What does it mean to do your best?
But which one is the best? (Image by jo vanel)
As a teacher, it’s all too easy to make kids cry.
It can be disconcerting when they start crying on the spot, but I’m very used to it by now. Depending on the situation, I hand them a Kleenex and we keep going, or we stop everything and address the issue.
It’s worse, however, when they go home and cry — and I hear about it later. This means that the kid cares so much about what I think that they keep it together in my presence, smiling and nodding, and then fall apart later.
The trigger for the at-home cryers seems to be my disappointment. For some kids, if I’ve appeared to express any disappointment in them, they are devastated. It comes down to this: What if they have done their very best, but their best isn’t good enough?
I’ve learned to tread very lightly here. It is all too easy, as a teacher, to believe that your student is phoning it in and doing the minimum when in reality, the work is pushing their knowledge and skills to the limit. When you ask for more (especially if it comes with stern disapproval or disappointment), the student may panic or cry — or refuse to do anything more.
Over the years, I’ve come up with a guiding principle that has helped me very much as a teacher and coach. I’ve come to believe that everyone is always doing their best.
The natural state of a human being is to seek growth and work toward being the person we want to be. But being human also means that we aren’t operating at our peak at all times. My best work happens when I’m well rested and well fed, all the necessary tools and resources are present, and I’m in a positive emotional state. But this is not where I find myself at all times. And sometimes, the conditions are perfect, but I struggle with a lack of clarity. Under such circumstances, the work that I accomplish is still my best. It’s the best that I could do at the time with the resources that I had.
Is that a cop-out? I don’t care. What, exactly is the benefit of taking myself to task for, for instance, letting my house get untidy because I didn’t have the energy to deal with it today? Who is the judge?
The inner voice that tells me I’m not doing well enough is pretty quiet. I was lucky enough to grow up in a home where I wasn’t scrutinized too closely. For some of us, however, the inner voice that tells us we’re not doing our best is loud and obnoxious and all but impossible to ignore.
An indoor rock-climbing competition has a variety of routes set up, each with a set level of points for completion based on the difficulty of the route. The person with the most points wins the competition. The best strategy is to choose routes that are appropriate for your skill level, even if they aren’t the most challenging. Attempting to stretch your ability and win the competition by doing the hardest routes possible would be absurd, yet I’ve seen kids adopt exactly this strategy because they are unable to accept that their best is not the best. The voice in their heads tells them that winning is the only way to do their best, but they achieve no points at all because the routes they are choosing are far too difficult for them.
After awhile, if we discover that there is nothing we can do to please the inner critic (or outer critic, in the case of a parent or a teacher), we give up. We’re like a donkey that’s been whipped so many times that it will not go faster in response to any external stimulus. It just plods along and goes through the motions.
That’s not to say that teachers and parents can never make corrections. We just need to be respectful. We must acknowledge that the person we’re working with is already doing their best. That is, they are doing what they can with the intellectual, emotional, and physical resources they have. If we want to help them improve their performance, we’ll need to give them additional guidance and support.
Does that mean we let people “get away with” crappy work? Only if we plan to give them no additional training or coaching. However, if we’re going to stick with them, we’ll be giving them more opportunities to grow and improve and show what they can do — and we don’t need to point out all of the ways they’re falling short in order to do that. We can accept that they’re doing the best they can while generously showing them exactly how to get better.
If you tend to be more punitive and stern, that’s okay — you’re doing your best, too. I encourage you to get the support you need to keep growing, yourself.