teaching – Tess Perko's Blog

Women: Six Sure Ways to Empower Your Leadership Ability

My parents didn’t raise me to be a leader. I was taught to be a follower, that women were supposed to be demure, passive, obedient, and silent. This early training manifested itself in numerous ways; for example, I expected men to drive, my dates to pay the bill, and males to make the important decisions.

Thinking this way hindered my ability to grow to my full potential for decades. I had to learn to overcome the proclivity not to give my opinion, disagree, stand up for my beliefs, or lead others. When I worked in the corporate world, I experienced discrimination which only perpetuated my lack of development, but, finally, when I took a job in the field of education, I was encouraged to lead and to think with unlimited potential because my teaching job demanded it.

I want to share some of the ways that I changed my perspective from being reluctant to becoming empowered with leadership ability.

Adopt New Roles

Women can practice being leaders by adopting new roles within their personal lives. After I married my husband, he lost interest in driving. At first, I didn’t like taking on this responsibility, but when I associated driving with exercising my leadership skills, I felt positive about it, and now I’m comfortable driving all the time. This may seem like a small change, but it helped me adjust to being in charge in other situations as well. It’s easier to take one step at a time than to jump up the whole staircase.

Practice Speaking to a Variety of Audiences

Teaching is one of the best ways to practice speaking in front of an audience. First of all, teaching requires daily or almost daily speaking to students, and a teacher can become well-practiced at opening and closing lines which occur for each class period. Another advantage to practicing speaking as a teacher is that the teacher is considered the most knowledgeable person in the room, which automatically builds confidence. The teacher develops her lesson plans, practices them, and presents the information in ways for all types of learners to understand. This involves work and a lot of practice.

People who want to become leaders can take the opportunity to become a teacher for others. All disciplines and industries need strong teachers.

Speaking as a leader, however, involves communicating to a variety of audiences: peers, colleagues with different skills, superiors, or strangers. Each type of audience has different expectations and a leader must anticipate what they are and how to fulfill them.

Some women join a Toastmasters group to learn how to be comfortable speaking about a variety of subjects to a variety of audiences. Others speak up when they attend conferences with peers, and some volunteer to lead charitable groups.

Admit Mistakes

One of the best ways for a leader to bond with an audience is to admit when she makes a mistake while speaking. She may misspell a word, forget a plus sign, or explain a concept incorrectly. Someone in her audience may point out her mistake, or she may find it herself while speaking. Audiences are human and they’ve made mistakes, too, so when a speaker confesses that she has blundered and admits it, the audience feels that she is more approachable, likeable, and believable.

Use Affirmations to Build Courage

Fear is the number one impediment in becoming a leader, and so I’ve found a way to build courage whenever I become anxious. On the bulletin board next to the desk where I write, I have pinned an affirmation that says I lead with grace and ease. This affirmation helps me remember that being a leader doesn’t have to be stressful. If I know I have the potential, I can approach leadership as if it is a natural expression of my personality. I keep my affirmation close by and recite it aloud whenever I see it.

Emulate Other Female Leaders

I am involved in a women’s charitable organization. One of the women in the group speaks in front of our meetings with confidence, talks loudly enough for everyone to hear, presents informative material, employs a sense of humor, and exudes a positive attitude. I admire her.

When I had to lead an important luncheon, I decided that I was going to try to emulate this woman. I spoke clearly, added a joke or two, and presented our honored guests with a gracious and optimistic manner.

After the luncheon was over, this woman sent me an email telling me that she was astounded with my leadership ability. How ironic that I was trying to emulate her. Of course, I let her know and now we admire each other.

Let Others Shine

A leader doesn’t always have to do all the talking. The best leaders give the spotlight to others so that they can shine. For example, teachers often ask students to explain a concept or to analyze a piece of literature. Directors ask their managers to update a team about a project’s progress, and chairpersons are expected to inform an organization about committee work.

When I was leading a charitable luncheon during which the organization awarded scholarships to college students, I asked each scholarship recipient to share his or her story with the club members. Their stories were profoundly interesting and took up more time than I did in presenting them. The luncheon was an astounding success due to the fact that the club members felt a connection with the recipients after learning their stories. All I did was stand back and let them speak.

Women have numerous talents to share with their communities, but many of us have been trained to take a back seat. It’s time for women to sit in the front. Both women and the world would benefit from more female drivers.

I Was My Own Best Student

I worked as an English professor for sixteen years. My average class size was 30 students and I usually taught four classes per semester. If you add up those statistics, I taught approximately 3,840 students over my career.

I remember so many of them.

Wilma smelled like marijuana when she entered the classroom at 8:00 a.m. every morning, and when it was her turn to answer a question, she looked up at me with glassy eyes. Once, when she came into my office to get some help on an essay, she told me that she didn’t vote because she could never make a difference, even though she cared deeply about global warming. She took two of my classes—fall and spring. By the time she finished the second semester, she had given up smoking marijuana and had registered to vote for the upcoming presidential election.

Andrew was a hard-working football player and a lackadaisical English student. One day at football practice, he broke his ankle so badly that his football career was ended. He couldn’t drive to school because his leg was in a cast. He couldn’t take the bus to school because he couldn’t walk to the bus, get on the bus, or walk from the bus to his classrooms. No one in his family could help him since they were so financially strapped that they all had to work. He dropped my class. I emailed him to find out why, and then I told him not to give up. Football wasn’t everything; he had a lot more options. The next fall, he came back to class, worked hard, and told me he was going to transfer to a four-year college in a year to major in business. I gave him hope, he said.

But even though I have so many stories like this in my memories, none of these students were my best. My best student, by far, was myself. I was so invested in teaching writing, literature, and critical thinking to these students, that I spent thousands of hours researching and preparing for my lessons, and then I taught them. My students asked me questions that I didn’t anticipate, and I found out the answers. They came to class unprepared in skills and homework, and I worked hard to fix this. Here’s some of what I—my best student—learned.

Learning Takes Nothing Less Than Commitment

A teacher can present the most wonderful lectures or plan the most engaging activities, but students who are not committed to learning, still will not learn. If students don’t understand the benefits of what they’re learning, they won’t exert the effort. They’ll skip the reading, write their essays at the last minute with no planning or revision, and ignore the details that produce strong thinking and writing skills. I began identifying the students who were not committed to learning and worked to get them engaged. I learned that there are many reasons that a student is not committed including homelessness, hunger, thirst, anxiety, depression, trauma, or pain. Getting them support to mitigate these problems can transform their lives.

Success in Anything Takes Several Steps

Some students came into the classroom wanting an “A,” but not wanting to do the work necessary to get an excellent grade. Somewhere along the way, they had been taught that grades were more important than actual learning, and they didn’t understand that learning was a process, not the result of talent. As the teacher of an essential college skill like writing, I had to figure out how to change this misconception. I used the analogy of a staircase, and told them that if they wanted to get to the top of the staircase, the best way was to take each step, one at a time; otherwise, they would either get injured if they leapt to the top and miss the lessons of each step. Now, I’m using every stair on my own staircase.

Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening, and Thinking Are Intrinsically Connected

Early in my life, I had been a good reader, but I hadn’t understood the intimate connection between reading and writing. While I was teaching English-As-A-Second-Language students, I learned that the most successful students engaged in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking in English. Later, I took this concept into my transfer-level writing and literature classes and taught it to my students. We analyzed readings for figures of speech, and then we practiced using them in writing. We scrutinized words for exact meanings in readings and then tried to use the best words in writing. We stood in front of the class and explained what poetry meant, and then used our speeches for essays. We learned that thinking is not the same as writing. Thoughts don’t come out of the brain in clear sentences, but they do provide incredible ideas for development.

Critical Thinking Can Be Learned and Understood

When I first was assigned to teach a critical thinking class, I had to try to define it for myself, but I didn’t truly understand what it was until I developed lessons for teaching it. Most students, I found out, didn’t understand it at all, and they had no idea why it was important. Finally, I developed a lesson which required students to evaluated websites based on criteria, and the students found out that not all websites were honest or credible. Their surprised faces showed their understanding of why a healthy skepticism was essential to navigating today’s unscrupulous society. Every time someone tries to scam me or sell me a product, I use this skill.

Writing Is a Slow Journey, not a Talent

Many of my students came into the classroom with a variety of writing skills, often deficient ones. My professorial pride would not let me pass students who wrote poorly, so I had to devise lessons to teach them strong writing practices. As I prepared and taught those lessons, I honed my own writing skills at the same time. I learned the importance of using consistent verb tense, active verbs, specific nouns, and focused verbs. To forgo adjectives for better nouns and adverbs for better verbs. To memorize the purpose of each part of speech and how their careful utilization strengthened my sentences. I learned how to deftly include quotations in my writing to improve my credibility, and, in class, my students and I practiced this until we were all much better. Oftentimes, students brought back stories of conversations at home where their parents noticed their improved vocabulary and speech.

Now I’m retired, and I’m writing a blog, short stories, and a novel. Fortunately, I was the best student in my classes for the last sixteen years and it’s paying off. I’m more productive in my writing than I ever have been, and I recently realized another lesson that I learned.

Happiness is a key ingredient to success. I’m certainly that.

Hidden

Photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash

Sylvia had a secret. One that rolled around in her stomach like a marble in a maze, bashing against the walls until they bruised, swirling her energy into anxiety.

Sylvia’s friend Ruth told detailed stories about how her mother psychologically abused her during her teenage years. When they were cleaning out her grandmother’s house after her death, Susan had wanted her grandmother’s wooden chest full of yarn. Her mother refused to let her have it, and, instead, gave it to Susan’s older sister who didn’t even knit. Susan wondered for decades why she wasn’t good enough to have such a treasured keepsake and why her mother had favored her sister over her. Ruth told everyone about the hurts in her background, but she still walked around like a broken doll, permanently damaged, as if nothing could ever erase the scars she had suffered.

When Ruth talked about her feelings, Sylvia flashed her own memories across her mind about how her father had favored her sister over her. “Isn’t she beautiful,” she remembered he had said. Sylvia had looked in the mirror countless times wondering why no one ever called her beautiful. She had clear skin, thick hair, blazing green eyes. Weren’t green eyes as pretty as blue ones?

Her friend Paul had told her about how his father was never around. He never played sports with him, never sat with him on the couch for a game of chess, never even got to his high-school graduation until Paul had already walked across the stage and waved to his mother who was frantically waving back with both hands, as if she was waving for two. Even today, Paul’s father didn’t act like a father, but like a distant friend who sent him an article once in awhile about a topic that never related to Paul’s life. Paul had worked hard to build self-confidence, but struggling with a narcissistic father made that an up-and-down journey.

Sylvia’s friend Jen talked about her childhood, too. She told Sylvia how a sixteen-year-old neighbor boy had raped her when she was eleven, luring her into his backyard shed one afternoon and slowly removing her clothes while he talked to her about the different birds in the garden. Jen said that it was therapeutic to talk about it after so many years of keeping it hidden. At first, she was embarrassed that it had happened to her. What did she do to encourage that boy anyway? Why did she let him get her into the shed by herself? Didn’t she know better? Sylvia didn’t see how Jen had let go of the trauma if she still had all these questions in her mind.

When Jen talked, Sylvia nodded empathetically: “It wasn’t your fault. He took advantage of you. He was stronger, and you couldn’t have stopped him.” Inside her chest, however, Sylvia carefully drew a curtain in front of her own heart, shielding it from the memory of her own secret, stopping her from the minute-by-minute re-enactment of the scene, her shame, her acquiescence, her fear of exposure.

Sylvia didn’t want her friends to know she had suffered so much, had been irreparably violated. Maybe someone would use the information about her secret as revenge if they ever got angry at her. They would expose her in front of people she didn’t trust, and she would endure more embarrassment than she could handle.

Sylvia had spent years searching for her own self-esteem, her worthiness to be loved, her value as a treasured friend, her worth as an employee, her right to be happy at all. She thought that she should go talk to someone about her secret so that she could get it off her chest. Would that even work?

Finally, she made an appointment with a female minister at a church she did not attend. She told the woman about her secret, and asked her what she should do to heal from it.

“First, ask God for forgiveness. God will forgive anyone, even if you can’t forgive. Once, you’re comfortable that God has forgiven you, then forgive yourself and anyone else involved.”

Sylvia had worked on forgiving herself and the other person involved for years. Nevertheless, the memories, surfaced again and again like a nightmare when she least expected them. Sometimes, she even invited them into her thoughts as if she could purge them out of existence by focusing on them one last final time.

Nothing stopped the nightmares. They came while she was sleeping in a vivid stream, and her fear rose incrementally during the dream until she would awaken all of a sudden, gasping for breath like she had been under water the whole time. Her forehead was drenched with sweat, her heart tight with shame.

Sylvia did feel the pain of her friends, and because she did, she could listen to their stories and offer some solace just by suffering with them. She also understood the pain that her students told her about.

Samantha was a student in Sylvia’s college composition class. Samantha’s mother had kicked her and her three-year-old daughter out of the house, and, now Samantha experienced anxiety that interfered with her performance at school. Sylvia had counseled Samantha through several episodes of anxiety, and she had passed her English class in spite of her mother.

Van suffered from post-traumatic-stress-syndrome ever since he returned from Iraq, and his significant other left him right in the middle of the semester. Since Sylvia knew what anxiety and poor self esteem felt like, she coached Van step by step until he, too, passed his writing class.

So many of her community college students needed emotional support in order to pass their classes. Owen’s father beat him. Misty lived with five family members in a noisy, two-bedroom apartment. Monica’s parents wanted her to get married like a dutiful Islam daughter and give up going to school. Randall had spent two weeks living out of his car during the semester until his uncle let him live in his garage.

Sylvia knew that if she put in more effort to help these students, they could succeed and improve their lives through education and awareness of other opportunities. Yet, sometimes, as Sylvia sat beside one student or another, she felt like a broken human being trying to help another broken soul.

Was it true that people who never felt loved died of heart attacks? Most mornings, she woke up with a tight chest. She lay in bed breathing in and out of her nose until her chest relaxed a little, but the tightness never fully went away.

Most people had a secret, didn’t they? Weren’t most people walking around, hiding their secrets underneath their shirts, their polite manners, their rudeness, their abusive characters, their anxiety, their bullying, their surrender, and their repeated attempts at survival?

Yes, they were, Sylvia knew. She was, too. She had endured so many scars and affronts to her character, yet here she was, carrying her secret around like a satchel of wisdom.

Really, she thought she deserved a medal.