Leadership: Building Confidence in Ones Inner Voice

I have just finished reading two novels by the Brazilian author, Paulo Coelho. In the first, he writes that all children hear voices but not all children go on to become adult prophets. Something dampens that talent as youngsters mature. Only those who continue as adults to listen to their inner-most voices have the ability to be prophets in their own time (The Fifth Mountain). In the second book, Coelho develops the theme of voices, clarifying them as “the voice of the world” that instructs each person’s “personal journey.” These wordless voices communicate at some deeper level, on a more emotional or non-verbal plane. Those who follow their inner most personal dreams will find their personal treasure; in fact “the entire world will conspire to help them;” the omens that lead to success are all around us, as is the voice. Failure comes from not heeding ones personal voice and not recognizing the omens along ones personal journey. Bit by bit, Santiago, the main character in The Alchemist, having been taught this deep secret, observes and listens to the world; he succeeds because he seeks out not only the “omens” that cross his path but also the “omens” given to him by great teachers along the way.

Interestingly, none of Coelho’s great mentors were professional teachers, none stood in front of classrooms, and none drew a salary for their teaching. Rather those who taught the teen aged Santiago the lasting lessons lived a public life, easily accessible, especially those closest to own their inner voice, the young.

But, I am a professional teacher, as are many of my friends and relatives. What does this say to me? How can I turn Coelho’s observation into a personal omen? Because we are paid by an institution, we face a resultant conundrum – how do we teach the great and deep truths while being hired to reach the far shallower goals of the state or school curriculum? How do we increase our students’ understanding of integrity, justice, oneness or social responsibility while trying to make sure they know about Hester Prynne and Jay Gatsby? A great rabbi indentified this basic human predicament, "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” [Matthew 6:24] Some teachers do the bare minimum but meet their curricular obligations; they tend also to be the teachers who can’t wait to leave school each afternoon and race out of the parking lot. Still, they too teach by example, and then they wonder why their students do not learn from them – actually, they don’t really wonder, they just blame the students.

Rather than puzzle over a seeming entrapment, we can, like Alexander, cut through the Gordian knot and see the unity of what we do. We can mine great literature for its deeper understandings and more importantly, we can devote ourselves to the young people in our care. In the process, students will meet their curriculum goals while also learning important life lessons. They learn the value of literature, not just its plot, and they learn the value of great teachers who work to connect the inner voices of both teacher and student. Teachers concerned with the inner truth unravel the knot of confrontation that often snags teens, hindering their movement forward. Instead, they splice back the severed lifeline between the two.

We model the concept of oneness, that all knowledge is related. I speak here as an English teacher; those in other subjects face similar challenges; they need to find their answers through their own disciplines. In all cases knowledge is one, the omens are there, and the inner voice of the text is present.

Some teachers excel in this work. Let me tell you about my friend and fellow English teacher, Nate. When I sat in on his classes, I observed that he spoke infrequently and then mostly to ask questions; he saw his task not in terms of giving answers, but in causing his students to mine their own thoughts and observations more deeply. He helped them sift through the rubble of each class’s intellectual explosions for the gems, the “omens,” that would lead them forward in their own journey. Sometimes, through the use of a little interrogative TNT, his classes cascaded with diamond insights freely available for the taking. Whereas many teachers would point out the rough cut stones that they recognized, he most often allowed the students to pick through the ideas, to do their own sifting. Not everyone had to have the same “correct” answer. Unlike its cousin, the Socratic Method where the teacher guides the student to discover the teacher’s “correct” answer by the kinds of questions that are asked, where the teacher controls the outcome, Nate asked open ended questions luring the class even further back into the dark recesses of their intellectual caves. Though their pockets might already seem full, he enticed them to look even deeper, to find even more valuable ore further back, to find those stones that just wanted cutting and polishing to bring out an even rarer brilliance. He provided structure and safety, protecting them against cave-ins; he took time to find about how each minor breathed and how he or she was equipped. A multitude of ideas resulted -- his one guideline was that any response needed to be true to the integrity of the text by citation or by inference. Because he had taken care early in the year to lower the barrier of distrust that students typically have towards a teacher, to show them that he did not play that most dishonest of all pedagogical games tell-me-what-I-am-thinking or otherwise you are wrong. Nate instigated intellectual debate among classmates about what was meant. He then asked his students to bring their ideas into their writing. The exercise was not in the essay, but rather in the assaying of what had been collected. Here the student learned how to weigh and judge the value of his find. Language and thought were brought together, each encouraging the other.

His office was near mine; I’d often pause in my own administrative work to eavesdrop on his conservations. Students would come to him whenever he had a break; they sat with him at lunch and in the afternoon to talk about their writing. It was through their own compositions that he caused them to kick about the intellectual debris scattered after each class in order to pan out nuggets. Though he did help with the editing process, the commas and spellings, his primary thrust was helping students better understand their own ideas and help them see that deeper understanding and better writing went hand in hand. The students discovered new relationships among the characters in the book, far more complex understandings of each character’s motivation, and insights in an understanding of their own world. They wondered aloud about the ethics of the plot, or the long term consequences of decisions. Nate listened. He asked for clarification – or asked how an idea could be better stated, how could this argument be put forth so that the force of the author’s own thinking was the clearest. He brought out of each student not specific answers or the black and yellow Cliff-note interpretations of others, but a new rainbow of insight hidden from these young authors prior to the conference. He whipped up the fever of sudden wealth by sparking their imagination, equipped his prospectors, enabled them with the necessary skills – and then followed them into the field, himself getting richer even as he helped others.

Was Nate a prophet? Did he touch the rock with his staff in order to allow gems to flow forth? Or, did he do what we as teachers are all called upon to do, to educate, to lead forth, to inspire courage even as we clasp our students’ hands to calm their fears. After allowing their eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness, he helped them see the Platonic phantom shadows of the ideal. Then he brought them back into the light not only with a better understanding of their own humanity, but also with an urge to accept the responsibility for their community with others.

Though I never heard Nate use the term leadership nor reference the great authors in the field of leadership studies; I firmly believe that he, like Coelho’s prophets, shaped the ability of each of his students to lead successfully by sharpening their ability to peer beneath the ordinary, to strive to understand the simplicity of complex ideas, and most importantly to continue to feed their own inner flame. He helped his students delight in their own sense of inner voice and their personal discovery of the omens hidden in great books. He built up their confidence to respect their own ideas. He had the confidence to know that what may appear to others, particularly other adults, as naïve and childish utterances; in fact were early steps to deeper and subtler truths that sometimes only the young are capable of seeing because they still have the ability to see visions.

I have heard teachers, in the privacy of faculty rooms, blame students for not learning when actually it was the teacher who failed to recognize and award the early glimmers of real knowledge. They were too busy grading regurgitated formulas. Good teachers are at their best when they enter the classroom also as learners. Some of the insights shared in Nate’s class were ones he had never thought about, or had not seen in the same way. He opened up his own mind to the omens, the ideas that came from his students – and then worked collaboratively with each student to develop these ideas.

Is Nate the exception? Yes, but he need not be. He excelled in part because he worked in a school that valued this style of teaching, one whose primary values included self discover, skills of mind, and generosity of heart. In this school students grew to expect this approach; Nate was not the exception in this particular community of learning. Because students expected this approach, their very expectation powered the school. Student anticipation, student actions and student habits expressed the voice of the school far better than marketing catalogs. Their ingrained expectations, their ability to heed their own inner voice, found its way through the intellectual over load of puberty. They carried their own still small inner voice forward into their adult worlds in order then to be prophets in their own time.