The Power of Boredom in Creativity and Learning

In this episode, Rachel shares her insights on the importance of boredom, rest, and nature in fostering creativity and learning, both in education and entrepreneurship. She discusses her personal experience of how allowing herself to be bored led to new ideas and connections, emphasizing the human uniqueness in synthesizing unrelated ideas.

Chapters
00:00 Anniversary Weekend Getaway
01:49 The Power of Boredom
04:22 Connections Through Boredom
07:33 Planning for Boredom
10:38 The Human Experience vs AI
14:27 Finding Clarity in Boredom
17:54 Sustainability in Teaching Business

Resources 

Rachel's Blog Post on Boredom and Learning 

"How We Learn" by Benedict Carey 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Teacher to Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Scizioni, former classroom teacher turned entrepreneur and mentor to educators building their own unique teacher businesses. This is a space for teachers who are curious about alternatives to the classroom, exploring private practice and other multifaceted work, and for those who want to know what success can look like beyond the classroom. I'm glad you're here. Now let's get into today's conversation. A couple weekends ago, my husband and I went away for our anniversary weekend. His family has a house in the mountains that his grandfather built, and the whole family shares it. And it's a really sweet little place. It's it's rustic, but it has all the modern amenities, and it's right on a lake, and there's also a boat. So we get to go out on the lake on the boat. And we've been doing this now for a few years, ever since COVID, and it's turned into one of our favorite things to do. It's just a really nice, relaxing weekend where we get to get away, and it's a very low budget and just a couple hours from where we live tradition that we've started. But this year, the weather was not supposed to be good. So one of our favorite things to do when we go up there is to spend the whole day on the lake. And we pack boat sandwiches, and I bring my book and I bring a journal. My husband brings his fishing things, and I look forward to a wonderful boat nap. I've never had one, I highly recommend. And this year, we thought we were only gonna get to be out there for just a couple hours at a time. And so the first day we were out, I didn't bring any of my things. I thought I'm just gonna enjoy nature and this time with my husband, and I'm just gonna relax, and maybe if I'm lucky, I'll get a boat nap. Well, the storm completely passed us, and we ended up being out there for over six hours, and I didn't have any of my things. My husband had his fishing gear, and I do that from time to time, but I wasn't really in the mood. And so for the first time in a really long time, I got bored by bored, and it was awesome. I mean, my kids complain, they're now 13 and 11. They've been complaining about being bored forever, and whenever they would be bored, I'd say, Great, that's fantastic. That's where all your best ideas come from. And so here I am, bored and not knowing what to do with myself. And it was exactly what I needed. It was perfect because that's where my brain was able to make some connections that it had not made before. And here were the things that it connected. It pulled together a conversation that I had had with a former student before the school year ended, probably back in May sometime, that inspired me to write a blog post, which is linked below in here. Basically, she was talking about how hard it is to teach now. And she's only been in the classroom for two years. This is just her second year. She did a long-term sub, and this is her second contract year. She's already noticed that it's really hard to like actually teach. And we were having a conversation about that. And that made me remember a book that I read back in grad school. So now we're jumping back to 2020, 2021 when I read Benedict Carey's How We Learn as part of my grad program. Highly recommend this book if you've never read it before. I'll also make sure that that's below for you. And it talked about how the brain needs boredom and novelty and low-risk environments. And it talks about how took these two different groups of students who were preparing for the same summative assessment and prepared them in two completely separate ways. The one did constant practice of the final assessment, and the other group practiced the concepts that were going to be on the assessment in new and novel ways. And obviously, group two outperformed, dramatically outperformed the group that only did test prep. So, of course, that's what the schools are doing. They're focusing all on test prep because it's clear they didn't consult an actual expert in learning, you know, i.e. a teacher, when they made the decision to do such. So we were having that conversation about the importance of physical movement for the brain to make more connections and how they need play and they need all of those low-risk opportunities that they can have in the electives, in the arts, specifically music and boredom, in order to hit those upper levels of blooms that we want them to be hitting in evaluation and creation. So here I am on this boat, bored, and all of these things kind of came crashing together as I'm watching the birds on the lake and I'm listening to my husband fish, and I'm looking at the clouds, and these novel ideas were coming together for me. We need this in entrepreneurship too. We need to be bored. It's it's productive in order for us to make new and novel connections between seemingly unrelated content or content that we have compartmentalized into different areas in order for our brains to do that, for these, you know, seemingly unrelated ideas to bump into each other and collide and make connections that our brains have never made before. We need boredom, we need play, we need rest, we need physical movement, we need, even as Benedict Carey talks about, a change of location. And I thought, wow, even now, after six years of entrepreneurship, I needed all of those things for my brain to make that connection. And I wasn't brainstorming, I wasn't planning, I wasn't physically working or even mentally working on anything. I was just there, looking at nature, pondering the wonders of life and how lucky we are to get to live on this beautiful planet. And my brain did what it did when I got out of my own way. And I had to laugh at myself because it instantly made me think about what my kids tell me when they're bored. I get so excited and I celebrate and I say, that's fantastic. That's when all your best ideas happen. And I get the eye roll every time, which is why I laughed at myself. And I remember as a kid being bored and coming up with awesome games and all of these really fun things to do as a kid that happened out of boredom. That whole necessity is the mother of invention. I needed something fun to do. So I came up with it. And the fact that I had gotten into adulthood and gotten so focused on the doing. I think back to the last episode I had when I was interviewing Erica and we were talking about the planning and the anxiety that I felt and how I relieved the anxiety by planning. How I just kind of really got stuck in that. Yet again, six years later, here's another layer of conditioning that I needed to work through and I needed to shed from both society and reinforced by teaching about the need to be constantly productive. The way to stave off anxiety is by working instead of by resting and reconnecting to nature and myself. And so that was my big aha moment that I had at the lake that I wanted to share with you was I think I'm gonna have to start planning time in my schedule. When I sit down and plan in October for my year, so in October, I plan out my year for the next year. And when we have our PPT retreat, which is every other year, is what I'm hoping. We've only had one so far. So this year will be the next one. We sit down, we try to do it sometime in October before all of the craziness of Thanksgiving and holiday happens, where we'll look at the following year and plan it via backwards design. So we'll look at, you know, when report cards come out, we look at our ideal students' lives and we plan all of our promotional periods and our launches, but we are also looking at our family life and putting in all of the vacations. And I put in my kids' camps because that requires a lot of running around for me in the summer. And so that changes my availability. So we look at all of that. So something I did last year when I'm looking at my schedule is building in days for deep work. So those are days that I'm not available for client work, but I'm working on just deep work on my business and really getting clarity around what I need to be focusing on in that quarter for the business to be successful. Any I'm really thinking about what my clients need and any new resources that I need to create or research that I need to do in order to be able to answer their questions and help them be the most successful. I've already added that into my planning, but I think now I need to add in days to be bored, days where I don't have anything where I'm not available, but I also don't have anything to do except probably walk around in nature and take some voice notes and journal, maybe my journal and just kind of see what comes up for me and just allow myself to be bored, go somewhere new. Maybe I'll go to like a new town and just sort of walk around and do a little solo trip and get out of my comfort zone and get out of my well-worn patterns and well-known, comfortable surroundings so I can make some space for new and novel connections in my brain and start applying what Benedict Carey said, not to my classroom and creating these experiences for my students, but or my teaching practice now that I'm in private practice, creating these opportunities for my students and teaching them about how their brains work best, but to actually apply these principles on myself so that way I can increase what my own brain is capable of, as well as taking some time to regulate my own nervous system and notice where different things in my life have changed and shifted. It's interesting. Every summer, my kids are a year older. Every summer their interests shift slightly. I mean, we're still doing alpaca camp, and that's amazing. If you've never done one, look for it. It's so fun if you're in an area where you can do that. And my littlest does horse camp and my oldest does soccer camp. And some of those things are, you know, they don't ever change. But the amount and the way that they need me changes every summer. And sometimes I don't realize that until we're almost halfway through because I'm so busy working and doing work that I love and that I thoroughly enjoy, and it's super easy to get lost in. But I'm really grateful for the accidental opportunity that I had to actually be bored and allow my brain to just plain wander. I look back at some of my old content and I see where I talked about that, like build in space into your life, time and space where you can just allow your brain to wander. And I think the tricky part for me, and possibly the tricky part for you, is because I'm planning this time. I'm listening to myself as I'm talking to you, and I'm planning this time. I'll have to keep you posted. If I'm able to successfully plan time to be bored without trying to turn that into some kind of work. So here's another idea that collided as I'm going down this rabbit hole in my own brain on the lake, listening to the waves crash against the rocks while my husband is fishing. Was that this very organic experience that we have as humans of being bored and allowing these seemingly unconnected ideas to bump into each other and create these little rabbit holes that we can go down in our thoughts? Is that this is something that AI can't do? This is a strictly human experience of creating new knowledge, of connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. This is synthesizing the information and creating new information from it. We're we're synthesizing it, we're evaluating it, and we're getting all the way up to that top level of blooms of creating. And while AI can generate ideas by synthesizing information and identifying patterns, and it can be helpful when brainstorming, I do enjoy using it as brainstorming. I use it as like a co-working assistant where I will type in sort of like a stream of consciousness, or I'll even when I'm walking, I will riff ideas into my notes app via dictation. And then sometimes I'll add that to my AI tool and say, ask me questions about this to help me go deeper into some of these ideas. And I do come up with some podcast episodes that way, just from taking these stream of consciousness thoughts that I'm riffing off of as I'm walking my dog and helping to develop and flesh those out into fully formed, much easier to follow. Remember, neurodivergent ADHD brain happening here into something that you can actually follow. And that's one of the ways that I will use an AI tool. But AI can't put together two seemingly unrelated ideas. It can't pull together memories and conversations and books that you read years ago and experiences that you had in the classroom with students and memories from childhood and bring all of that together to have these revelations and these moments of inspiration. That is a uniquely human experience and something that only we can do. And why we're not going to be replaced in especially service fields. And I feel like I see that a lot, where more and more we are rejecting AI. I think the more they push it on us, the more we reject it. The more they try to trick us with it, the more we reject it. So, in closing, I just wanted to say that if you've been feeling stuck lately or caught up in a couple of these traps of where you are just consuming content, looking for inspiration. I've done that, making plans or stuck in planning mode and somehow feeling less clear, taking action. I always say that action leads to clarity, not the planning, partly because planning is a comfort zone and we can just stay in the planning and not take action. And there's a lot of information we can only get from taking action. That's why I say that, not that planning is not important, but we can also get caught in a cycle of constantly taking action and end up on a loop, end up back on that hamster wheel again that we know so well, that is a very tried and true pathway. Remember, the brain does what it's familiar with. And I think that's kind of a danger in the advice that I've been giving of clarity coming through action is that, well, when I'm taking action, I can get back on that hamster wheel by accident. And so I think another place that we can get clarity is from boredom, allowing ourselves just time to be bored, to not have an agenda, or to have our agenda be completely messed up and have to come up with something new on the fly and just kind of sit there in our own space and not in the like zombie staring out into space recovering from burnout, but in going somewhere new, having a completely novel experience without having any attachment to the outcome. That's going to be the hard one for me. And just being, allowing our minds to wander, getting caught up in the sound of wind in the trees. Nature's particularly good for helping us to reconnect with our humanity and seeing what comes. Because I honestly can't remember the last time I really allowed myself to do that for an extended period of time. I think my tolerance for it before this trip was about 15 minutes. And if I was not able to find some way to make my brain productive in 15 minutes, I would switch gears. So that's my challenge for myself. It's my challenge for my kids. Every summer, I want them to get bored. Every summer I try really hard to allow there to be enough spaciousness in their schedules that they're not overscheduled. They're not constantly running from one camp to another camp to activity to activity to activity. This year I mentioned previously I'm working on letting my kids do some time management. I think I put that in a newsletter. But I'm only giving them like three things to do a day. And they have the whole 24 hours to get those three three things accomplished in because I want them to experiment with how they feel when they switch up the order of the things that they do things in or when they procrastinate and put it all to the end. What does that feel like? And how do they feel about it? And so I'm really intentional in my parenting about that for them because I want them to get bored. And when school comes back around, I want them to kind of be creating the routine. I found that made it a lot easier for me to transition back when I was a kid. Not as a teacher. That was a different experience. But as a kid, it made it a lot easier for me to go back to school when life had like a predictable rhythm. But I also, when summer break would come, enjoyed the freedom and the expansiveness of not having a set schedule. And so I think that was another big aha moment for me is that as an entrepreneur and as a former classroom teacher, now in private practice, I need that space, that expansiveness, that boredom and mental freedom to be bored and let my brain make these novel connections and have these aha moments. And like I tell my kids, that's where your best ideas come from. So that's everything for this episode. Next week, I want to talk about what sustainable actually looks like in a teaching business because I do think that a lot of us are building business and myself included, and I absolutely was, really sort of struggling between these two speeds of either full output or recovery and collapse. And I've been working really hard, really intentionally to create a middle ground. But when I look at how I still have only been really working in three speeds and having this time to be bored was really important, it's making me revisit what sustainability really looks like over the long term now that I'm coming into my sixth year of private practice teaching. So that's where we're going to go next week. Until then, I hope you have a great week. Thank you for listening. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with a colleague or leave a review. This helps the conversation reach other teachers who may need it. You can learn more about what I do and how to work with me at theprivatepracticeteacher.org. Best wishes always.