Encouragement - it takes a dog, by Doug McVadon
Encouragement, that’s what I get from my dog every morning. Go ahead and get up, I can hardly wait, she says with her tongue. She has a way of licking my chin; cheek and ear that makes me feel devoured but not threatened. And then she usually slips in that deft little bite on the top of my ear, too gentle to properly be called a bite, more of a love nip that she slips in while I am busy doing my combination laugh-cringe-try-to-get-away move. It is an oral assault she mounts against my face, and finally I have to grab her head and push it gently away. Go ahead and get up, it’ll be great, her eager eyes say.
The root of encouragement is courage. The courage to face the day. Why do I need that? And from a canine! Not even of my species and she somehow counteracts this dreadful weight of knowledge that wakes me up and makes me discouraged. It takes my courage away just to wake up into a world where cartoonists get assassinated for their political views and I know I am going to die with dreams still unfulfilled. And so Lacey, in her wonderful oblivion, knows not the existential dilemma, but seems to know it is a sunny day, and not as cold as it has been, and that I will feed her soon and she is happy.
A little encouragement goes a long way. My daughter’s friend Christopher wanted to be on the swim team. He is a little bit round of stature; openly gay, did not swim competitively as a youngster, and is what you might call the sensitive kind. But the coach said, sure! And now he is on the swim team, goes to practice, and is accepted on the team. He didn’t need a fast time, just some encouragement from a coach who gets that being on the high school team is more than a matter of winning.
A recent McKinsey report says one of the main reasons most leadership development efforts fail is that “Reflection is Decoupled from Real Work.” That is, the off-site course where you have a breakthrough and many insights doesn’t translate back on the job.
They then say:
“The answer sounds straightforward: tie leadership development to real on-the-job projects that have a business impact and improve learning. But it’s not easy to create opportunities that simultaneously address high-priority needs—say, accelerating a new-product launch, turning around a sales region, negotiating an external partnership, or developing a new digital-marketing strategy—and provide personal-development opportunities for the participants.”
I got very interested in this part, since it is my job to have such courses work!
They give an example of when a medical-device company “got this balance badly wrong when one of its employees, a participant in a leadership-development program, devoted long hours over several months to what he considered “real” work: creating a device to assist elderly people during a medical emergency. When he presented his assessment to the board, he was told that a full-time team had been working on exactly this challenge and that the directors would never consider a solution that was a by-product of a leadership-development program. Given the demotivating effect of this message, the employee soon left the company.”
He needed Lacey to lick his ear and say, don’t worry, the sun is out, there is food for breakfast, and you will do better in your next job anyway.
They didn’t say he quit because he was thwarted or professionally unfulfilled, they said it was because he was demotivated. Is that even a word? Have they “finalized” the decision “impacting” whether “demotivated” qualifies as a real word?
Can I just coin a term, too?
Disencouragement, I will call it, the act of dissing someone’s encouragement. Yeah I know there is already a word called discouragement, but irregardless, I like it. Keeps me motivated.
The root of encouragement is courage. The courage to face the day. Why do I need that? And from a canine! Not even of my species and she somehow counteracts this dreadful weight of knowledge that wakes me up and makes me discouraged. It takes my courage away just to wake up into a world where cartoonists get assassinated for their political views and I know I am going to die with dreams still unfulfilled. And so Lacey, in her wonderful oblivion, knows not the existential dilemma, but seems to know it is a sunny day, and not as cold as it has been, and that I will feed her soon and she is happy.
A little encouragement goes a long way. My daughter’s friend Christopher wanted to be on the swim team. He is a little bit round of stature; openly gay, did not swim competitively as a youngster, and is what you might call the sensitive kind. But the coach said, sure! And now he is on the swim team, goes to practice, and is accepted on the team. He didn’t need a fast time, just some encouragement from a coach who gets that being on the high school team is more than a matter of winning.
A recent McKinsey report says one of the main reasons most leadership development efforts fail is that “Reflection is Decoupled from Real Work.” That is, the off-site course where you have a breakthrough and many insights doesn’t translate back on the job.
They then say:
“The answer sounds straightforward: tie leadership development to real on-the-job projects that have a business impact and improve learning. But it’s not easy to create opportunities that simultaneously address high-priority needs—say, accelerating a new-product launch, turning around a sales region, negotiating an external partnership, or developing a new digital-marketing strategy—and provide personal-development opportunities for the participants.”
I got very interested in this part, since it is my job to have such courses work!
They give an example of when a medical-device company “got this balance badly wrong when one of its employees, a participant in a leadership-development program, devoted long hours over several months to what he considered “real” work: creating a device to assist elderly people during a medical emergency. When he presented his assessment to the board, he was told that a full-time team had been working on exactly this challenge and that the directors would never consider a solution that was a by-product of a leadership-development program. Given the demotivating effect of this message, the employee soon left the company.”
He needed Lacey to lick his ear and say, don’t worry, the sun is out, there is food for breakfast, and you will do better in your next job anyway.
They didn’t say he quit because he was thwarted or professionally unfulfilled, they said it was because he was demotivated. Is that even a word? Have they “finalized” the decision “impacting” whether “demotivated” qualifies as a real word?
Can I just coin a term, too?
Disencouragement, I will call it, the act of dissing someone’s encouragement. Yeah I know there is already a word called discouragement, but irregardless, I like it. Keeps me motivated.
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