If I Were Your Teacher!

IF I WERE YOUR TEACHER!

By Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, April 8, 2019

We are approaching the graduation season and each year we hear one graduation speaker after another give their take on the futures of the students graduating.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our schools were created not only to teach English, Math and Science, but as equally important subjects that would actually help a student succeed in today’s world. 

As a personal example, I attended 14 years of formal education before I was drafted during the Vietnam era.  Sadly I never did finish my college education, still in all honesty, when I was attending college I always felt like a square peg in a round hole; I just didn’t fit.  I have learned a great deal through my own self-education and personal experiences that include a 20 year Coast Guard Career and a 33 year Real Estate Salesman/Broker/Owner/Team Leader/Trainer career.  Add the reading of well over 1000 books and I feel I have a very good education but I am still reading and I am still learning.

Today I saw a post on LinkedIn where the person making the post suggested that it would be nice if our schools actually taught the 10 listed items in our schools to our students.  I read them with interest but it was so obvious, at least to me, some major subjects were left off the list.  I don’t know if they were considered and left off or just not considered and therefore not included on the list. 

You read them and you decide if I am wrong; certainly won’t be the first time.

The list as per the LinkedIn post

• Conflict Resolution
• How to Manage Money
• Entrepreneurship
• Public Speaking
• How to look after your health
• Creativity (not sure how you teach creativity but you can certainly encourage it)
• People Management
• Mental Health
• How to manage time
• Dealing with FAILURE

To these 10 items I would suggest that you add:

• Dealing with SUCCESS (a lot of people cannot)
• What MUST I do and how MUST I act at my place of employment
• Personal Relationships,
• The value of compound interest,
• How to speak and write with clarity
• How do identify what you want to do with the rest of your life
• The value of goal setting and how to do it
• Creating daily, weekly, monthly and yearly goals
• Determining what will your life look like when it is finished and what must you do between now and then to make it happen.  

Maybe the most important of all:

• Developing your Life’s Mission Statement (or call it a Goal or Objective, either works)
• Learning how and why you MUST be learning based
• Creating a personal development plan
• Working from a Daily To Do List to achieve your Life’s Mission Statement (Goal or Objective)

In my mind the most important item on the list is insuring that each student becomes learning based.  By that I don’t mean just learning what is being taught in our schools.  I have sadly discovered that a great many people in the sales business, of which I was active for over 33 years, never read a book on sales; NEVER!  Does that even make sense?

Compare that to a heart surgeon.  Would you seriously want to have your heart operated on by a surgeon who hasn’t read a book on the subject since he or she graduated from Medical School?  If you answered NO, then why would you select a person in the sales business that has stopped learning the sales business?  Neither one makes sense but the Doctor metaphor more makes more sense than the Sales metaphor.  Failure to select the right sales person could cost you money.  Failure to select a knowledgeable doctor could cost you your life.  Think about that for a minute. So when was the last time you visited a Doctor?  Did you interview the Doctor for his or her credentials or did you just accept the fact that he or she is a doctor and therefore must be at the top of their game?

The second most important item on the list and it did not make the LinkedIn top ten is creating a Life’s Mission Statement or you could substitute the word Goal or Objective instead of Mission it doesn’t matter; whatever you feel most comfortable using.  The best way to describe why this is important would be to use myself as an example.  Thanks to my personal mentor, teacher and friend Joe Tye, I created a Personal Life’s Mission Statement decades ago.  What did I create?

My Life’s Mission Statement is to help people to do whatever it they do to do it better!

You can tell that my LMS (Life’s Mission Statement) best describes not only a teacher but someone who wants to help the people around me to enjoy whatever degree of success they desire by doing their job better than ever imagined.

For example I write Nuggets for the Noggin with the intent and hope that someone, someone like you, will read them and then take away a message that would help them “to do whatever is they do to do it better.”  Then again, thanks to Joe Tye, I use his Direction-Deflection-Question (DDQ) whereby I constantly ask myself a question relating to my LMS:

Is what I am about to say or do consistent with my Life’s Mission Statement?

If YES, say or do it, if NO, DON’T!  It is that simple.

If you don’t know where you want your life to take you, any road will take you there.  I think Zig Ziglar may have said that.  That is a potent thought.  If you don’t know what your life will look like when it is finished, there is no way you could possibly know what you should and should not be doing at this very moment in time to create the life you eventually want to have.  Or, what will your life look like when it is finished?  But if you DO know with some certainty, then your Life’s Mission Statement and use of the DDQ may be the best tools at your disposal. 

Let’s for training purpose say you want to (1) retire with a sufficient wealth portfolio to support the life style you desire.  (2) you want to live in a home on a body of water or near a body of water (what will that home look like – create a mental imagine down to its colors)  (3) you want to have had children and have created enough wealth to send them to their school of choice or help them with their career of choice.  (4) you may want to own a boat, three cars, an airplane or whatever.  This is YOUR goal/objective not mine although it sounds pretty good.

Then using Joe Tye’s DDQ, just ask yourself the potent question:

Is what I am about to say or do leading towards my goals and/or objectives or is it leading me away from them; there is no in between!

Here is the sad part of this Nugget.  These things to the best of my knowledge are NOT being taught in our schools.  Why not?  I have no idea.  They are either NOT being taught or they are not being learned; either way it is not a good situation.  Therefore, you the student MUST create a self-development plan and then stick to your plan.  Be learning based otherwise your plan will be useless.  Always look for opportunities to learn by reading books, attending lectures, attending specialized education programs, etc.  But…JUST DO IT! (As the Nike slogan suggests).

And as just about every commencement speaker says, “And in conclusion…”  I would add to all of this that George Washington’s Rules of Civility should be taught.  He created and lived by over 100 such rules.  Yes they need to be updated, some removed and more importantly a great many “could” be added in regards to social media and cell phone use.  I lot of problems fester and develop between two or more people when they feel they are being disrespected by someone.  We see it occurring almost every night on our local nightly news.  We could all learn from George Washington.  Check them out for yourself.

http://www.foundationsmag.com/civility.html

So there you have it, this would be my commencement address if I were the one giving it.  Since I am not, you can read it.  What you take away from it is entirely up to you.