The Flourishing Changemaker
Last month, Art & I presented on a topic that is very close to our hearts at the United States Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) conference. It's about the importance of personal well-being while being engaged in external positive impact. The audience was mainly educators who are teaching entrepreneurship at different universities in the US.
As Art and I planned this workshop, we decided that the process of working together should reflect our core message. In other words, that it was important that we enjoy the process of developing the workshop as much as delivering a great workshop. And we’d check-in regularly on this goal.
A challenge we faced in our short 90-min. workshop was to both to share a framework for well-being as well as engage the audience in practical activities that they could use with their students. We decided that the most powerful approach to this workshop would be if participants experienced for themselves the importance of flourishing and discussed some of the challenges of well-being. They could then reflect on how to bring this same awareness into the courses they currently teach as well as practices to increase the well-being of their students.
The Workshop Flow:
We started the workshop asking participants to mingle and speak to three others about the questions, "What do our students need to flourish as entrepreneurs?" and, "Why is it important?" As we debriefed on these initial introductions, Art and I shared our own personal stories of why the topic of well-being for entrepreneurship is particularly important to us.
Next, we brought out some crayons and in a few minutes each participant had drawn six to eight factors that they themselves needed for well-being. Having introduced the notion that well-being is in fact highly personal, we felt ready to share a leading framework for the field of positive psychology. Dr. Seligman's PERMA model helped participants anchor this discussion in a well-respected framework.
Our last activity drew from the New York Times' bestseller "Designing Your Life" and allowed participants visually draw out activities that they regularly performed, which either energized or drained them. This visual representation of their typical weekly activities then led to a discussion on what would they like to do more of and what would they like to change. You can find the activity and worksheet here.
So what?
The difficult abstraction for participants is to take the ah-ha moments from this workshop back to the learners who they interact with and influence daily. We ended the session feeling like time had flown, but it renewed our sense that the topic of flourishing for changemakers is one that we're deeply invested in exploring further. The energy in the room had been palpable.
As Art and I listed to Steve Blank, who the moderator called the Father of Modern Day Entrepreneurship Education, deliver the plenary lunch talk, he suggested that the next big breakthrough in entrepreneurship education was not necessarily a new invention but rather being able to put the spotlight on something that’s out there but needs framing.
He looked out on the vast audience and asked which one of us would be stepping up. Art and I looked at each other at that moment and smiled. We knew we were onto something that could be truly changemaking. As long as the means justify the ends, and not the other way around, we’re up for the journey. :-)