You’re Not Superman, But You Hold Unprecedented Power
The Impact You Hold on Others is Not What You Think, it’s Different and its More
I sit in my car staring into the parking lot on a crisp September morning. I can feel a knot in my stomach. I run through my game plan for the day one more time. I feel the pressure to make the most of this time in the school. I am a nobody. I don’t rank on any scale. The students are the focus of the system. Teachers and administrators run the show. I am a student teacher who isn’t even permanently assigned to this high school. There is the low man on the totem pole, ten miles of dirt, and me. As I weigh all of this, the song to a superhero movie score comes on in the cabin of my cold rumbling Jeep. I had put on my pump up playlist to feel better. I remember why I signed up for this. I am going to change lives for the better. I am going to save lives through education. I leap out of the car nervous but renewed in my purpose.
It is the preliminary days of my student teaching, and I have the vague and daunting task of rotating to a bunch of rooms full of kids I don’t know, with teachers whom I have no working relationship with to take notes on lesson planning, classroom management, and tricks of the trade. That day held lessons but mostly it was just getting kicked around room to room. Didn’t matter I told myself. It was a stepping stone. I would have my own classroom someday. Thats when the real world saving efforts would kick in.
The Scenic Route to Perspective
I managed to grit through the rest of that student teaching phase. I eventually got matched up with an amazing teacher coach in a wonderful district. We built rapport. I took over her classroom. I got to know the kids and the school. I had time to get to know the people. I learned a lot and felt ready to make my impact on students of my own.
I didn’t see the world saving happening in front of my eyes yet though. I loved working with the kids, but the triumphant moments I imagined in my head weren’t happening. Didn’t matter, this was closer to the real thing, but not exactly. It would be different when I had my own classroom. I graduated and hit the applications hard. I was ready to be the superhero our education system needed.
I did get my own classroom. It was at a private academy with small class sizes. It was a school that was built for the fringe students, the one’s whole group instruction failed. I had mixed feelings. I was trained for whole group public instruction, but I was a teacher with a new license and no real experience to speak of. I took it and put every ounce of energy I had into my lessons.
After two years, I felt the improvement and some of my hard work was paying off. Less situations threw me off entirely. Some of my more recurrent lesson plans required only small tweaks. I felt more confident in my craft, which helped students retain more of the content. However, something was still bugging me. That superhero feeling was strangely absent. I hadn’t seen the triumphant moments that stem from life altering lessons. I must have been missing something. I reflected deeply on the problem almost every free moment I had.
A Whole New Light
Look hard at that image above. Can you see the two images? Whichever you see first, look hard for the other. When you see both, it is almost impossible not to see both of them flip flopping. That is a similar feeling I had when I shifted my perspective on teaching impact. There was no going back. I couldn’t “unsee” my new perspective.
I wish there was some triumphant epiphany moment when this realization came to be clear, but there wasn’t. Wisdom comes in whispers, tiny experiences, that add up to a new way of seeing things. Often it is hard earned but enduring as any lesson you will receive. So it went for my shift to Trajectory Shift thinking.
Potential Reached and Time
Good teachers want to see students or mentees reach their potential. My first first mistake was expectations about potential reached. As a new teacher I waited to see realized potential unfold before my very eyes. I wasn’t factoring in time and gradual growth, not in a realistic way.
I took a step back to appreciate time for what it is as a teacher or mentor, and I realized how small my window is with someone. I am one person, amongst many, who helps that student for small periods of time through the majority of the week within a year, maybe a few years if I’m lucky. Hopefully I get to be part of some pivotal moments, or set the stage for some to happen, and thats it. It was a humbling and crucial first realization.
Potential takes time to realize. However much time you think it takes, add more because humans are messy. This slow process is a feature, not a bug, of the high powered organ sitting in our skulls. As I came to accept this, the early mental images of the graph began to form. The time I have with my students is incredibly small. The amount of potential realized in that short time is almost imperceptible.
Potential takes time to realize. However much time you think it takes, add more because humans are messy.
Not Dramatic Pivotal Moments
The superhero moments don’t happen in real life. There are exceptions, but thats exactly what they are, exceptions. The rule is that moments of impact and trajectory shift are subtle. They typically are a complex accumulation of emotion, positive feelings, new perspective shifts, day to day interactions, rapport, trust, wins, losses and the small almost imperceptible coachable moments when a person is completely open and vulnerable. It is best to be a gardener who fosters environments for these moments to grow, not an architect who systematically engineered them to happen.
As I gain experience, I notice these moments more. Still, they are small, mundane even. That’s what makes them so special and inspiring. You catch a glimmer of it, and it’s gone. You don’t know what it will lead to. You’re not even sure it happened. Just a feeling. But it means you’re on to something with that student or mentee. They are the inspirational moments that can put wind back in your sails if you’re tuned in to see them.
This was the next natural conclusion I came to, and the most liberating one. No longer do I carry naive expectations of some big moment. I carry the more realistic knowledge, into my everyday set of lessons, that I am just one person on a team of people trying to create the opportunity for small pivotal moments. It’s not as simple as shrinking expectations, it’s about humbly admitting what you can and cannot do for someone, and thinking bigger picture.
The Life Difference You’ll Never See
This was the final piece to my perspective shift. I know and accept, I will likely never see the life difference I may have helped create. I discovered this final piece of the puzzle through two key relationships.
My father-in-law is a great guy. I was humbly intimidated when I first met him. Graduate of MIT, materials engineer, lifer at a big automotive company, respected amongst his peers and family alike, hailed from an unlikely little town that was as blue collar as you get in the mid 20th century. He was a big fish in a little pond at his local high school, applied to MIT on a whim, got in, and showed up with a bag over his shoulder without a plan or a place to live.
One evening over a warm glass of whiskey at a family get together, I asked more about his work at MIT. He can always tell a great story about a fond memory of a person he enjoyed working with. He proceeded to tell me about an old professor who would hobble into the lecture hall and slowly, methodically, create the space for trajectory shifts. He taught incoming freshman at MIT remedial math concepts. The group of students all were admitted based on their potential, but needed some extra space and time to help realize it.
My father-in-law, and all in this program, were let into a prestigious university with the hope to launch them into a life previously unattainable on the idea they just needed more time and right mentors to realize their own potential. This isn’t to say the rest of his life wasn’t filled with hard work and hard earned lessons of his own, but those early, fragile, and formative years had major trajectory shift without which he wouldn’t have his current life.
It took years for me to find this out. I had figured natural smarts breezed him through MIT. I met him late in life, just before his retirement, with a path full of rich experience and achievements in the rearview mirror. He had helped raise kids who became a nurse, doctor, and software engineer. I was seeing the major life difference initiated by teachers and mentors of years long past. They never got to see any of it.
The other observation came from some of the most inspirational people in my life, my parents. I learned about the harder years they faced when they were young. Both high school educated, a GED to my Dad’s name, thrown into life a too early with too little support, but they figured it out. They made an amazing life for my sister and I. They gave us all the encouragement they knew how, in a way that was worlds better than what they have received growing up.
As I got older, more details naturally emerged and appreciation of how hard it was for them grew as I went through my own early life journey. They never got those pivotal moments fostered by mentors, not early in life. They had to work tirelessly to make their own trajectory change. It put our family on a better path, but I always wonder, what would if someone had facilitated some pivotal moments for them. My parents still teach me life lessons after all these years, but they were as deserving as any of trajectory shifts fostered by caring mentors.
The implications of this for my teaching, coaching, mentoring, parenting, and self guided development has been revolutionary. Like most nuggets of wisdom I have come to appreciate, it presents a paradox. This perspective would have been deeply impactful earlier in my life, but the time it took to arrive at it on my own terms is what gives it value and impact for me now.
“The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.” — Socrates
The ancient Greeks didn’t have everything figured out, but Socrates is reaching out from the past to help me accept this paradox of wisdom. I am thankful for the journey that got me there. It makes me excited for what else may lie in wait for me.
If you are working on yourself, with someone or a group to make things better, know that you have an impact. It’s not how we build it up in our heads or what we see in movies, but it is far more significant than we realize. Treat that with the attention and responsibility it deserves, but don’t forget the humbling fact that you are one among many helping potential be realized.
