TLDR;
Ever feel like you’re doing great at work, hitting all your targets… but secretly, something just feels off?
Then this episode on the Uncommon Leadership Podcast is for you. Join me as I interview Dr. Maria H. Andersen, a learning engineer, EdTech CEO, and highly experienced educator, on the importance of finding the balance between personal fulfilment and professional success.
We talk at length about making intentional choices with your energy and how focusing on where you can make a difference is key to navigating an overwhelming world.
We also explore fascinating strategies like Replenishing Personal Resources and Idea Collisions to prevent burnout and spark exciting innovations.
Dr. Andersen’s expertise in fostering creativity, establishing healthy boundaries, and creating positive company cultures makes this conversation essential for leaders navigating the complex intersection of personal well-being and professional excellence.
If you’re ready to make that change, reclaim your energy, and build a path that’s truly yours, then tune in now!
Want to get in touch with the speakers?
Dr. Maria H. Andersen:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariahandersen/
Michael Hunter:
https://uncommonteams.com/work-with-me/
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Presented By: Uncommon Change
Transcript:
Michael Hunter
Hello, welcome to Uncommon Leadership. Whether you want more innovation, more easily, you’re feeling burnt out or overwhelmed, or you simply know that something isn’t quite the way you know it can be. You are not alone. I hear the same from leaders every day. On Uncommon Leadership, we explore aligning personal fulfillment with business success, creating authentic teams, and cultivating the resilience necessary to move beyond simply surviving today’s challenges into thriving.
I’m Michael Hunter, and today we’ll uncover fresh insights into what it means to lead with resilience, adaptability, and ease. Joining me today is Dr. Maria H. Andersen, the H, to separate her from all the other Maria Andersens, which I understand because there are a million Michael Hunters even in my city.
Maria is the co-founder and CEO of Socrait, her second EdTech startup, which launched just last month, which is November 2024, because there’s a slight delay here. With a 30-year career dedicated to improving teaching and learning, Maria has always kept one foot in the classroom. She’s taught across community colleges, private colleges, universities, and K-12 schools, covering a wide range of subjects including math, business, chemistry, ELL, or English Language Learning, and her personal favorite, a middle school elective she designed called “Technology and Society”.
Welcome, Maria.
Dr. Maria H. Andersen
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Michael
Excited to have you here. When did you first recognize that integrating your whole self and bringing that into everything you do might be a valuable approach?
Maria
Well, I spent my first 15 years as an adult, maybe longer than that, maybe more like 20 years as an adult, inside of academia in some way or another as a student, as a grad student, as a professor.
And so I don’t know that I realized anything was missing until I left it. And when I left it to work in EdTech in 2012, something started to feel off in my balance. The one lovely thing about academia is there’s always lots to do. There are multiple classes to teach. There are committees to be involved in.
There are extra jobs on the side that you can do. And so I had always found a way to fulfill my brain’s needs with the things that surrounded me. And when I moved into EdTech, I started to feel hints that things might be missing. And one of the things that I realized about probably five years into that was that I really needed like a teaching and learning outlet.
I have been involved with classes pretty much since I was 18 years old in college. Even then, I graded papers for a professor. I taught review sessions for math subjects. The next year I was a TA for chemistry, like I’ve been teaching since I was 18 years old. And to not be teaching was just very strange.
And I realized that there’s something about teaching that, the first thing is that you can actually leave your entire life behind when you’re in front of a classroom. It is so all consuming, to manage a class of students, teach the content, figure out the right pedagogy to go along with all of that, and the behavior management, you pretty much have to leave everything else in your life behind.
So in some ways, it’s like therapy from your regular life because whatever was worrying you, I actually cannot worry about it. At least I can’t while in front of a classroom. It’s like fully occupying of my entire self. And so, not having that kind of release from regular life meant that you were thinking and worrying about all your normal things all the time, without any break from it.
And the other thing I realized was that teaching, gives you a very real kind of petri dish to try creative things like you can think of them on a Monday and try them on a Tuesday and see how they work with real students, you know, in a real situation and very little in the corporate world, gives you that kind of creative outlet to just like, have an idea and try it the next day.
You know, depending on the size of the organization, sometimes you have an idea, you have to run it through 12 people. It has to run its way back down to you. By the time it gets back down to you, you have 12 better ideas and none of those have been approved. Right? So, I found as I moved into EdTech that I really had a need to fill.
I’m guessing that a lot of people fill that outlet because they have their own children and I don’t. And so this is kind of like, it’s my connection to youth. It’s my connection to just having a break from my regular life and, just that real-world creative outlet, I guess.
So that’s probably when I first started to feel that something was off. I really felt it. I think I really felt it the most when I was at, I did a stint as the director of learning design for Western Governors University. And for a while there, I had a really great team and we did a ton of really creative work together.
And then that team started to peel off to other leaders and my team kept shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. And as that happened, like my outlet to do creative things kind of started to disappear. And I probably would’ve just gone and taught a class and like fulfilled it that way. Except they had a really strict no outside work policy.
Like none. You couldn’t drive an Uber, you couldn’t teach a class, you couldn’t be a karate instructor, like you couldn’t do any outside work. And that was, you know, the thing that I would have gone to get that fulfilled, it wasn’t available to me. And in the end, I ended up leaving and that was probably at least a good part of it.
Michael
How much of what was missing in the situations was explicit act of teaching or of teaching kids?
Maria
That’s a good question.
Michael
Working with kids?
Maria
I do think that for me, that is, like if I had to pick my ideal work life balance, that there would always be that there, whether one year I the first year after I left Coursetune, I really was exhausted and I just wanted to have something of a break year. So my break year is probably different than other people’s version of a break year.
So I went to try my hand at teaching in K-12, and I taught a high school class on entrepreneurship and I taught this middle school class on technology and society, which had no curriculum whatsoever, and I had to completely build from scratch. And then I taught English language to immigrants who were new to the United States, who have literacy in another language but not English.
And so that was kind of like teaching three things I had never taught before, to three different levels of students. And that was my break year from everything else, which is probably not, like I said, anybody else’s version of a break year. But it was my version of a break year. And, I mean, your question is how much of it is teaching?
I think that, that’s my ideal, right? Like if I could do anything, teaching is just this lovely balance of creativity and fun, and teaching kids, you laugh every day. The things they say, especially middle schoolers, they also are incredibly frustrating. But you do laugh every day, and I can remember weeks in the corporate world where I didn’t laugh once on the job, you know, the entire week.
And, I think that that’s, again, it might be something you normally get from having your own children, but you know, I need that, personally. I think you have to, at some point, recognize the things that you need personally. Right?
Michael
Absolutely. This is one of the things I help people recognize and give to themselves is what I call their, your replenishing resources.
That we each have a set of things that we need to get. And if any of those were not getting enough, we’re refilling enough on whatever durations they need to come in at, then they can be super unhappy. A lot of the burnout and overwhelmed with the people that I’ve worked with and encountered, A, if not the primary root causes, often they’re one or more of their replenishing resources is too low, has been too low for too long.
And it’s like your garage door opener when one of those batteries is flat and the other one’s super good. Like, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and you can’t ever tell what’s gonna happen. Yeah. And people are the same way.
Maria
Yeah. I did feel like in the corporate world, like in early days, like of Coursetune, we were still building so much from scratch, and it was very creative, and you could see kind of like what was happening every day, and that was great. But as products mature, like my vision of a roadmap, you know, goes like four years out, you’re building tiny little iterations over, you know, two to four weeks or six weeks each time, right? And so that fulfillment of that like immediate satisfaction of like, Ooh, let’s try this, and then seeing a result, it’s like, it got to the point where like when you finally got to see the finished result, you were already onto the next iteration of what needed to be built.
It was almost always like a dissatisfaction because the day you released something, you’d start hearing about all the other features people wanted to have that you knew were in development but didn’t get out then, you know, like it just wasn’t quite the same anymore. And, teaching did help temper that a bit because there was always something, a creative outlet for that. In fact, when I, you know, wrote the offer letter to myself for my, this new company, I made sure to put in that letter that I would always be allowed to teach at least one prep. You know, that’s important to me, and I don’t want it taken away from me.
Michael
I love the idea of writing yourself an offer letter for the company that you are founding. Where did that idea come from?
Maria
Well, you kind of have to, ’cause you have to have like your stock vesting policies and, you know, what are your, my co-founder and I, we co-wrote our offer letters, you know, and I signed his, and he signed mine.
Right. So, but you, kind of, it’s good to set forth the things upfront that are important to you so that those are not removed and I think that’s actually, I know one of the questions later on is about, creating, you know, cultures that are, make people feel safe and empowered and, I think that actually allowing people and encouraging people to have their own side project is actually fairly good.
I think that a lot of creativity, innovation comes from the collision of random things in your life. And so if you can find something that really you feel passionate about, that you know, might take a few hours away from hours you could spend on work, you know, but still helps your brain to flourish and think around new ideas, that is actually more valuable to the company.
Those random collisions of a different, a whole different realm of subject area, colliding with what you’re doing. I think can be much more valuable than just more time spent doing the same thing.
Michael
Absolutely. And many companies want to do this. Not quite as many companies actually try to do this. What I find is a lot of the employees, the people who have to actually go do it, find it really hard to take their time away from their, call it mean job or the work that they’re doing to finish the sprint, this release, to take that time every week, every sprint to go off and work on something else.
You clearly don’t have that problem. You have ideas and engagement around this overflowing, and more than you could possibly do. What helps you keep excited about that and actually take the time to go do these other things that aren’t that central thing?
Maria
Well, I think one of the beauties of being a teacher is that you don’t actually have the luxury of not going to do it.
Like, if you have agreed to show up at a time and a place to teach a class, you will do that, right? There’s no real ability to just say, like, I don’t feel like teaching today. I’m just gonna stay home. Right? Like, you’ve made a commitment to the kids you teach or the adults you teach, and the time and the, so I think that one thing you can do is to have a high stakes appointment to do that stuff, right?
And, clearly being a teacher, an instructor, a volunteer, or something gives you that, like, oh, I did say I was gonna do this, so I’d better go. Right? So making a commitment, like an actual commitment to doing it, can help. That can be on the instruction side, it can be like, I actually paid and signed up for a class to do this, so I’m going to go do it.
Right. I’m sure that’s why so many exercise clubs have a fee that you pay if you don’t show up. Right. To help you to overcome that last-minute, like, oh, I’ll just stay in this meeting. Like, I don’t wanna pay the $20. I think I’ll go to class. Right. Another thing that you can do to make sure that you actually commit to the path you wanna be on, like maybe it’s like learning a new subject or something like that. I find it really helpful to sign up to give a workshop or a talk on a new subject, like say 6 to 12 months from now, so that there is no way I can back out of learning it. That like I have a high-stakes public failure ahead of me if I don’t learn the topic that I am going to be talking about, and I know from experience that a 6-month period or a 12-month period is enough time for me to really kind of wrap my head around a difficult topic. But there are lots of ways you can kind of hold yourself accountable to, something to make sure that you do actually set aside the time. It certainly can help to just, you know, have it on your calendar ahead of time so that there’s not any ability to schedule over it, you know?
At some point, my co-founders and I had to make a deal, essentially, like whenever they had kids to pick up, we would drop the call. Like if somebody said, I need to go pick up a kid from school, that was the end of a call. But I had this thing I do every morning. I walk my dogs at seven every morning, and every morning of the week, I walk my dogs with a different person.
These are all people who do not live near me. I have them on a headset, and so I have a Monday person, and every other Tuesday, I have different people who share Tuesday and Wednesday’s the same person. Thursday, it’s the same person. Friday it’s every other week. And so that’s time that I spend, that I dedicate to talking to a friend, right?
Consistent conversation where we can catch up and see how each other’s lives are doing. And, again, it’s a kind of a way to have a random set of ideas come at you from somebody who’s immersed in a different reality than yours. One of my friends is an acupuncture doctor. Another one runs her own consulting business around, math, developmental math reform.
One is an author in the instructional design field. One’s a futurist, right? And so to me, those 7:00 AM calls are really important both because I get to connect with a friend and I, get to kind of put my brain at problems that aren’t my problems, and to hear about ideas for things that are mine, my problems, right?
And so those calls were important to me. We always had morning meanings that would run into those calls, and at some point, I just had to say, look, to me, this is like picking up a kid. We have to stop running through my things. If you’re picking up a kid, we drop the call immediately. I just need to say I’m picking up a kid, and you guys know what that means.
And we drop the call immediately and I get to go to my phone calls. Right? Because there are some things where on a job, if you say a phrase like, I need to pick up a kid right now, everything stops. Right? And I don’t think that we give people who are childless the same grace that we give people who have children sometimes.
And so that became our phrase for, no, you need to respect Maria’s time too. Like this is her special thing she does, and we need to respect that. That way I get my exercise, I get my phone calls with friends, like, you know, these are things that are important to keeping my brain functioning optimally.
Michael
Thank you for all those examples. I see lots of ways to apply that into a business context. I’m curious, when you were at Coursetune and the other business environments, and I guess in your academic environments too, how did you help your people consistently take this time to do things not related to their primary task so that they had this creative time to pursue and bring in the innovations that could make an enormous difference in the company or the environment?
Maria
Well, I think one thing you have to do, as a leader, is to know what hobbies and things that your employees like to do and encourage it. Don’t, so first, don’t discourage it. Right? I think a lot of these things end up getting shut down kind of by accident because of a lack of understanding that that’s what’s happening, right?
So, I could probably list every single one of my employees at Coursetune and tell you what they liked to do in their free time and what times of day they did those things. And, you know, I had one employee who we agreed upfront would only work a 32-hour week, and that was enough at our company to get healthcare and benefits.
But that was the best thing for that employee, to manage their work-life balance and what they had going on. And they definitely put in a regular week of thinking and innovating. And I mean, different people have a different capacity for doing work, right? And like, just like there are 10x engineers, there are 10x of every other type of employee too, right?
And so, to imagine that a specific number of hours is like the ideal number of hours also seems a little strange to me. The work is the work, and I’ve always judged employees a lot more for what they are capable of getting done than the number of hours they put in.
Michael
So often work can, there’s always more work to do than we have time, and it’s so easy to focus on getting more of the work done because it’s always all super important. How do you keep those boundaries for yourselves that, yes, I could work another 40 hours today and it’s really, I need to go do these phone calls or make dinner or it’s just, it’s been enough hours today that I’m done and then how do you help your employees do that?
Maria
I think the longer you work, the greater recognition you have that you will never get everything done. I mean, I think that my current to-do list has something around 400 items on it. And there is a point where you’re seasoned enough to know that it doesn’t really matter if you stop and come back to it tomorrow, like things are getting done, and that’s all you can do.
The hardest part is actually focusing on the big deliverables when there are so many little things to do as well.
I think though that teachers are particularly good at this because the big deliverable is showing up in a classroom and teaching something to students in the most creative way you can think of and the details are the getting back, you know, answering emails, grading papers, administrative duty, like those are all the details, right?
And teachers do manage to show up every day and, get the big thing done. And so, to some extent, I think teachers are actually masters of this. It’s a hard thing for me to stay focused on the big things, so some days I write a list of like three big things I wanna focus on during the day, so that hopefully by the end of the day I’ve got those things.
Like I’ve moved those things forward amidst all the tiny details of, minutia of running a company. There are some great apps that kind of try to help you pick, you know, your top three for the day. What are the three things you must wanna get done today? I’ve been trying to use an app called, let’s see what it’s called.
I think it’s just called Journal. That’s what it says on the app anyways. And it will say like, you know, what are your top three things you wanna re like focus on today? So if you manage to, you know, use an app regularly, something like that might help and then your other question was, how do I help employees to do this?
I have to say that I kinda live and die by to-do lists. And so I try to help, every employee kind of has their own different strategy for how they get things done. The ones I have the most difficult time with are the ones who write nothing down and then drop the ball all the time. And so I’ve had several employees I’ve mentored over the years, to, I think I had one instructional designer who worked under me, and he just relied on his memory a hundred percent and never wrote things down, and at some point I was just like, leave this meeting. Go get yourself a piece of paper. Don’t come back until you have a paper and a pencil. I’m done with this. Right. And after that, he started carrying a notebook and he started writing things down, and I saw him, several years after I’d left WGU, at a conference, and he was like, wait, I just gotta show you something.
He went to his backpack, he pulled out a notepad, and he’s like, look, I still do it. Still write things down. It was a really good piece of advice. Right. I think that when you’re young, you think that your memory is fantastic. And I think that in general, that is true when you’re young, but that’s young without phones distracting you constantly.
Right. And I think of this last decade, the phone is so much of a distraction from the things that you’re supposed to be remembering to do. It’s putting so much information to your head that you don’t even realize how much you’re dropping out of, you know, you’ve said you’ve committed to something.
You’ve said you’re gonna do something, and it just disappears within half an hour. Right? And so I do think it’s actually more important than ever before to just write down things in some way. So that they don’t get dropped. They don’t necessarily have to be done immediately, but they do.
Probably, if somebody asked you to do something and you said you were gonna do it for heaven’s sakes, write it down. At least so that you keep becoming aware that there’s this thing that you did say you were gonna do. It’s really just bad form to commit to things and not even make progress on them. So I guess trying to help employees with a strategy that works for them.
Everybody’s kind of got a different system and a different way, and you know, some people like to use Evernote, some people like to use Notion and you know, I just use like a simple to-do app, for mine. But, you know, just finding some system that works to help people to stay on track. There’s also something magical about writing things down.
I think that you can, if they’re written down, you know, you won’t forget to do them. And so you can go about the rest of your life. Like you can go about having dinner with your family and doing an activity in the evening. And if you think of something you need to do, all you need to do is. Go to whatever app you’re using and write it down, right?
And then it’s outta your head again. Helps you to sleep at night, things like that. So I guess that’s just helping people if they need a strategy, if they’re not there yet, helping them to find something that lets them set aside that stuff and enjoy their life. I also always encourage employees to take vacations.
You know, I always wanna know when your next vacation is. Do you have it planned? Is it on the calendar? ‘Cause I think relaxation is really important. Having new experiences is really important.
Michael
Yes. Which is a great segue into my next question, that this is all how do we help ourselves, how do we help our people recognize the value coming out of taking that time away on vacation and also taking the time away from the primary things into the more exploratory, experimental, don’t know what’s gonna come out of this time on a regular basis. How do we, how do you show the business value, to people up the management chain from you, your peers, where you’re at the top like you often are as the, as a founder. How do you show the business value to them taking this time away from the thing that customers are demanding yesterday?
Maria
I mean, the best way I can do it is to model it and to be transparent and how other things have helped the company. Right. My husband is always amazed at how some random thing I did, that he’s like, I don’t even know why you’re doing this. Will end up being the thing that helps a particular idea or feature, or design that we have.
I can’t think of an example at the moment, but he still just like, I can’t believe that random thing actually helped. And so I do like to, like, when I get an idea from outside of the realm I’m in, I try to make sure that that’s, it’s clear that that’s where it came from. So like some of the design, of Coursetune came from biology actually.
Things that I had seen in biology diagrams in biology, like in electrophoresis gel, and like just a way a different field has taken information and modeled it or experimented with it, helped me to figure out how to build a very complicated instructional design system. So in a way that you could visualize what was going on.
And if I didn’t have a biology degree, I would not have been exposed to those things. Right. And, sometimes that there would be an insight, you know, from a conversation with the student that would help me figure out how to frame a particular problem we were dealing with, or an idea for how to present something in a new way.
And so just modeling that, being transparent, that like this ideas don’t happen in a vacuum. I’d say one thing an organization could do to help this would be to have a group read of that, I think it’s Steven Johnson’s book, ‘Where do ideas come from?’ Something like that. And one of the things he shows you in that book is that ideas are not just sparks that you have.
An idea usually comes from the collision of something new you were just exposed to, with your unique life experience and problems you’ve been trying to solve. Right? And that the reason we sometimes see the, what’s called the adjacent possible, it is just the development of the same idea in two places at two times by two people.
For example, calculus was discovered by two people at the same time, is because you reach, you’re at this like technological or knowledge frontier, and two people encounter something new on that frontier with the similar backgrounds, maybe slightly different subjects. And that collision of things is what actually sparks an idea.
And so like learning to understand how ideas actually are formed, you need this like idea bath. You need to be constantly exposed to new things. If you’re not constantly exposed to new things, you don’t even know which new things are gonna be the things that actually collide with the problems you’re trying to solve correctly.
Right? But you do need to be exposed to new ideas. And so what better way to have that happen than to have, you know, hobbies and projects and work outside of what you normally do that just keeps you constantly exposed to new thoughts and new ideas. Whether that’s volunteering in a kid’s classroom or, you know, some kind of instrument you play on the side, or a side project where you’re volunteering for an organization like these, are all things that are really valuable for creating that synergy of ideas.
We had a phrase where I went to a TEDx event in Qatar, many years ago, and we called it, that book had just come out recently, and we called it Idea Sex. Like when you, get a collection of people together who all have different backgrounds and are, you know, can talk for several hours. It’s just this, like all of these ideas floating around the room, having sex with each other and creating offspring.
Right? And that just doesn’t happen if all of your employees spend all of their time working for your company and doing nothing else; that doesn’t happen. So, you know, maybe the solution is a group read of this book or something like that, so that everybody really gets that this is valuable and important to the company.
Michael
What I’m really hearing you say is, the value we’re here in the business to create is not getting the thing done that the customer is asking for, or that some boss has decided needs to happen, or that was what we planned for the sprint. The value we’re really here to do is delight our customers, create outrageous, unexpected, delight for our customers, and that can’t; it’s really hard to plan that because again, know where we are and there’s an evolution and we can make things better and better and better. Yeah, we can project that some of this is gonna really delight our customers.
But the really unexpected things, the products that have really changed the tech world, or the ideas that have changed the world, all came out of unexpected directions. It wasn’t anyone sitting down and saying, okay, I’m going to create a Walkman, like I’m gonna create this thing that everyone’s gonna have on their ears, or I’m going to create the iPhone or your Jordans or Levi’s 501s.
People didn’t sit down to create these. They all came out of someone fulfilling some need for something that a whole bunch of ideas having sex with each other, as you said, that was the metaphor?
Maria
Yeah. I mean, I do think it is still important that you balance, like you do have to deliver features that customers want and you should not like, lose sight of that, but it can’t be so single-minded that there’s not space to think about, like, it’s very important that employees and leaders have other things in their life to have those sparks, to have those insights and innovative moments. And so you should really not shut them down. You should encourage them. And the work that gets done is, the work that gets done. And you hope to hire people who are productive enough that their work week gets the main things done, but giving them the space to do the side projects and the volunteering, and the hobbies.
It’s probably just as valuable to your employees’ ability to innovate in their spaces. More valuable to your company than having them work 80 hours.
Michael
Great. We need to nurture and encourage the full spectrum from completely to total dredge. These are the, we know exactly what to do. It’s just straight execution.
There’s no perhaps obvious creativity involved and everything in between, and letting people explore to understand where on that spectrum is best for them to be at any one point in time.
Maria
Yeah. You know, that work is hard because there’s always things involved in work that is actual work, right? There’s nothing fun about having to go and I’m hiring, you know, we have employees already in three states, so I’ve gotta go to three states and set up that we’re a foreign entity in that state.
Do a business license for that state, get the workers’ compensation accounts, get the tax accounts, connect that all to payroll. Like nothing about that that’s particularly fun or innovative, but it is required. It is ‘part of the work’, part of work, right? I think you have to balance a job so that you’re not doing a hundred percent stuff like that.
So that there is the ability to manage and control some of your own projects and, pass. Right. But that’s not to say we’re gonna make the other stuff completely go away. That’s part of the job, too. Right? And I have to do those things just the same as everybody else has to do those things. I think one of the places we’re going wrong in the US is by creating jobs that are nothing but that. That are nothing but a slog.
I think all of this movement to like create very, very, very specific jobs where somebody just does one thing as their job is really harming us. I don’t know how easy it is to be a happy employee and to look forward to your work when your work is very, very, very narrow in scope. I think we would be better off widening the scope of jobs a bit and having, you know, if you had 10 people who each did a very specific job, why not have 10 people who each can do three jobs instead?
It makes you get, gives you a team that’s more capable of covering each other’s workload. It gives people variety. They might hate one aspect of the job, but like two of the others, right? Like I think our drive to specialize has actually hurt, our ability to thrive as humans. So I know that for me, the more specialized jobs have become for me, the worse I like them.
And you know, that might just be me. There may be people who really love doing it only one thing as their job, but I doubt it. I think having a little bit of de-specialization would make a lot of jobs better.
Michael
Is that one of the things that you love so much about teaching that it forces you to be a generalist and to have that full spectrum of, it’s a dredge of grading the math problems where there’s a yes or no answer all the way through the creativity of coming up with lesson plans and figuring out how to teach gerunds to this particular set of kids who are not the way to do it for this set of kids you had last semester?
Maria
Yeah, I do think that there’s a lot of that in teaching.
I may just, I may crave it more than other people. I am probably more of a neo generalist by, you know, just by design. And so like, I don’t even like teaching just one subject. I did leave academia in 2012 ’cause I just couldn’t teach math anymore. It was the primary thing I taught, and I was just. I had spent 10 years becoming as creative and as good of a teacher.
But I just wasn’t getting the same bang for my buck anymore, teaching math. And so after I left, I ended up teaching, you know, like social media and business ethics and, entrepreneurship, and business management. And I, you know, I did go back and teach a little bit of math, but only under the promise that I could teach it however I wanted, as long as I was teaching the main parts of the subject area, which, you know, I got to do at a private liberal arts college.
And even, you know, like right now I’m teaching full-time, in K-12 and I’m teaching AP Calculus, Entrepreneurship, ACT math and technology and society. So, like very different classes. So, I think I particularly have a need to do a wide variety like it keeps my brain engaged fully, to teach a wide variety of things, to do a wide variety of things.
Now, I will say that teaching full-time while starting a new company is not ideal. So I will drop down to halftime in about two weeks. In the meantime, it’s a little bit nuts.
Michael
Because teaching only halftime will still be a little nuts.
Maria
It’ll be less nuts. I have taught calculus like 30 times, this is my 32nd time teaching calculus, so it’s not really something I have to do much prep for. I can show up and teach calculus. I have binders full of activities and notes and I could teach it without prepping it. So for me, that one’s not much of a burden, and I didn’t feel like if one is taking a one-year-long class, you shouldn’t have to switch instructors halfway through, so felt important to keep that one.
Michael
Yeah. And I’m getting the sense that for you, the intensive cross-pollination is super energizing, where for someone else it might be super draining.
Maria
It is super energizing. I often find that like something I’m like teaching in my technology and society class will like, bleed into my entrepreneurship class or my business class because something we’ll be talking about in there about the evolution of a particular technology, you can see like the business side of it, you know, and, teach it in another class. And, yeah, I mean I think it’s a really interesting cross pollenization and I started, this year in particular, I started building, we finally have a block schedule for two days of the week at the school I teach at.
And that gives you like 90 minutes with the kids once a week instead of 45-minute sections. And knowing that we had that 90 minutes meant that I could kind of think about, like, okay, what kinds of experiments or simulations could we do in that time that I didn’t, wasn’t able to do before? So we’ve probably built like almost a dozen simulations this year that for entrepreneurship and for technology and society, so that we could learn how something worked in a more physical way, with kind of a hands-on immersion instead of just reading about it. And so that’s just even like a slightly different set of constraints can completely change how you do something. Right. And again, just being able to try it and do it immediately. There’s just not many other kinds of careers where you get that chance to just, you know, change everything immediately, just to see what happens.
Right. It’s a really good one.
Michael
Is that one way that you help yourself find your way through all the change and uncertainty, and overwhelm that life seems to be ever more these days?
Maria
Well, I had to kind of develop a new strategy at about October of this year, watching how the election was progressing and realizing that the numbers were never gonna change no matter what. Like nothing that happened could change the numbers for the election at all. Crimes, great speeches, like nothing changed anything, policies, nothing changed anything.
And just realizing that there was not much that could be done, and yet I was spending a ton of time worrying and, being stressed about this. And so I actually kind of came up with a new plan for myself in October. And, one of the things was kind of sparked by my husband, who said, I had to like, wrote down my notes on this one ’cause I wanted to get this right.
He said, “Reading about this and watching videos about this and worrying about this is not actually changing anything. But it is making you sad and depressed and stressed out, and knowing these things are happening is not actually changing anything in your life right now.” Which is true. So I decided to kind of box in the amount of time I spent looking at politics.
I did it a very extreme version of this in that I decided to stop looking altogether and he was kind enough to agree to send me a weekly rollup of any articles, videos or stories he thought I would actually be interested in, because it relates to something I teach or something I do or something that’s important to me.
And so I go through once a week and read the his links. I just go directly to the stories, I read those stories, and that’s it. I think individuals can also like time box this and say, okay, I’m only gonna look, I would only look if it, if you find that it’s getting you down. I would only look on a morning when you have a really busy day. Because what happens on a really busy day is it pushes out the busyness of the day, pushes out the worry about what’s going on, right?
Now, I pair this with two other activities, so I should say I’m not just ignoring the news. I’m purposely ignoring the things that keep me from being my best self in the world. And so the second thing I am doing is funding all of the groups that are actually fighting the things I want fought, the battles I want fought.
I am not a lawyer and so I cannot directly have an impact on most of the things that are happening and about to happen. But I can fund the lawyers, so specifically looking for organizations that fund lobbying, legal battles, et cetera. And I am funding those things, right? So that is how I can directly impact what’s going on.
it might be volunteering for those folks, but right now I have no time. So for me, it’s funding those. And then the third thing is to look at the community around you and to say, who in this community of people around me is gonna need the most help? In the next four years, who is going to be hurt the most?
Who is going to be feeling the most direct impact every day from the things that are happening? Who can I help around me? Are there immigrants around me that I can help feel more comfortable in this country? Are there LGBTQ friends who I can help by being more supportive of, by inviting to more activities, by sending a text several times a week to see how they’re doing?
Are there BIPOC friends of mine that I can support better? Right? Are there low-income people around me who need more help with watching kids, meals occasionally, you know, because maybe some of the, where we’ve landed is because people don’t feel enough support from their communities. Are there teachers around me that could use help and support because they are so poorly paid, like so poorly paid?
I regularly watch my colleagues have flat tires and breakdowns on, you know, they’re, a lot of ’em are driving an hour to get to a school because they can’t afford to live in the community where they teach, right? Like, there are so many people around you, you can help in your own community, right? So, the deal I made with myself was gonna stop watching all of the news and reading all of the news because there’s nothing I can do about most of it.
I can fund the people who are actually doing something about it, and I can support more people in my community around me who I know are directly affected by the things that are gonna happen. And that allows me to then spend my life energy, doing the things that I can do, right? Like having the actual positive energy and the full energy to be supportive, to put all my time and effort at trying to solve problems I can solve.
Right? And, unfortunately, I think so many of us have gotten sucked into this media cycle around the anger and the outrage. And the more sucked into that you are, the less of your attention is going to the things that might actually make a difference to the people around you. So, you have to give it a little thought to how you wanna spend your life energy and whether you really wanna spend another decade of your life being outraged and worried.
I just decided back in October, I can’t do it anymore. I can’t spend another decade of my life outraged and worried. I need to go back to being a person who could be more creative and positive force for change in the world. Right? And that’s a lot of that is how we demonstrate it. It’s how we demonstrate it to the people around us.
Michael
So we can all do both in our personal life and at work, what you’ve just been explaining what you’re doing to bring our best selves into everything that we do. We can recognize what it is that’s holding us back from doing that. We can identify what about that we can’t change and take action to not focus on those steps.
For you, you’re not watching that part of the news, and you are, your husband’s sending you updates so that you don’t worry about missing things that you might really wanna know about. Then you are giving your happy, joyful, ‘make the world the place you want it to be’ energy to people who can take action in ways that you want to happen and that you know you can’t be yourself. And then you’re finding all sorts of creative ways to take action that you do have ability to. Of funding all sorts of groups who are going directions that you want, helping people in your community around the world. You can help make the world more of the way you want it to be for them. These are all things that we can do in the workplace, too.
Maria
And it was really interesting because it was about three or four weeks after I made that change that I actually came up with the idea for this new company I started. And, it’s a spectacularly good idea for solving the teacher burnout problem. And I don’t know that I would’ve had it if I hadn’t made the space in my head to actually be able to think about other things, right?
I think we all may be handicapping ourselves from our truly great ideas with this kind of attention, and outrage cycle that we’re all, that we’ve all been stuck in for so long. And I don’t wanna discount that there are very real things that are gonna be happening in the world that are not great.
And there will be people who have to pay attention to what’s going on because they may be directly affected by it. I mean, I may, I am a woman who is most likely gonna lose some of my rights, because women are part of the target of this new administration, right? But I just can’t do anything about that fact, other than funding people who will immediately fight it.
And so like, I have a phrase, I use my friends fund the lawyers, right? Just keep funding the lawyers, they are the ones who are going to immediate, they are the ones who have to pay attention, who have to immediately react, and have to immediately, you know, start legal action. And so they’re the ones who need the funding, right?
Me being angry at a congressman in my living room is not gonna help anything. So I just have to come up with positive ideas for change and, me actually maybe it’s just that, us being able to be positive forces for good, is the best way to fight this. And to be a good example to everybody around us, the kids that are in our sphere of influence, whether that’s your own children, your children’s friends, like even if you’re not a teacher, you know, there are people in your sphere of influence that need to see a positive force for good, to be able to have the energy, to be a force of nature in this world, right?
I can’t have that kind of energy if I’m constantly angry and worried and upset. So I think we all have to find our own path to what gets us there. But if you can find a path that means you don’t have to spend the next decade or four years not living your best life, then I think you should find that path.
We all have to find that path and that’s maybe the best thing we can do.
Michael
We do all have to find our path, and that’s maybe what life is all about is how can we inhabit that path more fully? How can we show up as more of ourselves, more of the time, and more of the places, and help everyone around us do the same?
Maria
Yeah.
Michael
The more that we’re able to do that, the more we can turn these scary, uncertain, overwhelming, burnout inducing situations, whatever that is for us right now, into situations that inspire creativity and allow us to have them breakthrough ideas like you had for your new business, that’s really what our companies and our families and friends in the world need us to have is to bring our unique perspectives into their lives so that we can enrich each other.
Maria
Absolutely.
Michael
You have a blog which is stuffed full of many years of all sorts of interesting writing. Is that the best way for people to get in contact with you?
Maria
I haven’t been writing so much lately. Unfortunately, I think, well, K-12 teaching is really quite, it will really take all of your time. I think on my best days as a full-time teacher, I maybe get 50% of the job done. It’s crazy what teachers are expected to actually do, every day, I think.
Anyways, this is all just to say I don’t write as much as I used to. I have probably like years of writing in my head that haven’t been written down. But certainly when I have had, when I do have time, occasionally I will put something up there. So, that blog is edgeoflearning.com and there’s certainly more than a decade of writing there already about some of the strategies that I’ve found helpful for managing time or productivity or, having insights, and how to work better and teaching if you’re a teacher.
And there’s a lot of stuff there on teaching too. I’d say, like if you’re trying to get ahold of me, you’d probably start with LinkedIn because I do kinda look at that every day. And my email, of course. But you can find me on LinkedIn.
Michael
I’ll have all those links in my, in the show notes, and I’ll note for the audience that if you’re thinking, well, I’m a manager, I’m a program manager, I’m a developer, I’m not a teacher. All this stuff that Maria is writing up on her blog probably isn’t gonna be relevant. Remember, everything we’ve talked about today about cross-pollination across disciplines and backgrounds and experiences, it’s all a hundred percent relevant.
You may just need to look at it a little bit sideways. This has been a great conversation today, Maria. What would you like to leave our audience with?
Maria
You had a question which we never quite touched on exactly about how to make people feel safe and empowered and build a good company culture and I think one of the things, that I have insisted be a company culture for us and this new venture is to try to build a culture where everybody assumes best intent. This is hard to do with existing company cultures, but maybe easier to do in smaller parts of that company culture or if you’re building something new to start with a culture of best intent when you work in a remote environment, when you read a lot of emails, when you read a lot of Slack messages, things like that, you don’t really get tone or expression of face or anything with those.
And it can be really easy to read a message and think, worst intent, maybe we should all read messages and think best intent instead. And I’ll just give you a quick example about that. A lot of managers will say this phrase, I need to talk to you about something. For many of us, that triggers an immediate response of fear, ’cause we’d had some manager who would say, I need to speak to you about something. And then when they got to speak to you about something, they would ream you out about something. Right. But I’ve had managers who say, I need to talk to you about something, and then told me about a fabulous new project that they wanted me to do or something like that.
But there’s something about this phrase that’s just really awful and so like just saying, I need to talk to you about, and filling in the blank! Because it was something bad, you are gonna be worried about it anyways. And if it’s something good, you know, not to worry about it anymore. Like just changing the phrase from the word something to what it actually is, I think can be just be more transparent with the people you work with, right? Don’t leave them hanging about what it is you need to talk to them about. Just tell them what it is you need to talk about, though, and then say, I can’t talk to you right now, but we’ll talk about this later, right? The transparency is huge.
I don’t know why we leave people with hanging on this fear, but I think, if you’re running a team or an organization, starting to assume best intent instead of worst intent, if everybody can do that and, that could be kind of a mantra. And then, being more transparent with, you know, what you need to talk to people about is probably goes a long way forming a better team.
Michael
A hundred percent for on both of those reminds me of feedback I had from a mentor many years ago who told me, Michael, “When you’re giving feedback, don’t say, I would like to appreciate you. I would like to thank you. I would like to, whatever it is, just do it. Thank the person. Give the feedback. Appreciate them.”
Yeah, and that has stuck with me ever since.
Thank you, Maria, for this fabulous conversation today. And thank you, audience, for joining us. What is holding you back from being your best self? How might cross-pollination from somewhere outside where you’re spending all your time make that a little better? Maria, and I would love to know. Thanks and have a great day.