Rising above it all

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Do you like standing out and being above average?

I think like most people, I’m somewhere in the middle. I’ve never been wanting to stay in a room and demand people‘s attention like “hey everybody, look at me!“ But at the same time, I think there is an innate human need to feel acknowledged, if not noticed.

Maybe some of this comes from my line of work. But I feel like being a teacher, more often than that, you have to be the center of attention in your classroom. But more than that, as a teacher, you have to be able to command people‘s attention.

I’m not saying that that makes me a natural leader or a great leader or anything like that. But I do feel like there have been times in my life, even when I’m in meetings with some of my professional colleagues, where I see an absence of genuine leadership. I see that many people in the room want to be heard, but don’t necessarily want to speak up. In those situations, I feel like I end up, picking up the slack, so to speak.

In fact, I’m dealing with the situation like this right now in the very school that I’m currently working at. Several of my colleagues have issues with some of our principles policies at the school. I feel like we’re all waiting for somebody to speak up and I’m coming to the realization and I’m probably going to say something at our staff meeting in two days.

As for feeling “above average”, I like to think that I’m above-average intelligence. I know there’s people who are far more intelligent than I. But at the same time, I know that I’m a hell of a lot smarter than most of the people walking around today.

I love being intelligent and I love learning. In fact, I consider myself a lifelong learner. What’s more, I find intelligence attractive. I wouldn’t go as far as to call myself a sapiosexua, but intelligence is a definite green flag for me.

On the flipside

On the other hand, I realize that as I get older, I mostly wanted to be left alone. It’s not that o don’t want to speak up as mix as it is matter of picking and choosing your battles; deciding what hi j things are with your energy and which ones are not.

Unfortunately, this situation at my work seems to be one where somebody definitely needs to speak up. And no one no one else is willing to do it, I guess I’ll be the one to start the conversation.

Meanwhile

Today would have been my 25th wedding anniversary. As I sit here and write this post in the 20th, I’m thinking about the significance of the anniversary but I’m not dwelling on it. If anything, what I’m really thinking about is how much I have changed as a person in the last 25 years.

I’m currently watching the Hulu miniseries Fleishman Os On Trouble. But watching this story unfold – about a divorced man roughly my age – really hits me on a very deep level. I’ll save any deeper analysis for my forthcoming review.

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