Life Management

I always tell my students that there are a few critical aspects of their life that they have to manage: family, friends, work (school), and politics. This is not in a particular order, and sometimes they switch priority depending on what’s going on.

I think that compartmentalizing the important aspects of adult life helps focus us and make us capable and functional people. Oftentimes when people feel “stuck”, or are frustrated with their lives, they aren’t able to pinpoint exactly what it is that is wrong, and are then not able to heal the issue.

“Form follows function”. If we are able to scientifically categorize parts of our life, we can engage them better. We do it for some parts of our life – calendars, to-do lists, etc., but if we don’t have our minds organized, then cleaning up a small part will not be successful.

When I don’t actively manage my mind, it feels like a tornado. The visualization of my mind is actually a tornado, and I end up feeling overwhelmed and tend towards burnout. It’s something I am experiencing right now, and I’m writing this blog post to help reorient myself towards active management.

Here are the series of life management exercises that I use and encourage others to use:

1. Positive reinforcement lists

Whenever people in my life or students are unable to process their lives, I encourage them to make lists of positive affirmations. I have multiple lists like these throughout the years and they are all stored in my journals, where I review them at random.

These lists start off general, but then they become more specific to categories. “Things I like about myself” as the general list, and then “How I am good at x” and so on. This helps me reflect on the good parts of my life, and combat the negativity that the world offers us today. Yes, the world may be a miserable and degrading experience for many people, but why should we take that personally?

2. Active meditation

I don’t really know what to call this and perhaps there is another “active meditation”, but this is the opposite of traditional meditation, where one tries to “empty their mind”.

I encourage people to simply lie down and let their thoughts go where they will. We often don’t get a lot of time to process all of the information we receive, or to make judgments on ideas and events without pressure. I have come up with many ideas about parts of my life in active meditation, some improvements, some general self-reflection, and sometimes I just think about things I’ve experienced. But I get up with a better sense of self.

3. Speaking directly

There are a lot of pitfalls in human communication, coming mainly from the fear that opinions will be attacked and we will be ostracized. There is a quote from the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel where Gustav H. comments “People are rude from fear that they will not get what they want”. I think there is a lot of truth to this, and that the best way to deal is to speak directly: say what we mean, and mean what we say.

Sarcasm in the classroom is also a hurtful endeavor, and is considered bullying by anti-bullying advocates. Teachers may try to be funny with sarcasm, but the truth is that students do not remember the tone, and only remember the words – and how it made them feel. Students feel vulnerable in a sarcastic classroom and will not feel that they can ask questions and improve their understanding from fear of being targeted. To create a supportive and inclusive classroom, we cannot be sarcastic in our classrooms, especially in the math classrooms.

Those are the more fundamental activities I regard in terms of maintaining a healthy sense of self, a feeling of doing right, and maintaining principles. I may add on to this list as more ideas come back to me but I think I will leave it for now.