Valuing Our Expertise, Renewing Our Confidence

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

This morning, I moved my office at school to another location in the building (we needed to create temporary additional space for privacy). So I unplugged my desktop computer, put the paperwork and resources I needed today into a couple of boxes, and relocated into a smaller conference room.

My many professional books stayed behind in the heavy shelf. I noticed this once I settled into my new office space. Shouldn’t I bring those over too? I thought. But I needed to get going with my day. I knew where to find them.

At the end of the day, I looked back on what I accomplished. Happy to say: quite a bit! There were a few times where, if I had been thinking about an idea, I might have stopped what I was doing and picked up a title to review where it might have initially derived. But today I didn’t have that luxury, so I simply moved ahead in my work.

This experience revealed to me that as professionals, we don’t value our own expertise enough. We worry about making a mistake or writing down the wrong thing. Are we worrying about being wrong though, or about being judged for our actions?

Evaluation and outside judgment induce fear because we have outsourced our vision of quality to someone else. Our confidence becomes dependent on what others have to say about our work. It’s hard to feel successful and innovate if we are always looking for others to validate our efforts. Today was a reminder that our experiences and strategies should be the first resources we reference in our complex work as educators.

Try it: Take yourself out of your physical space for a day. Limit your access to others’ ideas, whether that be print resources, social media, and/or people who are typically around you. As you do your work, reflect on your capacity to take risks and put your original ideas out there. Did you find the new environment liberating? Why or why not? Share your findings in the comments if you feel inclined.