There is an Argument

There is an argument to be made that a post about my surgery is a bit far afield for this blog on writing, writing novels, and other writing aspects. 

Already because of my PhD program, I've branched out into Adult Education (see here). But I think that's tangential in that I am doing a TON of writing for that program. I writing papers monthly, read dozens of articles weekly, and am in the midst of writing a book/dissertation so I think I can make the argument that that is writing. 

That being said, that last post (see here) on injuries and workouts actually does have a lot to do with writing. Anyone reading this blog will know I've been struggling to write my fourth novel, tentatively titled Sunset Perfect. There was a draft I wrote where the main character had a shoulder injury. This little shoulder surgery is helping me relate to and write that draft so it's more believable and realistic. My writing about my workout challenges (see here) is an aspect of the character that I can help make him more fleshed out. 

Everything I add here is either to remember and use for writing or a direct reflection of my writing. 

The End of the 100 Day Challenge

One of my readers wrote to find out how things are going with the new exercise challenge I started back in December. Those who read this blog regularly will remember I tried a 100 days of running challenge in the Fall (see here, here, and here). So the question of how the December weight lifting challenge (see here) is going is valid and timely. 

First, I had to deal with two personal issues in the past month. One was a personal, family issue which I'm STILL having trouble overcoming. The other is directly related to the new weight lifting challenge and severely limited my ability to continue. Simply put . . . the weight lifting challenge re-aggravated my shoulder and left me with no choice but to go see a doctor. According to the doctor I had a torn labrum in my shoulder and needed surgery. The picture below was me following surgery:

So my next 100 day challenge will be one that includes physical therapy, healing from the six or seven places where the surgeon cut into my shoulder, overcoming the need for a brace, sleeping on the couch, and very slowly getting the motion and muscle back to my arms and shoulders. The pic below shows the before and after of my surgery. The top is the torn labrum. The second (from a different angle) shows the repair. 

All in all the 100 day lifting challenge was a failure. Ultimately the fact that I went to see the surgeon was a moment that was out of time. I actually hurt my shoulder in Dec 19. I've had pain for the past year. It was just the 100 day challenge that brought that pain to the fore and forced me to deal with it. It was bound to happen and hopefully I'll be stronger in the long run because of it. Fingers crossed!

Easy One

 If you want great lines (see here and here for more), this an easy one . . . 

I go to the kitchen I hear "Hello" . . . I go to the living room, I hear "Hello"  . . . it seems like everywhere I go, in the house, the car, the office I hear "Hello" everywhere. Why? Sometimes we key in on songs. Sometimes family members and colleages like to suggest to Alexa that they play it. I don't mind, cause it's a great song. 

The problem? I hear this:

Hello from the other side

I must've called a thousand times

To tell you I'm sorry for everything that I've done

But when I call, you never seem to be home

Show any lyrics that are more soul shaking than those!

Elizabeth, Betsy 

Evershade, evershades, ever shade, ever shades, shades of Betsy

Meaningful Kisses

 As I was saying (here), I run into some of these lines that are impactful and hit me in the gut so that I do a double take. Here was one from "Baby Face Hot Sauce" on Twitter:

I felt enough on my own, with her,

Kisses had meaning

I don't know what it is about that one, but it hit me. Made me think of those gals with whom I shared those meaningful kisses. 

Elizabeth, Betsy 

Evershade, evershades, ever shade, ever shades, shades of Betsy

I'm Not the Best Program Planner

I'm in the midst of Program Planning, and after another discussion with my good friend Micah (see here), I've decided that I'm not into this class as much. 

I’ve decided, Program Planning isn’t my milieu. I’ll do it, but I’m not going to enjoy it. I think it comes from my foundational business and operations experience in the Army. I was in a unit that excelled at fast raids and attacks. We rarely ever held ground. There are plenty of units that advance, secure, and hold. We didn’t do that. We hit then we left. We carried very little with us. There was a planning phase, a recon, an infil, the attack, then an exfil. All those phases of the operation usually took place within a day or two. Some units plan for weeks and months in advance, that’s just not what I was trained to do, and certainly isn’t something I’m comfortable doing, nor do I like doing it.

There is a saying, by General Pershing who was the American leader on the Western Front in WWI who said, “Infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars.”

Folks who specialize in logistics are very much the program planners of the military world. They obsess on the details and every iota of the plan. We have folks like that at work too. People who will dwell on the mot juste. We have one of those in my project team. She is an EXCEPTIONAL project manager, but she could spend hours on the proper definition and delineation of “is this an objective or a goal.” 

Me? I don’t care if it’s an objective or a goal, I just want to get moving. We have another young lady here at work who has that same issue, although she seems to have a bad case of  “paralysis through analysis.” She refuses to get her butt in gear ever. She can linger on a project for years, whereas I, have to move forward. I hate being stagnant.

If I had my way I would not have worked in a project team. I’ve gotten used to doing my own thing and working on my own deadlines, so it’s been killing me to have to work with others. That being said, so far I’ve been blessed by having great teams. Andrew and Daron are terrific for our self-reflection group meetings. Anna was a terrific counterpart for the partner project in our last class, and right now I’m working with Emily and Anne, who are both amazingly competent and fun to work with. So I’ve been blessed in that regard.

Feedback and Counseling

In the military as a private, I was provided monthly feedback via counseling with my team leaders and squad leaders. That was my foundation and the basis of understanding that I was used to and that I came to value. Once I got into the contracting world I found that none of those systems existed that I had come so used to having. Now, fifteen or twenty years later, I still have yet to find the level of feedback that I had gotten used to in those formative years. 

I work with my direct reports and provide them feedback on a monthly basis because I find it useful. Most find it intrusive, I hope because they aren't used to that level of interaction. I've tried to institute feedback mechanisms to help critique and train our trainers and have found that in most cases these were used as platforms for revenge from one trainer to another. 

I've been surprised by how little formal feedback we in the corporate world, or perhaps it's the oil and gas industry, provide our direct reports and receive from our bosses. As a training institute, we go out of our way to get feedback from those that we train and the contractors who are our members, but we do very little for our direct reports. Perhaps this is because we are paid by our trainees and members and our direct reports come and go. Regardless, I really liked the emphasis that Brookfield placed on feedback and reflective learning tools in the book, but noticed that it was always from teacher to student (which of course makes sense as that was the focus of the book), but as leaders, we should not stop there but also look for ways to institute those systems in our organizations to the benefit of our workers. 

Storytelling for Engagement

Storytelling is key to engagement in so many ways when it comes to teaching classes. I try to use storytelling as an aspect of my teaching often. I think there are few things that help bring a class together than being able to know the history and the background of the teacher and maybe more importantly, vice versa. 

One thing I try to encourage all of my instructors to do is to reach out and promote that the class they are teaching tell their own stories. When I taught field technicians how to work large pieces of equipment I showed up with a wealth of book knowledge and 8 hours to fill. The classes I taught were to field personnel with hours and hours and weeks and years of time in the field on the very equipment that I was trying to train on. I learned quickly that not only should I step back and allow the class to teach themselves, but also to encourage the use of their telling their own stories. 

Quickly we found that the younger technicians really honored and enjoyed hearing the stories from their more senior supervisors. By that same token, the senior supervisors, when hearing the stories and anecdotes from their teams, we're able to add to them, address their issues, and help them. Encouraging the use of having the class tell us their stories really helped make the class more powerful and worthwhile for the class as a whole. 

Storytelling for Engagement

Storytelling is key to engagement in so many ways when it comes to teaching classes. I try to use storytelling as an aspect of my teaching often. I think there are few things that help bring a class together than being able to know the history and the background of the teacher and maybe more importantly, vice versa. 

One thing I try to encourage all of my instructors to do is to reach out and promote that the class they are teaching tell their own stories. When I taught field technicians how to work large pieces of equipment I showed up with a wealth of book knowledge and 8 hours to fill. The classes I taught were to field personnel with hours and hours and weeks and years of time in the field on the very equipment that I was trying to train on. I learned quickly that not only should I step back and allow the class to teach themselves, but also to encourage the use of their telling their own stories. 

Quickly we found that the younger technicians really honored and enjoyed hearing the stories from their more senior supervisors. By that same token, the senior supervisors, when hearing the stories and anecdotes from their teams, we're able to add to them, address their issues, and help them. Encouraging the use of having the class tell us their stories really helped make the class more powerful and worthwhile for the class as a whole. 

Follow Up on Bells and Whistles

As a follow up from yesterday (here), I find that too many bells and whistles can be distracting from the actual instructions. I've used quiz taking applications as a part of a multi-day online training, but polls? pointing out where I live on a map? breakout rooms? These are things I eschew for the most part for many reasons. In this seminar, the facilitator used all of these things within fifteen minutes and did it in a manner that was effecting, engaging, and seamless. This was a lesson to me about how these tangential applications can be used effectively by a skilled facilitator. I was very impressed, but I should have been, these are pros providing a lecture on the topic. 

On the other end of the spectrum, when fleshing out different applications to use for our own virtual classroom experience we looked at several. One, among the largest and most well known, the one that was backed by a large multi-national company, with a long history, the sales rep who led the audience of twenty-five through his sales presentation:

• Had technical difficulties at the start
• The leader did not know the features that were a part of his application well enough to answer questions
• Began the seminar without showing his video or face (which I think is a miss)
• When he did turn on his camera we saw a background of an unmade bed and dirty laundry, and 
• After fifteen minutes the system froze up and kicked the entire audience out

It truly was one of the worst experiences (especially a sales experience) I've been a part of. It highlighted for me that knowing the application backward and forward is the true measure of the facilitator. In both these cases, the first where the dog wagged the tail, the second where the tail wagged the dog, it was a story of the power and the hazards of technology for classrooms. 

Follow Up From HAZWOPER

I was speaking to my colleague, David the other day and discussing my last post (here) more. I'm stunned with all that we did. The reason we created a virtual classroom way back then was that we were providing 40-hour Hazwoper training to our new hires via live instructor-led training the problem was we were flying our trainers hither and yon and if you were unlucky enough to be hired in a remote place at the wrong time you were either not trained at all and sent to the field or you had to wait weeks for the trainer to return. It was NOT a good model.

In 2012 when we put in our virtual classroom we started by having the exact same training just through a virtual google hangout. We quickly realized we needed to adjust and improve it. Over time we did just that. We found that over time we saved hundreds of thousands in travel and training costs by not flying people around, our retention of new hires increased because they didn't have to wait weeks to be hired, we saved over fifty thousand in paper and printing costs, and eventually, the quality was good enough that I became quite proud of our home-brewed solution. We even got a call from Google because they were so surprised by how much we were using their technology. We even experimented with using their AR Google Glasses for our hands-on orientation. 

We did a lot to make the training as engaging and effective as possible so that the trainees were not overwhelmed or overly bored. I think we got there eventually. The best was when I would hear from the trainees about what they thought and several who had been in the industry for years thought our training was the best they had ever had. We also won several "best in class" training awards. 

The biggest issue, and the reason we had to stop in 2017. . . we got too big. It fell under its own weight. When we trained 10-15 people it was quite do-able and slick. When you hit twenty it got tough. Anything over 20 people and it became far less effective. When we canceled the program we were hiring 50 people a week. Many of our location managers were sorry to see the program canceled. They had come to depend on it and the training we were providing was the best in the industry. Fun times! I shudder to think what I would do to it now with what I've learned through these classes.