Freedom Friday: The Journey from the "Expert" to the "Educator"

Hello everybody and welcome once again to the unlearned podcast. I am your host, ruth Abigail aka Ra, and this is once again Freedom Friday, where me, or me and a friend of mine come and share something we have unlearned recently and how it has made us just a little bit more free. So I first just want to say a quick thank you. You guys have been rocking with this show for over a year and we're just going to keep trying to get better and better, and so just let us know what you want to unlearn, like I want to know what kind of things that you all would like to kind of have a little bit more encouragement, unlearning or just kind of one of the things that you're finding yourself more and more free in. I would love to know that. So you know, drop me a message on Instagram or Facebook whenever you see a clip posted and just ask. I'm just let me know what do you, what do you want to unlearn? How are you being more free? I really want to know that. So this week we couple weeks ago so by the time this comes out, it probably would have been a couple of weeks back that I had the opportunity to have a really cool conversation with a woman named Ashton and she is in the sketch noting business and if you don't know what sketch noting is, I did either, but essentially it is making conversations visual. She is, she goes to meetings or conferences and essentially recreates the high points of the conversation on paper in a visual form, so it's a lot easier to remember. It's really really cool and we had a really cool conversation about it. A lot of stuff around creativity, about growing in leadership, and one of the things that I found to be really, really interesting about her journey and what I want to share a little bit about today, as far as what I'm unlearning to in my journey is the transition from and I'm using this word pretty loosely right from being an expert in something to being an educator in something. So transitioning from an expert to an educator and I think I don't know that we really understand how much of a shift that is right, so it's really interesting. I think typically we make the assumption that because somebody is really good at something, it must mean that they can be really good at teaching it, and yet I think a lot of us have experienced that that is not always the case, that being really good at something yourself doesn't necessarily mean that you're able to give the information away to other people and, at the same time, the best teachers are not always the best at the thing that they're teaching. I think we have all experienced that, for whatever reason, there's just this natural expectation of if I'm an expert at something, then I should be able to educate. That's not always true. Everybody's not called to be an educator, but for those of us who are and I will consider myself on some level, not in the formal sense of the word within the school system or anything like that, but I do a lot of educating in what I do, and in this conversation with Ashton, she was sharing her desire and skill to educate people in this particular skill. I think it's some things we have to unlearn about that transition, because when you have lived in the expert space and what I mean by that is lived in a space where you were the primary person doing the thing, you were the one doing the thing. You were the one putting the reports together. You were the one doing the experiments. You were the one that is flying the plane. You are the one that's sewing the blanket. You were the one that is putting together the car. You are the person that's actually using your hands and or your brain to get the thing accomplished, and you're doing it at a high level. That's what I mean by an expert. That could be in anything. You're the one that's cooking the food. You are that person. That's an expert, and I think, on some level, we all have an expertise, whatever that is. You might be really good at playing basketball, you might be really good at skating, you might be really good at cooking, you might be really good at an instrument, you might be really good at writing. There's some level of expertise that you probably have, and that's what I mean. You are doing the thing. Your hands and your brain are doing the thing. Now, an educator would be and these are my definitions, right. I would describe that as, then, taking what you have and preparing someone else to do what you do. So you're not doing it. You are preparing someone else to do what you're already good at doing. I have kind of been in this mode, even in my role with Angel Street, right my leadership position. I've been working directly with young people for over 10 years and I'm in a position now where the primary role is not directly working with young people every day, it's not administering the activities with kids. That's not my role every day today, right. So I have a team whose role that that is, and for a good majority of the team doing it at Angel Street is not. They don't have that experience, and so I'm finding myself in an educator's position. I have to educate and train on things that I've been doing for a really long time and a lot of ways comes really naturally to me, and it has been. There are moments where it's really pretty cool, but then there are moments that could be kind of frustrating, because when you have done things at a high level and, by the definition that we're talking about, could be considered an expert in a particular field or with a particular skill, then one of the things that we have to unlearn, I think, in that regard, is that the people that are getting it from you will do it at your level immediately. We have to remember it took us X amount of years to get to that point, and so the work that we're used to seeing done at a high level, when we begin to give that away, we can't have that same expectation of when I do it. It's going to be the same way as when you do it Not yet. Not yet. Moving from an expert mindset to an educator's mindset takes a lot of patience, takes a lot of patience, takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of refining our language to meet people where they are. A lot of the ways that I've learned how to educate came from my work with young people. Right, we want a lot of times, when we're in the position of educating young people, whether it's formally or informally, we are forced to break things down in a way that they understand it, and so we call that. I've heard it called and I was trained to call it keep the cookies on the bottom shelf. We want to keep the cookies on the bottom shelf so that young people, people who don't know what you know can grasp what you know at their level. And it's the same way with people who you want, who you are educating in something you have built up an expertise in. We have to be very aware of the language we're using when we're getting that information to other people. One of the conversations that Ash and I had was about her writing a book and you know I've never written a book, but I've done writing before and there is a real refining that has to happen, because things that live in your head for years and when you read it and you get it out makes sense to you, to a reader who hasn't been in your head for years, a lot of times the first pass at that is not simple enough. We have to refine it and refine it and refine it. And she was sharing how. That was an experience that she had writing a draft and then giving it to people and them saying this is really good, but I don't know what this means. And she's thinking, oh, that's a pretty simple way of explaining that, but for them they didn't know right and so she had to get even more simple and even more simple. And I think a lot of us we're going into that, going from an expertise role or an expert's role to an educator role have to realize that the language we think is simple sometimes it's not simple enough. So it's gonna take us, humbling ourselves and unlearning what we think we know, to then relearning it on somebody else's level as if we've never learned it before, and that is very, very challenging. It takes patience, it takes time and it takes shifting my language in order for me to move from the expert to the educator, and here's why I think it's important to do that for a lot of us, right, for those of us who might find ourselves in a position of influence on some level. We gotta move from that position because there's no way for you, with one person, with one brain, two hands, two feet, one body, there's no way for you to get to as many people as you might want to get to. So the only way to multiply your expertise is to give it away to other people. But in order to do that, we have to learn how to do that effectively. And again, what I have had to unlearn is that is a process that can take patience. That will take patience, time and shifting my language, and not just once or twice, but that becoming a way that I begin to move in the field that I might be in. So I have to. My mindset is no longer the expert, my mindset is the educator, who knows things and knows how to do it. But it's no longer a win if I do it. It's a win if I can get somebody else to do it, and so it's like I'm learning all over again. I've learned the skill, but now can I learn to teach the skill? And teaching is a whole other skill. So I'm leveling up the skill I'm adding to my toolbox by learning how to teach the skill that I've already learned. That is, that takes time and patience and shifting of language, and so I think that's something we have to unlearn that it's not simple to move from expert to educator, even though a lot of people find themselves in the position of doing that. I think that we need to take our time and do it more effectively and have a better expectation of what comes with that. It's not just I'm just giving a manual to somebody and okay, this is what I do, so go do it. It doesn't work like that. We have to gradually give over what has been built up in our system for years, for some of us decades and begin to shift it. But it doesn't happen quickly and we can't have the same expectation of somebody who's just now getting it. So we also have to regulate our own expectation of how that skill is played out. They're not gonna do it at the same level immediately. You have to adjust right, and so, again, if we're doing that, the win is no longer, if I can do it well. The win is if other people do it well. We just went through a re-engaging process of doing some intentional outreach at Angel Street for some new programs that we're starting to do and, in the outreach piece of it, right, meeting new students. Right, being intentional about going out in spaces outside of our space and meeting new students and building relationships with them and engaging them. That is a skill. That's a skill that I've had the privilege of building up over the past decade or so. Some of my team members are newer to that skill. So in my giving away some of that expertise, it is not a win if I bring in new students, because that's not what I'm supposed to be doing. It's a win if they bring in new students. That's how I know that I've shifted right. If now what I know I can see in somebody else, so I don't know where you are. If you have children, this is something that I think is important You're giving what you have and what you know away to your children. It's not a win if you can wash the dishes. It's a win if now they know how to wash the dishes. Can you move from being an expert to an educator, if you are a leader and you have a team, if you are a coach for a sports team, if you have influence over one or more people and you can impact them and want to multiply your impact and impact that individual by giving them a skill they don't have, then we have to shift from being an expert to an educator. So this is a lot longer than I expected it to be. So if you made it to the end, congratulations, but I do. I mean, this is something that I've, I'm kind of living out right now and it's a re-energizing opportunity to be a shift mindsets a little bit, and so I hope that's helpful to you. It definitely is more freeing for me because it's a lot of fun sometimes to see the things that you've had to do in the past being replicated and it's still working right, and the thing that I learned somebody else had to give to me. So you're getting the chance to replicate even the replicate the thing that you were a product of, and that is that's really cool and really freeing and also releases the pressure of feeling like I have to be the expert in everything, or feeling like I have to wear the expert hat and everything If I can learn how to wear the educator hat when it's time. Then my expertise can multiply. So that's it, y'all. That's it. Thank you again for listening to Freedom Friday. And look If this is if you're getting more free as a result of these, these, these episodes or any of the series that we do, man, if you could download it, download it and then share it with somebody and help them to get free too. So we will see you next week and until then, let's keep unlearning together so that we can live more freely Peace. Thank you once again for listening to the Unlearned podcast. We would love to hear your comments and your feedback about the episode. Feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram and to let us know what you think. We're looking forward to the next time when we are able to unlearn together to move forward towards freedom. See you then. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh oh.