What’s Your Current Reality?

Building Relationships via REAL + Innovators’ Compass

Last week, we discussed the first section of the REAL + Innovators’ Compass–a communication tool used to discover an innovator’s professional and personal aspirations inspired by Ela Ben Ur.

As you might remember, working through the compass is an outstanding culture-building activity for teams of adults and/or students, but I wanted to break it down into smaller chunks and consider ONLY one step at a time.

Today, we will discuss quadrant 1–What’s Your Current Reality?  Professionally and/or personally?

What’s Your Current Reality?

1. How will this particular piece of the compass help me relate to those I serve?
2. In what ways will the responses to this question help me teach, lead, or create for my audience?
3. How might knowing the “current reality” of those I serve help develop trusting relationships?

Why this question? 

Quadrant 1 is all about finding out where one is? What does their current reality look, sound, and feel like?

It’s important to know where one is before planning the next move. How might knowing what one is currently feeling in their personal life help you guide them through an important task in their learning or professional setting? Or, might that piece of information cause you to put on the brakes for a certain project.

I encourage you to create responses for this section of the compass, as well, I also want to have my learners do the same. 

The responses to this question will help us have a starting point. It’s great to later look back on and see growth, too. Innovators never stay the same and neither does their “current reality.”

The Center of the Compass In Action

As an administrator of instructional coaches, I used REAL + Innovators’ Compass to get to know each of them. During the conversations, a couple of the coaches answered this question, “What’s your current reality?”–

One time I learned from a staff member that their current reality was tending to their mother who was battling Stage 4 cancer. Knowing this helped me tailor my approach and be more specific when checking on her.

Why is this important to the work we do?

If we want to help those we serve, we need to know where they are and where they want to go. There must be a Point A to get to Point B. We have to start from our current reality–all aspects of it.

Relationships can take a lot of time to develop, but discovering the answer of this question can help us better serve our learners.

Try it! 

What is your current reality? Professionally and/or personally?

Write as many things as you can down in 2 minutes.

-Tara

Want to Learn More?

The Complete Compass Process

The actual implementation of REAL + Innovators’ Compass is relatively simple. I explain it in detail in my book, Be REAL Educate from the Heart as well as in the blog linked below.

Warning– the compass might seem awkward, at first, due to the timed feature. However, when you follow the process the results will astound you. 

Typically, you’d have each student or staff member:

• fold 1 Piece of copy paper into 1/4’s 
• And, allow them to respond to each question by writing their answers on the compass.
• Give them 90 seconds per question to write as many things as they can think of

The idea of the compass was inspired by Ela Ben Ur (contact info in link blog link). I adopted her method and created a series of questions, blended with the REAL acronym, to provide a tool to better relate to the people I serve. Blog post linked HERE for the entire REAL + Innovators’ Compass process.