Motivating People to Excellence | Cheryl Ferguson | TEDxWinnipeg

Imagine that you are alone in a room, suddenly you hear a loud alarm and in two minutes 200 teenagers enter the room, go to the shelves around the room, open boxes and take out objects of all shapes and sizes and then they leave. They sit in front of you and start making sounds directly towards you. This is my life every day. I am a high school band director and I love every minute of it. I teach in a program that has won national gold medals for 40 consecutive years, so when

people

want to talk to me about my work, they often ask me how to motivate

people

toward

excellence

.

It all starts with the bricks in my room. The bricks in my classroom are very, very, very simple. They have no character through these singles. white rectangular bricks, if they had character, would have to be described as institutional at best, however, 13 years ago an interesting phenomenon occurred, around 10 students decided they wanted to claim some bricks, so they each chose one and wrote their name and their graduation class on the bricks they did it in a back practice room with the thought that maybe they wouldn't get caught or that no one would notice, while people did notice, the next year they saw some bricks more and the following year even more until finally, three years after the original bricks were claimed.

Some tenth graders came up to me and said, Hello, Miss Ferguson, what's the problem with the bricks? How do we earn our own brick? And I realized that bricks were the talk of the class. These students were spending time trying. to figure out how to get a brick of your own, so I made up some guidelines. I said, well, if you stay in the band until the end of 12th grade, I'll give you your own brick and you can decorate it however you want for the next few years. The years saw some surprising results. The students were interested, they wanted to choose their spot, they wanted their brick to be a friend's brick or maybe where they sat or where they kept their instrument and soon a group dynamic began to emerge.

Entire classes were wanted. To have their bricks together, one class painted their background green, another yellow and finally another put a border around their bricks and chose a brick in the middle to show all the achievements they had made that year, the students had talked, They wanted to be remembered. as individuals but also as part of a group and had shown that

excellence

was important to them, whether I'm in my band room or leading honor band or at music camp, my job is to bring people together toward excellence, people with other approaches. In their lives, people from other backgrounds have to leave all that baggage at the door and have to come together to achieve a great final musical product.

Now I have begun to wonder if excellence is being lost in a vortex of smartphones and social media, how do we satisfy the longing that people have for love and attention that they often try to find through web-based relationships. We all know Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in addition to biological and safety needs. He describes the need for self-actualization, love, belonging, and esteem. I think we can't really enjoy success unless these needs are met, so when people are on social media and engaging in, hey, look at me, types of posts on the internet, maybe they're trying to fill a void in love and belonging or self-actualization, but maybe there is another way to fill that void.

What about the old human connection? I would like to propose a revolution in which we return to a time when people connected as human beings face to face and spent time trying to learn each other's thoughts and beliefs. If we nurture the individual, they will be more likely to be able to embrace a concept of excellence and there will be a better team player now, how do we nurture the individual that we have? To start, make them feel valued and valuable. Now as a high school teacher, I can tell you that teenagers have a spidey sense and can smell a fake from a mile away.

You must begin with genuine care. Use a person's name. The name of a person like everyone else. knowing is the sweetest sound you can hear. I'm sure you've heard of those studies where people open the phone book when it arrives at our doors and first search their name using the name of a person who tells them It's worth your time and it's worth knowing. next. When you compliment someone, use specific compliments like band director. I have performed hundreds of concerts and at the end of the concert the comments often appear. Hey, good job, you'd be surprised at the different students' reaction if you say something like the way you played that note at the end of the second movement made my heart race and took me back to the moment I saw my son.

Nate for the first time, his eyes opened and said okay. thanks great, specific praise really makes a difference. We also need to ask people questions. Asking questions identifies that you are genuinely curious and truly care about the person, but you have to stick around to hear the answer. I remember one time he was running. I was walking through the school hallways toward a probably unimportant meeting and I passed a fifteen-year-old girl in the hallway and said, Hi, how are you? She said, "Okay, I guess," and something in the tone of her voice made me stop and say, why doesn't she come to my office for a minute?

Then she sat in my office and said: I'm so sorry, Miss Fergus, and I just didn't sleep all night once again, my parents were fighting and unfortunately I heard my father's blow, my mother's expression. her face when I told her I would help her with something I will never forget, if we nurture the individual and make that investment, people will be more able to accept a group goal of excellence, but what about defining what excellence is? Is it simply about maintaining what has been done before? Is it about surpassing a standard set by others? Who decides what excellence is for any group of people?

It's about having a vision, a goal, an idea of ​​where we are going. Her one-year-old son, Sam, is a soccer fan. He spends hours watching Thomas Muller's plays with the sincere thought that one day he could use those moves against his 10-year-old rivals. He studies in the basement at 6 o'clock. morning and practice and I never tell him that he can't do it and that he will never be Thomas Muller and that is ridiculous and why not, because what if he can and what if his pursuit of that excellence allows him to reach his own level of excellence I have seen I work this over and over again with young musicians if you ask a group of students to play a piece of music and then ask them to stop closing their eyes and imagine the best sound they have ever heard on their professional instrument. playing your instrument and then playing the passage again without fail, there are always improvements.

Our brain has an incredible ability to visualize excellence and then direct our bodies and minds toward it. We simply had to have a goal, so achieving excellence is about nurturing the individual and also having a vision and a goal must be present and both must be rigorously pursued, but what about motivation? What is the spark that drives people to achieve excellence? First, I have learned in my time as a teacher that it starts from the extrinsic and moves. towards the intrinsic I remember a group of students, they were sixth graders from another school, came to my school for a clinical session and I remember them all sitting there and we were trying to execute a rhythm, it was a series of notes and breaks that They had to play perfectly together without anyone playing over the rest, as in most groups, some students played on the wrists and interfered with the excellence we could now achieve.

I really wanted this group of students to achieve excellence right now, so I looked at the clock. I saw that we had 5 minutes left and I said desperately if you can do this for me and I will perfectly buy you a pony. They looked at me like I was crazy. I said listen, don't worry. I will continue. via I'll buy you a pony just do this like this something magical happened they sat forward their eyes glowed and they all executed the beat perfectly turns out they always had the tools to achieve excellence they just had to be motivated to do it now I'm not sure if It was either a physical object or just not wanting to let the group down, but I'm also not sure it matters that the group of students achieved excellence at the time and I bought the pony from them.

A year later, another group of students from the same school came with a new class of sixth graders and before the clinic started I heard them all chatting about the band room pony, so I thought, man, this one thing has become legendary, I'm going to see if I can also offer these guys a pony, so there came a time in the clinic where I wanted them to play two bars and stop and I told them: if everyone stops together and not a single person plays an extra note, i will buy from you. a pony and again it was like magic they sat forward, their eyes sparkled and they executed both measurements without a single mistake now I'm pretty sure it wasn't because of that nine dollar pony that I didn't end up buying them. pretty sure they just knew they were part of the tradition and legacy and didn't want to be the one to let anyone down.

If we think of moving toward success with the metaphor of a ladder, we can imagine someone climbing toward success by having a vision to help them. know where to place the ladder and motivates them to do so. nurturing the individual gives them the strength to climb one rung at a time, but probably the most important part of the picture is giving the ladder something to lean on and this is where my bricks come from, these bricks fused on top of each other are come together to provide a vision of excellence for those to come, through these bricks my students have been taught that they are valued as individuals and yet as part of a group and The group needs them to be successful and I believe that You will go out into the world and collect your own bricks to give to others and I think you will build something fantastic, thank you.