Why you should define your fears instead of your goals

Why you should define your fears instead of your goals

A main theme of our class discussion and learning was around mechanisms we can  employ as educators and administrators to change behaviors. My enduring take-away was that punishments never affect the desired behavior modification on a lasting basis. Using positive reinforcement has the greatest efficacy and negative reinforcements applied correctly can also be used with good effect to modify behavior.

If you have just 13 free minutes, watching to this segment would be a great use of that time. In this TEDTalk, Tim Ferris offers some interesting insight in to Stoicism as "an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments and for making better decisions."

"We suffer more often in imagination than in reality"
 Seneca the Younger

Tim offers a Stoic framework for taking yourself outside of the moment in an exercise he calls "Fear Setting" as opposed to goal setting. Rather than directly defining your goals, Tim follows the Stoic practice of "premeditatio malorum," which means the pre-meditation of evils. The three-step process first defines the fears that are the obstacles to achieving your goals, the possible beneficial outcomes and then the likely costs of inaction.  I interpret this as a different approach to employing negative reinforcement or than I had previously considered.

In carrying out our work in schools, we could benefit from the "mental toughness training" that many of our current day achievers are borrowing from the Stoics.

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