DailyJim: Leaders as informal educators

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Jim Kleiber show. Oops, I screwed that up. It's another daily Jim. That's what I normally say. Today is Wednesday, September something, September. Oh, too many notifications. September 4th, 2024. Today, I want to talk about leaders as informal educators.

So I thought, okay, I have a guest while I'm doing this episode. So not a guest, but a audience.

And so I'm a little nervous. But today I want to talk about leaders as informal educators. And I was, for some reason, reading about Gandhi today and MLK and Mandela and some of these people I've looked up to for a long time. And I came across a quote by Nehru, who I believe was the first prime minister of India. And he was talking about how Gandhi touched the lives of millions, that by having a relationship with millions of people, he became, he entered into millions of hearts. And as a result of being in millions of hearts, he touched people and changed their lives. And they started to behave a little more like him. And then he said something like infinitely less than the skills that he had, but started to gain some of his skills. And I had been thinking about why a few years back I told my friends in the non-formal education space in Europe that I wanted to shift to politics.

And I still haven't understood why I wanted to do that. But now I've realized that reading that quote, the whole point was to go from a non-formal education to an informal education. Same with the podcast. The idea is to teach people, train people in a much more informal way. I got a testimonial or a story from a friend today who said that he had thought about going to see a therapist, but if you want to see a therapist, he might be prescribed antidepressants. And he instead had a conversation with me for a couple hours and afterwards felt so much better and had more clarity of purpose etc etc and for me that is informal education informal learning it's just conversations with each other it's conversations with friends family people that we meet it's observations that we have it's not it's not super structured and so when you look at formal non-formal and informal education formal tends to be the one where it's very structured It's in institutions of learning, and the goal is to learn the specific curriculum and then advance and get credentials for it, et cetera, et cetera. Non-formal education tends to be still structured learning, but less structured. I would say focuses more on the reflection, less on the learning outcome, but more of the learning process, and still can take place in institutions, but is not nearly as formal. And then informal is more of the observations that we have when we interact with people just on a day-to-day basis. And when I look at it from this lens, I realized that I think a lot of leaders train us or teach us or educate us, whether they want to or not, because we often look up to leaders as examples of how to behave. For example, we look to our parents to learn how to speak. So a lot of our speaking patterns, communication patterns come from our parents because they literally teach us how to speak by saying, oh, this is an apple or this is, say please. So we learn a lot of these skills from our parents and other people in our lives. And this is one thing that I really didn't like about Donald Trump being president is that we started to pick up some of his communication patterns as well. People who didn't like him would start to use blah, blah, blah, sad. So they would use the same communication style that he would use, whether they even realized they were doing it or not. Some may have thought they were mocking him, but I think they started to pick it up as habits just in general. So when I think about it that way, I think it helps me frame the work that I've been doing because I think...

Why I shifted away from the non-formal education was that I found it a little hard to get people to show up to some of the classes I wanted to run. And I thought, well, what if I could teach people some of these skills, but in a much less formal way, a much more informal way, where they just learn by osmosis through conversations. And if you look at a lot of the testimonials that I've received over the last couple weeks on my website, a lot of them come from the informal conversations. It's a friend who was really stuck while overseas. And he said I was the only person he could open up to at the time. It's the security guard who says, you know, just by the conversations I've had with you at night after you come home from the club, it's really changed my perspective on life. And so when people ask me, what do I do? I think I've struggled to explain it, but maybe now it's a little easier to say that it's more like informal education, training people on how to deal with conflict and emotions and relationships and self-love and all these things, but not in a formal classroom, not with a set rubric or curriculum, but just through interacting with each other. And to say it that way, then it gives me more of an incentive to get really good at this stuff so that I can model these behaviors and that people might learn, as Nehru said, about millions of people learning from Gandhi, just by being in their hearts and having that relationship with them and interacting with them, that they start to maybe develop some of the same behaviors or learn some of the same skills. So yeah, so I'm starting to think about leadership a little more as informal education and how that might affect the way that I not only do the work, but also have the motivation to get even stronger and better at loving and fighting.

And also in how I talk to other people about it. So we'll see how it goes, but that's the impression for now. So I'll talk to you all tomorrow, Thursday, last day of the week. All right, bye.