Rigorous Intention
Do you remember a teacher or a mentor who changed your life? I recently found a study that demonstrated how one caring adult can change the entire future for a young person and the topic had me wondering if we can take that same sentiment and apply it to embracing better goals in education.
In fact, all this interest in things like mindfulness and “leaning in” has me wondering if it isn’t time for all of us to start nurturing the kind of thoughtfulness it takes to change someone’s day, be it a child, a customer or a stranger!
What if we stopped rewarding the smartest, the fastest, the strongest, and started rewarding something that starts on a level playing field. I’m calling it Rigorous Intention? A simple definition might be: the impulse to go the extra mile.
Let’s start with a thought experiment. Take a moment to reflect on the people you may recognize in the following questions:
Have you ever had a bad meal in a restaurant, but given the wait staff a nice big tip anyway, because you knew they were going the extra mile to do their very best in a bad situation?
What about a doctor or dentist office that so wildly exceeded your expectations that you run around telling everyone they must go to that office?
Have you ever been delightfully surprised by the friendliness of a TSA agent or toll booth attendant?
Do you drive a long way, or pay more than you need to, for the services of a hairdresser, fitness instructor or auto mechanic?
Have you ever watched a child take fall after fall while learning to ride a bike, but they keep getting back on for another try?
There’s a quality of character that all those people are exhibiting. What they all have in common is something I like to call Rigorous Intention.
It’s like good intention on overdrive!
When someone is acting with Rigorous Intention, we can spot it a mile away. In fact, I suspect we are hard wired to recognize it and follow. That may be one of the key ingredients to progress throughout human history: we could recognize someone paying way more attention to detail, and they were a safer bet if one were going to choose who to follow.
Need a bit more clarity? Rigorous Intention is the opposite of “going through the motions”. I define “rigorous intention” as a quality and magnitude of effort that is immediately obvious to others. Best of all, I suspect it’s an internal drive. Sure, there are work and family cultures that create fertile soil for rigorous intention to take root and thrive. But if you see someone acting with rigorous intention, you can often look around and it seems obvious that they are motivated by an internal compass.
We get so excited by people who are doing things with Rigorous Intention because they are such a refreshing surprise!
As I write, I’m on an airplane with a flight attendant who hasn’t cracked a smile yet. She is taking drink orders with all the pep of a zombie, and oh, she just carelessly pushed the drink cart into the leg of a sleeping baby who lit the cabin up with a shriek at 6:40 am. And for an added touch of cheer, she then carelessly pitched the snacks she was holding into a bin with a roll of the eyes for everyone in rows 10 through 35 to see. Lovely.
This is not Rigorous Intention. She’s a “flight attendant” not the least bit focused on the attending to the details of anything. She’s making the motions needed to check a box, without committing one more neuron than necessary.
Sadly, I suspect we can find people working with this same laissez-faire in every field, but the “thought leaders”, well, they are the people who we all love to work with. They set the bar high for an organization’s standards and create cultures where people take pride in their work. They are the people who are truly present with the task at hand. They can even fail with grace and we rarely fault them because we have so much confidence in the fact that they tried their best.
SUCCESS CONSISTS OF GOING FROM FAILURE TO FAILURE WITHOUT LOSS OF ENTHUSIASM.
– CHURCHHILL
There are nurses who calmly make us feel like we are the only patient they are caring for, and then as the door closes behind them, we hear their footsteps quicken because they are sprinting to the next patient’s bedside. There are car detailers who get into the corners with a toothbrush, and salespeople who will point you to a competitor if they don’t have exactly what you need. There are TSA agents who call you “hun” and apologize profusely as they take that pocket knife you’ve had since earning your Eagle Scout badge.
People are practicing Rigorous Intention when their focus is not just completing a task, but finding joy and pride in the process.
Now, to the real questions: How do we encourage this mindset, make it more the norm than the exception in society?
I suspect we could have the biggest impact on the future if we started at the source: by updating our education system.
It's safe to assume that if teachers were not forced to "teach to the test", many of them would have goals that would dwarf the short-term usefulness of standardized testing.
I know a lot of dedicated teachers who would jump at the chance to work in a system that rewards the long game of creating life-long learners and helping students to discover and embrace their unique gifts of interest and aptitudes. But that's not what's happening now.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with people in education from cultures as diverse as India, Kenya and Japan, and the consensus appears to be that around the globe, the end game of many education systems has gone very wrong. Now almost every education system in the world is “teaching to the test.”
I’m beginning to suspect the current challenge that employers have in finding employees who really care about the quality of their work may have started in our education system, when students were taught to care about the wrong things. Successful test-taking skills are no predictor of success for accountants, dental hygienists, electricians, city managers, administrative assistants, and almost any other job.
In fact, if you pause to think about the people who you’ve needed help from in the last few weeks, almost all the professions that impact our daily lives require qualities that are absent in the “teaching to the test” model.
Perhaps it’s time to teach and reward the skills that have always carried humanity forward: attention to detail, the ability to focus intensely, creative problem-solving and collaboration with others. Those are the hallmarks of working with Rigorous Intention.
Hmmm… if we got better at those skills, we might solve a lot of the world’s most vexing problems!
Contact me if you’d like to start a dialogue about using Rigorous Intention in your field. It’s a conversation worth starting!
