Monthly archive for September 2013
Showing results 6 - 10 of 13 for the month of September, 2013.
16 Sep 2013
In the second winning entry from our “The Course That Changed My Life” competition, Marie Lefebvre shares her experience of a course in Project Management that led her to look at achieving her goals in a very different way.
“Last June, I completed a course in Project Management. The course was in my diary since April. For some reasons as June came and my life was in a bit of a tumble, it was what I desperately needed. I can clearly say that the course changed my life. I have learnt two things from the course:
- First, when you have an issue, focus on finding a solution.
- Secondly, the solution is never far, most of the time it is inside you.
They gave me two pieces of paper with the Project Management process and a matrix to prioritise my goals. It was the best gift that I could receive. I came out refreshed with the world in front of me. That day, I made the personal commitment to become a master in Project Management. I made the commitment to design my life.
The goal entailed understanding better who I am, what I want to achieve and why I failed to achieve my goals so far. Using the tool, I laid out all the things that I wanted to achieve in the nearer time and in the longer term. I recognised that I was bombarded by social commitments but actually my real aspirations were to develop myself as an individual, learning new skills and abilities to lead a more self-sufficient and sustainable life and help people in return in this path.
I developed a plan for each of my goals and priced them out. It led to the development of a financial budget tool. My financial analysis confirmed that I was giving to others more that I had. Worse, it was not in line with my values and hopes for a more sustainable lifestyle. I knew that for real change to occur I needed to de-clutter my life and clean my soul. I developed a number of tools helping me going through with those endeavours. What stroked me after few weeks gathering my notes together is how much I have evolved and how it translated in tangible changes too. I am calmer, more in phase with what is happening in the now. I am more aware of what triggers my feelings. I also recognised that I am a visual and creative person.
I repainted my house and reorganised it throughout, whilst upcycling items and giving many away. Now I am working away to start sharing with others that change is possible. In this path, I am looking for a solution to do it full-time whilst remaining financially stable. Whilst I volunteer with Transition Leicester to help my community reduce their carbon footprint, and focus my attention on starting a group of interest on the local economy in Leicester, volunteering in my spare time is no more aligned with my inspiration. I know from my Project Management course that the solution is not far. Could a training with Transition Network unleash my full potential?
Marie wins a place on the Transition Training of her choice, so we hope that she will share with us the answer to her question once she has done the training!
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11 Sep 2013
Transition Network’s Transition Launch training, the training designed to support people getting started making Transition happen where they live is now up and running. Developed in partnership with Gaia University, it’s a fantastic new opportunity for people who, for one reason or another, struggle to find the time to do the training, but would still like to obtain the insights it offers. You can read more about it, and find out how to sign up and take part, here. To find out more about it, we spoke to Naresh Giangrande, one of its creators, and started by asking him to give us a potted history of Transition Training, and how it came to exist.
“I guess it evolved because so many people started arriving in Totnes as soon as we started doing this Totnes project, wanting to know what we did and how we did it. You were writing the book and we thought “wouldn’t it be great to give people an embodied experience of what Transition is like, or what it is, or what this process is?” So Sophy Banks and I set up the training in late 2007 I think.
Immediately there was huge demand. We just kept doing trainings and they kept selling out. We realised pretty early on, within about 4 or 5 months of delivering this training, that it was a really great event. It brought people together; it gave them a sense of what Transition is. It gave them a whole lot of content and material but it also helped bring groups together and also networked groups in different parts of the country. We gave people a sense of the depth of the vision that we were trying to communicate.
Fairly early on in the process we realised that the two of us couldn’t deliver all the training that was necessary, particularly because a lot of people were coming from overseas to do the training. We thought that doesn’t really fit in how we see ourselves and how we see what Transition is: that local thing but we just had to travel all the time. So what we decided to do was train other people to do this, which we did in mid-2008 when we did our first ‘Train the Trainers’ which enabled other people to deliver this training.
Then because we were getting such interest from abroad, in late 2008 – early 2009 we went on our world tour where we went to 7 different countries. We did Transition Training, and we trained different trainers in the US, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Hong Kong. Since then we’ve had another 6 or 8 ‘Train the Trainers’. We now have trainers in 24 different countries, the training had been delivered in 28-30 different countries. It’s something that’s spread all around the world. It’s a compelling, interesting, fun and enjoyable 2 days and it’s 2 days that are jam-packed with content, maybe even a bit too full. We think that when people have done the training it gives them a reasonable chance of setting up a good Transition Initiative.
What different trainings have been developed?
The first thing we added was ‘Effective Groups’, which, although we don’t see it as a core training, it emerged fairly quickly as an important piece of what initiatives need to work well. We were getting a lot of messages from people that it was the group process that was difficult in their Transition Initiative. Nick Osbourne developed his ‘Effective Groups’ training which addresses all the issues that you need to be competent and to run good groups, and also addresses things such as what happens when there is conflict, and deal with it creatively. That was something we did to support Transition Initiatives. The overall mission of Transition Training is to support Transition Initiatives to do Transition well.
We did the Effective Groups, and that was followed on by what we call the Thrive Training, which arose because people started groups and then they’d either reached places where they didn’t know what to do next or they felt there were some difficulties – some people were expressing that it would be great to have a training. “We’ve set it up, we’ve got working groups going, we’ve doing all these projects, but what next, what else can we do? It would be great to have a training that helped us vision and empower us to move on, on this path of Transition”. So we set up Transition Thrive which is designed to do exactly that, to help groups either iron out some of the difficulties they have or move on to their next steps.
How did Launch Online come about?
It came about because the technology enables us to do high-quality trainings online now, and I guess there’s two reasons really for why we want to do the launch training online. The first is accessibility, to make it accessible to more people, and the second is to explore how to use the technology that’s out there that can enable us to create really high-quality trainings, and explore whether by doing a different format we can create something that is as, or maybe even more successful at enabling and supporting Transition initiatives and Transition groups around the world.
Let me just explore the two bits of it. At the moment, if you want to do the Transition Training, the only format it’s been developed in is over two days, mostly over a weekend. Most people just can’t afford to take that time out because they have children or businesses or whatever. It’s also quite expensive to travel and find somewhere to stay. So in order to make it more accessible we thought it would be better to be able to do the training wherever you are in the world; you just have to be able to log on online. You don’t have to leave your house.
We’ve cut it up into little bitesizse chunks, so the course is going to consist of 8 weekly webinars. Once a week there’s going to be a webinar on a Tuesday night in the UK, You can just log on to the webinar and you can listen live and be part of the training. The technology now enables you to ask questions.
The second bit is that this technology gives you the possibility of creating something that we can’t do face to face. Which is that first of all, we cut the material up in to bitesize chunks, so we’ll cover one topic in each of these eight weekly webinars. These webinars, the first one will be the introductions and cover the context issues and the second one will be the introduction to Transition. The third one will be awareness raising and so on. By cutting it up into bitesize chunks, people can get a real sense of what this particular piece is, and then over the next week will have a chance to mull it over.
The webinar will be put up online, they can listen to it again, and get any of the bits they didn’t get the first time. There’ll be also a private space for participants to share and ask questions, the content providers will be there to answer questions and to guide people to put up additional resources. There’s a whole week to chew over and mull over each piece of the training. Also ideally, especially if you’re already part of an Initiative, you could try it out and come back either later in the week or the next time and say “I tried this and this is what happened, what else could I have done or how could I have done that differently?”
It’s a great way to integrate learning into doing and to trying it out. For that reason I think using technology in this way could be a very powerful way of delivering this training.
What will people get out of it?
First of all, I guess it puts out a pretty complete vision of the starting out phase of Transition. It gives you a really complete sense of what Transition is. It also enables you to meet other people who are doing Transition, and for many people that’s a real bonus. Maybe they’re living somewhere or they don’t have anybody else who’s interested in this, they’ve thought about where the world’s going they’ve read things about climate change and they want to make a difference. So having this training enables them to come together with other people and have a couple of days to really explore these ideas in depth.
It gives people a sense of the depth of the vision of some of the inner work that we’re doing and how we weave that into the training. In a way, that’s been the most surprising thing for people. Constantly, the feedback we get is about what surprised people on the training, is the inner piece that we do on the second day. A lot of people never really realised that, oh yes, that inner peace is really an important piece if we’re going to transition this culture to something that’s healthy, with high wellbeing – we need to pay attention to that as well”.
Lastly, I asked him what, in his opinion, makes a good Trainer? I haven’t transcribed that one, you’ll just have to listen to that!
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11 Sep 2013
Today we have a guest post from Sophy Banks, as many of us return to work after a sun-soaked summer, on how to bring a balance of ‘being’ and ‘doing’ into that return to work, and also hear about a forthcoming training that will explore that balance in the wider work of Transition.
Here we are in September and I’m having a familiar experience. After the quiet of August and time relaxing in the summer sun, the start of September brings a flurry of Transition meetings and I feel like a runner accelerating out of the starting blocks as Transition Network ramps back up to its normal speed of working.
Back in July Rob interviewed me about The Power of Not Doing Stuff – the need to balance action with stillness, giving out with receiving back. Thinking back to that conversation I wonder how many people in how many places have a similar return to the busyness of Transition at this time of year?
As we transition from one state to another, opportunities arise to bring the wisdom of both kinds of energy together. So if like me you’re starting to get busy, maybe this is a good time to think about how to bring the quality of rest or spaciousness into the productive or speedy parts of our lives. Some questions I’ve been asking, both to myself or in groups, are things like:
- How would meetings, events or conversations look if there was more balance between getting stuff done and reflection or spaciousness? Would that be a good thing?
- How can we balance the urgency and scale of the challenges with respecting our own needs and limitations?
- How sustainable are we, individually or as a group, with our current level of activity? And if we’re not, what would it take to reach that place?
Transition Network has been on quite a journey itself around finding balance between the qualities of “doing” and “being”. We have regular “Being” meetings for staff where we don’t do any business, rather we give time to reflecting on and strengthening the organisational culture and the levels of trust between us. A number of staff have commented on how unusual and special it feels to be part of an organisation that values this use of time.
One of the consequences has been to help us navigate the potentially stormy waters of restructuring the organisation in the past year or so. I believe our previous experience in looking at how we are together, and then attending to the process of change as it happened, turned something which could have brought us into difficulty or conflict, into a process which brought us closer together and made the organisation stronger.
On September 21 / 22 I’ll be running a two day workshop in London which looks at many aspects of how we can create sustainable and sustaining ways of being and working as individuals and groups. We’ll consider questions like – if we include something of Inner Transition in a Transition initiative what might that look like? And what stories and learning can we share from our experience? We’ll also look at our personal well being and spend time doing things that are recharging and revitalising.
The previous courses have sold out, and brought together groups with stories and questions from many different countries and projects – so book soon if you’d like to be part of it. Here are some comments from previous participants:
“A wonderful mix of theory and practice, shared with wonderful people at a nice place”
“Recharged my batteries”
“It gave me ideas on how to begin the inner transition process for myself, in my initiative and at the regional level”
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10 Sep 2013
Over the next 3 days, we’ll be publishing the winners of our Transition Training competition, where people were invited to share stories of the course they did that changed their lives. Thanks to everyone who entered. In today’s first one, Jen Gale shares the power of learning how to use her sewing machine.
Just over 4 years ago, I signed up for a “Learn to Love Your Sewing Machine” course. Having never touched a sewing machine before, not even at school, and believing that I didn’t have a creative bone in my body, I decided after the birth of our first child, that I wanted to learn to sew.
So, armed with my £50 Aldi special sewing machine, I tentatively embarked upon this 3 week course, and never looked back! I went from being absolutely terrified of my sewing machine, to actually really loving it-just like the course title said I would. I quickly learned really basic things, like what a “bobbin” was, and how to thread it up, and then actually began sewing.
I quickly moved on to a Basic Dressmaking Course, and made, with a great deal of help, a skirt. Even once it was made, I couldn’t believe that I could actually make something that would withstand being worn, and even more, being washed, so it was with some trepidation that I placed it in the washing machine for the first time. But it survived. And so my love of sewing and creating was born.
I started to explore all kinds of creative avenues that I had previously assumed where the domain of other people. I made a wrap around skirt, on my own. It’s not perfect, but it is functional, and I started to appreciate the sense of achievement you can get from creating something that you previously thought you had to buy.
As I started to learn more and explore more, I discovered the wonderful world of ‘Upcycling’ and re-purposing, and fell in love with the idea of creating something new from something old. And the more I discovered, the more I got to thinking about the amount of ‘stuff’ that we consume. In our daily lives, and also in materials for crafting.
Yes, it will always be better to make something ourselves (rather than some poor unknown on the other side of the world, sweating away in dreadful conditions for a pittance) but why buy new materials, when there is already such an abundance of perfectly useable, and sometimes much nicer things to use?
The more I learned and thought, the more the mindless consumption that seems to represent our society, and maybe, our generation, just seemed so wrong.
So I decided that we (myself and my young family) should embark up on a year of Buying Nothing New. Primarily to see if it could be done, and also to make us think more about what we were buying.
On September 1st 2012, My Make Do and Mend Year began. I blogged about it every day, documenting the challenges and solutions of Buying Nothing New, and it has been the most incredible journey. It has truly changed our lives.
I have learned so much. About where our food and clothes and ‘stuff’ comes from. About the resources that go into all of these things, the people who make them, how they get to our shops, and the HUGE amount of energy that is necessary to make this happen. And then that ultimately, it nearly all ends up in landfill. And that we are running out of landfill.
During the course of the year, we have been on a Rubbish Diet, I have helped to set up a Repair Café in my town, and run a Swish, not to mention appeared on the local radio, and TV, talking about the blog and my mission to get the world Making Do and Mending. I have spoken at a TEDx event, and the blog has even been featured in The Sun.
I have been taken out of my comfort zone, learned new skills, and embraced a whole new way of life. I am now passionate about spreading the word, and encouraging other people to think about what they are buying, and ways that they can reduce their environmental impact.
My next project is try and set up a Transition Group in my local town, and hopefully really make an impact of my own community. All this from the simple act of learning to sew.
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9 Sep 2013
Over the next few days we will be sharing the winning three stories in our Transition Training competition of courses people did that changed their lives. I thought it might be a good idea to start with my story of the course that impacted me the most in my life so far.
In June 2001, I got off the bus in a small village in Lancashire, with a rather heavy bag and in somewhat inclement weather, to walk up the hill to Middlewood, a permaculture project set atop a hill in beautiful woodland. The walk was considerably longer than I had anticipated, the road, seemingly to nowhere, seemed to stretch on for miles. Eventually I made it there in a somewhat sweaty blather, and found my bunk in the Study Centre, a beautiful building clad in timber from the site, graced, at its heart, by the first masonry stove I had ever seen (see right).
The reason for my trek was to do a course called Teaching Permaculture Creatively, led by Rod Everett. I had recently got a copy of the book of the same name, by Robin Clanfield and Skye, and had been deeply impressed by its approach. I was just about to start teaching the Practical Sustainability course at Kinsale Further Education College and was seeking an immersion in different approaches to teaching.
Middlewood was a stunningly beautiful place. The community there lived mostly in yurts adapted for year-round living, and many worked the land and managed the woods. There were reed beds, gardens, innovative buildings, off-the-grid renewables and so on. There was also a beautiful river, woods to get lost in, and the Study Centre had a fantastic library of permaculture books. And, of course, there were the other course participants, permaculture teachers drawn from across the country.
The course itself took place in a large yurt, in the round. One of the early exercises that really stuck with me was when we got into pairs, and were asked to discuss and list things we are good at. Once each person had done this, we were then asked to reflect on how it was that we became good at those things. Did we do a course? Did we teach ourselves from books? Did we seek out people who could teach us? There are many ways in which we seek out what we need to learn, and, as Rod argued, the role of the teacher is to enable people to learn through the whole spectrum of ways in which we learn, not just the sitting-down-and-listening-to-a-teacher way.
We were also introduced to the Learning Pyramid, and how much information people retain depending on the way in which information is presented, and how the best way for people to retain something is for them to teach it to someone else. Putting this chart up alongside how most learning takes place in schools and universities is pretty sobering.
What most impressed me was how much of the course, how much of the learning, happened without your being aware that it was happening. That realisation came later though. By the afternoon of the second day I was feeling really pissed off. It felt like all we had done up to that point was chat, go for a walk around the site looking at things, chatted, eaten and wandered around a bit more. When were we actually going to start learning stuff? When would the teaching start? When I mentioned this, Rod got us into pairs to reflect on what we could remember in terms of what we had done that afternoon.
Sure enough, it turned out we had learnt an astonishing amount of stuff. The 15 minutes we had spent chatting next to the reed bed actually, it turned out, had furnished me with an understanding of how the whole system had worked, to the point where I could draw a fairly accurate diagram of it. It also left me with a real grasp of soil fertility, the use of different plants in capturing nutrients, and how to use those plants. And I had thought we were just having a chat.
The 10 minutes sheltering from the rain in the woodshed had left me with a thorough understanding of how reciprocal frame roofs work, and of seasoning timber for optimal efficiency in wood stoves. Popping in to visit one of the families and chatting to them in front of their woodstove had taught lots about yurt construction, wood heating and adapting yurts to year-round living in the north of England.
Enjoying the view from the sloped field and seeing the newly-planted orchard there provided a lot of insight into designing for slopes, working with gradients and so on. The stroll back across the site, and the conversations on the walk had yielded a real appreciation of how the site’s designers had applied the permaculture principle of zoning. Even the salad when we got home, and the explanation of what was in it (the leaves and flowers of 24 different plants) was an education.
But none of it had been formally taught. No flipcharts, powerpoint slides, no teacher at the front of the classroom, no instructional videos or (heaven forbid) exams. In part we had taught ourselves, in part Rod had very skilfully introduced us to ideas, engaged us in conversation, without our realising we were formally being taught anything. That was a revelation.
The course continued in that vein, and included some great exercises and approaches that I went on to use in my teaching. Here are 11 of my favourites:
- Start the course with a wishlist: start on the first day by inviting people to suggest what it is they need from the course, what they would want to have covered in order to leave feeling completely satisfied with it by the end. Stick the list on the wall, and then during the course once something he been covered, check that everyone feels it has been covered to everyone’s satisfaction and then cross it off. Ideally at the end of course everything will have been ticked.
- Start each day with a revision: we started every day with a reflection over what we had done the previous day. This was a powerful exercise, arriving in the morning unable to remember much of what had happened the previous day, but bringing it all back to mind was very helpful. This can be done in different ways. It could just be getting people into pairs, a 5 minute each way ‘Think and Listen’ (one person talks, the other just listens, and after 5 minutes they swap over), it could be a guided visualisation, an imaginary walkthrough of the day (“first we did this, then we did that”), or an imaginary walkthrough but backwards, starting at the end of the day and running through to the morning. To bring everyone’s mindfulness back to where we are and what we’ve already done is a great way to start the day, especially if followed by the opportunity to ask questions relating to the previous day’s content.
- Collectively document the course: one of the things I loved was that every day, two people volunteered to keep a record of the day’s activities, a master set of notes if you like. This took the pressure off everyone to take their own notes. At the end of every day, two people huddled together around a table pulling their notes together and producing beautifully presented notes with drawings, notes and mindmaps to capture the day’s learnings. By the end of the course the entire thing had been captured in this way, and then 3 weeks after the course, when it might have been starting to slip from your memory, the printed copy of the manual of your course popped through the letterbox. Beautiful.
- Role plays: one day we did a role play, where everyone had a card, setting out their character and their point of view on an issue. As I remember, our scenario was that we were holding a planning appeal for a local alternative school, with us each representing different person at the appeal. We all set to the debates with great gusto in our characters, Rod afterwards commenting on how many of the issues raised and dynamics from the actual appeal had also come up in our pretend one. I have often used this approach since, it can be a very powerful way of exploring complex issues.
- Certificates and ‘affirmation shields’: at the end of the course, we were given our certificates, but rather than just being signed by the teacher, they were signed by all the participants. Before they were presented, everyone was given a sheet of paper and asked to write their name on it and to do a drawing of themselves. Then we went around and on everyone else’s sheet we wrote something we had really enjoyed about spending time with that person. When that was done, the ceremony of awarding certificates went thus: the teacher presented the first person with their certificate and their affirmation shield, that person then presented the next person, and so on and so on.
- We are all teachers: on a couple of days of the course we each had to prepare a 20 minute session, sharing one of the exercises that we used as permaculture teachers that we felt represented this creative approach. The rest of the group then were invited to give feedback, which was really useful. This gave an introduction to a range of approaches which people had already tried out in the courses they had been teaching.
- ‘Get into pairs’: I loved the way that even simple tasks could be turned into fun activities, energy boosts for when eyelids start drooping, or learning opportunities. Each time we needed to get into pairs, a different way of doing that was used. For example, one time we were each secretly given the name of an animal, told to mingle around in the middle of the room, close our eyes, and then find our partner by making that animal’s noise. Another way, at the start of a session about trees and woodlands, was that on the floor in the middle of the room was a circle of leaves. Everyone was invited to choose a leaf that appealed to them. They were then told that someone else in the room has the same leaf, and by seeing what everyone else has, to find that person. Once in pairs, they were asked to identify the leaf, and if they couldn’t the rest of the group was asked to. One time we were stood next to a long, thin log lying on the ground. We were told we all had to jump up onto it, otherwise the crocodiles would get us. Up we hopped, and were then told that, without putting our feet on the ground (and thereby feeding the crocodiles) we were to arrange ourselves in the order of our birthdays, January this end, December that end. Much manoeuvring and clambering ensued, and then that line of people was divided into twos to form pairs.
- Improvise – do the unexpected: one of my favourites of the sessions where we taught each other was when Ken (I think it was Ken), started by asking for everyone’s coats and jumpers. In the middle of the room he used them to build a 3D model of a landscape, with valley, slopes and different features. He then used this to lead a session about slope and aspect, how to use land in different ways depending on its gradient, where to plant forests, as well as a talk about keylining and how to move water around in such a landscape. I loved the spontaneity of it, and that added frisson of “what’s he going to do with my coat?”, rather similar to when a magician asks for your watch.
- Good food: Never underestimate how important good food is on a course. I have been on crap courses with great food which have generated very little in the way of complaints, and likewise on great courses where the room is cold and the food is poor, and believe me, things can unravel pretty quickly under those circumstances! The food at Middlewood was great, especially the bread.
- Keep it changing: different people learn in different ways. Some learn from listening to someone speaking, others really don’t. Many people have an attention span of about 15-20 minutes, anything beyond that you start losing people. So get up, move around. One of the things I took back to my teaching was that spirit of “right let’s go outside and do the next bit under a tree”. When I was teaching in Kinsale, we’d often do a short session in class, then go outside, do something practical, play a game, go back in the classroom, break into pairs to reflect on what we had learned, and so on.
- “If you’re tired, have a snooze”: At the beginning of the course, Rod pointed out that there was a mattress in the yurt, and that if any of us felt sleepy and wanted a snooze, to just go and sleep. His logic was that if you are battling to keep your eyes open you aren’t learning anything, that this course is also a break from busy lives, and on balance, over the course, you will learn much more if you rest when you need to than if you flog on regardless. In the early days of the course in Kinsale, I had a mattress in the corner, until the number of students became too big and there wasn’t room for it any more.
That’s 11, although I’m sure there were many more. If ever a course shifted my sense of how to do something, that was it. Twelve years later I feel I’m still digesting the learnings from it.
Robin Clayfield and Skye’s Manual of Teaching Permaculture Creatively is available from Ecologic Books here.
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