423 - Giving an "A"

Today on Getting Unstuck

Hi, I’m Jeff Ikler, host of the Cultivating Curiosity podcast. This summer, I’m periodically releasing mini-episodes of “Cultivating Curiosity.” In about 10 minutes, I’ll dive deeper into a key point from a previously broadcast evergreen episode. The content in these mini-episodes is designed to be readily applicable to your life or work.

At some point during the summer of 2019, I was walking in our nearby forest preserve, listening to a podcast with Tim Ferriss in conversation with Seth Godin. Tim Ferriss always asks his guests during the wrap-up what they’re reading that they find fascinating—books that have truly impacted them. Without hesitation, Seth Godin replied, The Art of Possibility. I thought, if Seth Godin found the book worthwhile, I had to look into it.

The authors of the book are Benjamin Zander, who at the time was the Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and served on the Faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston. That’s an important distinction, as you will hear.

And Rosamund Stone Zander was a family therapist and a landscape painter. Sadly, Roz died in September 2023 in a tragic accident.

The idea

The book’s central premise is that life is a story and we are its author. Many of the circumstances that block us from leading a deeply satisfying life are assumptions and interpretations of our own making. We can, therefore, write better ones. Supporting that idea are 12 practices, which, if followed, promise to transform our thinking and the way we walk through life.

The book, then, and this is important, is not a self-improvement book that results in merely tweaking our undesirable habits or making only incremental changes. The 12 practices are powerfully disruptive. Not surprisingly, because Roz was a psychotherapist, the practices call for a completely different way of looking at the world and our behavior.

I purchased the audio version of the book because the authors narrated it and Ben infused it with rich musical examples. If I had been asked to write a back cover blurb, I might have offered something very erudite like, “I was blown away by it.” It sits on my bookshelf with only a few other titles that I can grab in case of disaster.

At the time, I thought I had little hope of securing Ben and Roz as guests on our fledgling show, but they could not have been more gracious in their response and participation. Episode 100, which I’ll link in the show notes, has become one of my top 5 downloaded episodes out of more than 400, and for good reason.

I’m going to feature two of the practices in this mini-episode:

One is “It’s all invented,” which is really the capstone practice, and

Two, Giving an A.

In both cases, the authors will explain the practice in an excerpt from the original interview, followed by my brief commentary.

It’s all invented. Here is Roz touching on “It’s all invented.”

Everything we do or say is really embedded in an interpretation, and we don't notice that, and when slide back and forth between the interpretation and what we say is real, and most of the time we are saying that what we, how we are interpreting things is reality, and that's how you get Republicans, Democrats, and all sorts of people in conflict because they don't make that distinction, so we are saying everything that you do and talk about, aside from something that everybody agrees is just happened or is true, is a story, and if you, if everything is a story, you can retell the story, and it'll make a different life for you. Enormous power of realizing that, and then saying, "Okay, let me just take the same circumstances I've just dealt with and make up a new story about it that helps, that is enlivening to me and enlivening to you and enlivening to everybody else.

This practice has always taught me that I have the power to reframe and interpret what I’ve seen or heard about something, whether it’s external or internal to me, so that whatever it is becomes more meaningful. I don’t see this as putting a glossy coat of paint on something. It’s challenging me to look at an aspect of life for what can be gleaned from it. This practice definitely calls for me to pause, step back, and refrain from immediate judgment. And that’s not always easy because it runs counter to how our brains seek immediate clarity.

As an exercise, take a situation and see if you can look at it differently so that it is, as Roz suggests, more enlivening. Sometimes you might have to do this through gritted teeth, but remember, you are the author of the story.

Give yourself an “A.” OK, here is the second practice: Giving an A. We’ll hear from both Ben and Roz in this excerpt.

The giving of the, which was Ross's idea, came out of my class, and the reason is that the students were living under such fear of competition and failure, and so I, we came up with this idea, Ross came up with the idea, and I practiced it, which is giving the A the beginning of the year before they've done anything. This is right in the very first class, they get the grade. The condition is there to write a letter at the beginning of the year describing who they will have become by the end of the year, and that to justify this thing, and so they're describing themselves at their very best at being successful and effective and wonderful musicians and people, and that's the person I teach when I go into the class, so that there became a way of approaching all teaching or conducting, I walk into an orchestra and give everybody an a instantaneously before we've begun, and the orchestra players feel that sense of confidence, of trust, of joy, of shared love of the music, and it creates an atmosphere. Oh, and then very important, if they make a mistake, we go, how fascinating. That has to be seen. How fascinating. I encourage people to go out and try that on the golf course, because what we do is we live under such fear of failure that we become very cautious and anxious, fearful, and looking all the time to see if other people are making the mistakes, and so it's not an atmosphere of risk taking and joy, and if you create an atmosphere of risk taking and joy, then, and everybody who makes a mistake gets to say, "How fascinating, then you've got a chance to people to learn more effectively, giving something here about transformation, because if we don't give an A and hope they'll live up to it, right, you see them as an A, and that means that I, or Ben, as the teacher or therapist, or whoever's given the giving the A has to do the work themselves, that becomes the relationship of an A. It isn't just the student that we hope to help along, because they feel loved and everything, and now they, they're not afraid. It is the relationship that changes, and that is the transformation. So, teachers transformed, students transform in the process, and transformation means that you're living in a different world, you're living in a world that doesn't operate by the same physics as the world we live in. It's very hard for people to get that the A is not a judgment

Giving an A is my favorite of the twelve practices because, as Roz pointed out, it carries responsibility for both the giver and the receiver. We can give anyone an A, and that calls for us to see and treat them differently because our intent is that the A becomes, to quote from the book, “a possibility for the receiver to live into.”

I saw immediate application in my lifelong vocation of education. The key, as the authors point out in the book, is for the receiver to “place themselves in the future, looking back, and to report on all the insights they acquired and milestones they attained during the year as if those accomplishments were already in the past. Everything must be written in the past tense. Phrases such as I hope or I intend or I will must not appear.”

As an exercise, give a server in a restaurant an A the minute you sit down. How might doing so impact your behavior toward them? The key point here is that you’re not trying to get the server to live up to a standard you’ve set, but to have them look more carefully at their own behavior and how they want to conduct themselves.

Connect / Referenced

Book: The Art of Possibility

Benjamin Zander Center

Video: Ben’s TED Talk

Video: Ben on “Giving an A”

Rosamund Stone Zander

Book: Pathways to Possibility

Original episode: Creating a Life of Possibility: "How Fascinating!"