To begin,
Feel the places you are connected to your chair or to the earth.
Feel yourself being supported,
Held.
From there,
Let's inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale,
Taking it all in,
And exhale,
Letting it all go.
Welcome to a hit of hope.
I recently had to attend yet another Zoom meeting,
And this one was on metacognition.
No that is not the next Marvel superhero.
Metacognition is just a big word for thinking about thinking.
And in the context of college,
It's thinking about how you learn.
So if a student fails a test and they say to the professor,
But I studied,
The professor might then ask,
Tell me how you studied.
The student is likely to say they spent hours and hours at it.
What the student is not likely to say is,
I skimmed through the chapters again while my roommates were playing Call of Duty,
And I had a beer in my hand.
It's not likely that most students would be that honest.
And often neither are we when we think about our thinking.
For instance,
We might not realize or want to admit how often we get caught up in the if-then thinking.
We've all done this before.
It's a tempting trap.
If this happens,
Then I will be happy.
Could be if I get a new love,
A promotion,
A house,
A new pair of boots,
A new truck,
Then I will be happy.
And many of us might be in this kind of thinking right now.
If this pandemic were over,
Then life could go back to normal and I would be happy.
This is not to downplay the very real struggles that are present at this moment.
Not at all.
There are huge and collective griefs we are facing as a world.
There are personal and no less real struggles that we are facing as families and individuals.
But this is it.
This now is our life,
And we don't know how long things are going to go on like this.
So can we think about this kind of thinking?
Note it and decide if we want to wait for the not yet instead of fully embracing this now with all of its ups and downs.
While there are many other ways we can think about our thinking,
I'll highlight just one more.
And it has to do with one of my favorite sayings.
Your motivation colors your results.
Put another way,
How you think about what you are doing impacts what happens.
So if you help someone and yet you are frustrated or annoyed or waiting to be thanked the whole time,
That colors your results.
If you do something out of fear,
That colors your results.
Your motivation colors your results.
So the metacognition here would be to think about your thinking before you act.
Why are you doing something?
Is that really why you want to do it?
And then how does that motivation color or imbue the act and what would a different motivation do?
You might be rolling your eyes at this point and saying,
Good God,
Betsy,
If I ask all of those questions,
I'll never get anything done.
And I hear you.
And I'm not urging you to question every single thing every single time.
But when you feel yourself getting frustrated or afraid,
When you find yourself thinking or acting in ways that leave you depleted instead of fulfilled,
Maybe thinking about your thinking is a place to start.
Inhale,
Exhale.
So considering metacognition,
Thinking about thinking.
And in the classroom,
Effort does not always equal an A.
But in this case,
It just might.
And it might lead you toward that self that you fully want to inhabit.
The one who steps up,
Who steps forward and leads the way.
Namaste.
