Joyful Jubilant Learning

Three Cups of Tea

I''m really excited that this year I've chosen to review a book that works for Joyful Jubilant Learning on multiple levels.

First, I'm always looking for true stories of how an individual or team can take declare a new possibility, especially an imaginable but seemingly impossible "possibility", and out of their passion and commitment making that seeming impossibility a reality.  Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations...One School at a Time By Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin is that kind of story.

In 1993, not quite 15 years ago, Greg Mortenson was working as a nurse in San Fransisco to finance his passion for mountain climbing.  On a failed expedition to the world's second highest mountain, K2, Mortenson deliriously takes a wrong turn on the path down and finds himself taken in and cared for by the villagers of Korphe.  During his recuperation, he asks to visit the village school, only to find the students out in the open, practicing lessons on their own while awaiting the return of the teacher they shared with another village.  Mortenson's heart opens, and he promises he will return to Korphe and build a school.

As of the date this story was published, along with what the book characterizes as "one of the most underqualified and overachieving staffs of any charitable organization on earth," Mortenson had built fifty-three schools in some of the most remote and politically unstable parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan.  The schools Mortenson's Central Asia Institute builds educate girls along with boys, and offer a secular education to compete with the madrassa, the schools sponsored by religious extremists in the region.  Talk about a way that education can change the world!

And the book works on another level, as we see Greg Mortenson himself challenged to learn and grow thanks to what the people of these villages have to teach him. The book takes its title from an incident in which Mortenson is supervising the construction of that first school in Korphe and apparently behaving like a bull in a china shop.  The  village headman asks Mortenson to accompany him on a walk.  He then strips the American of his tools, locks them in a cabinet, and sits him down to a cup of butter tea.  Haji Ali explains that Mortenson is driving everyone crazy.  He warns him that to succeed in Baltistan, Mortenson must learn to respect their ways.  "Doctor Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea.  We may be uneducated.  But we are not stupid.  We have lived and survived here for a long time."

I found this a wonderful lesson.  As newcomers to a place on the planet, or as a manager new to a team or company, the key to our success will be to respect and learn from others.  What we think we know may not be the knowledge that our goal requires.

Last but not least, I recommend this book to you because thanks to the writer David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea is non-fiction that reads with the pacing and drama of a great novel. I can pretty much promise that by the end of this book, you will find yourself understanding why Relin confesses to having lost his journalistic objectivity.  Like him, I found myself wanting to see Greg Mortenson succeed, and wondering what I can be doing to make my world a better place.

Beth Robinson

Move Closer, Stay Longer

OOPS—it turns out I have inadvertently chosen a book you can’t find (yet) on Amazon or in your local bookstore. I didn’t intend it to be that way, because I’d bought the book easily. If you decide after reading this review that you want to own the book, it is available at Dr Stephanie Burns website Australian dollars Why would you want to work so hard to own this book? Depends on what it is you’ve set yourself to learn, and how adept you are when the learning curve swerves from joyful to fearful or jubilant to hesitant!

There are two books that have marked me profoundly as a learner over the past seven years. The first was George Leonard’s Mastery, which I was assigned at the beginning of a two-year management and leadership course in 2000. The second is Stephanie Burns’s Move Closer Stay Longer, which I read six years later when it showed up in my horsemanship course. The kind of learning both books address isn’t in the realm of mere acquisition of knowledge. These are the books I turn to when I’m learning to do something I’ve never done, learning to do something I already do but better, or learning to be something I’m not yet. If like me you relish the Start of things Leonard’s book should become your bible for getting through the Middles which must be waded through on the road to mastery. But what happens if because of your fears you never start; or never practice enough to develop the habits and skills to get better?

We all have experience fears. Fear of physical harm, fear of rejection, fear of getting what we want, fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of being embarrassed, fear of intimacy, fear of finding our limits, fear of success. Fear of public speaking, fear of asking for a raise, fear of swimming in open water, fear of new technology. What’s so cool is discovering a simple strategy so that fear won’t keep you getting what you want, doing what you want, and going where you want, as the subtitle of this book promises.

The background to the book is funny. Dr. Stephanie Burns is a master in the field of adult learning, and herself a fanatic about learning. A former student of hers in

Australia

named Linda married an American natural horsemanship wonder named Pat Parelli and began applying what she’d learned about learning to help her husband. She developed materials to teach people how to have a relationship with their horses based upon “love language and leadership in equal doses.” Students of Parelli Natural Horsemanship were having amazing success with their horses…except when they weren’t. Linda worried that too many of their students seemed to be getting stuck in the beginning stages, and she approached her mentor Dr. Burns for help.

After reviewing the Parelli home study materials in order to suggest improvements, Dr. Burns concluded that in order to understand what was happening with students, she needed to become a student of the program herself. Okay, but… “Before I could start there were a few problems to overcome. Simple things like I didn’t have a horse. Actually I had never touched a horse.”

In her fascination with the potential for learning, Dr. Stephanie Burns turns her life upside down and buys five acres and a gentle gelding named Nugget. Then Dr Burns discovers yet another hurdle: she has acquired a whopping big fear of horses—mixed with a big dose of fear about what she doesn’t know about horses She knows this fear is meant to keep her safe and doesn’t want to lose that element because horses are large unpredictable animals that can in fact be physical dangerous. But she doesn’t want to have it prevent her from learning…and she also has made a commitment to finding a way to help other students, and it’s now become clear to her that one of the hurdles other students are facing is their fears!

Instead of studying the process of acquiring the skills of natural horsemanship, she finds herself studying more generally how fear can cause us to replace useful actions that relate to our goals with useless actions or none at all. And as she says, in that case there is:
No learning

No change

No achievement

No fun.

The book is short, only a little over 100 pages from Forward to Acknowledgements. It is funny and real, as Dr Burns is unflinchingly honest about her own fears and their consequences. Using her own journey for illustration, she takes the reader quickly and definitively through the anatomy of fear; the fundamental strategy for coping with it (i.e. Move Closer Stay Longer); and a repertoire of actions that might be useful at different times when we feel fearful. I've found the strategies also are useful for coping with procrastination, boredom, and a range of other situations in which I find myself taking useless actions or none at all. In short, when it comes to reaching our goals FEAR is not the problem; NOT TAKING ACTION is the problem!

 PS—if you check out Stephanie Burns’s website, be sure to look at HER list of favorite books!