Just Start Again

My wife and I have two children.  My son, the youngest of the two, just finished his junior year of high school.  Similar to our daughter, the junior year was by far the most difficult.  Last Friday was report card day.

My son and I, May 2019

The email came in at the same moment I was sitting down for a mindfulness exercise, just after finishing my workout.  Immediately after that, my phone blew up. My wife texted to discuss our response: he fell short of the goal, how would we respond?  Emotions were high. Meeting that goal meant earning a baseball trip the upcoming weekend.  My wife reported he was a bit angry about missing the goal. She felt I needed to get home soon so that together we could help him move forward.  I skipped the mindfulness exercise, headed for the shower, then drove home.

Agile Best Self Principle #6: The most effective way to be your best self is to be mindful and intentional.

In spite of missing the goal narrowly, there was a lot to be happy about.  He had a major improvement in the class he struggled with most in the previous trimester.  I knew he had worked hard to earn that improvement; I intentionally chose to emphasize the hard work and improvement as we went to lunch together. He needed me to be his dad that day – nothing more, nothing less. That was my second mindful, intentional choice: my Best Self for this day was to be dad.

The next morning I realized I had missed my daily mindfulness session.  A streak of nearly 180 days broken.  Ughhhhhhh! My first instinct was to get a little upset with myself.  However, those 180 days of mindfulness helped me approach the situation with curiosity.  It helped me see that what I was doing was intentionally prioritizing my son’s needs over my own.  I flipped the switch from disappointment to self-kindness, and further into cultivating feelings of optimism over starting a new streak.

It’s like when we get distracted during a meditation or mindfulness training session. Have some compassion. Just start again.

Copyright © 2018 – 2026 Michaele Gardner and Brian Hackerson

Mashups

The 12 Agile Best Self Principles were created during a curious and unintentional mashup of the 12 Agile Principles and Self Care practices and ideas. Both Brian and I have a love of the Agile software development mindset. We spend much of our time honing our craft and living these values and principles.

But let’s get serious, 12 principles is a lot! I can barely remember if I have eaten today or find my car keys. How can I remember 12 things?

Here is the bad news: You can’t. And life does not boil down to 12 discrete, unrelated principles.

Here is the good news: You don’t have to*.

Here is the growth mindset news: If you deliberately practice applying these principles while you are mindful and intentional about how they coexist, you will learn how to leverage these principles to be your best self.

I learned the Agile Principles by applying the principle of reflecting on how to become more effective – then tuning and adjusting accordingly. Essentially I took a team behavior and mashed it up against multiple Agile principles to see what we doing right and what we could do better. For example, if we over-complicated our code review process, then we were violating the principle of simplicity, self-organizing (because we had become self-dis-organizing), and tanked the principle around trust, motivation and giving individuals “the environment and support they need.”

This approach is the opposite of the Highlander quote: “There can be only one”. This process is more like finding ants in your kitchen – there is almost always more than one.

I’ve nicknamed the process of noticing an action, habit or event then looking at it through the lens of multiple best self principles a “mashup”. I also liked the words innovation and collision, but they didn’t resonate quite so much. The word mashup sounds mushy and imprecise (as it should). You can learn and experiment by thinking through experience and principle mashups. All you need is an interesting experience (hopefully a good one, because we are here to turn up the good) and the 12 Agile Best Self principles. Easy peasy.

In the world of art, one of my favorite examples of a mashup is taking ink and watercolor and mixing them together. This creates an ethereal, yet vivid and rich flow of color. I love it. The watercolor remains translucent, while the ink can be used to create clear lines and demarcation.

So mash things up. Purposely collide practice and theory. Bring ideas from different spaces together. Get messy and mushy with no clear finished product in mind. Start a watercolor painting and draw in the ink later.

*At the Global Scrum Gathering: Austin 2019, Daniel Pink said to lead with the bad news because as receivers, we all want the bad news first. He didn’t say anything about the growth mindset news (’cause I just made that up).

Copyright © 2018 – 2026 Michaele Gardner and Brian Hackerson