Conducting myself as a manager..

There are some conductors that have found a way to carve out happy niches for themselves and to happily work within the contexts of their organisations or own businesses - but happily employed or self employed conductors seem to be a minority.  Most often, when you talk to conductors working all around the world, there is an undercurrent of frustration; frustration about not having choice in or control over the programs they conduct and frustration about restrictions and rules and policies for their organisation or governing and funding bodies that get in the way of what they see as best conductive practice.  For years I have been advocating for conductors to step up and take lead roles in organisations providing Conductive Education, and for organisations to look to conductors to build, shape, and manage programs.

I can certainly confess that I was a frustrated grumbler in previous places that I worked - and though I am not sorry that I fought for what I thought was right for my participants and for CE, I am sorry that I was not mature enough, or clever enough to to find ways to thrive within organisations that were trying to support me and CE. When I look proudly back at what has been achieved by my baby, the program at Dimes Canada, I realise how impatient I was, wanting everything to be perfect and perfectly my way right away, and that I was not able to see how hard the organisation was working to bring about change or to appreciate how much behind me - and CE - they were and still are.   I now realise that I got too frustrated with the teething pains of a new program and too caught up in what I saw as the good fight to engage well with management or to step up and take the reigns even with ample opportunity.

Now, years later in another time and another place, after years of successful private practice, I find myself sitting in a very different position as a managing conductor in an organisation brimming with potential but working through transition. A exciting position within an organisation that has chosen to give a conductor the opportunity to build and shape programs; a tenuous position working with frustrated conductors dissatisfied with previous management; an unfamiliar position within an organisation and a program that I haven't personally built from scratch.      

I am emotionally unattached to the history and politics of the organisation but respectful and empathetic to the frustrations of the conductors I am working with and their relationship with what has been, and their resulting demotivation. I do not feel threatened or needing to fight with senior management or board members; I accept they do not necessarily think like conductors but appreciate that they are supportive of seeing our program continue to succeed and grow, and accept that part of my job is to liaise between them and the conductive team. It is an oddly mellow headspace to be honest, an odd combination of bustling passion and excitement and calm clear-headedness that I haven't experienced in any other CE job that I've had.

I have had the opportunity to reflect on how I conduct myself as a managing conductor.  As I've said time and time again, and as Andrew told me years ago, being a conductor is not about 'what you do' but about 'how you do everything that you do'.  In this job there are times when I'm working as a conductor, and times when I am working as a manager, but I know that when I am wearing my manager hat I still think and feel like a conductor.

I have a general manager that I love working with who I have been blessed to have as a mentor - DB is a compassionate and dedicated manager with vast experience in management, governance, and leadership in non profit, disability, and education organisations.   He has given me structure and space to grow and learn, and challenges me to find a way to take this role on my way, conductively, and is patient as I try to find my equilibrium as a conductive manager.  I dare say that he is in fact a 'conductive' manager.

I have stopped trying to see conducting and managing as different - in the classroom I conduct my participants, and I the office I conduct myself and my team -- and I assure you conducting conductors is by far the harder of the two.

As in the classroom, I find myself digging my heels in about believing in my team, about expecting the best from my team even when they are under-performing, about believing it is always worth trying to find a way forward even when my team do not see it.  I still strongly feel responsible for being part of the solution, and believe that it is possible to find a solution even if I'm not the one to find it.  When things haven't gone well I wonder what I haven't done well, what as a manager I should have done better; when things are going well I feel really proud of my team and enjoy their success and the levity it creates in our office.

Even after challenging days or minutes with my team I find myself falling back on an attitude of rugged positivity and tenacious determinism - the very same attitude I have always had with my participants.  Even after a challenging day I still come back in the next day ready to try again, and hoping that this might be the day when we find the break through that moves us forward.

I want to be able to find ways to motivate and inspire my team, to give them opportunities to grow and thrive, to figure out how to bring out the best in them, and to learn how to respect them for where they are at.  I feel badly when I am not able to create that conductive environment for them, or when they choose not to run with opportunities I think that I have opened.  I try to understand my disappointment in myself as a manager who isn't always able to provide an ideal environment or to lift my team in the context of my expectation that as conductors they should be able to create this environment for each other, for our program assistants, and for themselves.  I try to balance this by being transparent in my efforts to bring a conductive approach to my management style, hoping that they too will be conductive with themselves and each other outside of the classroom, and wondering if that is an unreasonable thing to hope for.

It has taken me a while to have the confidence to start to voice this.  I know that there are going to be days and moments that are better than others and I'm a lot more okay about that than I was a few months ago when I started this job, with bright eyes, bushy tail, and rose tinted glasses.  Reflecting conductively helps me remember that as long as I am doing my best in any moment, it is the best that I can do, and thus helps me reflect more kindly on my own successes and challenges. I am so proud to be a part of a profession that has taught me to do everything that I do conductively, and so excited to bring my conductive approach and mindset with me as I step up and into my new role here.

Dodging raindrops and finding my feet...

I know I've gone quiet lately.  The past several months have been tumultuous -- I've effectively shut down a business and a chapter of my life, moved country and started a new challenging job, and I guess it is hard to find your voice when you are busy trying to find your feet.  And no, this is not the first time I've jumped from one life chapter to the next, but for many reasons it has been the hardest.  I realise now that part of why this transition has been so challenging is that I underestimated how tenacious the personal and conductive roots that connect me to Sydney have become.

It was heart wrenching closing down Transformations.  It is always hard to say goodbye, and even though I know that friends and clients who over the last decade have become mentors and friends will stay in touch as many from other chapter have done, the nature and consistency of relationships must change.  We always talk about how two way conductive relationships are, and it was very hard to step away from people who have supported me and everything I've done personally and professionally over the last decade.

To add insult to injury, I spent the better part of the last three months in Sydney desperately looking for appropriate people in the rehabilitation and fitness industry to hand my regular clients over to.  I brought carefully considered hand selected trusted colleagues and professionals I respected to meet my clients, hoping they would carry on my work, and many of them balked.  I found myself having those conversations, the ones where people tell you that they could never do what I do, with trusted friends and colleagues and I felt like they were rejecting a part of me when they said they didn't think they could take on one of my clients for an hour a week.  I was reminded of a challenging discussion that Andrew Sutton, back in my student days in Birmingham, lead us as first year students through about understanding that in a profession like the one we had chosen, we were choosing to have disability in our lives, but that we had to have compassion and awareness that it was not something our clients and their families actively chose.  I guess I forgot that the world that is so normal to me, filled with people I value and hold so dear, is such a strange and scary world to so many other people, and I took it really personally that even as a favour to me, let alone the gift of regular client into someone's business, respected professionals would not choose to be involved in my world.

In Conductive Education we have always heard about families who have travelled halfway around the world and disrupted their lives and families so that they would access Conductive Education for their child.  We also need to talk about the wildness of being a part of a profession where the only opportunities for employment in your field often necessitates disrupting your life and family and moving to another corner of the world.  I love, and am grateful for the opportunities and adventures that  a career in Conductive Education has afforded me - but this time I didn't just follow my whim and do what suited me in the moment.  I uprooted a wonderful husband, a person whose happiness and well-being I feel inherently responsible for, a person willing to leave a life that he loved to support me on a journey that I wanted to take, and have watched him struggle to settle in and find his feet and his happiness.  I romanticised the adventure we were going to have together, and actually assumed it would be easier to jump chapters with him instead of on my own and didn't prepare either of us for the roller-coaster ride and bumps along the way.

I also romanticised the job I was coming into, an established adult CE centre, working with two conductors I liked and respected, in a place that I have always wanted the opportunity to explore.  I didn't allow myself to think about things like the subtle but very relevant distinctions between Kiwi and Aussie culture, let alone the culture shock of jumping into established groups that have been running very well without me for years thank you very much, or about having clients who have had years of conductive experience that hasn't included me.  Some of the adults here have been around CE longer than I have - in my professional experience, every group I've run, every client I've had since my student days and other than during my hiatus in Norway, has been a person I've introduced to CE and a group that I have set up and run (with mentorship and guidance) my way.  I have had to learn, adjust, adapt - as have my new clients and colleagues and it has not been an easy ride.

I've also come into an organisation going through change - in fact I am part of that change and the associated discomfort, and worse yet I'm causing some of that discomfort.  I now understand that part of my roll is actually going to be conducting this organisation through change and I am going to have to work hard to learn how to do that.  In other jobs and in other organisations where there has been change, I've had to learn to roll with the punches and have had to learn to fight back where necessary.  I've learned that if change is a wave crashing over you it is hard, so you have to either learn to ride the wave or to choose to get out of the water, but now I'm part of the wave instead of the surfer and to be honest it is really hard to learn how to be a more gentle wave -- it has never been my style and it will have to be my style if I'm going to be any good at my job here.  And that, in itself, is overwhelming, and I hope I am mature and ready enough to change myself.

So three months in to this new chapter I'm still settling in.  But I notice myself composing blog posts in my head, on the train as I head home from work, on my notepad and emailed to myself as reminders of things I want to think about and write about.  I'm trying to keep my head up, to be excited instead of overwhelmed, to count gratitudes instead of raindrops, and to find my feet -- and hopefully my voice too.

It felt like home...

I often write about my experiences, trials and tribulations, of working conductively with people well and truly beyond the scope of traditional Conductive Education.  I am very passionate about this work and about what conduction has to offer a wide array of people and circumstances.  But, that said, when I start to work with somebody with a good old fashioned 'motor disorder' it really does feel like coming home; the tried and tested task series, rhythms, and ways of managing and solving things; the immediate connection and response from the person who suddenly realizes that they are working with somebody who really understands their body and it's seemingly random behaviour; the excitement that sparkles across their face when one of those tried and tested tricks is mastered and used for the first time - witnessing that moment when they let themselves feel positive, hopeful, and in control again.

And nothing makes me feel like I'm home in that professional capacity more than ataxia.  Yes, it was the subject matter of a special research project I did in 3rd year of uni, but moreover -- and despite the relative rarity of ataxia amongst other presentations of motor disorder -- I have had extensive experience and success working with people with ataxias including ataxia caused by rare genetic or metabolic conditions, accidents, strokes, MS, CP etc.

When I met SA, a woman in her late 40s with nearly textbook perfect ataxia and also another of my Enable Me 2 clients, I really felt that for the first time in a long time I had come home.  SA developed ataxia a few years ago as a result of Wernicke's encephalopathy causing Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, a rare, degenerative brain disorder caused by an extreme vitamin B1 deficiency (please see references for further reading).  Everything about the way SA moves and processes movement makes sense to me, and more importantly everything about the way she responds to the tasks, the rhythm, the trick, the teaching, the conduction is predictable.

We planned on 5 weeks of intensive CE -- working on her ability to use specific tricks manage her ataxia through formal tasks and practical applications in her home environment followed by several sessions of community based practical application practice.  We started working, and SA learned quickly and responded incredibly well -- getting up from the floor and walking down stairs with control and without vertigo and balance loss, a rhythmic and nearly restored natural gait with arms swinging gracefully opposite legs and minimal foot slapping, hand writing becoming ledgible again, even exciting tales of spontaneous used of learned tricks. "I brushed my teeth standing up at the sink and could fix my hips even when my hand was vigorously brushing my teeth!" SA reported excitedly one day when I arrived. "I can feel my weight transfer to the foot I want to stand on and it makes me feel like I can dance again", she said.

And then the volcano erupted.  I suggested an outing for the following week that would involve train travel -- regaining independent train travel was one of the key goal areas SA had identified as key to  regaining her life.  SA had started talking about wanting to do more than simple exercises, she wanted to run and play tennis and go places.  She understood how the exercises were helping her but felt ready to move on; I knew that the time had come to get out of the classroom with her and into the world.  SA surprised me with not wanting to discuss going.  I was prepared to let it go and to continue as we were - her body, her life, her time frame; fine by me.  But I had already triggered something, there was no going back and the volcano erupted with an explosive raging vengeance I never in a million years expected from this shy, friendly, good natured woman.

She raged about the therapists and case managers and her mom all forcing this therapy down her throat and telling her what was important.  She raged about her mom, a wonderful woman in her mid seventies who by this point SA was referring to as a stupid selfish cow who just wanted to be free of the burden of caring for her, absolutely not the case.  SA's mom actually left the house during the explosion in tears because she was so tragically in the direct line of volcano fire.  Or perhaps it was too painful to hear SA say that if this was how it was going to be that she had no interest in continuing to live like this and demanding who her mom was to judge her for that.  SA raged on and on about how no one understood that she was unwell and that when she got better she would be able to do everything again; she kept saying "I'm unwell, why would I want to go jumping on and off of trains when I'm unwell".

And that was my last session with her.  In calmer conversation later that evening SA and her mom decided to stop all therapy and intervention for now even though they knew it was helping her.  They enrolled in a community computer course and a neighbour is supposedly taking SA to a local pool for some swimming and promised to be in touch at a later date to review, refresh, or progress the tricks we had been mastering.

I have never witnessed a volcanic eruption of this nature; not in a professional capacity anyway.  I have talked to other participants about their volcano moments when the pressure from emotions and cognition of their life and disability and prognosis erupted; about the moments when denial and reality could no longer co-exist and exploded in tears and fits of rage.  But I have never witnessed it up close and in person with one of my participants, with someone I worked intensively with, with someone I cared about.  Two years of hospitals and medicine and therapy and nothing resembling SA's life as she knew it before she got sick.  Two years of intervention; at the beginning the promise and hope of getting better (complete recovery is possible within a few months of Wernicke's Encephalopathy and very unlikely after that time); now only the possibility of learning to manage it better.  Two years gone and SA going through the motions of rehabilitation and therapy and CE to placate her mother and please the nice therapists, yet still SA thinks that she will wake up one day and that the brain injury will be gone, that her 'illness' will be gone, that she will be better, that everything will be as it was.

And for me, 5 weeks of working intensively with SA and missing her cues, misunderstanding her, not realising where she was at and what she really needed from me.  Today I was discussing the notion of healing with AS in the context of the difference between healing a person of their condition vs trying to heal that person despite their disability.  I hope to one day have the chance to articulate that to SA and to her mother, but I do not think that SA will come back to me or to CE.  I am very sad about that and feel that by missing something so important I have failed someone whom I really could have helped.  I felt like I had come home when I met SA -- when really I had missed an important turn and wasn't even in the right ball park.


References:
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/288379-overview
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/wernicke_korsakoff/wernicke-korsakoff.htm

Ask the Expert - or Putting the 'E' in 'CE'

Before I had any real understanding of what Conductive Education actually was, I was interested in it.  I had the general idea that it had something to do with helping people with disabilities and I liked the idea of helping.  I didn't really know what was meant by 'conductive' -- despite lengthy debates amongst other students and conductors, reading Andrew's various analysis' over the years, and spending the last 15 years trying to trying to explain it to other people I'm still not totally sure what it really means.  However, I did understand the word 'education'.  I have long been passionate about education, teaching, learning, and dynamic potential.  I had some amazing teachers over the years; teachers who lifted me, who inspired me, who saved me from my teenage self but somehow I couldn't see myself standing at the front of a classroom and 30 kids in a mainstream school teaching curriculum subjects.  You might think that hopping on a plane from Canada to England to pursue a career based on some vague ideas about helping and teaching and disability was a bit insane, but at the time it really felt like this perfect opportunity custom designed just for me had somehow fallen out of the sky and landed at my feet.

And yes, we studied anatomy and physiology, etiology and presentation of conditions and diseases, and disability politics.  But much more, we studied pedagogy.  We learned about learning and motivation and potential and transformation and experience.  We learned about Vygotskii and his 'zone of next potential', and we learned about driven and inspired teachers like Feuerstein who didn't just find ways to teach people deemed 'unteachable', but believed so much in the power and processes of education that they sought and developed alternative ways of teaching and unleashing potential, and in doing so transformed the potential of education itself.  We learned about inspired teachers like Peto who chose to see past the medical model of disability and to believe that teaching and learning could positively  influence the presentation of disability, and developed a holistic pedagogy around helping people learn ways to manage their bodies.  And we learned that everyone could learn, and that learning is a lifelong process, that learning is dynamic and non-linear, and that learning is a shared two way experience between teacher and learner and that both teacher and learner learn and grow as a result of the interchange.  These ideas still excite and fascinate me today.

CW is working to regain leg strength following a hip surgery, so that she can push through her legs and bridge in her wheelchair and therefore be able to adjust her position in her chair to get comfortable and to allow her to get dressed and do other things involving position changes more independently and without hoisting.  Last week after our session, CW and I were chatting, reviewing the progress that she had made over the past few weeks.  We agreed that there had been slow but steady improvements in the movement and strength of her legs but that we were both frustrated that the bridging wasn't happening.  CW respects and trusts her orthopaedic surgeon -- his best advice was keep doing what you are doing.  CW works with a fantastic physio -- who gave us great feedback on how much pressure CW was able to put through each leg and which muscles were and weren't firing -- interesting and useful, but again, not getting us anywhere.  We had worked out the obvious things -- that mechanically a huge change in leg length would change everything and had tried everything to adjust for that, and still, well, nothing.  Then CW said that maybe it was more about where her back was in her chair now, and that if she had something behind her to bridge over it would work.  And this light went on for both of us -- yes leg strength was vital to the bridging, but CW doesn't bridge like other people bridge, she has a complex system of arching her back and triggering a reflexive movement and then using her legs to support her.

So the next session we tried ... and here is the result



But the real result ... another reminder that though I'm the teacher, I'm also the learner, and I am certainly not the expert.  I have some pieces of paper from university saying I'm a conductor, and I have years of experience working with many people and their incredibly different bodies and have learned some tricks and 'task solutions' that I can share.  But I don't know what it feels like to be in CW's body -- she is the expert.  And because as the teacher/learner I had the humility to say 'I don't know, what do you think' and as the learner/teacher she had the confidence to say why don't we try this, we both learned, and we found a solution.

“To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow student.”                

            -- Soren Kierkegaard, Danish Existentialist