Posts tagged with "passion"
The day I saw real magic happen…
I still remember the first time I saw real magic. Not the Paul Daniels, rabbit out of the hat kind, but the real thing where something that wasn’t there before suddenly appeared in the world. The venue was a rather uninspiring room in a council building somewhere in the central belt. The stage set of bad coffee and poor lighting with an audience of distracted, stressed teachers didn’t inspire much hope either.
But then the ‘magician’ took to the stage, not in evening dress or sequins, but jeans and a fleece. The trick was very simple, all that happened was the the ‘magician’ (better known as the workshop facilitator) slowed time down. Well actually she made the participants slow down, she also made the distracting concerns of work disappear to the edges of the room.
With the magic fairy dust of time and focus, wonderful things began to happen. Participants rediscovered the big stuff; why they became teachers, what they wanted to achieve, their passion for enabling others to grow and thrive. Those magic ingredients worked their alchemy and suddenly wonderful things appeared in to room; enthusiasm, passion and amazing ideas that went on to change learners experiences of education forever.
Ever since that day I have believed that one of the very few things that can genuinely change the world is to give people the gift of time free from the constant distractions of every day and then challenge them to focus their knowledge, skills, experience and ideas on the ‘big stuff’. And that is how I came to the Natural Change Programme, a process that does exactly that.
So why is it that, despite believing that time to think and focus are the most important things, I don’t seem to have any? Since the Natural Change Programme launched nearly a month ago, I’ve hosted an international conference, attended meetings, spent hours on trains, worked weekends and best of all watched my brother marry the love of his life. In amongst all this I hardy given this Programme a second thought despite the fact it will be the one thing that takes up more of my time than anything else this year.
All of which is why I find myself dashing across Glasgow to meet the bus that will whisk us away in jeans still damp from last minute laundry, with nails still displaying the impractical effects of the pre-wedding manicure, under a cloud of guilt about the emails I should have sent already and the first blog post I haven’t written yet.
So here it is, a testament to the importance of achieving more by stepping out of the tornado, from a women that is doing a passable impression of Dorothy, but with much less glamorous shoes.
