Resisting the pressure!

It is becoming like a pressure cooker

We are all subjected to institutionalising forces, pressures on us that seek to shape our behaviour to someone else’s agenda.  Four main sources of pressure are:

• Bureaucracy – creates rules to systematise behaviour to minimise risks of non-compliance which has the effect of limiting choices and making creative actions harder to do

• Advertising – aims to make us feel inadequate, a feeling that, apparently, can be assuaged by buying what is being offered

• Managed media narratives – aim to make us fearful of selected people, organisations, ideas etc.  Effectively, aims to choose our enemies for us and shape our behaviour towards them

• Social media – aims to makes us stay on a given platform by providing media that appeal to our anxieties – of missing out, of not gaining approval - and, often, even baser instincts such as hate.

These pressures are not good for us, either mentally or physically.  To resist them, we need to have high levels of autonomy – our capacity to think and act in ways that are meaningful to us.

Most importantly, we need to shelter young people from too much exposure to these pressures (just enough for inoculation) and help young people develop their autonomy so that they too can resist these pressures and develop in healthy ways.

We can develop autonomy in young people in three, linked ways:

• by modelling what it means to be autonomous ourselves, and

• ensuring that we have such self-management that we do not bring to bear our own institutionalising pressures onto young people (and this becomes part of our responsibility for sheltering), and

• supporting autonomy as it emerges

The tools for developing and strengthening our own autonomy are well known and include mindfulness and meditation practices, and practices such as inquiry to help re-frame our beliefs (i.e. use self-questioning and insight to view things differently).

A culture which uses these tools as a matter of course affords individual self-transformation and a virtuous cycle of increasing capability.

Surely, we should be doing this.

You can still download a pdf version of Why We Teach here.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

• To purchase a copy of Red Brain Blue Brain, Student Feedback or Why We Teach go here