Do yourself proud, be a leader

My father, whose name I bear, had a saying he used to put into cards and letters from him to me.  He would sign off with this maxim: "Do yourself proud... be a leader."  As a teenager, and later as a young adult, I found pressure in those words.  Pride was something that other people have in you, not you in yourself.  If my father was to be proud of me, I would need good grades, trophies, achievements... I would need to be lauded in my endeavors.  Did my father say this to me?  No.  I made these assumptions up myself, and constrained my life with them ever since.  Being a leader?  That means things like being the team captain in sports, or class president.  Maybe jumping out of a foxhole and demanding that your fellow soldiers follow you forward, bullets whizzing by your head...  Turns out that's not what he was looking for either.  Once again, my assumptions at play.

It's now many years later, and I am close to the same age my father was when he first started using those words with me. I have my own family now, and they need my guidance to navigate a world that I see as vastly trickier and more dangerous than the one through which my father helped me.  I need advice to dole out.  I need wisdom to impart.  I need to know what I am doing.  There are small people who are counting on me to have the answers! I am also a teacher.  I made a career change after a number of years of job changing, and could not be happier in my chosen profession. But that means that I have a second family, a family of students, and they also count on me to be prepared, to know the answers, to have it together.  Yikes!

How did this happen?  And what am I going to do?!?

Carol Dweck is an omnipresent name in our present thinking about parenting, teaching, coaching... really anything that speaks to the human experience.  She brought us the term "growth mindset", and distinguished it from a fixed mindset.  Dweck tells us that we are all creatures with malleable characteristics and abilities.  Intellectual capacity is not fixed, as your IQ score might lead you to believe, but rather vibrant and dynamic.  Because of that, those of us with an internal locus of control, a sense of personal agency, can make ourselves into whatever we want.  That's a powerful notion, and for some, it's all they need to propel them into action.  For others, it may be even more daunting than the trauma of living out a "fixed mindset" life where we are static and stuck.  The weight of expectations can be a powerful inhibiting force.  If only there were some sage words... nothing fancy, no two dollar SAT vocabulary... just simple, truthful, direct.

My father got it in six words.  Six!  As his son, I listened with a different mindset and a different orientation toward life.  As an adult with my own children (both biological and academic) to raise, I listen to those words and think about the simple beauty in their message.  My job is to be the best me that I can be.  No one else can do it but me.  If I push myself, then I have made an accomplishment that moves me along my own trajectory.  If I hold a door open for the person behind me at the grocery store, then I have modeled positive behavior and acted as a leader.

We each have a path to follow.  Follow yours, and you will always be leading the way.

Thanks for listening.

CK