Why is it so difficult to turn off? Investigating competitiveness

Logan slogan 35 is "don't be so competitive" (the next iteration in the #lojongchallenge). There is hardly a slogan that is more apt in today's competitive world. In the academic world I am part of, competition is part and parcel, because we constantly have to compete with colleagues to win grants and get our research published in the top journals. Of course there is also a lot of collaboration within science, especially in my department, in the end the evaluation and reward system is highly skewed towards recognising only individuals. A particularly powerful example of this are the Nobel prizes, which were awarded last week. These almost assume that science is done by individuals, rather than by a team, as it is in reality. Pretty much all universities require you to be in the top-whatever to survive as an academic (which obviously is impossible, because by definition not everyone can be the top). This is slightly problematic because science really thrives when you combine many different viewpoints and ideas.

Somehow I internalized the competition to such an extent that I find it difficult to turn off: there is always something more to do, and I find it very hard to give myself permission to rest. Of course it's easy to blame that only on the external world. Probably I myself am at fault at least just as much. But nevertheless, the external world really facilitates that. I think taking the time to be still and rest is almost a revolutionary act.

For me, working against this innate and external competitiveness is a constant struggle that requires a lot of vigilance to recognize these patterns creeping up, and to drop them. I found two things really helpful here: first, practising joy when someone else gets ahead or does something good. When you look at it, seeing someone else succeed and seeing them happy is actually really nice and pleasant, and it improves your relationship with them as well. In one of the ballet schools I take class at the students tend to applaud for each other when they do something well. A very nice gesture, I think. I also try to remember to tell other people what I like about them, and especially to appreciate my students. A little positivity goes a long way!

The other trick I use is to investigate again and again the effects of suspending competitiveness for a moment and just letting be. When I take a few minutes to just rest, I find that actually my performance improves, because I often recognize things that I had overlooked until that moment, and thereby make fewer mistakes. Moreover, it also really feels good. But somehow it's still so hard to do--to overcome the ingrained 'doing' habit. With this blog, I try to commit again to taking more moments of silence and being. Just another reminder...

How are you doing? Do you notice these kinds of tendencies as well? How do you work with competitiveness?

Connecting mindfulness (research) to societal action: a report from the Dutch Mindfulness Symposium

A few weeks ago, I attended the National Mindfulness Symposium organized by the Radboud Centre for Mindfulness. This is a yearly event in which researchers and mindfulness practitioners (mostly the latter) get together to discuss current topics in mindfulness interventions and research. Obviously this year's meeting was online.

The meeting started with a talk by Stephen Batchelor. He emphasized the need to not focus so much on mindfulness as a way to temporarily relax, but instead developing the tools to lead more flourishing, wise and compassionate lives. While I do not agree with him that Buddhism gets in the way of this, and needs to go back to its secular roots to do this, I still found he made some helpful points. He summarized the way to flourishing in terms of four tasks: (1) saying yes to whatever is going on ("embrace life"), (2) letting go of habitual reactive patterns, (3) stopping of reactivity so you can respond more wisely and (4) actualize a way of life. So the main point is to act without aweareness, and with "fearless engagement" as he put it. Those are definitely sensible points in my book, and critical to face the disasters of today's world, ranging from covid-19 to climate change. A good document summarising this can be found here.

Next up was Jamie Bristow, who also emphasised skilful action. According to him, the main reason mindfulness works is that it allows us to engage in intentional action. This is beautifully written up in a document by the Mindfulness Initiative. According to this document, mindfulness helps to develop three dimensions of agency: perception, understanding, and doing. This helps to face the crisis of this world, which is our collective inability to act in accord with the complexity of the world. This includes the ability to face uncomfortable truths, and deal with information overload. Our attention is so easily distracted by the big corporations that we just act habitually without thinking. Mindfulness helps us to reduce this doing mode and engage more in a reflective being mode in which we can perform more intentional action.

The last keynote was by Femke Merkx, a Buddhist teacher who has been engaging a lot with climate change. She reminded us that the compassion cultivated in Buddhism is not as much a difficult moral imperative but rather through the practice is an effortless gesture. So we have to start by cultivating our minds in order for compassionate action to become effortless, like the image of green tara. As Joanna Macy puts it: start by honouring your pain, then letting compassion arise, which allows you to see with new eyes, such that you can go forth, and finally engage with joy, which allows you to have more courage to feel the pain, and the cycle starts again. She finally mentioned being part of the Climate Tables, a series of conversations in which the pain of climate change is deeply faced, and from a space of compassion these issues are thought about to allow people to start to act from their intrinsic values.

In the afternoon, there were contributed symposia. I attended a symposium about the effect of mindfulness interventions. There was a lot of discussion about mindfulness for parents of children with ADHD. Corina Greven presented work in which the interpersonal mindfulness in parenting scale showed improvements after such an intervention. Eva Potharst showed how this scale correlated with several other self-report scales, including acceptance and emotional communication. Importantly, it also correlates with objective behaviour such as the amount of mother's gaze towards the child. Mira Cladder-Micus investigated MBCT for very chronic and treatment-resistant depression. The good news was that even in this group, depression was reduced after the intervention, although it did not completely go away. A final study that was presented was an analysis of the cost-effectiveness of MBCT interventions, by Annelieke van Velthoven. Sadly, the MBCT was not cost-effective compared to continuing anti-depressant medication.

In the last session of the afternoon, I organized a panel on the ethics of being a mindfulness researcher. How can we use the principles we learn in our mindfulness practice to deal with the ethical challenges and the competitiveness of the academic world? The panel started off with very personal stories by Anne Speckens and Katleen van der Gucht, who shared how it was challenging to follow their own path instead of going for the route of perceived success. We then went into small groups and discussed how it is sometimes challenging to practise generosity and kindness when faced with a pressure to compete and excel. One issue we discussed is how peer review can sometimes be a brutal exchange, rather than a process of constructive criticism. We can all do our parts to be a kind reviewer (instead of being =="reviewer 2"). Another thing that came up is the importance of reducing your own sense of self-importance and practise humilty: both as a person and about your scientific findings. This all requires a slow change of culture, but hopefully we can all do our part and make this world a better place.

Some tips and tricks for hybrid teaching

As most people, I have been engaging in hybrid teaching in the last months. This is surely challenging, but thankfully our university has quite some support from education professionals to help us rethink our courses. Teaching online is not simply a matter of delivering your lectures through the internet, but rather requires you to rethink the way you teach. And this doesn't have to be bad, and I must say I really enjoy learning new teaching tricks. I am currently participating in a course on Teaching Online taught by Tracy Poeltzer, which is a lot of fun. In this blog I share some of the things I have learnt in the course and in webinars.

Image from the days of giving in-person talks

One of the most important things to think about in teaching online is building connections with the students, because successful learning does not only depend on transferring information successfully, but also requires a human connection. A very simple way to start building connections is before class: being present in the chat about 5-10 minutes before the class starts and welcoming students and asking how they are doing or chatting about the weather is a good start. You can then gauge how students are feeling in the class itself by asking them to respond with an emoji or respond to a question using polling software such as mentimeter or polleverywhere. Another fun icebreaker is to ask students to pin themselves on a map in one of these polling software tools. This is especially useful now students may not be following your course from the same continent as where you are. Then during the class, it's always nice to tell stories. A powerful way ti tell a story is using the word "imagine...". Also analogies can be very powerful, for example teaching during the pandemic is like building a plane while it's flying in the air. This evokes a vivid imagine in the student's mind. Another way of humanizing the course is to use video introductions to get to know each other. A perfect and easy tool for this is flipgrid, in which you can easily make videos and comment on other's videos. Also video or spoken comments can be a nice way to humanize things. Googledocs for example allows you to record comments with google voice, but you can also record video comments with screencastify and loom. These comments have the added advantage that you can share more of your thinking process with the students, which can sometimes be a hekpful learning tool. A final nice tool to humanize the course is to hold an informal coffee shop in which students can drop by to ask questions but also to simply chat or wave to each other. Teaching online also requires you to be much clearer for the students about what is expected of them, and ideally the course has many asynchronous components that students can do at a time that works for them. One model that students seem to like is to make folders for every week of the course, and in those folders to make a series of steps. In that way, students find it easy to keep track of where they are and what they need to do when (someone should build calendar plugins for those!). Then when you get to the lecture, it's good to minimize the amount of frontal talking. You can actually pre-record your lectures in short chunks (or use existing lectures from e.g., TED, coursera etc), and then use class time to discuss these in breakout groups. Breakout groups are great because students really get to know each other. One nice model for breakout groups is to ask students to discuss about questions they want to ask the lecturer in the next plenary session. In that way, students practise asking questions. A very practical tip for the lecture time is to insert a slide that reminds you to press the record button (if you're anything like me and tend to forget to record). As regards discussion, it is helpful to explicitly discuss group norms for interaction, that mention things like kindness, respect etc. The same can also be useful to put in discussion fora, which are very helpful to get students to interact on an asynchronous basis. Finally, it's really important to remember that we are all working from covid brains, so be gentle with yourself as well as with the students. How are you doing with covid teaching? Any tips or tricks?