(18) What I learned about going with the flow

I use a great phrase when life seems to prevent you doing what you want to do: Looking back on your life and you can see how the dots join up. Looking forward you just can’t see the dots yet.

It’s sometimes useful to remember that sometimes it is good let go of what it is you are trying to achieve and allow yourself to simply go with the flow.

Some considerable time back I was planning to be a teacher and I got accepted to The Institute of Education at London University. Trouble was, and I cannot now remember why, I wasn’t able to take the place that they offered me and asked if it could be deferred for a year. They said no they couldn’t leave it open for me and that I would have to re-apply the following year. I was so annoyed: I was risking a place in the University I wanted to study because I couldn’t take it that year,

After I turned down the place I had a year to fill before I could apply again and had no idea what I was going to do. Quite by chance I spotted a small ad asking for women, living in Islington (I was in Walthamstow at the time!), to study for a City & Guilds in jewellery design. I thought it looked interesting, applied and to my joy was accepted. There started a great experience where I spent a year studying silversmithing which I then followed with a summer spent working in a blacksmith forge. Extremely hard work, but amazing fun.

So, a year on I re-applied for my PGCE at the Institute and, with relief, I was accepted. If you’ve read my earlier blogs you will know I quickly realised that teaching wasn’t for me but I duly applied for a job when the interview experience part of the course came about. What is wonderfully strange is that the job I applied for, and got, was for a metalwork teacher, something I certainly would not have been qualified to apply for had I completed my PGCE the year earlier. I loved the teaching job at the school I was in and loved working for the lively Borough of Newham. After I left the school I went on to be an educational consultant for Newham, and still have many working, and social links there to this day.

OK so my life would have gone in another direction had I accepted the first offer of the teacher training place, or had not been accepted the second time I applied. But what I’m saying here is that the experiences that I had were ‘right’ for me, even though they were born out of the initial frustration of having to turn down my original teacher training place. Looking back I can see how the dots joined up. Looking forward I know the decisions that feel right today will also turn out fine in the future too.

(11) What I learned about living my dreams – Part 2!

The second reason people don’t follow their dreams is because they don’t believe in them enough.

Easier said than done I know.

Not that recall chunks of the bible much in my everyday life (?!) but listen to this:

“All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” Mark 11:24

So even way back then Man was aware of the power of belief.

I came across something similar when I first started learning about Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). I had been working with a brilliant Master Practitioner, Michael, on a few issues around the stresses associated with being a newly qualified teacher. It was a course being offered to all NQTs when they started in the, very progressive, London borough of Newham. Anyway, my teaching story is that I decided to train to be a teacher and, about one week into the Post Graduate Certificate of Education at the very prestigious Institute of Education at London University, I decided it was all wrong. No, not me at all. Gulp.

I’d come to the conclusion that all schooling was merely institutionalised babysitting and that we were, in fact, keeping our kids away from the very society they should be exploring. I could go on, but I’ll save my ‘education is flawed’ rant for another day. But I was on the course now so I felt I had to see it through and perhaps I could get work in some peripheral, supportive role in education. Something with more freedom to tweak the curriculum to ‘real’ learning (see how bitter I was?). Six months later, and with me even more restless, it was interview time: all students were required to apply for and be interviewed for teaching posts. I launched myself into it feeling I should participate for the experience if nothing else. I had little intention of joining the ranks of the perpetrators of the schooling myth (teachers). Happily for me I spotted a job teaching metalwork in an east London Boys’ school that was 1½ miles from where I was living. Not so happily for me I went and landed the job.

OK I said. I’ll do it for two years and then I’ll get out. After all I have to know what it’s like inside, if I am to be able to influence education at large in any way. Within that first year I’d been introduced to Michael and the spooky wonders of NLP. And so, in one of our early sessions, Michael had asked about what would be my ideal working situation. Without even thinking I said I would like to be earning the same amount of money, but only working three days a week. Where did that come from? Michael and I explored the motivation for this declaration, programmed it in and job done.

Time passed and I duly left teaching after my allotted couple of years. Don’t get me wrong, I actually really enjoyed being part of the school, the kids were fantastic fun and, on the whole, the staff were very dedicated and interesting people. But it was simply time for me to go. I didn’t leave teaching for any other specific work, I just picked up bits and pieces from the various contacts I’d made over the years. Then I bumped into a colleague (at a tube station!) who said, co-incidentally, she’d been thinking of getting in touch as there was ten days work at the education business partnership she worked for. Another rambling story later and I ended up working there for three years. And oh yes, on better money than when I was teaching, and only three days a week. It took me a while before I realised I’d got what I’d asked for . . .

I think my chequered career since then has much to do with my belief that I can do what I want to, and be paid for it. That realisation did rather set me free from having to find a ‘job’. Though finances can be unreliable and a bit hairy at times I still live with that confidence now.