coaching – Panta Rhei Enterprise

Hey, Friend,

Mind your language.
The language of COVID-19.
The language of instruction.
Language and cognition.

Hope I did not startle you with the imperative: mind your language. I do mean you personally, but I do not mean to imply that you have said something inappropriate. It’s simple: all of us should be mindful of the language we use. All the time. I know this is hard to do. I have failed miserably. Too often. It is more something to strive for, to be aware of. We are focused on What we want to say. We inform, explain, promise, declare, question, list, pray, or baptize. All by using language. We rely on our utterances when we teach, train, coach, or mentor. And it is this area I want to focus on in this blog post.

Personal confession: I have been studying language, teaching it, and teaching about it for many years. I enjoy thinking about language and texts. Taking them apart and putting them together (again). Language or the way we communicate is one of our characteristics that makes us who we are—human, so I believe. Language and thought – or more technically: cognition – are inextricably linked in many different and complex ways. And yet, we are all able to use a language we grew up with without ever having to necessarily learn about it, think about it, or reflect on it. What a luxurious gift!

So, we all got a gift. Would it not be better to take good care of that gift? One polishes it to make it shine for the joy of others. Another monitors it to make it a precise and useful instrument. And a third ensures that no injury or misunderstanding results.

And if each of us strives to do all three at least most of the time, then I would call that being mindful about how we use language. This can improve all of our social interaction, and I will focus on the role of language and how we use it when we teach, train, coach, or mentor in this series of blog posts.

Panta Rhei

About a week ago, I took some time and built a little skeleton of blog posts to set up the functionality of our site. Chris and I began the Panta Rhei site for two reasons (I believe; he will correct me soon if I am wrong):

We believe that with our joint expertise, experience, and education, we have a couple of things to share, things that we hope others might find helpful. We have always shared them with family, colleagues, students, friends, … at conferences, in the classroom, in meetings and informal conversations. We want to reach out more and do this more systematically.
At this stage, our thoughts are on different phenomena, challenges, fields, prospects, questions, … It is a whole complex – a bit like a nourishing, comforting stew – of ideas, insights, lived experiences, learned theorems. Difficult to digest and even more difficult to name the ingredients and teach the recipe. So initially, we will use this blog to bring clarity and system to our thoughts. To stay in the picture: we don’t expect anybody to want our stew exactly the way we have had it simmering for many years. We will use the stew as a solid base for a variety of soups, soups that are not only nourishing but also presentable and transparent. In other words, each blog entry will bring more clarity to one thought. And we decided to do this “live” and publish each blog post immediately or soon after writing.

We are hoping to get your reactions, your comments, your questions, …

This post has been tagged with all 36 tags we currently have for this blog to give you an idea what this is all gonna be about. A little more in this vein in the next post.