E238 - Jill Reilly
Welcome back to the PBL Simplified for Administrators podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Stoyer, and we're talking all things PBL. If you're a school administrator or a district administrator, You're trying to bring about change in a system that's been doing it the same way for a very long time and it's not easy and change process would be easy except that people are involved. So that's why we have the podcast. We talk about success stories. We bring you leadership guests like we will today. Today we've got Jill Riley on. Her book 10 permissions is going to help you through that process of creating space for you to create change. And I'm going give you a couple quotes. And so here we go. It says um You don't have to submit your life to secure mediocrity. It's huge. Uh, think small. Take the next right step. That's how change happens. Making everybody else's choices is the easiest. Making your own is the hardest and the most satisfying. And one of my personal favorites, optimism is radical. Believing in a better future is borderline revolutionary. So maybe we're revolutionaries around here. Jill, thanks for being on the podcast. Appreciate you. Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. I like to hang with revolutionaries. So, uh, yeah, thank you for, you know, choosing those four quotes. I think they do a good job of sort of capturing the the spirit and the intent of the book.
Yeah, we actually our model school in Columbus, Indiana, uh, their um their tagline is be revolutionary actually. Ah, brilliant. Yeah. I think I want to tag on this idea of optimism is radical as well for them. It's exciting. Well, I mean, that's where I start the book because I think in this moment it is. You know, it's it's very very easy to kind of get sucked into pessimism and cynicism and to feel within that like you don't have any power. And my point is that, you know, you can't have agency if you believe that, you know, there's forces at work that are dragging you and everything around you down. So, you know, optimism is is the lifeblood of all the best thinking and all the best action. So, yeah, I think we've got to work from there.
Super good. So, let's back up a second and hear a little bit more about you as we bring you into our world, which I'm super excited to have you here. Uh, so everybody gets the same question actually when they come on the podcast. So, what is your why for the work that you do? And then if you would just dovetail right into what inspired you to write 10 permissions? Yeah, I mean those are actually the same answer in many ways. Um, I think my why has always been helping people navigate profound change in their lives, in their countries. I mean, I'll I'll give you a very short history, which is that I'm from the States, grew up in the Midwest. Um, at some point while I was at college, started to feel like I wanted to be a part of something bigger, possibly something revolutionary. So, South Africa was going through a transition from aparate to democracy, preparing for its first democratic elections. And I was like I got to get there. I I want to be a part of that. And you have to know how much my my parents were not thrilled with that decision to step off my default path. Um
but I just have always felt like one I wanted to sort of feel like I was a part of a bigger world and two that I wanted to contribute to people's sense of capability in you know creating their own path in you know coming to South Africa in 1993 when it was trying to reinvent itself was the most extraordinary uh classroom in terms of change in terms of social change human change and it really set me on a trajectory of working across Africa Asia southeastern Europe always present when people were you know trying to uh I'll use the word reinvent some element of their lives and being being present for that and you know honestly Ryan a lot of the 10 permissions is born out of that experience a lot of the failures of that experience because as you started off saying change is tough big change is
uh overwhelming so you know we'll talk about this but this theme of permission and self-permission was born out of that process of you know being present to people as they navigated change Yeah. And what struck me uh and why I really wanted to have you on the podcast is really just even this term permissions. You we work with school leaders across the country and we're doing something different, right? And we have some leaders that just get it. You Cynthia Bruno from Kentucky was on and I asked her, I said, "Uh, what keeps you up at night?" Said, "What keeps me up at night is that we could possibly be an ordinary school. I just can't live with that, right? We can't be ordinary." And so she kind of gets it, right? She has this but I know there's this whole group of uh maybe first followers, early adopters in there somewhere that that need that permission. You know, we'll finish a workshop and say, "I feel like I just have permission to go and do the work I'm supposed to do."
That that term is is strong. Yeah. So, let me let me dive in with our next question. So, a lot of our school leaders, they they feel stuck, right? There's the outdated expectations from community or the system, but they also know there are these 21st century needs. So what kind of permission do you think they need right now with that dichotomy? Yeah, I mean I think everyone in the world feels that way right now and that's kind of what I say at the book. We're in this sort of liinal transitional state between 20th and 21st century ways of operating um between as you've described sort of yesterday's expectations and today's possibilities. Um and I think every human I know right now feels this kind of Sorry about that. Every human I know right now feels that tug. Um there's an expectation that our way of operating will resemble what used to be. I can a shorthand for that might be a sort of boomer way of behaving uh of living. And in some ways that's still what good looks like. Um but at the same time we look around and we absolutely know that in many ways that way of operating is no longer feasible or desirable. Um, so I think part of what I'm talking about in the book and this would apply to, you know, the people you're working with is to accept the fact that we are allowed to adapt and there are a thousand ways that we have adapted already sort of as as consumers, as parents, as partners, as humans. We have made thousands of of adaptations to this fluid world. We curate so many elements of our lives, you know, right now and we accept that as being the norm. And I think this idea that we would update some of the bigger features of our lives, the way that we work, the way that we educate people, the way that we, you know, interact with institutions, those feel higher stakes than a lot of the other ones that I'm talking about here, but in fact, they're just as logical of ad adaptations as the other ones that we've made. And so I think when you start to kind of take the the judgment and the the not the fear because you won't take the fear out but I think there's a fair degree of judgment around this idea that we've we've got to do this differently. Um when you accept the fact that it's a completely different set of conditions and therefore it's totally natural for you to adapt your way of operating within them. You kind of can approach it with a little bit more you know curiosity and um and positivity than a fear of your own irrelevance. I think
it's a really interesting point, Jill. So, just the judgment associated with doing something differently that or never questioning the story that we're supposed to go down, right? And because I was personally I was I crushed high school, right? I had a 4.2 GPA. I was a three sport athlete. So, I did all the things I was supposed to do. I went to a Big 10 college. It turns out I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.
So, I thought I was winning and, you know, I had to take this huge huge, you know, almost a U-turn from industrial engineering to teaching eighth grade English. I was following the story, right? And yeah. Yeah. I think another story I just want to put out there and then I'm going to ask you I want to ask you what the cost is of not questioning these things because I think there's a cost to it
because we've got these great CTE programs that teach kids how to weld. They could be nurses. You could run an HVAC system. Welders could be making 80 grand right out of high school. But there's some judgment associated that when you go down that path, right? Like if I were to be a 4.2 GPA student and then decide I want to be a welder, there would be judgment. There would be questions. Like, but what's the cost of not questioning these stories that we've inherited? Well, I think the cost right now is irrelevance. Oo, that's a big one. Wow. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I'm gonna go there. You started with revolutionary, so you know, let's go. Let's go there. I mean, you've just set up a story. it's perfect. You know, you can tick every single one of those boxes and feel good because you know you you are meeting the external metrics that were established you know in a previous age that suggested that you were on the right path. So the the suggestion was that you know your intelligence your ability to you know answer questions correctly was what you needed in order to you know get into college and you were get good grades, get a good job, you know go to go to a good school, get a good job. That was the story. And and there was a logic to it because in many ways, were you to, you know, just keep going on that path, you would be rewarded with financial security and status.
And you know, one of the things I do in the book is contrast old logic to new logic. So what everybody knows right now is that, you know, that old logic of, you know, get good grades, go to a good school, it does not mean you will get a good job. That's right. So, first of all, that chain is broken. So, it's not delivering on the security that we would have hoped for. You know, what you're pointing to in your story is that it also in many cases is not spitting out young humans who have the self-awareness, the self-efficacy, the agency to truly then take what they've learned and begin to apply it in a meaningful way in a fluid world. So, you know, it was setting people up to use my language to sort of put on a suit and sleepwalk. So just just keep going. But what it didn't what it didn't do um was equip you with a a broader set of adaptive capabilities or a deeper sense of knowing your own interests and desires that is absolutely necessary right now. So you know to me that's the five alarm fire right now is that you have kids who are still buying into that and parents who you know better than I do are doubling down on it because it's the only formula they have. It's the go-to formula. So, what else am I going to do? You know, it's like, let me get get even let's push for even higher academic achievements and even more extra murals so that we can,
you know, sort of immunize ourselves against this new reality. And the simple fact is that we're not preparing kids for that world. We're just protecting them from the realities of it. So, you spit you spit them out and then you wonder why they end up back. in your basement in two years time. Well, because they don't have the human capabilities to navigate, they have the capabilities to follow a prescribed path. And that's not what's relevant right now. No, it's not. And old story versus new story. What's interesting is the story worked for my dad, right? So, he grew up in in poverty, in rural poverty, and he was a first generation college student
and he went to Purdue and he got an engineering degree and that got him out of poverty. So, then that's what I did, right? And but I could tell that that path wasn't right for me. You know, it took me a minute. Um but it's in your terms you you say default good life stories, right? So I I think that fits in there, right? And then so how do we parallel that? How do we parallel it to schools? Can we make that shift a little bit? Because there are default school stories. Uh you know, if if a school has great extracurriculars, a good football team, um you know, they spit out some kids that go to college, then it must be good school, right? You can go you can go to real estate websites when you go to buy your house and there's a score for like for good schools like what's that score and is it still relevant? I think that's a good question.
Um I'm going to say not really. I mean one would you know I wouldn't only want to judge it based on I mean it's still using the old metrics to define its own goodness, right? It it's using test scores and you know what is on offer and so that You know, one doesn't want to dismiss those things as being not of value because obviously they are a value. I've got two teenage sons. They go to school. They take tests. I haven't ripped them out and sent them into the woods to kind of learn how to navigate. Like I'm, you know, I get it.
Yeah. However, I'm not under any illusion about what this is giving them. It's not the turnkey it once was. It is a useful period for them to develop certain you know cognitive and social and to a far you know other extent emotional set of capabilities that comes with growing up but I'm absolutely aware that they are going to need to and part of what I talk about in the book is a mindset of just kind of filling up a toolkit with stuff that they're learning they're then going to have to have the ability to rip that open in several years and go okay so now what do I do with it So I think there is a deeper level of uh capabilities, behaviors that a lot of schools perhaps aren't yet focusing attention on which I think is part of what your approach kind of emphasizes um which I would put under sort of agency and authority and adaptability that I see as really critical that have yet to bubble up to the top as being you know key um components of a solid education. The way for instance that several years ago STEM sort of became a we're good because we focus on this. I would imagine that over the next 5 to 10 years some of these things will start to bubble up as being you know because we focus on these things or we try and nurture these qualities. We are considered you know of high quality. But I think for the most part now we are still focusing on things like test scores. which are valuable but they are not nearly they do not hold the currency that they once did and I think everybody you know knows that already.
Yeah I I think that is the line that we take Jill I think you you you nailed it is we have partners that and listeners right now that are a micro school and they can chuck just about everything that's been traditional and say hey learners what do you want to learn let's go we also have these huge ships that are 16,000 kids heads and very large districts and it's like well what shifts can we make right how can we challenge some of the defaults right how do we get collaboration and agency and problem solving into this work and how do we value that and so we're going down that road one of the permissions that you have in the book I think is really important is this permission to go astray and I think it's powerful so how do we help school leaders give themselves this and their teams this permission to go astray and try things that maybe aren't safe proven maybe in other places but maybe not proven where they're at.
Yeah, thank you. I mean, for me that's a critical one because I think it's that narrow linear thinking that locks us into the old ways. It's it's the unwillingness or the the lack of feeling of safety, which I think is what you're kind of pointing to throughout here for trying something different. And that's, you know, what it always comes down to. It comes down to that on an individual basis. It comes down to that on a group and then on an institutional basis. And as you kind of just mentioned a little while ago, I think you know a lot of times there is space within you know as you move down that chain of just individuals in their classrooms of a day beginning to try things
that don't need to, you know, and you describe working at a sort of bottomup way that don't need to start with let's throw out curriculum or let's you know have an entirely new sort of set of metrics for how we measure childhood you know capability. But you know within the the realm of what a teacher or an administrator has room to do that begins to create more space um for different kinds of interpersonal reaction interpersonal you know interactions um for students potentially to have choices that they don't currently have. And again, these can be micro things.
So, I'm having been, you know, present for more largecale change failures than I want to mention. A huge fan, a huge fan of very small, granular, and things that start to tap individual agency right from the start. Because you know what I think happens is that you often and and I'm not coming entirely as you know from an education background. I'm coming from corporates. I'm coming from nonprofits. I'm coming from communities where some leader issues a dictate to do things and then you have a bunch of people sitting there having to negotiate with themselves about their own role in this. And this is where the permission comes up because for me change is all about your relationship with yourself. And what is at stake with me here? What is at stake for me in this process? What am I losing? What am I gaining? But that permission conversation with self is, am I willing to show up tomorrow and do something that I haven't done before? And it can be tiny, but am I willing to do that? And how does that feel for me? And for the most part, in my own experience, what is happening is a fear of loss of control, a fear of loss of status, a fear of loss of belonging. So in in raising this issue of permission, you know, it starts for me to elevate that conversation of what makes me feel like I'm not allowed to do this. Um, you know, what makes me worry that I'm going to get in trouble or that I might fail. So I think that, you know, what I would say is that this going astray can be things that don't have to feel on the front end radical and risky. They can feel playful and interesting.
Sure. Right. In in in our world, you know, in our world, we challenge administrators to redo their faculty meeting, right? Like let's start there and let's make it collaborative. Um let's ask teachers what they want. Um but I want to I want to go back because you you made me take some really good notes just now. So it's how do how do I personally take this change? Right? So am I willing to show up tomorrow and do something different? And we've got a whole bunch of protocols in our leadership workshops that help leaders kind of move from innovators, get them on board to their early majority. We think it's really important. But I'm going to guess that you're going to tell us that it has to start with the leader, right? Like is the leader willing to do that? Go first. Is is my guess right? And then if I am, Um what like how do we do that? How do we decide as leaders that we're going to go first but not look silly or you know all these how do we give ourselves permission?
Yeah. I I think that is the conversation that you have with yourself which is you you know and I I I come back a lot to what is at stake for me in the current story? What's at stake for me in the current way of operating? And you know a lot of my work is and always has been you know facilitating um group dialogues and and coaching sessions and conversations for people. Um and again, this is born out of 30 years of not doing this and realizing what what is going on here because you can sit in the meeting and everybody says this is a great idea and I want to do it, but then everybody goes back and the next day there's resistance and there's fear.
So, how do we how do we start to to get at this? And I talk a lot about being the first and being the last. So, these are things that most people don't want to be. They're happy to they're happy to be the fourth or the fifth. Um, but are they are they going to be the first? And, you know, maybe you can find that one person who's willing to do that one small thing that just models that permission giving that, okay, sure, I'll go. And maybe it's a tiny thing, maybe it's a question. that hasn't been asked before, a conversation, an invitation, um, that just opens up space. I think a lot of times as people in positions of formal authority, we are afraid of we want to come in with like a finished and a a fully fleshed out thing, you know, and implemented. And I think a lot of times we have to be willing to work out loud a little bit
with ourselves and with each other. And let me go even further and with our students if they're old enough and if we feel comfortable enough because I think kids these days could should understand that we are all in a process of adapting our understanding of what this looks like. It's great modeling, right? It's great modeling. Yes. And for me that as I was thinking about our conversation, it's like almost if you begin as a an educator to, you know, absorb the fact that Because the currency of knowledge has now decreased so much because it's everywhere and you can access it wherever you want.
The greatest value in many ways that you can offer is the behaviors that you're modeling the ways the ways in which you are showing up and the questions that you're asking the experiments that you're running the failures that you're owning the emotions that you're willing to kind of share. Now everybody will have to make sense of that within their own context. I It's not a one-sizefits-all formula. But I I think what we need to do as adults is help young people see that, you know, a way of operating that isn't all about I know and I'm here to tell you and you will sit and absorb that and you know in this fixed way to model the more fluid approach to model something that feels feels like it's more of a work in progress. Honestly, I think that's one of the greatest um gifts that we could give our learners.
Yeah. Yeah. It's so good. Like the work we do, we you know, we've got a process. We've got agendas, but everyone ends up customized because it's it's different because we're working through it fluidly and that just freaks some people out. It's like, well, we've been doing it for a decade. Like we right like we know this works, but it's going to be very fluid. Like we we'll get there, but you all are going to work through this. So you you've got one chapter that well frankly it it might freak some of us out. So it's called forget about the future.
It's going to seem scary, right? Because we we do have we have some leaders listening that are at a turnaround school and frankly if they don't make some accountability and some test scores movement they all get fired, right? So like there's those things are there but we also know that we need to have I know kind of a loosenless to a looseness to our leadership so that we can adapt and move So talk to me a little bit about this forget about the future piece and that permission. Yeah, I mean obviously a lot of these are intended to be a little bit provocative, a little bit kind of get you sitting up going, hey, what do you mean by that? And that again is born out of 30 years of change work that was all about decide where you want to go,
build your five-year plan and then work backwards as to how you're going to get there. And I mean I can still recall in the 90s. Yes, I'm revealing how old I am. You know, working with people through, okay, what is quarter three and year four going to look like? And it was like we were working on the assumption that, you know, we were in control of the variables, the future would look like the past. And, you know, we could map out this, you know, controlled set of, you know, plans for ourselves. And even then, I mean, it was a joke because you'd show up not even six months later and everybody would have forgotten about the exercise. So even then we knew it was just kind of theater to make ourselves feel and and Ryan I think so much of this as you're kind of pointing to already is about our sense of control, right? And and and knowing has always been our our pathway to control. And what's freaking us out now is that I don't think there's anybody who knows what next year is going to look like right now. And I mean in the educ ational space in terms of how quickly will the impacts of AI start to force themselves into you know the top of our agendas for changing you know our approaches. Um so as you say you know a loose leadership approach big intentions a big understanding of what the end result should look like could look like but how I'm going to get there is gonna really shift over a much shorter time frame than maybe what I'm used to working with. So, you know, it's shorter time frames. It's a much more inductive rather than deductive approach. It's a readiness to say, okay, you know, I can't ignore what's happening now because I've fixed myself onto a set of three to five year goals and I feel like if I deviate from those, it's a failure. Um, I think You know, I say have big intentions, but small attention. Pay attention to what's right around you.
Be really super present to the opportunities for you to adapt and evolve. Um, and yeah, I think we could not be so preoccupied with the longer term because it will free up, you know, some space for now. I think we can spend less time trying to predict and more time trying to kind of pattern spot and figure out the possibility in the present tense because we devote and have historically devoted a lot of time to the long-term stuff. And I think we could probably without losing a lot of the quality of what we're doing right now sort of narrow some of our time frames down a little bit and open ourselves up to something that allowed us to be a little bit more agile in the way that we work.
Well, let me So, we've got this interesting idea that we think is is a great idea. So, I want to I want to just put this up to you and see see how we do. So, we've got this depends on the school district, but larger districts a five-year plan, right? And we've got the Gant chart that says this is what we're going to do this semester. We got fall semester, right? So, we've literally got this Gant chart. Now, within that, we know that schools are going to interact. So, if it's a district with 24 schools, a large district, some of those elementaryaries are going to come in this semester, some are others based on the leaders perception of iness, right? And within our leadership workshops, we're going to customize what that implementation plan looks like. So, because a lot of times you got a 5-year grant, right? And you have to plan those things out, right, in our world.
So, what I think we do well and might even lead to our next discussion on like thinking small is we've thought big, but that's not in concrete. I always say like this is wet cement, right? And so, here's the general plan. We think we're going to bring people in here and then we're going to customize on the smaller level. As we get to that semester, we're going to plan that out. Yeah. What do what do you think? What would you coke on that or what what what are your thoughts? No, I mean, I get it. I worked in nonprofits for a long time where you got the five-year grant or the three-year grant. I mean, I and I, you know, a lot of times a lot of our work was satisfying the funders
who wanted them. Yeah. Who wanted to know that you thought you knew where you were going to be in five years time. So, I absolutely understand and as you say, as long as you you've done that exercise and it is not to say that that exercise is could not be of value potentially in that it, you know, might stretch you out a little bit. I think the reality right now is I don't think we know really what's going to come along our paths within the next two years. It's going to re configure our understanding of what things look like in five years. Um, building in space for, as you've already kind of noted, little experiments, um, routine check-ins for what are we learning? I mean, my biggest issue with that kind of thinking is that it can often sort of dull our present tense active learning
because we feel like we've done the work of mapping out the path and now we just walked on it, right? And, you know, I think you've got to be super intentional then about staying alive and alert to what's happening along the path that you think you know and as you've said already be willing to say look you know between you know now and when we did this last year these things have changed this is what it's taught us so I think being like extra explicit about what variables are changing what we're learning what little experiments are we running can build some you know adaptive mindset and active learning into that um kind of mandated planning that that you guys have.
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And so, yeah, I appreciate the feedback. You know, I in the plan that we just rolled out a couple months ago, it we got in the room, ridiculously smart people that are passionate, like into the work, and we decided on this this five-year plan, and a week later, we're like, you know what, we got to push this for for whatever that is. So, I like the idea of being extra explicit about hey, we are looking for flexibility. We're looking for variables. If we said implement in October and something happens with your staff and that makes no sense, like let's push that. We're not telling you to operate in October, right? We're we want to make sure it makes sense.
So, the extra explicit that helps and I think extra explicit about, you know, maybe um I mean a couple things different ways of thinking about the same thing, which is what I don't know. So, here's here's a space that you know is either you know rapidly changing within our world. We can't see clearly here. So let's pin that and say we got to keep you know really focused on this which is changing in front of our eyes in real time and so we might want to just be aware of that. Um equally sort of you know some of the things that we're really curious about and want to want to watch so that we can you know learn from it. We can hitch our ride onto if we want to. Um, you know, I I like to I think of this a lot in terms of just the the physical act of like walking into spaces where you've never been before and you're sort of, you know, you're looking around and you're actively trying to see things and learn quickly. And I think, you know, whatever you can do to keep sort of locking into that, hey, look around. Hey, look around.
Hey, you know what's out there that you're either worried about or you're curious? ious about um and all of those are behaviors, right? Those are those are adaptive behaviors and mindsets and those those can exist within a five-year planning cycle. But I think yeah, the extra intentionality just means that they become a part of your culture even if you know the five-year planning is a mandated part of your process. Yeah. I with everything I think there's nuance in this work, right? Like we're not throwing much out. We're we're adapting and
Right. Right. So, you've got a chapter on on traveling light that I think is is really interesting. Um so, your book invites us to travel light, let go of what doesn't serve us. So, can you talk a little bit more about that chapter and maybe bring it back to our administrators and some things that they can let go of? Yeah, I mean, I think the the the lived experience of most people who exist within institutions for an extended period of time is a heaviness.
Yep. And with and with that a loss of a sense of agility and possibility. Um we are encouraged as adults to kind of keep taking on more, keep doing more, keep getting more responsibility or keep moving our way up whatever hierarchy exists. I mean there's a kind of more mentality that I think we associate with good again capable. Um, and I think the flip side of that is that there's there's still judgment even if it's only self judgment attached to no I don't I don't want to do that. No, I can't. Um, no, it doesn't work for me. Um, or you know, either not just saying yes and more or kind of looking at something and saying maybe this has run its course. maybe we don't need to, you know, see this as again a fixed part of how we do things or who we are. And I think in any institution, it's easy for things to quickly become part of the furniture. Um it's much harder to remove that and say, you know, are we good if we stop doing this? So, um I think part of what I say is take only what you can carry.
So there might be se seasons as an individual leader, as a school, as a team where you're just like, you know what, we don't we can't carry this right now. And and that might be some extra programming or something you put in your plan that you were going to do and you say, it's okay. You know, we are allowed in the spirit of adaptability to not chuck it out, but say, can we put this aside? Can we put this down? Pick it back up again later. Yeah. Or not. But You know, when it always struck me that there was this, you know, it's it's kind of the hallmark of moving further into your career or gaining extra responsibility is that you actually start to feel less light
um on a number of different levels. So, it's kind of an invitation to interpret that for yourself and to think about what would that look and feel like for me um and what difference might that make to how I showed up to my colleagues, to my community, to my, you know, people around me at home or at school. Um, because I think it's it's, you know, it's part of what often gets in the way at this kind of imperceptible level is just this deeply baked in sense of like I can't anymore. I don't want more. And change often can be introduced and can feel like more, you know, oh my gosh, now they've got this change thing that they want to do and it just feels like extra responsibility on top of somebody who's already overloaded. So, you know, I think I would treat that as an invitation for conversation of, you know, is there stuff we can put down? Is there stuff I want to put down, but I don't feel allowed?
Yeah. I I thought the first thing I thought of and it's sticking with me is just putting down the self-judgment, right? It's like so many things that we think we're being judged on and we're not even. We're just self- judging. It's like, goodness, that's an easy one. Put that one down. And you know, Ryan, that comes up that simple point cuts through the entire book, which is that so much of any sort of change process, any sort of growth process, it's you and you. There's often so much more space than you allow yourself to explore. You're often the one kind of going, "No, you know, I I I can't, I shouldn't. Um, it's your fear. Nobody is standing around you. And when you start to say to people like, you know, whose permission are you waiting for? Well, they're not actively waiting for anybody else. They're just not used to intentionally giving it to themselves. So, you know, this is really encouraging a more, you know, active dialogue with self around these things.
Can you can you give us an example? of a leader that you've worked with where you know this granting of permission putting down self- judgment um has made a change for them so we can kind of see what it looks like. Yeah, I think you know I have in mind somebody who is the head of an NGO um who I think it was interesting felt a lot of um the kind of intergenerational judgment um which I do think is an issue right now for a lot of older leaders like they perceive the fact that they are regarded as you know irrelevant or they're under a lot of pressure from people around them to adapt and respond to um what they see as expectations that might not be entirely fair or entirely desirable. And I think in this case this person had sort of taken a lot of that and internalized it into a dialogue in himself that he you know hadn't even perhaps had the courage to have a conversation with his team about it. So for me a lot of the self-permission begins to reflect in the conversations you have with the people around you. I mean that's often the very first indicator is that I'm allowing myself to show up and have a slightly more honest convers in which I own my own like concerns, assumptions, worries. And that's what this person started to do sort of one by one starting with the people that he felt the most comfortable with was just to kind of sit down and have some heart-ledd conversations and gut-ledd conversations about how he, you know, worried that he was being seen increasingly as, you know, the boomer. who needed to go
only to realize that that was a story that he made up. Um it was not it was not to say that there weren't differences of opinion about how things should be done or about how you know or that there wasn't stuff that he needed to deal with, but it kind of I think what a lot of people do is latch on to a familiar frame that makes them helps them make sense of what was going on. And in this case that that was what you know he did was oh they think I'm old and irrelevant. And um so yeah, I think for a lot of people it just starts to reflect in the way you invite people in a little bit more. The places that you allow yourself to go into. So maybe you physically show up to new things that you didn't before. You might sit down at the lunch table with the people that you don't normally talk to. Um you make available I think to people in different ways and then you you know one of the things I talk about it is it's not just a thought process you've got to physically go out and do something different right
otherwise it's just you meditating in your own thoughts about what's possible so you know taking small active choices to disrupt what the previous patterns were in terms of how people engage with each other is you know how a lot of it starts to to unfold in informal ways. Okay. As well as in formal ways. And and just got a couple more questions. Um you mentioned this term frame and you and you're talking about permissions and you talk a lot about, you know, how do you get past fear, how you're giving yourself permission. I I remember when I'm switched from traditional teaching to project- based learning. I was in a failing school and the frame I used is it can't get worse. Like we're we're in a failing school. we're going to try something different. We don't fully know the outcomes. We've seen other people that have done it. We've been trained. We don't fully know the outcomes.
But the frame was it can't get worse. And and that just made us it allowed us to move forward and we did get great outcomes, right? Kids showed up to school and then if you could have isolated our little spot, we would have been a a B on Saturday's test. Like we even got that portion. Not that's most important. How important is is framing or even naming the frame or the mission in this in this work. I think it's huge. I mean, I think what you've you've just kind of named it, I actually encourage people to write some of these things out a lot for them.
Um or, you know, talk to themselves like self-t talk. Yep. As you've just, you know, if you were to walk in and say, you know, well, it's not going to get worse. Um what if I only get better might be it can only get better might be the positive version of that, I guess. Sorry. Yes. It can only get better. I named it but that that is actually I actually named it as it can't get worse like it so therefore it can only get better that's how I named it. Yeah maybe I am allowed maybe there is more space
maybe I am safe you know what if what if I am safe to um walk into my classroom and move the chairs around and whatever's going to happen. So you know I think a lot of what we're also talking about here is kind of reframing our own discomforts as things that maybe aren't as threatening or we can handle them more than in our mind's eye we think we can. So I think for a lot of people you sit on the other side of it and your brain turns out what if stories about well if I if I do this then it might feel all these things that will feel risky to me in terms of my place within that system. But you know if you start to move in and take very small steps and say well you know maybe I will be safe if I do A, B, and C. And then you do that small thing where you start to earn and it's all earned, you know, it's not imagined. It's not it's it's earned experiences of you beginning to kind of engage differently and then you're you go, "Oh, okay. I'm all right. Let me try something else." And this for me is a huge huge piece of the kind of change lessons, which is that, you know, often times these things are framed in problems that need to be solved. Something's wrong and we want to make it right and we get into this kind of before and after mindset. Um, and a lot of times I think once we're in problem solving mode, it can actually things feel quite high stakes. You know, it it can feel like, oh my gosh, we need to make this work. What do we going to do you know we've got
and it can also feel overwhelming so I really um try again to reframe it as rather than you know even if there are big things that we need to resolve let's focus on rather um developing some core capabilities that are going to sustain us through not only resolving this issue but anything else that comes along. So my my brain shifts from fixing something to kind of building what I might call a fitness for change and a fitness for making things happen within my space. Um, I kind of describe that as being more creative than corrective.
Now, even if in the end it's the same end result. You obviously want certain things to shift at a bigger scale, but in terms of what I'm required to do on a daily basis, you know, maybe I can chunk that out into small steps that feel a little more creative, a little bit more generative. And in that process, I am learning how to both manage myself because self-management is absolutely critical in all of this. You know, as I experiment with things, as I feel uncomfortable, as I feel afraid, as I'm worried about failure, I get experience dealing with that.
And I would rather have somebody try 10 tiny things and earn that fitness, earn that muscle of making change, then one big thing where it's like, you know, we're going to try this big thing and then it feels high stakes. You don't actually learn as much along the way in terms of earned ability to move through things. Um, so I really encourage people to sort of design little, you know, iterative and cycles and small things that kind of keep you moving forward as opposed to big interventions that that can often paralyze the most creative action.
Yeah, super good. Jill, does that make sense? It does make sense because so I put, you know, evidence of success would be my wording, right? So, you're you've got these small wins that are adding up, showing you that it's working and you're doing good, but you're also I like the fitness term though is really important because then you're you're building these different muscles. That's right. When I was when I did this in the classroom, you know, frankly, there there were a lot of teachers that did not like what we were doing and eventually did not like me, right? But but I had I had evidence of success. It was good for kids and I built this muscle that eventually it's like, well, I don't care what you think about me because I know it's good for kids,
right? It's funny because I'll tell stories to my kids and it's weird for them to know there are people in the world that don't like dad, but but we know why, right? Because we did something different. We shook up the system, but it was good and we had evidence. So, we didn't make this big leap. I think that was important because I think I I'm probably recovering people pleaser, right? And we don't always like to make people angry, but I had these small steps that help me build the different muscles to be able to take that and the evidence to show that it's working for kids.
Yeah. And I think it's going to be really important in the coming years to create spaces for teachers to like write themselves about 2,000 permission slips. Mhm. Because their entire identity has been created around a certain way of operating and to and that's what they were trained to do and that's what they were programmed to do. And you know I think the what I learned from 30 years of people you know and I'll take navigating change and I'll take an example of working with people in the middle of the world's biggest HIV AIDS epidemic. So, you know, we came in and said, "Well, here are three things you can do that if you did them consistently, this thing would, you know, you'd cut this thing down." So, you know, these three things, simple, simple, right?
Mhm. Ran around educating people, handing out condoms, doing this, doing that. Did any of it work? No. Because it wasn't a rational decision. It's not a rational decision. It's about, you know, it's about culture. It's about identity. It's about place and sense of place. And you know, this is where my whole thinking around who's going to be the first one to have that conversation with their husband. You know, who's going to be the last one in their family to, you know, take a second wife? That was an example there. Like, am I going to be the one and realizing that nobody wanted to do that even if it made total sense because their identities were wrapped up in the past.
And I think what we have right now is a lot of people whose identities are wrapped up in the past way of operating and they need to, you know, go through a lot of work with themselves to figure out how they're going to find a path or else they will be irrelevant um very soon. They probably have a few years but you know it's coming. So uh there will be a rising sense of urgency I think over the years that might shake up some people who otherwise were complacent. But I think when we when we also for us as people who are around facilitating change, you know, the empathy to say, I get it. You're afraid.
Yeah. Just afraid. And that's, you know, that speaks to so much of the reasons that people resist the things that make so much sense. Um, and yeah, and so again, I think that building up muscle that building up of a fitness. I I really like to apply sort of like fitness concepts to change because it makes so much sense. It's it's like I say, you know, you can't do a high jump from standing still. You can't you don't go out and run a marathon tomorrow. You start walking. You start stretching. You start doing this. You start doing that. So, let's just start doing that. You know, not scary. I don't feel like a failure. I'm not worried I'm going to, you know, crash and burn.
It's manag ing your story and uh I think you know it's really relevant for you guys right now and for all of us. I mean I'm a parent. I've got kids who are going through all this so I'm managing my own story at the same time. Yeah, Jill, this has been super fun and great. I loved it. It's these I wanted I could we could keep doing this for a long time. I know we could. Right. We don't usually do twoour episodes though, so we're g we're gonna have to wrap. We're having a ton of fun. Uh yeah, thanks for being willing to, you know, just kind of poke some of our work um and really, you know, invest in our leaders that are listening too. So again, I want to give you a chance to to tell us where we can find more out about your work, but I also want to just reiterate some of the quotes I gave at the beginning. You don't have to submit your life to secure mediocrity. I just feel like that should be on a I don't know if you can put it on a wall or not, but maybe on a note card that you carry in your back pocket because I don't know. Anyway, I I love it. So, think small. Take the next right step. That's how change happens. So good. Making everybody else's choices is the easiest. Making your own is the hardest and the most satisfying. I've lived that out.
Optimism is radical. Believing in a better future is borderline revolutionary. And and that's the work we're doing. And so your book comes out comes out next week, right? On the 16th. Uh two weeks on the 16th. Oh, yes. Sorry. Next week. Yep. comes out next week. Uh we can pre-order right now, right? So we could pre-order. Um but we could also go see your TED talk and check out your website. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Where are those at? Yeah, 10permissions.com. Um you can find out more about obviously the book and the work I'm doing around and also trying I know you're in the business of creating community. I'm as well just the kind of we don't have to do this by ourselves. We're all figuring this out. We're all as I said at the beginning stuck between yesterday and today and tomorrow and you know, feeling really pushed and pulled. So, why don't we come together and figure out, you know, how we not only give ourselves permission, but help create structures of permission for other people to say, "Yeah, it's okay." Um, and that there's access to the TED talk there, which was a lot about change. I mean, the TED talk was about change, and that's been the work I've been doing my whole life. So, yeah, there's so many parallels between your work in education and what I'm doing now and what I've always done. And I've just really enjoyed learning from you and the amazing work that you're doing. So, yeah, keep going.
Yeah, thanks for speaking into into our audience and our work, Jill. Appreciate it. Thank you. 100%. Thank you. All right, PBL Simplified Administrators. Uh, what a great talk today. I just find some piece from today. You might have to listen to it twice. Uh, make sure you get Jill's book. I would pre-order it. Make sure you get the first copy and go through those 10 permissions yourself. Walk down that path yourself. take notes, see what challenges you, where do you feel uncomfortable. Uh, and then after you've done that, now you can take your team through it because you need to build those permissions within your team to be able to make change and to be a give them vocabulary, right? Like help them have those conversations of where is change scary, where are the stakes, how can we make a small step before we make a huge leap. And as you start to develop that culture in your school, you're going to see the change that you want start to take place in classrooms and eventually your whole school. culture and then you're going to be super fired up about leading and that's what we're looking for. Go out and lead inspired.
