The Courage to Brand: The Courage to Connect

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…