It’s safe to say that lately I’m full of stories of how people-I-look-up-to have been pretty amazing to me, and because I feel like people don’t compliment others enough (or even talk well about others) it’s something I’m consciously trying to do.
But I did have a problem in letting that admiration of certain others also powered up my anxiety in a way that it felt like it was wrong to interact with them. That their intelligence and life experience (also along with their status and position) meant I wasn’t worthy of being in their presence, their company.
And this is a perfectly normal feeling to have. Students feeling scared to approach their tutor/lecturer/professor? Exact same feelings and reasons.
What I wanted to share in this blog post today was the quote that, after mulling it over for quite an amount of time, has quelled that anxiety for me. It’s a 1 minute 22 second clip from a very old movie:
But for those with the sound always off or deaf, here’s a context-less snippet:
“For you, the day Bison graced your village, was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.”
Now the context in the above video is obviously not the same as the scenarios I talk about, but one can carry across the idea in the sense that any moment, meeting, opportunity with a person (that is undoubtedly senior, older, more experienced than me) that I look up to, is no doubt always an amazing opportunity for me, but to them, it was probably part of a normal day.
I remember being very flustered about chairing a committee meeting for the first time, and debriefing in supervisor meeting about overthinking every single detail. One of my supervisors asked: “How were the other committee meetings for you?” which deflated me very quickly. It should have ‘just’ been another committee meeting, but I had gotten myself worked up over chairing it for the first time, and the other committee members most likely saw it as ‘just another meeting’.
That said, the other side is being in that position of authority, someone that others also look up to. And I’ve been in that position (which was bound to happen when one has been teaching for some 10-12 years…). So even if teaching was ‘just another day’ to me, it may mean a lot to a student or someone under me.
This means to me that as a teacher/tutor, I should make any reasonable effort to diffuse that kind of anxiety that people below me would have. That means being present, sincere, authentic, and keeping my bad/shitty moments away from students, which in turn means taking care of my own mental health in a way that enables me to show up for my students (and more generally speaking, those under me).
But it’s also easy for one to put pressure on themselves to be a good leader/figure in that way, but I must admit because I’ve been teaching for so long it’s not something I think about these days, most likely because of my current position as a PhD student and not actively teaching. At the same time I’m also aware that my default preference would be to not want to lead, because I know I’d unconsciously put that pressure on myself, the irony being that I’d probably still do a better job than most other people.
I should probably remain humble, though 😅
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