From a posting on the Tomorrow’s Professor mailing list on a concept called active waiting:
“Active waiting requires the kind of patience that tolerates short-term discomforts (such as temptations to do something else more immediately rewarding than preparing for teaching) in order to gain longer-term rewards (e.g., students who learn more). Active waiting means subduing the part of yourself that admonishes you to put off thoughts of teaching improvements until you are completely caught up on other things. Active waiting, surprisingly, means being able to do two or more things at once (e.g., preparing for teaching during the little openings that occur even during busy days, while nonetheless making enough progress on other things). Oddest of all, active waiting also means suspending disbelief. You might, for instance, believe that efficiencies could work for other people by not for you (“I’ve always been kind of disorganized and happily behind schedule; I could never stand this”)…
Active waiting has many other benefits, some of them hard to imagine until experienced. It brings serenity because it is neither tense nor pressing. It provides a growing mindfulness of having something important and worthwhile to say before saying it. It promotes a more causal but focuses attitude toward preparing and presenting; teaching that once had to be written out is now more easily and enjoyably done from conceptual outlines and diagrams that often fill but a page per class. With active waiting, and decisions about the final structure of the content are put off, classes are more spontaneous and more likely to involve students as active participants. And, not least, with active waiting there is more opportunity for discovery in teaching.”
This is a short article but it describes an internal process that is very similar to what we call “holding space” in Open Space facilitation: that ability to be both totally present and completely invisible for the group. In fact this is a good skill to have for all kinds of facilitation, including parenting and being in relationship.
Found through the excellently repurposed blog of Karen McComas.
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A gem shared by John Engle on the OSLIST, and keeping right in line with some recent thinking on action:
Silence is the measure of the power to act; that is, a person never has more power to act than he has silence. Anyone can understand that to do something is far greater than to talk about doing it. If, therefore, a person has a plan or idea and is fully resolved to carry it out, he does not need to talk about it. What he talks about in connection with the proposed action is what he is most unsure of and most unwilling to do.
— Soren Kierkegaard