Vicki Saunders

Another interesting insight I had in the past few days was around failure. Everyone is talking about how we need to teach ourselves to feel ok with failing. But what is failure?

A women at the Intersection event talked about how nervous they were in launching their first online testing suites at a school. They were observing the first student who came up to computer who took the test. He failed the test. She ran out the room and stopped him in the hallway and asked if he was ok. A little confused, he looked at her and said, Sure.  I’ll just study more and try it again.

There’s something about taking tests it online, knowing you can go back to it and do whatever it takes to learn it again versus this one-time chance to take a test that we have been doing for the past 100 years that seems so lame. Why would you have one moment in time to get something right?

This whole generation growing up now is used to launching Cut the Rope and other such apps that requires experimentation until you learn the way to move from level 1 to level 2 to level 3. Do the kids consider it failure when they don’t know what to do the first, second and third time they try something?  Definitely not.

My friend Dawna Markova said that the brain tracks for success. The first time an infant reaches for a cup they miss it and get their nose, then their hair, then the table the cup is sitting on then they get the cup! Then they reach out again for the cup and miss it, over and over again until they get the cup every time. Our brain doesn’t track the failures when we are learning. It tracks the successes. Its only our culture that is so focused on the deficits, the times we don’t get it right as opposed to all the times we do. I love how much room there is for innovation in this space. Stay tuned.

Yesterday we had an Ascension Intention Party for any of our friends who wanted to come and share their intentions for the new era we are entering. It was a full day from 10:30am until 8p with a solid flow of amazing people visiting and sharing their visions for a new world. At 11am my friend Kara arrived with her amazing young son, Theo.  The “reveal your greatness” coach, Gina, led a visualization exercise for everyone at our house and for a few hundred people on the phone from around the world. We shared words describing the kind of world we want to create (peaceful, sustainable, food and water for all) and then did personal visualizations for what we want for ourselves in 3, 10, and 20 years from now. Theo clapped throughout the ‘exercise’ with excitement and joy. I was wondering what must be going on in his head as he was present almost as a portal for the next generation leading us to what’s next.

The goddess, Jane painted a gorgeous canvas and left part of it blank for us all to write in our intentions. Theo walked into the room where we had the canvas, picked up a gold paint pen and I asked, “Do you know what you want to write? Can I help you with spelling”? He didn’t even look at me and with total focus he said, “No thank you. I know exactly what I want to write”.  And he took the gold paint pen on the blank canvas and wrote Peace For All across the centre of it. As I look at it this morning I’m so moved to think that we had his glorious energy in our house to share this special day. And, I’m so grateful to all who shared your visions and hopes and dreams and intentions. This morning, our house is totally charged for a fantastic 2013 and beyond.

Blessings to all!!

I’ve been a coach and mentor to hundreds of startups, dreamers, and change agents over the past 15 years.  I used to have a thinking partnership with Dawna Markova and she would always start the call with the question ” what have you been ‘teaching’ people lately?” (i.e., what advice are you giving others). And then we would explore the wisdom we were sharing with others (which is often all about us).

I’m not sure it’s any different lately, but I am noticing that I’ve been doing a lot of  ’boldness’ coaching my whole life.

My husband always says the problem with education is the that the bar is set too low. I’m thinking that this is a society-wide epidemic. We don’t challenge ourselves and others enough. We are often surrounded by people who want us to stay small, not rock the boat, follow the rules. Well, clearly, as we can see all around us, those rules aren’t really getting us where we need to be.

There are so many things that are broken, that need re-inventing, that need re-thinking. It’s a great time to be alive. It’s also not the time to be thinking small.

What if your idea could be bigger and have a greater positive impact? What if it could be done twice as fast? What if you could be happy and balanced and impactful all at the same time? What if you could take Friday’s off to reflect so that you are more effective? What if slowing down (meditating) actually allows you to be more productive (because you are grounded and balanced and less easy to distract)?

I’m mentoring a Next36 team that is brimming with ideas and hopes and dreams. I asked them a couple of months ago, “who’s on your wish list?”. You are in this incredible program funded by 3 Canadian billionaires and can pretty much get to anyone in the country. Who do you want to meet? This is your chance. Make a list, dream big and get out there and introduce yourself around, share your dreams, hear other people’s stories and get to it. Seize the opportunity.

Umair Haque has a great article in HBR – Overthrow Yourself –  where he says the reason for the organization is to ‘evoke the highest human potential’. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an organization that has a reason d’être anywhere near that but it’s certainly A if not THE, design point I would consider central to my life. How am I putting myself in situations and finding environments where I can evoke my highest human potential?

How are you?

About 15 years ago I met a teacher named Richard Ford in a highly frenetic classroom in North York. I was looking for bright young students to design web pages for a project I was working on. Richard called over a couple of grade 9′s and said, Do you guys know how to design a webpage?

No, they said.

Well, said Richard, this lady will hire you if you can show her a sample of a designed webpage by Monday. Can you do that? Uh, sure, they said.

It was Friday.

I looked at Richard and thought…this is the innovative teacher everyone has been talking about? He’s nuts. He’s asking kids to do impossible things they’ll never get done. So, as the kids walked away all excited I said to him, what are you doing? I’m looking for kids who know how to code a webpage. Oh, they will, he said. They have the whole weekend. They can do it.

And that was the beginning of my experience with Richard and his impossible deadlines. He later explained that the biggest problem with education (and, indeed, with our whole approach to teaching, mentoring and working with youth) was that we set the bar too low. All you have to do is set impossible deadlines 3 times in a row and then the pace and risk taking experience will be in their blood.

I thought he was absolutely crazy, and then I saw the results. Over and over I’ve seen him pull a rabbit out of a hat by believing and pushing and challenging young people to go beyond what seems possible. To try something, iterate it and keep reaching for the goal. Set impossible deadlines, expect more than is reasonable and magic happens.

I just spent the weekend with 36 bright young students as part of Selection Weekend for the Next 36. Reza, Ajay, Claudia and their team demonstrated exactly the thing I had learned from Richard. Expect the impossible and you’ll get greatness.

9 teams of 4 students, who were introduced to one another for the first time, as a team, at 4pm on Saturday were expected to make their first pitch (for a mobile app that solves a major problem with a big market opportunity) in front of a room full of mentors Sunday morning at 9am. They all came fully prepared with a problem they were solving, market size defined, a value proposition, basic understanding of the competition, go-to-market strategy, business model and potential valuation 9 months from now when the program is complete.

It’s been years since I’ve seen someone push a group of young high potential youth to their max and it was a joyous occasion. It’s programs like this that give me hope for Canada.

We need to set the bar high. Connect and support those who want to go for it and keep on pushing the limits if we are to achieve greatness as a country. Next36 is a great example of a program that does just that.

As a mentor to a team of students that will be building a business over the next 9 months I’ll keep posting my thoughts on this innovative program. Stay tuned.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Jeff Sach’s speak on the New Progressive Movement in Toronto. The room was surprisingly small for such a distinguished speaker.

The last time I saw Sachs speak was  at Deepak’s Alliance for a New Humanity conference in Puerto Rico. He was on stage debating Satish Kumar from the Schumacher College and it was one of the most amazing debates I’ve ever seen. Jeff was putting forth a model to bring a person out of poverty in Africa (bed nets, etc) – he would posit that $70 – was all that was needed and that he was proving the model in his Millennium Villages. Satish declared that “poverty is good business” and that there was no way economics nor an economic model was going to get us out of poverty. It’s a spiritual issue, not an economic one. When we decide that we cannot let other humans live on this planet in hunger, in poverty while others live with so much, then poverty will end. But the current state of the world and the game most people have agreed to play will keep poverty where it is. I’m not doing his argument justice but read Satish’s Resurgence for a taste of his gift to this planet.

Sachs started his discussion talking about the complete disappearance of US leadership in the world. Drought, climate change, genocide, disease, pick the issue, there is a total absence of US leadership  in all of this.  He

He thinks that the great economists that are cited continuously by the right in the US, Adam Smith, Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman all believed that government needed to fund education, climate change, and that they recognized the externalities to the market. But today’s politicians are reading only a part of these economists. They aren’t seeing the whole picture.

He asked, How did we get on a long term decline we are in? He thinks it’s through a miserable diagnosis and went back to find where the problem began.  When was the last time we took on big challenges? He said there was no chance of a national ambition today. He joked that it would be focused grouped to death and would never get off the ground.

He thinks the fateful moment was 1981. Reagan said on Jan 20,1981, Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem. This was the crazy diagnosis that got us on this path.

Top tax rates were cut. Greed was considered good. Unions were broken. The finance system was deregulated. And it all ended in calamity.

The puzzle for us isn’t that Reagan got it wrong but why hasn’t it changed for 30 years.

The bottom line, says Sachs, our politics are just corrupt. It’s legalized corruption. $4B a year is spent on lobbying. $7B will be spent in 2012 in the US election.  Politicians are on the take and it’s a legalized game. (See 60Minutes episode from November13th)

We are a society turned into a game for the rich.

The median male worker has not seen a rise in real income since 1973. Government is half shutdown in the US with non-discretionary spending; transportation, education, NASA, environmental protection, energy, etc gutted to 2% of GDP. The dismantling of government will not get us where we want to go. We need to figure out what we want government to do and then pay for it.

The Occupy movement is about a system of impunity and corruption at the top and it’s just getting started according to Sachs – see his post in the NY Times stating that we are at the beginning of a  New Progressive Movement.