 This is the ADAPT and persist video. It's a narrated story. The learning objective is to value persistence, adaptability, and flexibility. So before we get into the real content of this video about being adaptable and persisting, let me just tell you a story. And this is one that happened a long time ago just before I went into fourth grade when my parents enrolled me in summer camp. And I did not want to be there. And I probably was throwing some sort of a fit and I was not participating particularly well at camp. One of the things that we were taught to do was to knit. And while this is not the actual scarf that I attempted at that point, I did, I guess, sort of try to knit and I did not succeed. I think because my expectations were unrealistic, I thought that my scarf should look really, really lovely even though it was the very first thing I'd ever knit. So I did not adapt to this new learning situation well and I did not persist because of my expectations. So I'm going to come back to this knitting story a bit later. But in the meantime, we're going to continue on with sort of the true content of this adapt and persist video. In this graphic, you can see a man pointing to a flow chart. An example that we're going to be working with in this quest relates directly to flow charts. My challenge in creating this challenge for you was to decide how I could make these emotions or behaviors of adapting and persisting tangible. And it came to me that perhaps I could do a flow chart such as the one that you see here, although this is not the one that I've created, that would walk somebody through the decisions that you would make when you're adapting to learning something new and whether or not you would persist in that. Now this was something of a challenge for me because I am not particularly good at doing flow charts. So I started to think about this flow chart and I thought well I can just use any symbols that look good. But then I realized that's not the case so I had to learn about what these symbols meant. This was starting to get a little bit more complex than I expected it would. So I wondered should I just do something different. In the last slide you saw different shaped symbols that show up in flow charts. In this diagram you see those again but they actually tell you in each case what category of information would go in them. So I realized that in order to do this flow chart for you, not only did I have to figure out how if somebody is learning or doing something new, what decision points they would run across when they decide to sort of adapt themselves to this learning and persist with it. But I'd also need to learn these symbols. And I thought that this was more than I had bargained for and I wondered if I should just start all over with another approach. But I realized that that would not be a good example of persisting. Logically what you would see now would be the flow chart that I've been talking about. About how to work through a process where you may be adapting what you do and how you decide if you're going to persist or not. But all you see is some text and no chart and that's because even though I came up with all of the content to put in this chart, I'm having a really hard time using free applications to be able to save it and export it and import it here in a way that is legible. And so this is pretty frustrating and I'm not quite sure what to do. I've tried over and over and over to capture it using one particular package, Gliffy, but it just comes out not very clear. So I'm going to take a little bit of a break from this and go back to the knitting story that I started at the very beginning. Don't worry, you will find out what happens with the flow chart. On this slide you can see a book that I saw at a local bookstore and it's called Yarn Harlot, The Secret Life of a Knitter. And for some reason this title just grabbed me as did this picture of this poor little lamb whose the wool from his fleece is being sort of knit off of him. So I decided, well I'm going to read this book, this sounds really interesting. But then The Secret Life of a Knitter, that's the subtitle. If I'm not a knitter, will I get the jokes? You know, will this be worth reading? But I decided I was going to read this book. So what I decided to do is to learn how to knit. And I can't really say that when I learned how many years ago I truly learned it. Somebody tried to teach me. I didn't persist with it. So all of a sudden I was now motivated to do this. So on this slide you see the start of a knitting project. And deciding to learn how to knit, even though it doesn't seem to be a big thing, I had to adapt my view of myself. So in my field I'm known as an expert. But by taking on this new challenge of learning how to knit, I was going back to being a novice. And I had to adapt my expectations. I couldn't realistically expect that I would learn how to knit one week, and I'd be a master knitter the next week. And I had to decide I was okay with this adaptation of my view of myself. Normally I'm a quick learner, but that did not seem to be the case with knitting. And there were times that I just got very frustrated and I needed an awful lot of help from people. But I did persist. And you can see from this pair of gloves that I made about a year after I started knitting, that I was doing pretty well. And it was worth it. It really was worth all the frustrations. And I'm really glad I persisted. I'm putting together this content. So there's the parallel stories. There's the story about my personal experience with knitting, where I had to adapt my expectations of myself and persist in what I was doing until I could get to a level where I felt comfortable with my skill. I didn't have to wait quite that long to read the book that was motivating me. But once I had started, I decided I did want to continue. And then there's the story about this poor flow chart that I've been trying to put together. So I've been putting all this material into a PowerPoint, and I thought I could share it with you that way. But then I thought, well, everybody does PowerPoints. I'm sort of bored with PowerPoints. Maybe I should try to stretch my wings and do something a little bit different. And I started looking around for a way to do that because I didn't really know. And then I found my brain shark, which is what you're watching. You hear a scream from my brain shark, which is this storytelling application. And because I was having difficulty being able to show the flow charts that I had developed, this gave me something new to learn, something to persist with while I was feeling frustrated about the flow charts. But once I got this to work, I felt a little bit more empowered, and I went back and I continued to work on the flow charts, and you will finally get a chance to see those. And I am very pleased to put up the first of two flow charts that illustrate the content of this challenge and also that show the process that I was talking about both with my knitting and with being able to put a flow chart together. So at the top you see there is a box for new activity. Beneath that, it says, learn more about the activity. On the left hand side, there is the possibility that it would require new knowledge to be able to engage in this activity. On the other side of the screen it says that it doesn't require any new knowledge. But if it does require new knowledge, you've got a couple of choices. You could decide to learn more about it or not. If you decide to learn about it, you might then go ahead and accomplish the activity, or you might not accomplish it, you might not choose to, or you might only partially accomplish it. If you decide not to bother about getting that new knowledge that would be required for the activity, you might decide to move on to something else. If it doesn't require new knowledge, you might go ahead and accomplish it, or you might not. So if you are familiar with flow charts, you might want to double check the symbols that I used. I am hoping that they are right. The second flow chart expands upon what was on the left hand side of the previous one. So you've decided to learn and perhaps you've accomplished the activity. And then you've got some things to think about. Was acquiring the knowledge worth the effort? Did you enjoy the activity? And it could be that you enjoyed it so much, you'll learn more and start the process again with something related to it or something brand new. If it wasn't worth the effort, you may just sort of stop. The other option is if it was worth the effort, you might just decide to take a break for a little while because your brain is a little bit tired. Now if you didn't accomplish it, you might be thinking about why didn't you accomplish it? So was it that learning something new sort of tripped you up? And if that is the case, would you perhaps look for other ways to learn it or would you move on to something else? So that's one possibility. Or you might not have accomplished it and you didn't succeed for some other reason and the same two outcomes might be possible. You'll look for other ways to learn it or move on to something else. And so what I'm thinking about here was that for putting together this flow chart, I didn't accomplish it going through the entire process. I was able to come up with my content. I was able to figure out the symbols, put them I think in the right places, but I couldn't show it to you. And having that problem embedding it so that it was legible in a slide, it was worthless sort of without being able to do that. So I got tripped up, but I then looked for another way to learn it. So my hope is that thinking through this process and having these two examples will help you to think about it and to do the activity connected with this challenge.