Training Wheels Only Take You So Far

My two children NEVER had training wheels on their bikes.
Instead, they learned to ride with a balance bike -- the bikes with no pedals that you push with your feet.

As a result, when they got on an actual bike, they barely needed support.
It was totally UNLIKE my experience, where my father spent weeks running alongside me, holding me up, as I tried to gain my balance on my own two wheels.
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Yesterday, in a meet up with some fellow facilitators, we focused on UNPREPAREDNESS as a topic.

Some of the questions I wrote down included:
👉 What's the purpose of my preparedness?
👉 Who am I preparing for?
👉 What's the balance point of emergence and structure?
👉 What are the different gender standards when it comes to preparedness?

Over the course of the conversation, I came up with this metaphor of preparedness being like training wheels.
When I first started my teaching career in 2000, I wrote out my lesson plans to the minute, ensuring that I had full structure.

I needed the training wheels to feel stable enough to move forward with my lesson.

After a nearly three decades of teaching, coaching, and facilitating, I no longer feel that I need that level of detail. I can "wing it" quite easily, if needed.

I am able to take off the training wheels and enjoy the open road -- even the off road.

In one of my current book circles, we're exploring the idea of "Good student habits" and how they are holding us back.

One of those habits is "over-preparedness."

In our last session together, I asked the participants to write down an activity that they know about, but they aren't an expert in.

Then, I introduced an improv game called "Ask the Expert" where they had to pretend to be the expert of that very thing that they wrote down. 😬

Some of them felt like it was lying.
Others were surprised at how comfortable they felt being the expert.

Later today we'll meet again, and we'll start by celebrating any unpreparedness and improvisation over the last 2 weeks.

⭐️ Do you like being prepared? How do you know when you're prepared "enough?"

Originally posted on LinkedIn with comments.

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