Allow me to paint a picture. 5 a.m. on Easter Sunday morning. I’m wide awake…and have been since three. I’ve checked in with every socially-type medium I have available—Twitter, Google+, graduate course message boards, text (apologies to those of you who sleep with your ringer on), email—I’d extinguished my outlets. So I start thinking about this amazing group of people I met yesterday and some of the things I took from them and decided that no time like the present; I might as well go for an early morning walk...the first in over a year. And then I think, “Why stop there?” After downloading a couch25K jogging app and my latest audiobookcheckout from the FortWorth Public Library, I hop out of bed, eagerly shove myself into my latest Under Armor, attach my armband phone holder (complete with phone and earbuds), and fling open my front door….
Rain. Downpour. Not kidding.
As I’m making a numberless lap
around my cul-de-sac somewhere along my third cycle of
jog-60-seconds-walk-90-seconds—rain-soaked and huffing—the irony of the morning
struck me as a perfect metaphor for my recent, two-year personal/professional
(whatever) development journey. Isn’t that like most hard things? We eagerly
dress the part, prepare as best we can, greet it head on…and then there’s a
moment…when it all looks really big and really scary and really daunting…and we
think, “Wouldn’t it just be best to go back to bed?”
Last week, I participated in a Digital-Age
Learning training with the instructional and technology coaches and fellow
librarians in my district. What was designed as a two-day training was packed
into a few hours, my favorite of which was devoted to professional branding.
Call it dumb luck or Divine Intervention, but in this hour, I happened to pick
this TedTalk to
watch, summarize, and present to my fellow trainees. What was meant to be a
talk about branding for me translated into connection, which is what it’s all
about for me.
In the spirit of professionalism
and building an audience, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of
maintaining multiple online presences, but there’s a part of me—a rather large
part actually—that feels like that’s just not authentic. For me, whether its
personal or professional (teacher-librarian-counselor-editor-writer), it’s all
about connection. For a long time, I’ve not been willing to put that out there
professionally. As Brene Brown says in Daring Greatly, the more relatable we are the less credentialed people think we
are—but why?
Connection and relationship are
what the business of education is all
about. (Don’t believe me; try teaching Shakespeare to 25 teenagers without a
relationship and see how far you get.) It doesn’t matter how good we look on
paper if we’re not teaching students how to connect with the best version of
themselves they can possibly be, thereby generating the best possible
relationships with others they can possibly have. And if we’re not modeling
authentic connection and relationship with others on our campus (students,
teachers, admin), how can we hope to meaningfully impact students?
Connection is hard, especially in
the beginning. It’s the rain on an Easter morning when the hope of a new runner
emerges. But we.can.do.hard.things.
Go on. Measure the benefits. Dare Greatly. Connect…
