I want to share something from Seth Godin's book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. It involves tasks - and lessons - and it reminded me of a significant event in my own life.
In a section called: "Leaning In, Backing Off, Doing Nothing" Seth Godin tells about a time that he "announced a paid summer internship for students." He continues: "...I set up a private Facebook group for the applicants and invited each one to participate."
He goes on to tell how the students responded. Some joined, some of the ones who joined participated, some did not. Some apparently showed themselves as leaders.
"And the rest? They lurked...Whom would you hire?"
When I was in graduate school we had lab courses connected with most of our counseling classes. The labs were for working through the lessons we'd learned - for making the theoretical practical.
At the start of one of our labs the professor set our group a task and left us for an hour or so. I don't remember the task because, as it turned out, the task really didn't matter. I remember the last hour of that lab very clearly though.
When the professor returned he asked what we'd done. We were eager to explain how far we'd gotten with the task, how much time we'd need to finish, and what we figured out while doing the work.
He didn't care. Almost immediately he stopped us to say: "Yeah. Okay, but how did you do it?" Huh? He didn't want to know what we did. He wanted the who/how info - who worked with whom, who lead, who didn't, how was it done and most importantly - how were the roles decided. The task was a trick!
I still get a tear in my eye when I recall the shock that our group had - this brilliant little class (and we were) of serious and caring grad students in a counseling program - when we realized we had effed up - royally.
Roles were chosen (foisted upon, you might say) folks in an nonreflective way - based more on stereotypes than on true understanding of each other (and this in a group that had a history together - and were, I repeat, graduate students in a counseling program!)
What we were taught that day, and what I saw in Seth Godin's story about his intern applicants on Facebook, is: The task is usually a trick! The real lesson is almost always what's behind the task. And this is true whether the tasks are set up for us (as they were for Seth G.'s interns or my grad class) or are the seemingly random tasks of life.
Show up for the real lesson, not just the task!
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This sounds like a book I need to read!
Posted by: sharyn | Wednesday, 04 March 2009 at 10:12 PM
ohhhh i liked that one!!!!
thanks for this!
Posted by: terri | Thursday, 05 March 2009 at 09:08 AM
What a clever professor indeed!
Posted by: Teryll | Thursday, 05 March 2009 at 09:53 AM
I'm going to put this on my "books to read" list. Hi, Karen! Long time no see!!
Posted by: Janice Rogers | Tuesday, 06 December 2016 at 04:16 PM