As an old saying goes, if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, did it really make a sound?
Likewise, I think of myself as a relatively humble and normal person. I have the same struggles as everyone else, thinking about how to pay bills, put food on the plate, and more.
But the more I traverse the world of education, as a third-year special educator, the more jaded I get about how the world does not always incentivize humility.
The world seems to incentivize people who toot their own horn a lot.
In fact, it normally never does. In terms of team morale and culture, I’ve rarely ever heard people admit to their feelings of incompetence and unhappiness with the job outside of behind closed doors circles.
In education, it means if you’re doing a great job with your students, if you get great growth in data and have great relationships with students, you better make sure people know about it.
Why we have to sell ourselves
Although the student themselves is the one who actually makes the growth and does the work, a teacher has to take some credit to gain prestige and status in the eyes of their peers and administration.
I hate that I think this way. I hate that the profession has shown me you have to think that way to get by, to put substantial effort into marketing and promoting yourself and your accomplishments over just focusing on the work. Kimberly Gorelik at WeAreTeachers talks about how to brag about yourself in order to lift the profession and raise your status so you seem better in front of others.
Here are some of my accomplishments as a teacher: I recently helped guarantee 100% compliance for a special education indicator my school was having trouble with. I had my students write letters to the mayor, and the mayor wrote back. I’ve had students who have never written a paragraph before write whole five-paragraph essays. I’ve had some students grow multiple grade levels in reading in one year.
It’s a culture that disincentivizes you for taking responsibility when something is going wrong. It’s a culture that disincentivizes you from admitting when you don’t think you’re doing a good job, from showing any weakness. Trainings might preach vulnerability, but either directly or indirectly, you will probably be penalized or seen as lesser for being vulnerable.
I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job on most days. I always think, when my classroom has any major behavioral problems, that someone in the community can come into my classroom and teach better than me. That’s how I really feel, but I’m careful about who I admit it to.
So whether you think I’m a good teacher or not probably depends on what I tell you. It depends on the stories I tell. It depends on how I market myself. It depends on what I present.
I have this sense that if I have a success and accomplishment, and don’t tell anyone about it, it didn’t really happen. Guaranteeing 100% compliance on the special education indicator is one example — if no one knows about it and knows about all the work I went through to turn the school’s numbers around, then it will feel like I toiled away for hours a week of unpaid labor.
I try to now walk the thin line between not promoting myself and overpromoting myself. I don’t believe I ever talk about my accomplishments in a way that’s disingenuous, but other people might think otherwise.
And I realize this culture in education, although pervasive, is not exclusive to education.
Playing the game and putting on a show
One example is running. I tell people and post on social media about one or two social media successes here and there. But I see people who run slower than me use their running success to create content all across social media, especially content that generates millions of views.
I’m not going to be a liar: it makes me a bit jealous because when I write about my journey running, barely anyone reads it, even when I am somewhat successful. But that might be a different story — it’s the packaging and presentation that I struggle to make relatable, and others who create content on their running excel at.
The one thing different about running compared to other domains of my life, like writing and teaching, is running can be more objective. Your time is your time. Your place is your place, whereas success in teaching and writing tends to be significantly more subjective.
Of course, finding success for its own worth has some value and validation. But you can be the most competent and accomplished person in the world, but still struggle to land jobs if you don’t know how to sell yourself.
Sometimes, people don’t buy into the substance. Sometimes, they buy into the packaging.
I don’t really know how to sell myself if I’m being honest, and it’s a personal weakness of mine. Social psychologist Heidi Grant says that in hiring, someone’s track record of success isn’t as important as their potential track record for future success.
So sometimes it’s not about selling success or actually getting results. It’s about selling a feeling of success and potential of success.
I’m not some success-obsessed guru but I increasingly find myself falling into mindsets like “if you don’t tell people about your results, they didn’t really happen” and “it’s more about the presentation than the substance sometimes” because of the pressures I’m under. I know what’s more important — family, friends, relationships, and actually doing the work and service well as opposed to being good at selling it.
Maybe I’m just growing up. Maybe I’m growing more disillusioned with the world and willing to play the game and put on a show to increase my odds at survival and advancement. Does that make me an increasingly worse and more selfish person? Maybe.
For my Master’s Degree, I had a whole thesis project that was 90% about how I packaged incredibly ordinary and mundane work done in my classroom, 10% about the actual work.
So I hate to admit it. Sometimes it’s more important to play the game and put on a show than actually do everything you can to do the work well. Somehow, I have more tunnel vision of being more selective about admitting my successes and accomplishments, but conveniently omitting all my flaws and failures, particularly in the workplace.
This might be personal branding 101 to the majority of people in the corporate world and in the workforce. While I prize authenticity over professionalism, it’s not like I’m going to advertise and tell the whole world every time I checked my phone while I was teaching and wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing.
So there are successes we have for personal validation. There are giving acts of service we make we don’t tell anyone about, like the charities we choose to donate to. There are hobbies and personal goals we don’t tell anyone about.
But there are also successes we do, and unfortunately, have to tell people about to bolster our personal brands, for the sake of our professional careers.
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This post was previously published on Publishous.
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