Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Fixing a faulty sensor in my mind

Of late, I am coming to understand that I have a cognitive flaw that will limit my ability to accumulate social capital among the movers and shakers of my school district.  Put simply, I am not able to sink my teeth into details.

I've actively participated in a wide spectrum of school- and district-level meetings, committees, and task forces.  And as we are wont to do in public education, we spend considerable time developing action plans, policy language, and vision statements.  I believe I have a skill when it comes to understanding the essence of a matter, or grasping the elusive, key insight that allows a group to take an important step back and see the larger picture.  But during the meaty 80% of meetings when bullet points are dissected and smaller dots are connected to form meaningful threads, my mind begins to glaze over and wander.

I am also not proud to admit that this phenomenon occurs with regularity when I am engaged in one-to-one conversations with colleagues as well.  My wife once compared her mind to a hard drive, and declared that she habitually avoids cluttering it with unimportant information.  I do the same except that my mental "importance sensor" is flaky.  I need to get some maintenance done on it as soon as I can.

No comments:

Post a Comment