There is a certain irony to this blog post. I was meant to have it written and published last week for the actual first week of school. Unfortunately, life got in the way. Despite my ‘hurry up’ driver pushing me to finish, I knew it was not a priority and so I gave myself permission to take a bit more time.
In my last post, I outlined the concept of drivers in transactional analysis. These being messages received in early childhood that are carried into our adult lives to dictate many of our behaviours. Sometimes they may be useful, but often they can cause stresses and problems when they take over. With the start of school I thought I would examine in more detail the ‘hurry up’ driver. To my thinking it can affect not only pupils, but also staff at schools, in some possibly subtle ways.
I expect one of the most explicit ways I which this driver is experienced is first thing I the morning, with that call to get up and get a move on. The incessant beeping of the alarm clock, the shouts of the anxious parents, the doom laden traffic reports on the radio. These all suggest an important role that punctuality plays in our everyday life. Being late can be bad. As the saying goes, the early bird often does catch the worm. So this post is not advocating being late or unprepared. In fact people with strong ‘hurry up’ drivers will often be reliable and stick to deadlines. Unfortunately, increasing speed in a task may reduce quality. There might be a need to multi-task and live in a form of organised (or unorganised) chaos, as the number of tasks to be performed in a given time start to stack up. Possibly the biggest thing lacking from those driven by ‘hurry up’ is time. If, like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, you are perpetually late, when do you have time to stop and relax? If you can’t relax, then it is likely, in your thinking that others should hurry up too, leading to impatience. We possibly all know someone who is continually trying to hurry someone out of a door even though there is plenty of time.
At school, there is a constant message to get to places on time. Increasingly, schools are removing bells to signal the start and end of lessons. Instead they sometimes employ a more common sense approach of providing change-over time, to get from one end of a large building to the other. Still there is an explicit message that if you are late, you will be punished. If you are not punished, you may miss out, either on important information, or perhaps another perk, like a seat at the back. This fosters a need for respectful punctuality, but what happens if competition creeps in? I have known people become resentful of those that always get the back seat (even though they have come from the room next door). Their hurry up driver kicks in, perhaps triggering thoughts of not being as good as other people. This can lead to running down corridors (major school crime), or perhaps pushing and shoving to get the best spot. If someone is constantly late because they do come from the other side of the school, the problem may become personalised. Constant punishments for being late are internalised so that the person feels more and more sad and frustrated each time they try to get to a destination on time and fail. A simple explanation to the teacher may solve the problem, but if a driver message has been internalised from a much earlier time, a person may see themselves as the problem (I am always too slow), and so this discussion may not seem an option.
If this driver is applied to learning, there can be all sorts of problems. When pupils first arrive at school there is a bombardment of maps, timetables, diagrams, rule lists and all manner of other information. Usually there is a grace period to learn this new information, but what happens when that period runs out? Again, comparison can start to creep in to thinking. A person may ask themselves what must be wrong with them, if after four days, they still don’t know where the dining room is without looking at a map. This might seem like a simple example, but imagine what happens to someone with a strong ‘hurry up’ driver when faced with a full timetable of subjects. The curriculum for each subject will be full to the brim and there will be constant reminders that there is not enough time to get it all completed. At the start of a topic, you might be told there will be six weeks to learn everything for a test. There is an inherent pressure to learn quickly.
A ‘hurry up’ driver might allow a person to seemingly cope with the demands to learn, but it is the hiddden cost, and what happens when they can’t that is important. Some topics might be more difficult to grasp than others. Some people have a natural affinity for certain topics and for learning particular types of information. Drivers are imperatives that we say to ourselves, so what does it mean if we can’t learn something on time? The answer is that it may be seen as a personal failing. This can trigger a spiral like feedback loop into your driver. For example, if after reading a textbook for two hours on Monday night, the information has still not been learnt. Therefore, I will have to finish my other homework quickly on Tuesday night so I can spend three hours reading another book on the subject. This path leads to exhaustion, burn out and possibly symptoms of depression.
At this point I want to mention new, and current teaching staff. At the start of school, they also will have a bewildering amount of information given to them, perhaps with an even shorter grace period in which to learn and adjust to it all. They too are expected to hurry up, in terms of delivery of their curriculum. A teacher with a ‘hurry up’ driver will definitely pass this onto their pupils, and possibly get impatient when the class or individuals are not learning fast enough. A more subtle form of this driver in action is perhaps with relationships. I have known new teachers who have been observed in the first half term who have had judgements made about the relationships they have with their classes. I have heard comments made from teacher friends like, “that class hates me” or “I am never going to get those boys on side”. In counselling, one of the first things you come to realise in training is that relationships take time to develop. In fact they are the underpinning of person centred counselling. They are complex things that involve a lot of factors like diversity, trust and personal history. Teachers don’t just have to form a relationship with ‘the class’, they have to form them with the thirty plus pupils in each class. Yet I have experienced teachers consider themselves failing because they do not seem to have connected with three pupils in one of their classes by Christmas.
So what can be done to perhaps reduce the impact of a ‘hurry up’ driver? Below I outline some suggested points to manage and limit the effect that this driver can have:
- Life is not a race. There’s no gold medal for finishing life first. When we compare our progress to others, we often forget that they are probably running on a different track to us. Also, it’s a cliché, but slow and steady often does win the race (not that there is one) in the end.
- Be mindful. Take time to stop and reflect on life, and enjoy each moment as it happens. Celebrate achievements and enjoy the process of a task, rather than the end product. Mindfulness takes time and practice, and for those with a ‘hurry up’ driver it can be difficult to stop or pause, but it can be done. Life is a wonderful thing, take the time to enjoy it!
- Prioritise. Not everything has to be done at once. Plan and make lists of what has to be done, and make sure that things that can wait, do wait. Ensure that downtime to recuperate appears regularly on the list.
- Allow others time. This will require pausing and the employment of empathy. While waiting for others, use the time to consider why they may be taking longer than you. Their needs and priority list may look very different to yours.
- Praises those that take time. This is for people that encounter those with ‘hurry up’ drivers. Don’t praise them for being quick, or chastise them for producing rushed or sloppy work. Instead, reflect and appreciate times when they have taken their time. Help them to be mindful and enjoy moments as they happen.
- Don’t take it personally. Being late because the bus broke down is not a failing on your part. Life doesn’t always go to plan. Deadlines sometimes need adjusting to compensate for unknown problems. It’s Ok to ask for help to complete or learn things. The old lady taking ages to get on the bus is not purposely punishing you and is not evil, she just needs a bit of understanding and extra time. Drivers often compensate for the feeling that we are not good enough. People appreciate you for who you are, not for how quickly you can do things. You are a good person, without the driver.
- Balance is possible. The alternative to going as fast as possible is not a dead stop. If you do stop, starting up again is very possible. This thinking might be alien to those with a need to ‘hurry up’. Seek a balance between going at breakneck speed and snail’s pace. Slow and steady is more than good enough most of the time. This also means you have the energy to increase the pace when you really need it.
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