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Trusting your gut

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In a blog entitled “Teacher in a Strange Land,” Nancy Flanagan provides some great advice for teachers that echoed some thoughts I have had lately:
 
Listen to advice — but trust your gut. Your goal is becoming an authentic teacher, one with autonomy, mastery and purpose. You will inevitably build a practice by stealing ideas from hundreds of people. The concepts you retain and embed into daily work are those that align and resonate with your core beliefs about education, which will change over time. Learn to trust the little interior voice that tells you what “works” for your colleague–her behavior rewards system based on Jolly Ranchers, say– may be totally wrong for you, in spite of the fact that her class walks quietly in a straight line and your kids are straggling and blabbing.
 
It was the “trusting your gut” part that echoed with me.  I recently read similar advice about this “gut instinct” and I’ve trusted myself more lately in recent decisions.  This Forbes article describes the “gut intuition” as a process that “accesses our accumulated experiences in a synthesized way, so that we can form judgments and take action without any logical, conscious consideration.”
 
Having a gut instinct isn’t always the issue for me.  Sometimes, I have an intuition about something but I listen to outside advice and choose against what I instinctively know is the right decision.  In recent days, I’ve changed that behavior.  As a result, I’ve made some decisions that aren’t always popular but I have a confidence and ownership in the decision that I have made.
 
What about you?
 

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Comments

  1. I think this quote:
     
    a process that “accesses our accumulated experiences
     
    is the most important point, and I would argue that it’s the accumulation of experiences that TRAINS our guts. In that light, I’m not convinced a new teacher should trust their guts. (and I know some seasoned teachers who trust their guts inadvisedly!!) The book to remember is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.
     
    Jed Scott

  2. Right! In my ideal world, educators would all empower students to have self-awareness, self-control, and social responsibility. Students’ decisions would be based on intrinsic notions of “What’s best for me and best for others” rather than “What’s going to keep me out of trouble or get me a happy face.” Teachers who value autonomy, mastery, and purpose for themselves might also value it for students … I know I do. I want students to have real drive, autonomy, and mastery over the subject matter AND over themselves.
     
    The notion that the strict teacher–with the stereotypically compliant kids, who “rules” through fear, shame, and intimidation–is to be lauded is one of the great myths, IMHO.
     
    Related RSAnimate video/lecture by Dan Pink on Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us
     
    It’s a MUST WATCH if you haven’t already.
     
    Cheers!
     
    Tom

  3. I spent twenty years in a business that is built far more on “gut instinct” than ever it likes to admit – military intelligence.  You’re surrounded by careful, perfectly linear, logical thinkers – commanders and operations sorts – who have the most difficult job in the world – leading people in combat.  You, on the other hand, are supposed to give them 100% accurate and actionable intelligence.  Impossible.  Intelligence, as I’ve argued before with many others, is the only job in the world where you can be 99% right and still lose your boss’s, er, behind, on the 1% you can’t and don’t know.  Which means you rely, to a greater or lesser degree, on instinct.  Sometimes it’s just because the info isn’t there or can’t be obtained; sometimes, it’s the pressure of time that forces an answer before you’re satisfied that it is fully formed and formulated in your own mind and is consistent with the information available.  Frankly, in such a situation, your “gut” gets butterflies – at least, mine did.  Nonetheless, I had a number of “lucky” calls that at times (in an exercise) brought questions about the source of my intelligence conclusion.  The difference is, linear thinkers connect dots – and if one is missing, their worst tendency is to stop and worry at the missing dot until they put it there, and then move on.  The non-linear thinker, on the other hand, doesn’t worry the dots – he’s busier trying to reach a sensible conclusion – not a “logical” one necessarily, but a “sense”-ible one – to include that niggling worry about what’s up with the other fella.  Anecdotally, I was often very surprised at how many intelligence personnel in the Army during my twenty years there were drawn to the arts – well out of proportion with the total numbers of people available from all branches – and it’s perhaps this willingness to engage the right brain that might “fill” the picture in a world of “left-brainers.”  I don’t know; I’m not a specialist in studies of the mind; yet, to me there’s a certain logic and consistency here.  The larger point, about paying attention to your gut instinct, is a valid one; it allows us to be more complete and more effective as people, irrespective of the field.  Now, engineers and physicists and the like would argue perhaps against this; and yet, were not some of the greatest theoretical advances in any number of mathematical and scientific fields the result of an intuitive leap?  So if they can “get away with it,” why can’t the rest of us who are far more inclined to do so naturally?
     
    Ron

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