Episode 32: It’s this or that, or…is it?
Hello, hello! Good morning, good afternoon – whenever you’re listening to this podcast, welcome to another episode of the Teaching and Raising Problem Solvers podcast.
If you’re listening to this, this is the second episode in February, or it may be – who knows when you’ll listen to this – whenever it is, whatever month it is, whatever year it is, welcome. I’m so, so glad you’re here.
In today’s episode, I wanted to talk about this funny concept of “it’s this or it’s that, or…is it?” I think this theme has been coming up a lot for me lately, and it’s kind of evoked a lot of thought around it, you know, personally and professionally. It’s making me think a lot about this concept of “it’s this or it’s that,” you know, binary thinking.
Part of this is really prompted by the book, Think Again, by Adam Grant. I read a lot. I have a lot of books that I go through in a year. My goal for 2023 is 100 books, which is on the lower end – I think last year I read around 150 books. But this year I want to dive more into journal articles and getting really good at decoding research again. I feel like since grad school… I am a member of The Informed SLP, so shout-out to TISLP. I get a lot of my research article resources from there and then kind of go from there. But Think Again I think slides into my top ten list for books, because it’s something that I work on with my students, but also I think collectively as a society we are struggling with. And it’s this binary thinking – it’s either this or it’s this. So when you see an issue, you’re either on this side or that side. In Adam Grant’s book, he talks a lot about how things are really a continuum vs. one side or the other. And we see this in a lot of issues in our world that are typically polarized, of this or that. And I think this question of, “Is it this or is it that, or is it really” is really designed to help us think more about what is actually happening in a scenario.
In January, I talked about how I think the adults have to evolve a lot. We have to work on our own regulation, which really involves us thinking more about our own thoughts, thinking more about our own perspectives, thinking more about our own feelings, working on our own analysis of how those are connected to our behaviors and why. And also looking at the other side, and the continuum in between, about how things are existing around certain issues.
This comes up a lot with students because – the first part of my self-regulation definition, which I talked about last month is being aware of your thoughts. That’s a hard skill even for a lot of adults. That metacognitive skill of thinking about your thinking, of being aware of and thinking about your thoughts, is a really big first step for a lot of people, but also a really challenging first step for a lot of people.
I was working with a student two weeks ago who was having a hard time with a project they had done that they didn’t like the first version of. This is a student who typically becomes really dysregulated by certain visual stimuli, and we’ve been exploring this and understanding how it connects with their overall self-regulation profile. And you know, this is just a great reminder – if you are not thinking about sensory with students who are chronically dysregulated, you may be missing a huge piece of the puzzle, so please connect with OT and a team about that, if that’s you.
But anyways, in this specific scenario, the student had completed an assignment, a multi-step project, and the first version of it did not go as they planned. It turned out not at all like it theoretically needed to be, and not at all as they wanted it to. This was due to nobody’s fault; it was actually an error of the equipment that was used in the process. But this student was so, so, so dysregulated by the presence of this visual stimuli that it wound up triggering a pretty significant interaction between them and the adults around them, and let to a further escalation of other events.
When we were breaking it down two weeks ago, I was just going over that self-regulation cycle with this student. I was talking about how a situation or an event usually triggers thoughts that lead to feelings that lead to actions. Oftentimes, that happens so fast that our brain filters things so quickly through the limbic system to see if it’s safe or not safe, that we don’t even recognize the thoughts that we’re having sometimes before they lead to our actions. And that likely there were thoughts and feelings preceding that, that were leading to what happened prior to the escalation. And keep in mind that I have a relationship with this student. I have trust with this student. We have long-established rapport, and this was separated from the incident when things had actually happened, which are key factors in circling back to things, and just kind of previewing and thinking about helping students understand the process. And in that dialog, we were just having a conversation and the student said, in the middle of the conversation, “It is infuriating that I got it wrong.” And I said, “Whoah. Whoah. That is powerful.” And I said, “So there’s two pieces of information that I’m hearing there. Can we talk about that?” That’s really important, too, is autonomy. I try and preserve autonomy a lot when I’m debriefing or previewing with students – just that, “Is it okay if I share this with you? Is it okay if I point that out?” Just because we are autonomous creatures. We need autonomy, especially when we’re talking about our self-regulation. Having other people bring things to our attention can be dysregulating if it isn’t funneled through the layers of we are approving access to that information.
So I said, “I’m hearing a feeling and I’m hearing a thought.” And we broke that down. We broke it down to: I got it wrong, and mad, furious. So I said, “I’m curious – in this process, is it possible that there’s not a ‘I got it wrong’ or ‘I got it right’ (this or that), but there’s other thought options that could happen here. There’s other thought choices that could happen here. And I have to tell you, for the adults listening, this is a hard skill for a lot of us. I am working on this skill. Externalizing things is often easy – we can support others in that process, but it’s hard for us. But I said, “Is it possible there’s another thought here besides ‘I got it wrong’ or ‘I got it right’?” And then we explored those other thoughts. And we got to talk about the fact that so much of life, which for this student often falls into ‘this’ or ‘that’, so much of life is often in the gray. And us learning to navigate that without pulling tighter to this or that and understanding it as gray is so important for our overall self-regulation, but also for our connectedness to the world.
So, I wanted to pop on and share that reflection, and share that experience. And hopefully it helps you expand the ‘this or that’ thinking as you’re moving through your day today. And I will talk to you in the next episode.