Getting into the Zone

Happy New Year! I hope you and your family had a wonderful break. It is great to have everyone back at school, ready to take on the challenges of 2020!

On Monday, our faculty and staff started off the New Year with a professional development day. I took the opportunity to share with everyone one of my favourite TED Talks, ‘How to get better at the things you care about’ by Eduardo Briceño, the leader of Mindset Works. 

This talk explores the two different zones in our professional and personal lives that we can utilise to achieve our potential: the Performance Zone and the Learning Zone. Briceño explains that our lives are so busy that we can be constantly in the Performance Zone and may not be spending enough time in our Learning Zone. This means that we can end up stagnating and not reaching our full potential. We feel frustrated and disappointed in ourselves.

Our expectation when we are in the Performance Zone is that we will do our very best. We focus on what we have mastered and try to demonstrate our skills to the best of our ability. We make mistakes because we are unprepared or we lost focus. Mistakes are to be avoided because the stakes are so high. It’s clear, we can’t spend all of our time here.

In order to truly improve, we need to spend time in the Learning Zone when we can develop our expertise, skills and experience, and be able to make mistakes to learn from them in a low stakes environment. Our goal in the Learning Zone is to improve. We focus on what we don’t know yet or cannot do yet. We expect to make mistakes because we are challenging ourselves. And, most importantly, we learn when we make mistakes.

Check out the video to see if it resonates with you as much as it did our faculty and staff. See if you or your children or even your colleagues can learn how to recognize and move between these two zones. If you can, I am confident that you will be able to perform at your best in any high stakes environment – when it really matters.

Speaking of the Performance Zone, a special shout out to two great recent performances—our students' Math Contest results and our Lower School Choir. Scroll down for more information on how these two groups performed at their best and made us all very proud.

Ms. Cheryl Boughton
Head of School