their foundations than we were. The stakes are higher for them and the competition for jobs is more fierce.
Inside most classrooms today you find teachers taking an iterative approach, balancing the advantages of constancy and routine with their necessity for experimentation and adaptation. You find teachers who are doing the best they can with the resources they have. The demands on teachers have never been greater. And they know it.
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I have been a fan of Roger Federer since I first saw him interviewed in 2003. I was struck then by his poise and his grace and the way he thinks about the game. And now, at just 27 years old, with 14 Grand Slam titles to his name, he’s still as consistent as ever.
Federer’s got the whole package: great footwork, unfailing mechanics and power which help him keep his opponents on the run. But what really sets him in apart is his mental technique.
Mental Tennis
The most important psychological ability in a Tennis player is called “selective attention” or “attention management” (Source). This goes way beyond simply staying focused; it is about directing your awareness to relevant stimuli while ignoring things like a screaming crowd or someone sneezing. The mind wants to focus on anything novel or different, but you have to keep your mind engaged in the tactics of the moment. Asad Raza writes, “Concentration takes mental energy…whenever I saw Federer on the grounds, he seemed to be using as little of it as possible”. [Click to continue the article, or to comment…]
The traits of successful people is a subject that has intrigued us since at least the 1930s. That was the era when Dale Carnegie founded self-improvement industry (which now worth $11 Billion per year in the US alone); it was also in the late 1930s that a group of social scientists quietly began the ambitious Grant study exploring the lives of 268 Harvard-educated men.
Sixty years later (the study still going strong) they have basically given up hope of discovering the secret recipe of greatness which they were after. (They also didn’t achieve their other lofty aim of easing “the disharmony of the world at large.”) However, they have at least identified seven primary factors that predict healthy (physical and psychological) living and aging. They are: getting an education; having a stable marriage; not smoking; employing “mature adaptations;” not abusing alcohol; having some exercise and maintaining a healthy weight.
All of these strike me as surprisingly simple, straight-forward and actionable recommendations –all but the one. Challenging is the concept of “adaptations,” which the study has explored. Adaptations are the defence mechanisms that people use to respond psychologically to challenges in life:
Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. […]
The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship). (The Atlantic article is available here.)
