DailyJim: The pressure to formalize

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Thursday, September 5th, 2024. Today I want to talk about the pressure to formalize.

So, yesterday I talked about how I think leaders are often informal educators. Basically teaching us many things just by how they are behaving, how they are interacting, interacting leading by example and instilling their behaviors into us now i think sometimes it can be really hard to say that that's what we want to do to do something that is more informal is more unstructured is more organic because there can be a lot of pressure to formalize things things, to structure them, to package them, to put them into boxes, really.

You know, a question that people often ask in the U.S. is, so what do you do? Or what do you do for work? And I think often we want to have these very clean boxes, or many people do. And then if I say, you know, I have conversations with people and I help them realize different things about their life and emotions. They go, so you're a psychologist. I'm like, no. So you're a therapist. No. So you're a life coach. No. So you're a, what are you? This was a conversation I had in South Africa. I was in Cape Town. I went to a comedy show and my friends and I showed up late, which one should never do at a comedy show. And we got placed in the front row, which one should also never do at a comedy show unless you want attention. mentioned. And the guy says, I was one of a few white guys in a place. He's like, hey, what do you do for work? And I said, I teach people how, I think I said, I teach people how to love. And he says, so you're a therapist? I said, no. And he's like, actually, I can't fully remember how the conversation went, but I think there were a few more expletives and more confusion and laughter. And that's, we can put so much pressure to formalize things. Okay, what is step one? What is step two, up to step 10? Okay, where do I place in the metrics? Okay, where am I in the hierarchy of learning or anything? Okay, what is your package? What is the price? What is the instead of just being like.

Appreciating the ambiguity, the flexibility, the organic nature of things that are much more informal.

So, I mean, you can look at work in the U.S. or any part of the world, and there are people who have very formalized jobs and get paid very informalized ways. And there are people who have very informal jobs, like caretaking for an older relative or for a relative who has as maybe a physical or mental challenge, or taking care of animals in the streets, or, you know, there's so many things that we do in society that are much more informal, much more informal ways of helping each other instead of the very formalized, structured ways. And yet, sometimes we seem to celebrate the formalized ones more than the informal. Maybe Maybe it's because the formal is much more conscious, much more talked about, much more visible in some ways, where the informal can almost be like through osmosis, where it can just kind of seep and pervade. And it's almost like the wind or not even the water. It's more like the wind. It's more like air, something that's invisible, but that really can infect us and change the way that we interact. So yeah i'm just talking about that a little bit because i think i often feel a lot of pressure to formalize what i do and if i don't answer it in a very formal way one people may not understand or two people may not want to support or help or at least that's what i assume, Because what I really want to do is I want to help people in these informal ways. And I would say non-formal as well, which is more of the training, which is more of the martial arts perspective. Again, more of a martial arts perspective that's less formalized because you can have a full range. You can have some that have very formalized level of instruction, of tradition, of belt systems, rankings and how you proceed in the art. And then you have some that are much more flexible, much more non-formal in the way that they just want to teach skills and don't have such a formal structured ranking system. And then you have others that are like the informal way of learning how to fight is basically just learning how to fight in the streets or watching people fight or watching YouTube videos or things like this. So, yeah, so I've been focusing much more on the informal way of learning and education and a partial with the non-formal and just wondering how, maybe this is another question, how to do the business model of helping in informal ways where it's not so formalized and structured. Structured so that's something i want to think about over the weekend right now i want to rest my voice get some water and go dance a bit so hope you all taking care and talk to you next week.