Teaching often educates the teacher…
When my role was being the twice gifted educator…that is, one who works with learners who have been identified as having two primary situations…perhaps giftedness with dyslexia, or profound giftedness with behavior disorders….or blindness with attention defecit…very often the children or young adults I worked with taught me skills to overcome what they had overcome. You’ve seen the work of that in action, the woman with no hands painting with her toes, a person with hearing loss using visual cues to read lips, etc The lessons we sometimes learned were that people went to a whole different level of effort to do the things they were convinced they could do..and often did them better than those who had a much less complex row to hoe in life.
We learn skills to succeed.
We LEARN skills to succeed.
Success is based on the SKILLS we learn.
Success is based on the skills we LEARN and the beliefs we have about them.
I think that perhaps the most important gift my parents instilled in my young life was that anything that I wanted to learn badly enough, could be learned. The many years I taught school also affirmed to me that folks will learn alot of skills that may have a negative impact in their life as well. What skills have you learned that keep you where you are when you’d prefer to be somewhere else?
- skills of avoidance, when engagement of things you KNEW how to do would have meant success
- skills of affirming false statements to your inner mind, bombarding you with words that simply work to destroy your own success
- skills of employing negative tactics to thwart your capable efforts: procrastination of necessary tasks
- skills of purposefully missing your goals and targets out of fear, lack of self esteem, or shame present in your life.
As a teacher I saw most often that the best and the brightest did not win the races we were working on. Whether it was athletic competition, academic preparation/performance, or a specific talent. The ones who won the race learned the skills of learning, unlearned the skills that didn’t work for them, and employed the skills of belief, effort, and the ability to get up and go again when they failed.
Success depends on the skills you learn…and accept as truly capable of empowering you to where you seek to go.
As a strategist, I continually work with people to develop and help them recognize the skills that will strengthen their journey to get to their next goal. If you want to be a writer, you have to learn the craft of writing, editing, how SEO works at a broad level, you have to become aware of presence, audience, and aesthetic design’s affect on your audience’s arrival at your space. There are skills to learn and gifts and talents to grow by the learning that which will help you succeed. However, as an educator I know that as many mechanical skills that can be taught or caught….if the person doesn’t believe that his/her goal is accomplishable ultimately they will create within themselves a way to fail….very often through the very skills they know how to do not being done.
What skills do you own that you choose not to engage?
What successes are you creating and how do they support your success?
Why are you not doing what you desire to do?
What is it you truly desire to do right now….no thought editing..what was the first thing that came to mind?
Today is Saturday…take time this weekend, maybe even keep a little pad and pencil with you. What are the skills you’re employing in your life…what skills can you identify you are consistently engaging and what skills would you like to grow?
After all, you can learn to do anything you set your mind to do…and if you chose to, unlearn those skills you’ve artfully used to avoid your own success.
I challenge you, what if you took a sheet of paper and simply made lists of things you want to do but aren’t doing…in column two and three leave space to them identify the skills that those goals would require, whether owned by you or ones needed to learn…what does that list look like?
