Have you tried the Daily 5 Minutes?

The Daily 5 Minutes is a new conversation you give to someone else as a gift – a listening gift from you. When you offer to “Take 5″ with someone, and they’ve been let in on what that D5M invitation means, you are saying,

“For the next 5 minutes I am here to do absolutely nothing but listen to you, and respond to you if you would like me to. Within the next 5 minutes, there will be nothing in this world more important than my listening to whatever you might have on your mind: I want to hear from you, and I want to know more about what you are thinking about, wondering about, and feeling.”

It’s a beautiful thing.

The Daily 5 Minutes originated in my workplace laboratory nearly two decades ago, and since then it has proven to be wonderfully adaptable in a variety of different settings – including your school classrooms.

I’ll bet you can imagine why teachers love it so much.

For you to be a listener, someone else has to do the talking.

When you introduce the Daily 5 Minutes practice to your students, they have a role to play as the receivers of your gift: They have to agree to do the talking. I know how difficult that can be at times, getting them to do so. However once they get started with the D5M, they warm up to talking to you in an amazing way, for a circle of comfort is created between you.

If this is the first you have heard of the Daily 5 Minutes, take a look at this article I just posted on Talking Story earlier today: 5 Minutes/ 3 Values/ 9 MWA Questions Redux

Here is an excerpt on the “3 Values” part of it:

In the classes we personally present at Say Leadership Coaching, we teach the D5M in connection with three values, Ha’aha’a, Kākou and ‘Ike loa;

Ha’aha’a is the value of humility and thus it helps us to be open to what we can receive from others, being willing to have them connect with us, and affect us in a transformational way. Being humble is never lowly; it is accepting others from a place of strength and confidence in one’s self-esteem.

“Humble managers see with their ears.” Learn more about D5M-ing your Decisions: See with your ears. We managers don’t have all the answers; we find them. We also find stories.

Kākou is the value of inclusiveness and it promotes the “language of we.” Thus, we think of Kākou as the value of effective communication. When communication is Kākou, it connects everyone in an organization, so everyone is “in the know.” Think about it: Even Following is NOT a Passive Activity

‘Ike loa is the value of learning and knowledge, and in using the Daily 5 Minutes, you will get to know your staff exceptionally well while simultaneously improving both your listening skills and your relationship with them. You will discover the knowledge which resides in other people, and believe me, We Learn Best from Other People.

At the end of the article, you will see this announcement, and it may be something you decide to take advantage of as well: Do not delay, for the it is a free alpha and the registration will close promptly at midnight November 2nd in your timezone:
Ready, set, alpha! — Find out more about how the D5M habit-builder alpha works
Another Step Forward | Ruzuku is here. — Learn about Ruzuku (my alpha partner) and see some screen shots

When I read Dean’s posting, “The Teacher as the Leader” I could not resist pulling out one of the most popular articles I have ever written for the web in the years since Managing with Aloha was published so I could compare notes.

I had titled it “The Calling of Management: The 10 Beliefs of Great Managers” as a plea that managers not settle for “pretty good” or “good enough,” and pursue greatness relentlessly. Belief in the people we manage is where we had to start.

Those of you who teach in our schools get hold of those “people we manage” way before we do.

School Friends by Woodley Wonderworks on Flickr

I would like to seize this timely opportunity Dean has given us (an opportunity framed by his recent writings) to revise my mini essay for all of you who are teachers, for I would make a similar argument about teaching.

Teaching is a profession that I believe to be a calling. This calling to teach is rooted in exceptionally strong beliefs about our human capacity and worthiness.

Learning feeds on this belief of possibility.

What is your calling to teach?

Dean wrote a power-packed sentence as the beginning of his article;

“Teachers are leaders (of people) and managers (of processes).”

In my own coaching vocabulary I stay away from the word ‘leader’ as much as may be possible, for a distinction which collaborates with what Dean wrote. One person (and I prefer calling them managers) will do both things, manage and lead. Those two words are the actions of management and leadership; they become more useful to us when we think about them as intentional and strategic verbs.

In my mana’o (belief system) MUCH commonality exists between great managers and great teachers, in large part because they share the Ho‘ohana to see others succeed as the result of their generously given mentorship, with learning being the great enabler. It’s a kind of servant leadership, whether you call that mentorship ‘managing,’ ‘leading,’ ‘teaching’ or ‘coaching.’

To be a great manager, you must believe in those you will manage and lead.
To be a great teacher, you must believe in those you will teach and mentor.

I honestly do not believe there is any other way. So here is my article revision for teachers, with the inclusion of Alaka’i, the Hawaiian value of leadership.

The 10 Alaka’i Beliefs of Great Teachers

It is extremely worthwhile to see this light of renewal go on in teachers eyes when they realize that the hard work of teaching can evolve into the gift of a calling in your life.

When you are a teacher, your work is vitally important: it matters.

Take your work from good to great. What is your Ho‘ohana intention?

Did you choose to be a teacher, or did you just find your way to being one? Whatever the history of your journey, do you love being a teacher? If not, why do you persist in being one?

You can’t be a great teacher if you do not intentionally choose to be one, and then make a passionate commitment to teaching consciously and with full intention. To get started with Managing with Aloha as a helpful values-based philosophy, you must be able to honestly say being a teacher is your deliberate choice, and that your passion lies in the joys which come from being a great teacher: “Good” is not good enough, for as a teacher you directly affect the quality of student’s lives. That is not a responsibility to be taken lightly.

You must take stock of where your own convictions are when it comes to certain beliefs:

What do the truly great teachers of our world believe in?

1. Teachers must believe that people are innately good. Without this core belief and faith in their students and communities, great teaching and the learning it enables is not possible.
2. Teachers believe they do not work on their students, they work with them; they enable and empower their working on self. They believe this results in a mutual collaboration: They learn from their students as much as they will teach them.
3. Teachers believe that empowerment comes from within, and has more to do with self-motivation and innate talent than with an obedience to authority. They get their cues from the student, not from the curriculum, lesson plan or learning process.
4. Teachers believe that all students have strengths which can be made stronger, and that their weaknesses can be compensated for to become unimportant.
5. Teachers do not believe they train students as they teach, they believe they grow talents, train skills and offer additional knowledge.
6. Teachers believe they coach and mentor students, and they love doing so — not “like,” love.
7. Teachers believe that the students they teach are more than capable of creating a better future. They hold great faith and trust in the four-fold human capacities of physical ability, intellect, emotion, and spirit, no matter a students’ age.
8. Teachers believe in the power of positive, affirmative thinking, and they have a low tolerance for negativity. They are confident and eternal optimists, and they share their enthusiasm.
9. Teachers believe it is their job to remove barriers and obstacles so students can attain the level of greatness they are destined for. They believe that “can’t” is a temporary state of affairs, and that everything is only impossible until the first person does it. They believe that “I don’t know” is a beginning, and not an end.
10. Teachers believe that their legacy will be in the students they have helped to achieve worthwhile and meaningful goals. They believe that success is measured in people who thrive and prosper having learned to be good contributors to our society while in their care as students.

These are the reasons why teachers matter, and why teaching is so vitally important. These are the challenges you must be eager to tackle in your calling as a great teacher; Let-me-at-’em, I’m-perfect-for-this-job eager.

Additional Reading

You may find these complementary essays helpful, though they were written for managers in the workplace:

1. What’s your Calling? Has it become your Ho‘ohana? Excerpt:

I have a core belief about being a manager, and that is that management is a calling, and NOT a job defined by a title or position on an org chart. To be a great manager is to answer one’s calling to bring Ho‘ohana work to people as well, just as you have already done for yourself. In the Managing with Aloha philosophy for example, we frame that Ho‘ohana delivery work in a workplace that is values-centered, mission-driven, and customer-focused. You can think of those three things as the other compass points, however Ho‘ohana is always our North Star.

2. The Role of the Manager in Managing with Aloha: The case for a better way to work. Excerpt:

Managers are still overwhelmingly treated as technicians and process-marchers in most workplaces, and not as the coaches, mentors, and people-groomers they SHOULD be, and should be ALL THE TIME.

I have nothing against all the brilliant technicians, organizers and conductors in the world, for heaven knows we need them, and I have been known to dabble in their expertise too… However those are different jobs — not better, not worse, different — than the job managers should have. It is dramatically different from the definition of the Role of the Manager in a workplace managed and led with a foundation of Aloha in the organizational culture.

Aloha! Welcome to Teaching with Aloha.

One of the reasons I most admire you who are teachers, no matter what you teach, is that I am confident you are a lifelong learner. I am convinced that learning is a superpower, and teaching is the enabling of that superpower, growing it to epic proportions. Therefore, I am delighted to welcome you to a brand new exploration of what I call your Teaching Ho‘ohana: YOUR value-driven intention with learning the art and heart of teaching.

Not a typo: I will explain why “YOUR” is capitalized in a moment.

Our Language of Intention

TWA Glossary Entries:
Learning: A human superpower
Teaching: Enabling and growing the learning superpower
Teaching Ho‘ohana: A teacher’s value-driven intention with learning the art and heart of teaching

And there you instantly have one of the first things you will love about the learning you will experience here at Teaching with Aloha! It took 13 English words for me to say “Teaching” with the distinction of one Hawaiian value [Ho‘ohana]. As you will soon discover, what a vibrant and dynamic distinction it is.

Our intention here is not to teach you Hawaiian; visit Hawai‘i and you’ll discover that the vast majority of us do not speak the language either. However you will learn Hawaiian words for universal values, and many other phrases which altogether do compose a language we will share in our TWA community. Some words will be Hawaiian, some will be English, and some hapa, a combination of the two – like Teaching Ho‘ohana. Collectively we refer to the TWA website construct as our Language of Intention with the art and the heart of teaching.

As a teacher, you know that words are powerful, and language makes our words optimally useful. Hawaiian is beautiful and quite melodious, but here is its true goodness: Hawaiian is a contextual language, not a literal one of word-for-word translation. Hawaiian context primarily refers to personal story (we call this kaona) and a person’s values as connected to innate spirit and learned belief (we call this mana’o).

Read that last sentence one more time and sit with it for a moment. Getting impatient with the wordiness of English yet?

What this means, is that YOU step into our TWA Language of Intention almost instantly, for the language you will learn here will be brand new: It will develop based on your kaona (your teaching stories) and your mana’o (your spirit and convictions). With Dean Boyer’s gentle (and brilliant) guidance, it will become YOUR language of intention for your very personal, values-based Teaching Ho‘ohana.

Believe me, you will want to share your language of intention, for when you do your own superpower with learning and Ho‘ohana for teaching grows exponentially! However even if you choose not to share your new language in the “real world” initially, the process of learning the language of your own kaona and mana’o is one I am confident you will enjoy.

For we both know what an extraordinarily special thing your Teaching Ho‘ohana truly is, don’t we. It is your calling, and very much a part of your Aloha spirit.

Why Choose Values?

Like you, I am a teacher. I am truly in my element when I am working to cultivate the learning superpower. My students are adult learners, and they are workplace managers.

When managers speak of their staff, they talk about wanting an increased sense of responsibility, better reliability and dependability, honesty and integrity, humility and a hunger to do whatever it takes to learn, grow, and improve in the pursuit of excellence. What they are longing for, are “old fashioned” values in the innate character of their staff.

They want these things with good reason. If I was forced to choose just one thing from the revered Business 101 triad of vision, mission, and values for my managers’ toolbox at work, regardless of the kind of company or industry I was in, I would choose values without any hesitation whatsoever.

Why? Quite simple, really. Values determine behavior.

When you
— choose the values which will be the hallmark of the character found within your company, and
— you align all your operational systems and processes with those values, and
— you use your values to create a workplace where people thrive when they practice them,
What you will get, is the performance which separates winners from everyone else, for they are self-managed and self-led. They are self-aware.

As a teacher, you will reveal the self-motivating actions which develop and grow lifelong learners. As you will soon learn, and first do for yourself, your students will become self-aware of their Aloha.

When you choose the right values, you get everything else you need to be successful —including those other two we business people revere; vision and mission, whether personal or professional.

Said another way, in cultivating the learning superpower, values are your secret weapon.

“To manage with Aloha is to draw out the best performance of your own management practice from the values that are inherent in your nature and a match for the demands of your business. To be a great manager, is to realize your success depends on the people you manage, and they are driven by their values just as much as you are. You have to respect their culture, and learn to speak the language of their values. In all likelihood, their values will match up with your own much more than you think.”
—Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii’s Universal Values to the Art of Business

Choose this Community. Get involved

This has been long enough for a first posting! I can get very excited about these things and keep going on about them endlessly, and I mostly wanted to extend a warm welcome to you for now, and say mahalo, thank you so much for being here – I do appreciate your reading this far!

You may be anxious to hear more about the fullness of Aloha, and I want that for you too, however we shall leave that for Dean, our Mea Ho‘okipa (host) for he is a fabulous teacher. You will read of his kaona and mana’o for Teaching with Aloha in his welcome.

Then, it will be your turn! Start with a comment for Dean: Introduce yourself and say Aloha.  As you continue to read each new posting, please share your art and your heart with us and with each other: We are eager to learn from you too!

When you participate in our conversations you instantly become part of the Ho‘ohana Community of Managing with Aloha practitioners, and you don’t even have to read my book – though that would be quite cool, and may help in an accelerated course should you want turbo-charging with your superpower.
(If you are an administrator who manages others, yes, I am not going to be shy about this: Buy my book! It will help you.)

One last tip: Get an email subscription to keep in touch, for it makes quite a difference in creating the Teaching with Aloha habit. (Habits are a magic potion in MWA, and you can use them too.) Then water the seed of your learning superpower with conversation and connection here in our Teaching with Aloha community. You already have the best fertilizer there is: Kaona (your teaching stories) and Mana’o (your spirit and convictions).

Hana hou; see how much you have already learned about our Language of Intention? I knew I recognized that lifelong learner in you! This is going to be absolutely joyful.

We Ho‘ohana together, Kākou.
With much aloha,
Rosa

Workplace Aloha Coach and Author Rosa Say