The next issue of our Lifewide Magazine is being formed around this
African proverb... a cultural story with deep meanings, and I thought it was
worth spending the time to reflect on my own early life. My first thought was
that this is a story about lots of people being actively involved in helping and
enabling a child to grow up. That seems obvious I suppose most of us have
parents, siblings, aunts/uncles, cousins and grandparents and I guess in an
African village all would have played a part.. But I interpreted the story to mean that other members of the village would also be involved..perhaps to teach essential skills and pass on cultural wisdom that was essential for the health and survival of the village..

There was nothing exceptional about my childhood. I was born in 1950 in the middle of Manchester.. and my earliest memories (less than 5) are of a street of terraced houses (Camelford St) with front doors that opened onto the street. I have quite a lot of fragments of early memories and impressions of my surroundings. I know we had good neighbours who sometimes looked after me but I'm sure my early upbringing was dominated by mum and dad and home. When I was 5 I moved to the northwest side of Manchester a place called Monton.. to a home with a front and back garden..I remember that moving was a traumatic experience fore me. It was still a town, with a cotton mill and canal at the end of the road, but at least there were fields to play in..and without too many cars it was safe to play in the street..which I did with the kids nearby... the neighbours were friendly but I don't remember much of a community in the way I imagined the African proverb describes. As I became increasingly aware of who I was. I learnt what was right and wrong and suffered the consequences (usually a smack and being sent to bed) if I did not follow the rules or crossed a boundary...like playing on the railway.. or falling in the  canal..or answering back..

We considered ourselves as a good working class family you achieved through hard work and a good job was you aim in life. My parents ambition for me was not very great at that stage.. you left school at 16 and got a job... my dad left school at 14 and what was good enough for him was good enough for me.. (at that stage).. so I don't think I was encouraged in the
 sense of ever thinking that education was a way of making something of yourself. My mum had to look after all of us.. by the time I was 10 there were 5 of us! so she had her work cut out. Being the eldest I felt I was the one that was treated the harshest and I was the one that was always pushing at the boundaries .. like bed time.. So perhaps that became part of my
chararcter..

My mum was the one we spent most time with and she was the one who had to keep us under control and look after us..she worked very hard and for years she never had a pair of knitting needles out of her hands. She had a tremendous positive spirit and always saw the good in everyone and everything (still does) and although her ambitions for us were also limited she never
stopped encouraging us.. I owe my own positivity to her I'm sure. I know I was loved and cared for and their role model as parents has stood me in good stead for being one myself.

My father's gift to me was his work ethic (his own a reaction to his father who had been unemployed for most of his childhood when the family had suffered real poverty and led to his mothers early death). Whatever the weather he cycled the five miles to work and never missed a dayunless he literally couldn't climb on his bike.  He suffered from bronchitis and his presence was often announced by coughing.. I had to do my share of jobs like run errands and I was also volunteered! to cut
the hedges and grass of neighbours. I remember resenting it but if I'm honest all these things fed into me.

I'm sure I leant at primary school. I certainly learnt to be a member of a community, make friends, treat people with respect and
follow rules pushing at them from time to time and suffering the consequences.. I remember being caned on several occasions.  My school had not learnt how to get pupils through the 11+ with only one or two passing each year so no one was
surprised that I didn't pass it. 

From the age of 8 church choir and cubs expanded my horizons enormously -
and gave me my first taste of freedom away from parental control! Day trips by
train to Derbyshire and the Lake District or the N Wales coast... In all of
these activities I think I learned much from just being out in the world and
interacting with people and adults.  When I think more deeply about this I think
that both choir and cubs taught me the value of being part of a community, of
learning their cultures and being part of it, of doing things together and in
the case of the choir practicing an anthem over and over again and then performing it. I can with the benefit of hindsight see that this was important learning. Both cubs and choir required discipline and commitment.. once a week for cubs .. Sunday morning and evening for choir and Friday for practice..they both taught me a sense of belonging and they both taught me that if you stick at something long enough, with time you will become a leader one day.... head chorister in the choir or a sixer (responsible for at least people) in the cubs.. When I look back these were important things to learn at that age and I'm sure they shaped me psychology and spiritually (though not religeous).

What I do know is that by the age of 10 I had a good sense of who I was but
not who I wanted to be. Going to secondary school was my first defining moment - a gym, playing fields and organised sport was all I needed to become who I wanted to be. Sport (any) and teams became my life..and I was good at these things..my confidence and belief in myself grew. I loved my school and just being in the environment helped me grow up.. I was in the top class and I don't know how but I came top in my first term which entitled me to a crack at the 12+ exam. The first of three important second chances in my formal education. I was reluctant to try for the Grammar school as I liked my Secondary Modern school so much. My mum and dad thought I should try and sent me to see the vicar who they thought could influence me and he did.. I decided I would go and do the exam and then decide what to do.. I passed and then had to make the decision which was a no brainer for my parents but more difficult for me.. Needless to say I went and that was my second defining moment as a child.

Looking back I did not have any sense that I was raised by a community.. perhaps a village would have been different....my values were learnt through family, school and church, there were adults who undoubtedly influenced me and particularly controlled what I did but I think I learnt more from my friends and just being out and about in the world : a pattern that continued through my teens. Growing up and becoming me was a social process but it was more to do with participating in life than being shaped and influenced by significant others.

I am not sure that my early childhood story plays well into my interpretation of it 'takes a village idea'.. My story I think reflects more the idea that as we grow up we have to find and put ourselves into different communities in order to learn from
others and gain the experiences that will help us develop as people. Nor does my story play very well into the saying “Give
me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man”.  While early life influences are very important, and we
they most certainly shape our  beliefs and values, once we become aware of who we are and of our own agency, there are
opportunities that if we take them will enable us to become the person we want to be indeed perhaps its the way we start to learn who we want to be, We are not rigidly held in the mould of ourselves as a seven year old.

A beautiful day is all you need to motivate you to get out into the garden and today was a bright sunny day - the light just filled my head and it felt great. I resolved to have another go at the pathway I am making in the woods (its been a couple of weeks since I made a start on it) and spent several hours chopping at brambles and cutting branches off trees. But manual labour creates great space for thinking and amongst the scratches I thought what a powerful metaphor for living making pathways is. I am designing it as I build it. I know roughly the direction I want to go 'working with the grain' of the woods but the detail emerges as obstacles are encountered like half buried tree trunks that make me alter my route. I can't do it without the tools I have - spade, saw, pick axe. It involves a bit of pain and discomfort but opening up the lovely new spaces make it all worthwhile.

For a long time I have pondered setting up a Linked-In Group for Lifewide Education but never got round to it even though I know it is in the interests of LWE that I do it. 'Pondering' seems a more comfortable word than 'procrastinating' which according to Wikipedia means the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of lower priority, or doing something from which one derives enjoyment, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time. Sadly, I think I'm often guilty of this.

According to Freud, the pleasure principle may be responsible for procrastination; humans do not prefer negative emotions, and putting off a stressful task until a further date, is enjoyable. So as someone who seeks out joy that sounds plausible.

The concept that humans work best under pressure provides additional enjoyment and motivation to postponing a task. Some psychologists cite such behaviour as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. Other psychologists indicate that anxiety is just as likely to get people to start working early as late and the focus should be impulsiveness. That is, anxiety will cause people to delay only if they are impulsive. Again, if I'm honest I do put things off until I can't put them off any longer and I start to get a bit agitated.

Sadly, my post does not fall into the three criteria for behaviour to be classified as procrastination  Schraw, Wadkins, and Olafson namely it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying.[4] Similarly, Steel (2007) reviews all previous attempts to define procrastination, indicating it is "to voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse off for the delay."

Procrastination may result in stress, a sense of guilt and crisis, severe loss of personal productivity, as well as social disapproval for not meeting responsibilities or commitments (I like to think that none of these things applies to the level at which I procrastinate). 

These feelings combined may promote further procrastination. While it is regarded as normal for people to procrastinate to some degree (well that's a relief) it becomes a problem when it impedes normal functioning. Chronic procrastination may be a sign of an underlying psychological disorder. Such procrastinators may have difficulty seeking support due to social stigma and the belief that task-aversion is caused by laziness, low willpower or low ambition.

I like to think that a degree of procrastination can be an advantage. It must be the case when you are trying to juggle many balls and keep progressing along many fronts simultaneously. Time spent in doing something that enables you to make a contribution or make progress on one front might be viewed as procrastination from another angle but actually it all contributes to the bigger picture of achievement. And perhaps at the end of the day its the way we maintain our positive emotional spirit. A little digression can help stoke the fires for another tussle with something that is tough and not so enjoyable.

I find procrastination can be overcome with a trigger and this week I was talking to NC about marketing LWE and I felt I couldn't defend not having a Linked-in group so I did it. And what's more we have seven members within 24hrs. Far more than our facebook page!! LIFEWIDE EDUCATION LINKED IN GROUP  Now I enter the other reason for procrastination - I know its going to consume my time and energy to make it work!

Schraw, Gregory; Wadkins, Theresa; Olafson, Lori (2007). "Doing the things we do: A grounded theory of academic procrastination". Journal of Educational Psychology 99: 12. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.99.1.12.

Wikepedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination#cite_note-3

A few weeks ago I drew attention to a new book I had read called The
Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity
at Work, written by husband and wife team Teresa Amabile and Steven
J. Kramer. Their book discusses how even seemingly humdrum events can make huge
differences in employees' emotional and intellectual well-being and their
involvement in and enjoyment of their work. According to their research, the
single most important factor is simply a sense of making progress on meaningful
work. Their research also shows that people who feel good and positive about
their work are also likely to be more creative and to take more risks in trying
out new things.

 How we feel about our work has a strong influence on our inner
work life - 'the confluence of perceptions, emotions and motivations that
individuals experience as they react to and make sense of the events in their
workday' (Amabile and Kramer 2011:20). 'Inner work life is inner because it goes
on inside each person. Although it is central to the person's experience of the
workday, it is usually imperceptible to others. ...part of the reason [for this]
is that people try to hide it' (Amabile and Kramer
2011:21).

According to psychological research, the three processes that affect performance (and
influence inner work life) are: perceptions about what is happening (thoughts -
maybe impressions or well developed theories), emotions (or feelings - both
sharply defined reactions and more general feelings like moods) and motivation
(a person's grasp of what needs to be done and their drive to do
it).

What struck me about these ideas about our perceptions, feelings and
motivations at work, was their relevance to our daily lives that are not necessarily to do with
work. We do have an inner life that for the most part we keep hidden from others and that inner life does affect the
way we see the world and interact with it. And that sense of making progress is
something we want to do whenever we take on something new or we want to achieve
something regardless of the context. That sense of making progress also inspires
us to try to do more and to try and be more adventurous and
creative.

Amabile and Cramer identify seven major catalysts for making progress and when looked at
from a lifewide perspective they seem to be relevant to any achievement or
goal driven activity in life. These factors are listed below together with some
commentary relating it to lifewide development.
 
1.  Setting clear goals: People have to understand what they're doing and why
they are doing it.

 Lifewide development is predicated on the goals that people have in different parts of
their lives. The personal development activity plan invites people to identify
their goals and to say which aspects of themselves the person would like to
develop in order to achieve their goal(s).

 2.  Allowing autonomy: People need to know have to the autonomy in order
to enable them to reach their goal in the way they believe is
necessary.

 Lifewide development is predicated on the idea that individuals are responsible for their
own development. In their own lives they have the freedom to chose how to react
to the situations they encounter or create so personal autonomy lies at the
heart of the developmental process.

 3. Providing resources: The resources have to match the project and have to be available when they are
needed.

 Lifewide development requires individuals to create their own resources or structure the
environment to enable them to achieve their goals. Alternatively, people put
themselves into environments where the resources are more likely to be secured -
for example into a formal education or training environment to access teachers
and learning materials.

 4. Giving enough time—but not too much—to complete a project. Deadlines are important, but only if
employees understand how the deadline benefits the mission. "Extreme time
pressure is bad for creative productivity, but low-to-moderate time pressure is
good."

 Lifewide development involves learners managing their own lives and prioritising the
times they have for different projects. They have to manage their own time and
allocate sufficient time to achieve their goals. How time is used in a flexible
but productive way is one of the important dimensions of self-awareness
cultivated through the lifewide development award. Setting time scales in
open-ended life projects is often not possible - by their nature they go rolling
on. But setting timescales around particular tasks that have to be accomplished
(like searching for and booking a holiday) is something that we have to do all
the time. We call it 'prioritising'. Juggling lots of balls and deciding the
timing of when we have to focus on a particular thing. Here the ideas of
'deciding what to do' and  'making a start' would seem to be relevant.

 5.  Being able to find help with the work. People feel inhibited if
they don't feel comfortable asking for support or, worse, if they feel that
others are deliberately blocking necessary information from them.

One of our most important resources is the help that other people give us be the
family, friends, work colleagues or anyone else who we feel has the potential to
help. Lifewide development is formed around the idea of a community that helps
other people to learn - 'it takes a village to raise a child' - it takes a
community to help an adult develop themselves.

 6. Learning from both problems and successes and not being blamed for
trying and not succeeding

 Lifewide development is all about learning through your own life experiences - good or
bad. Often the more challenging experiences we encounter do not work out as we
thought they might work out and therein lies important learning. The reflective
process that lifewide development promotes, and the conversations it fosters
between mentors, peers and members of the community are all intended to
encourage people to learn from their experiences and to share their experiences
so that others might offer their perspectives. Trying things that are not
successful can lead to negative emotional states that can restrict our ability
to learn. The importance of being able to change such states - perhaps through
  rationalisation or analysis of what went wrong might help to mediate negative
  emotions.

 7. Allowing ideas to flow: Good managers know when to shut up and listen and not
interfere.

Valuing your own ideas and finding ways of bringing them into concrete existence is an
important part of being and becoming the person you want to be. Lifewide
development values participants' ideas and encourages and supports them to make
them flow and overcome obstacles that stop them from flowing.

 The book also details the four nourishers necessary for a healthy inner
work life: respect and recognition, encouragement, emotional support, and,
finally, affiliation—any action that serves to develop mutual trust,
appreciation, and even affection among co-workers will nourish a healthy inner
work life. 

These nourishers are all important to the concept of lifewide education, learning and
personal development and we actively search for recognition and feelings of
being valued, we enjoy being encouraged and trusted, and we seek affiliations
through our need and desire to belong to family and friendship groups and
communities.

Lifewide development respects and values participants' commitment to their own
development and through the Lifewide Development Award (LDA) provides
recognition for their efforts and the capabilities they demonstrate.
'Encouragement' 'lies at the heart of the LDA and also the mentoring
conversations and the idea of a supportive community. Similarly, the role of
mentor and peers is to provide emotional support and the very idea of lifewider
community is all about engendering the idea of belonging to a social group that
is supporting personal development.

 Amabile T and Kramer S (2011) The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity
at Work. Boston: Harvard Business Review
Press