My Growth Mindset quiz results on April 18, 2022: I have some work to do. Screengrab from IDRlabs.com
Do you have a growth mindset? Or do you fear challenge and change?
They are questions I ask students in my COMM8400 Business Communications classes each semester at Conestoga College. As I ask them to take an online quiz, I also log also answer the 20 questions myself.
My quiz result today: I have a growth mindset with some fixed ideas.
I have some work to do in my personal growth, apparently.
I notice variations in my quiz results, semester to semester. When things are going well, when I’m feeling successful, I remember having a higher growth-mindset score. When life is messier, I’m stressed and struggling, I remember I have a higher fixed-mindset score. I can’t help but note the relationship.
Personal growth
The big takeaway for me after teaching a lesson on Growth Mindset is always “skills and intelligence are malleable,” as Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck says.
Dweck’s research always reminds me of the power of smart goal setting, flexible thinking and embracing imperfection. It’s time for me to read her Growth Mindset book again.
Encouraging students to develop a growth mindset for personal and career success reminds me to walk the walk myself. It’s always better for a teacher to model the effective strategies that build my personal and business communication skills.
I have control of my life when I decide to take control of my life.
I have the ability to change and learn — and learn and change.
Challenges are a good thing because they’re hard and build my problem-solving mental muscle.
Embracing failure is a powerful way for my best learning opportunities to take root and grow.
Man speaking in front of a seated audience in a lecture hall.
If you want to be a better public speaker, start by listening.
Effective speech writing is all about knowing who you are talking to, and giving them what they want – or need – to hear.
It’s a hard lesson for me to learn – especially when there’s a police officer in plain clothes staring you down.
One day, somewhere back in mid-2002, I was asked to speak at a lunchtime Rotary club meeting about journalism and the news business. Easy enough, I thought. At that point, I just received my 20-year pin serving the trenches at the Cambridge Reporter newspaper. I was the newly appointed editor and feeling pretty good about myself.
Great stories are good, but
With all those years a reporter, photographer and editor, I knew I had great stories.
I cobbled together a speech about how I approached the news business, how I made a living asking questions. How I found stories. How I shaped those stories for my audience. And, of course, What was the weirdest thing I ever wrote about?
(It was a guy who brought a potato into the newsroom one day, looking for a story. The spud looked exactly like former U.S. President Richard Nixon’s face and head. Seriously. Photo and story for the front page, please).
Anyway, my speech went well enough. I told few more stories while neglecting to delve deeply into why one story gets published and another doesn’t.
I had my speech all written down – and kept reading from it behind the podium. No point-form notes to I could keep my eyes on the audience. I droned on for 10 minutes. I didn’t vary down my tempo and use inflection to emphasize important points.
I didn’t think through who was in the audience. Who might put their hand up in the question and answer session?
Be prepared
I broke a basic rule of journalism: be prepared.
Rotarians? What could go wrong? All I had to do was call the organizer and ask who the club members are. Or more accurately, remind me who was likely to be in the audience. I knew most of them from writing stories about what they’ve done in town over the years.
Local business leaders who have learned how to ask good questions, because their livelihood depends on good information. The crowd gathered in the Galt Country Club meeting room was also salted with other community leaders, people who also knew how to ask good questions. After all, nobody builds credibility for their personal brand by talking all the time.
None of that was in my mind as set myself up as the target in the question-and-answer session. I started to recognize the faces as they asked me about stories I had covered, softball questions about why the media does what it does and why I like my job. (Answer: I love asking questions).
Then she stood up and greeted me politely. I wished I remembered she was a one-time homicide investigator and was now commander of the local police detachment. Super friendly. With a detective’s mindset. I didn’t see it coming.
“I’ve heard there’s a Code of Ethics for Journalists – so why didn’t you talk about that in your speech. What do you say to people who don’t think journalists have any ethics?”
Busted.
Answer obvious questions
I wasn’t ready for an obvious question. I stammered and wobbled at the podium, before making a half-hearted explanation. It was ugly.
I wasn’t ready with a story to tell a personal story around the never-ending public discourse of ethics in journalism. Something everyone seems to have an opinion on. Something that’s been simmering for centuries, long before people started accusing the media of creating “Fake News.”
I learned. Always remember: audience first is the smart way to approach speech writing.
Listen to what they say — and imagine what they are likely to ask.
Please use the form below to contact Kevin Swayze, so he can put his business storytelling experience to work helping you find, shape and share your message with impact.
Contact Kevin by email or contact him by mobile phone: 226-924-4237.
Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario, plans online teaching job fairs May 15 and May 19, 2021.
If you’ve ever thought about teaching what you know, Conestoga College is looking for you.
For the last two years, I’ve delivered Citizen Journalism and business Client Communications classes at the Doon campus in Kitchener, Ontario. The part-time teaching opportunities give me a chance to share the communication skills learned my a 30-odd year career in newspaper and online journalism. That experience was the foundation to building my business storytelling skills and media relations experience.
It was a coming home for me when I returned to campus in 2019. I graduated from Conestoga in 1986 with a Journalism-Print Diploma (honours). The next year, I started my journalism-communications career at the now-closed Cambridge Reporter newspaper. Back then, I never thought I’d be a teacher. But 30 years later, but I responded to a last-minute request to teach a class at Conestoga. And I haven’t looked back.
Part-time teaching jobs
Conestoga is looking for more part-time faculty. I encourage you to think about sharing your career skills with students in programs ranging from business to social services and animation to bricklaying.
If you can’t attend the sessions, you may also leave your contact information to receive an application form for potential teaching opportunities, the form says.
In my experience, if you’re serious about wanting to teach, Conestoga is ready to help you succeed while helping your students succeed.
Without exception, over the last two years, everyone I’ve worked with at Conestoga has welcomed and encouraged me to learn and grow. I started teaching without any formal teaching training on my resume. Conestoga offers training, workshops and discounted tuition for continuing education courses to build your teaching toolkit.
I’ve found that the more I teach, the more I learn. The skills I learn and practice while teaching helps me build my career as a project-based business communications consultant, after leaving The Record newspaper in 2016.
In truth, I wonder some days if I’m learning more than I am teaching my students.
Teaching makes me better as a communications consultant and business storyteller. After all, my day job employs the same fundamental skills I use in class – and vice versa.
Kevin Swayze returned to Conestoga College in 2019 to teach, 35 years after he first attended classes at the Doon Campus in Kitchener.
I went back to the future this month.
I am back at Conestoga College, 35 years after I first attended classes there.
Last time, I was there as a student – and graduated with honours from the Journalism-Print program. Found a job and made a 30-year career at newspapers.
Kevin Swayze’s 1987 media card while working at the Cambridge Reporter newspaper.
This time, I am an instructor. I’m teaching “citizen journalism” for online presentations. Both were unknown when I was learning how to stitch words together like a newspaper reporter.
I feel more than a twinge of nostalgia as I walk the halls as a journalism professor. It’s a long way from the farm where I grew up near Hamilton, Ontario. I realize I have far less hair now than I did in the 1980s.
Nostalgia in the halls
The Doon Campus building in Kitchener is where it always was, along Highway 401. It’s now about twice as large as when I attended classes, after multiple additions to the buildings since I graduated.
On-campus parking enforcement remains as enthusiastic as I remembered from 1984. Back then, I remember buying paper parking passes and putting them on the dashboard of my two-door 1977 Pontiac LeMans gas-guzzling car.
Today, I pay for parking using an app on my Blackberry. Tap, Tap, Tap to process a credit card payment. It must be working since I’ve not yet found a metal clamp from parking services on the front wheel of my utilitarian 2010 Ford Focus.
There’s now an on-campus Tim Hortons coffee shop just inside Door 3. Across the hallway is a student life centre. And just down the hall is a beautiful, extensive library with big windows and glassed-in study rooms – but few books on the shelves.
And now after working 30 years as a newspaper journalist, my brain starts asking questions. Comparing today to yesterday’s so long ago.
All the students! Far more than I ever remember. Thousands of students. I’d guess there are double – maybe triple – the students now at Doon than I ever remembered before.
International students
Stepping back inside Conestoga also reminded me how things changed from the Ontario of my youth.
I don’t remember anyone who didn’t look or talk more or less like me or talk like me when I arrived at Conestoga in 1984 and walked the concrete-block walls.
Today, a third of Conestoga’s 18,000 full-time students are from outside Canada. Most are from India and Nigeria this semester.
Conestoga College Hallway in 2021.
More than three-quarters of my class are international students. It’s a blast.
I’m learning international students are likely planning to stay in Canada, as part of a national immigration effort that started about five years ago. Students must complete two years of studies here – at three times tuition for Canadians. That earns them a work permit to stay and practise skills they’ve learned and, eventually, the preferred path when applying for landed immigrant status.
Staying in Canada
In several seminars for new teachers, the situation is described as a win-win-win.
A win for Conestoga, because there’s a decline in Canadian students applying for classes as the Canadian birthrate declines. A win for international students – most of them from middle-class families – are eager for a respected Canadian education – with the bonus of potential citizenship in a safe, stable country. A win for a country that needs more educated, enthusiastic young people to keep the economy growing.
At the same time as international students are filling Conestoga, there’s a widespread effort to encourage enrolment from young people in Canada’s Indigenous communities. It’s part of a national effort to begin mending Canada’s ugly history of racism toward First Nations communities. One of many steps toward reconciliation.
And there’s also an overriding effort to assist all students to succeed — with mental health counselling a phone call away and assistance for students with learning disabilities.
All part-time teachers at Conestoga must attend five, three-hour training sessions to learn how to support and engage with students. I understand something like half of the students at Conestoga have learning disabilities, diagnosed or not. I don’t remember hearing anything remotely like this when I was a student.
Walking the same halls I walked as a journalism student more than three decades ago, prompts me to pause.
I think about what’s changed. And a few things that haven’t.
And I still wish I had more hair.
This blog post is adapted from a speech presented at Cambridge Toastmasters, Jan. 19, 2019.
Please use the form below to contact Kevin Swayze, so he can put his business storytelling experience to work helping you find, shape and share your message with impact.
Contact Kevin by email or contact him by mobile phone: 226-924-4237.
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