Between Conferences
I just got back from keynoting the NCSY Staff Convention in Stamford, Connecticut. This is an annual gathering of dedicated, exciting educators who engage with teens and inspire them in their Judaism. Some of the NCSY branches have begun doing “family engagement,” and some have brought the teens’ moms on Momentum trips - which is where I met these women, who asked me to join the conference as a speaker.
I had three talks: a breakout session in the morning for personal development, on parenting; a keynote at 10:30 am called “One Me, One Nation, One World: navigating this journey and making a difference”; and a final breakout at 4pm on work/life balance, after which I’d be whisked to the airport at 5:30 via Uber for an 8pm flight home (which took off at 9:30pm instead).
The work/life balance session had about 40 people signed up but only 20 showed, so in that small intimate space I presented the group with the following challenge. What are the big “rocks” in your life? What are your most important priorities? The participants threw out suggestions which I then wrote on a large piece of paper. Here are several: work, kids, marriage, spirituality, physical self-care, emotional self-care, community work, hobbies, housework, extended family, Torah study.
The group then broke up into small clusters and I asked them to pull the five most important “rocks” and rank them in order of priority.
Some interesting patterns emerged: almost everyone put spirituality first, even though according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, physical needs come before anything else. As a group of Jewish educators, this makes sense - everyone agreed that if your physical needs go unmet, nothing else matters, but still as a matter of theoretical priority, this group ranked spirituality above all else in the sense that it is the point of it all.
Another pattern was that everyone ranked marriage before kids. Again, as a group of Jewish educators, they were right to rank it thus, but your average man-or-woman-on-the-street would not do so. Your average respondent would either struggle to rank them, or rank kids first (because they are needier and more vulnerable).
Finally, everyone put work last. Now remember - this group’s work IS their spirituality - which they ranked first. Why? I think everyone recognized that it’s too easy to let work concerns take over, especially when your work is personally meaningful, spiritual, and gives you a strong sense of purpose. Yet, they all agreed that family, self-care, and spirituality is more important than work.
The question I challenged the group with, though, is this: why is it so easy to “know your priorities” in a conference room, but so hard to implement those priorities in real life? I know the struggle. One more email, one more phone call, one more ramble… and my kids are waiting for me to finish so they can talk to me, so we can go somewhere, so we can play something.
Why are so many things easier said than done?
In my parenting talk in the morning, I described three stages of parenting, an idea I’ve heard from my colleagues Lori Palatnik and Adrienne Gold: when kids are young, you are a manager. When they are teens, you are a supervisor. And when they are grown, you are a consultant.
“When,” I asked the group, “does a consultant give advice?”
Everyone answered together: “When asked!”
I looked around and said, “It’s amazing how everyone knows the right answer to the question. Yet it is so hard to do in real life.”
The distance from head to heart, said the Chassidic masters, is the greatest distance in the world.
It’s good to go to conferences. Very good, in fact. We get inspired, we network, we remember our priorities. The hard part is coming home and translating all that is in our heads - into our hearts. There are no real tips or shortcuts to the process. Jewish wisdom also teaches us, “Nothing can stand in the way of your willpower.” If you really, really want what’s in your head to travel to your heart, you’ll find a way.
You’ll find a way to remember your priorities in the heat of the moment. You’ll find a way to close your laptop and put away your phone. And you’ll find a way to stay inspired - between conferences.
Shabbat Shalom,
Ruchi
