Every Presidents’ Weekend, interns return to our training center for assessments, instruction, and time to share discoveries with one another. It is a harbinger of spring, a little like the swallows returning to Capistrano.
Successes and Struggles
Like many of us, interns often find it easier to talk about their struggles than to recognize their growth and successes. In part, this is because they are actively looking for ways to improve their practice. But it is at least equally due to our cultural values. Many of us were taught at an impressionable age that talking about successes is bragging – a self-serving effort to elevate ourselves in the eyes of others. We can learn early on to keep our successes to ourselves and to promote our struggles, all in a misplaced effort to appear humble. This is a dangerous habit.
When we habitually repress our success and strengths and focus exclusively on our struggles and weaknesses, we disempower ourselves. What is there to inspires us to reach for dizzying new heights when our inner voice is searching for share-worthy struggles? We can begin to believe our own propaganda – that the only thing we have to share is our inadequacies. When these create cognitive dissonance with our self-image, we begin the blame-game. “I am doing everything right, but this parent/child/administrator/situation is so hard/unfair.” These declarations have sadly become tantamount to badges of honor, broadcasting how hard we are working at our craft. They push us out of being proactive and undermine our ability to have faith in ourselves and to act with courage. As Walt Kelly, creator of the Pogo comic strip, brilliantly said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I frequently find myself in conversations with interns and teachers helping them reclaim two powerful cognitive and emotional feelings that have been hijacked by our culture: humility and guilt.
The Habit of Humility
Our culture equates humility with weakness. We are admonished to “look out for number one”. Our norms are founded on the idea that competition produces self-sufficiency and success, while collaboration fosters dependency.
Any Montessorian can tell you that this is the antithesis of what we believe. The humility of the adult is a cornerstone of our practice, part of what Montessori herself identified as part of The Transformation of the Adult. In The Discovery of the Child, she wrote, “The teacher must fashion herself, she must learn how to observe, how to be calm, patient, and humble, how to restrain her own impulses, and how to carry out her eminently practical tasks with the required delicacy.” The personal humility that she calls for is interior, placed in the context of calm, patient observation of the child, not in the context of constantly plumbing and manifesting our personal fears and inadequacies.
C. S. Lewis explored the dichotomy of these two perspectives on humility, “Humility is not about thinking less of yourself, but about thinking about yourself less.” Humility is finding our true center in Other: something or someone outside of ourselves. We might find our Other(s) in faith, in service, in the context of the Universe, or in the success and happiness of those around us. In Montessori classrooms, our humility is in evidence when we are centered more on serving the needs of the child than on maximizing our success as teachers.
With true humility, when something goes awry in the classroom, we think about the impact on the students and about potential root causes more than we do about how it inconvenienced or embarrassed us. Then we look for the cause in ourselves and in the environment that we created rather than in the children, parents, or school. Finally, we acknowledge our error and try something different. We become objective scientists making adjustments and observing the results, free of the ego that fuels blame. And we recognize the occasional pang of regret as a messenger with important information about where we might have made a better choice.
Regret Unattended Becomes Guilt
Guilt is a gift. Whenever I say this, those who most need to hear the message unintentionally self-identify: they laugh. They are so burdened by guilty thoughts and feelings that the idea of it being a gift is ludicrous. But it is a gift. Guilt tells us when we need to change our behavior or seek forgiveness. It is our heart or soul or conscience trying to set us up for better success in the future.
What happens if we heed those feelings and change our behavior or seek forgiveness? If we are able to internalize the life lesson and apply it to similar situations in the future, Guilt has fulfilled its purpose; we evolve. On the other hand, if we tell ourselves that whatever mistake we made was so egregious that simple reparation is not enough, we punish ourselves by perseverating on our error and the pain associated with it. We cling to our guilt, becoming mired in thoughts and feelings of inadequacy. This self-flagellation does not lead to evolution; it leads to an ever-increasing conviction that we are not up to the task; we are now and will always be a failure. We thwart Guilt’s authentic mission to help us evolve.
The key to reaping the best from guilt is learning to let go once it has served its purpose. With more resilient or long-term guilt, we may need to overtly check in with our heart, soul, and mind, and say, “Thank you for alerting me to the need to change. I am grateful that you want me to be successful. I have taken care of this. You can stand down.” The more ingrained the guilt, the more times we may need to acknowledge the gift and intent of Guilt before we can let it go.
Finding Our Strength
Perhaps ironically, our humility enables us to find our strength. When we live in the certain knowledge of our Other-centeredness, we are better able to see specific and authentic ways in which our strengths complement others’. When we disconnect from ego, we are equally able to acknowledge what is going well and what might benefit from a change. We allow ourselves to be human, to make mistakes, to seek forgiveness, to alter our behaviors, and to emerge wiser and stronger from the experience. Humility helps us see Guilt as a messenger rather than as judge, jury, and executioner so that we can heed the message and move on.
Reflection for Adults: Choose whichever line of thinking most resonates with you at this time:
- What are my strengths? My talents? My accomplishments? Can I think about these elements of my life as readily as my weaknesses, shortcomings, and failures? What would create or preserve a healthy balance between these two?
- Are there aspects of my life that engender feelings of guilt – things that I “beat myself up” about? If so:
- What is Guilt trying to convey to me? Do I need to change a behavior or to seek forgiveness?
- If a behavior change is needed will it (a) prevent the event from re-occurring or (b) enable me to respond differently?
- Have I made the behavioral change? If not, what will it take to commit to change?
- Have I sought forgiveness? If I have sought it and not received it, have I forgiven the other person’s unforgiving response?
- Have I found authentic humility?
- If so, what is/are my Other, my center(s)?
- In the classroom, am I able to find my humility in calm, patient, non-judgmental observation of the children?
- Do I manifest that humility by involving children in choices that affect them?
- Am I able to practice humility even as I assess what is going well in the classroom – what things I would like to preserve?
Reflection for Children/Adults:
- How easy is it to talk to friends about what you are good at or what is going well in your life?
- Is it easier or harder to talk to adults about these things? Why?
- What is the difference between sharing successes and bragging?
- Can you be humble and still talk about your success?
- How can we make it easier for others to talk to us about their successes?
- How would it be different if we celebrated each person’s accomplishments?
Image by Daniel Reche from Pixabay
“In reality, humility means nothing other than complete honesty about yourself.”
William Countryman, author