12 Feb 22
Humble, Approachable, Credible, and Aggressive. I have taught 30-50 instructors and countless other students that those four traits are the most important traits of an expert instructor as well as just being a well-rounded human being. As a life-long learner, you will not make it far without “eating a slice of humble pie” every now and then. As defined by the Cambridge Dictionary-Online, Humble is tending to consider yourself as having no special importance that makes you better than others; not proud. [1]
If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m going to let you know my thoughts on humility. One of the main reasons for this topic was actually inspired from a dinner and drink conversation with a colleague and good friend of mine. Both of us recounted some times where our best learning events were rooted in failure. It was through that failure that we were served a pretty large slice of humble pie and after eating that slice of humble pie, we were both able to crawl out, stand up, brush ourselves off, and continue our individual missions. In addition to the conversation we had, I was also told recently by a Doctor of Education that it seemed like the four traits mentioned above, are “more of a culture than a trait.” The doctor continued to explain that those cultures can be ingrained but not necessarily taught. To that end, I couldn’t disagree more with him. So welcome to a quick dissertation on why humility is important as a learner and a teacher and how you can teach it as an expert teacher to other aspiring expert teachers.
The Importance of Humility:
First, the definition given by the Cambridge dictionary is a bit misleading. Let me redefine it for everyone so we are speaking from a common playing field. Humble is understanding that you do not have the answer for everything, but you have the aptitude and attitude to figure it out. Simply put, it is the acute understanding of what you don’t know and that you have the willingness to admit that you don’t know it.
Why does that definition matter? Your humility directly correlates to your approachability, credibility and your aggressiveness! How many times have you asked a question of a “subject matter expert” only to receive a vague answer that is redirected or a blatantly incorrect answer because they are too high and mighty to admit that they don’t have the answer at that very moment? For me, it is A LOT. But remember that I have spent a lot of time putting other instructors on the spot while attempting to perfect their approaches to teaching. Needless to say, they get caught in the “I have to know this answer” game all the time. I am here to tell you today; it is okay to not know everything!
Alright, venting aside, if you are humble enough to understand what your weak areas are, as a life-long learner, you will always have something to improve. If you are willing to admit what your weak areas are, other people, your peers, and students, see that you are human and that it is okay to not know everything. If you are willing to admit that you don’t know things it opens up some vulnerability areas that can make you more approachable to your students. If you avoid answering questions you don’t actually know so that you can sound smart and admit that you don’t have that answer but you can get the data for them it increases your credibility. If you avoid giving incorrect data or half-truths in order to sound smarter, it will increase your credibility and grow your approachability. If you are willing to admit that you don’t know things AND you go and research the things you don’t know AND you find that student who was asking the question to teach them what you learned in order to answer their question, you increase your credibility and approachability to that student. It is all linked together, and it doesn’t have to start with humility but, I can tell you from experience, humility goes a long way in opening up those doors for approachability and credibility. If you are still doubting the importance of humility let me give you a personal example.
I was going through the United States Air Force JTAC Weapons Instructor Course in 2015. I had been doing pretty well in the course. One of our assignments that we were given was to present a contentious topic pertaining to our job in front of our classmates and all of the instructor cadre in within the unit. All that mean was that I had to pick a topic that has been debated at length between the Joint Terminal Attack Controllers on the ground and the A-10 pilots in the air. I chose a topic that I was confident about, no need to get into the details about it, but I was overly confident walking into the briefing. To give you a little glimpse of my confidence and where I was at my final line to my argument was: “Listen, all I am saying is that when I show up to a bad situation on the ground with the exact same amount of information, I do my job. All we are asking is that when you show up to the same situation from the air and are tasked with doing the exact same thing, you do your job.” Needless to say, it felt like a “mic drop” moment for me. My classmates all looked at me and non-verbally cheered me on as if to say, “great job man” and “there is no way they can argue that” but that, in-fact, was not the case. As I peered around to the cadre in the room most of them looked at me in disbelief at what they had just witnessed, others just got up and left the briefing room without a word. It was at that moment I had my first thought of “I messed up”.
What followed was a series of side-bar debriefings and counselling with various leaders in the schoolhouse. All of those were centered around my arrogance and unprofessionalism during the briefing. What was the most upsetting to me was that I thought that is exactly what they were looking for. I went into that briefing room with “aggressiveness” in mind hoping that it would exude confidence and lead to increased credibility and approachability. I negated humility completely. In my various counseling sessions, I was educated on everything that is going on in the air. I was reminded of the fact that I was speaking “well outside of my knowledge base”. Man, what a way to deflate my ego at that point. But it didn’t stop there.
Three days later I had my next mission. It was a typical scenario except this time, during the ride out to the range we pulled off in order to get an intel update and discovered that we were going to need to perform an offset infiltration to get to an observation point to observe the target area. What does that mean? We were about 10km from our target area and needed to maneuver about 3000m to get to a piece of terrain that was probably a 600’ elevation change from where we were but that 600’ elevation change happened in about 100m of lateral distance. (it was steep) All of this had to be performed on a super condensed timeline as well since we had originally planned to infiltrate the area by a vehicle. So the stress got turned up quickly on the ground and there was a physical feat to accomplish while overcoming a mental feat of a mission change. Then my aircraft checked on as normal. As soon as they checked on, it felt like everything started going wrong. All of a sudden, my instructor was throwing ground burst simulators and shooting his rifle simulating a firefight that our position had been compromised. Then, in the middle of this, our target was shifting on our primary objective and then the true curveball hit me. A new aircraft with a callsign I had never heard before checked-in, callsign, “Maniac”.
Maniac was a pain in my ass for the rest of the mission. He checked on as a very cocky forward air controller-airborne (FAC-A). In extremely dumbed downed terms, he basically had all of the same qualifications I have on the ground, but he performs them from his perch in a cockpit above the fight. He began to attempt to take control on every single target that I would start briefing. He was confusing the situation on the ground and in the air for the other pilots on the radio. This back and for the continued for an hour or so as we continued to maneuver to a safe area on the ground to find some cover and concealment from our simulated enemy and still attack targets to complete our original mission. All the while, maniac would interrupt comms, pass bad data, attempt to take control of airstrikes, and overall, just be a cocky pilot who was just “showing up and doing his job” just like I had told him to do in the briefing three days prior. It wasn’t until the mission was over, I was down a headset and a gopro camera from slamming my helmet on the ground in complete frustration at one point (this is actually on video) that I realized this was all a big lesson in humility for me.
Wow John, that sounds like they just wanted to humiliate you and put you in your place… Yeah, that is what it sounds like, because that is what they did. But that wasn’t where it stopped, there were plenty of small lessons that followed to “build me back up”. So, can you teach humility? I can tell you from experience, yes, yes you can. But it is not easy by any means.
Teaching Humility:
Well John, how can you teach humility? That sounds more like a culture thing. Well, you can always consult google and look for what others have written already on the subject. I did this for you though and went to google.scholar.com and typed “teaching humility” into the search bar. In just 0.04 seconds I was returned to a screen with 155,000 results with scholarly articles on “teaching humility”. Oddly enough, as I scoured through these results, I didn’t find a single article that actually told you how to teach humility. There were a lot that talked about the importance of humility in teaching and learning but none of them gave me a tool or a skill to walk away with that I could start teaching this “very important trait” to others with. So, if the scholars can’t tell you how to do it, then I can at the very least give you my experience in how my team and I accomplished this in the past and how I still teach it today.
Putting it very simple, to teach humility is to challenge your student into proving that they are correct and that what they are saying is factual EVERY SINGLE TIME THEY SPEAK. Teaching humility takes a lot of time, but it all starts with identifying a student who may think of themselves as high and mighty (remember in my story and the confidence I entered the room with?). Trust me, you won’t have to look too hard in a group of “type-As” to find one. Once you identify your boastful student (after the briefing for me) you need to study them, you need to challenge them, and you need to basically have an unrelenting attack on their methods, thoughts, ideas, and most importantly their “facts”. (They already had a lot of this data on me)
John, that sounds exhausting for the instructor and might even be a little bit aggressive, enough so that it borderlines with hazing… You’re right, but sometimes, you need to break someone down to build them up. (Unrelenting counselling, and a mission that sealed my fate?) This is a fine line, but I guarantee if you execute this style of attack correctly, your student will not only understand humility in the end, but they will be more confident in their skills and be a better teacher for it on the other side. As a disclaimer: I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, social medicine professional, or even a doctor in education. This is literally what has worked for me, and so far, I haven’t had any of my students come back and tell me I gave them PTSD or any other traumatic experience. Most of them accept defeat and grow into a better human and teacher.
Identification is easy, you will notice this student you can do no wrong, they are probably your top performer actually. Before you decide to go on the offensive you need to study your student’s actions during performance. Watch your student execute. Look for any flaws in their execution, make note of it and see how they correct themselves, if they do. Look for their interactions with other people in the group to see if their arrogance (if they are displaying it outright) is pouring through. There are no actions taken here, just building your case and gathering your tools for your offensive. Then watch them brief, teach, and debrief. Watch how they answer questions. See what areas they try to avoid in their briefs, find those weaknesses no matter how small they might seem. Do they have a lot of non-verbal pauses? Verbal pauses? Odd hand gestures? Weird eye contact? Just pick this person apart, on paper, and study them.
The hardest part about this phase is that you will want to step-in. You will want to instruct them and mentor them, but you have to avoid it. Literally let this guy keep digging a hole and do some data collection on him. You are going to feel like a complete asshole. You need to be super judgy of everything they do at this point. You will probably start to have some feelings of actual disgust for this person, don’t let that get in your way. John, this sounds super weird, like you are plotting to destroy this guy's life… You’re right again, it does seem super weird, but this is all on paper right now with notes that your ends in mind, should be focused on making this student better… keep that in the back of your head though, and keep gathering juicy details on everything they do that is wrong.
Okay, so once you have a lot of data it is time to start your “attack”. It is very important to remember during this entire phase that you are not attacking the student personally. None of that matters and it will actually cause you to lose credibility if you step outside of that boundary and make it personal. What I mean is that you don’t attack anything that doesn’t have to do with your mission. For me it was making sure that everything that came out of my mouth when we were talking about our job and our mission was 100% factual, ALL THE TIME. It was absolutely exhausting as a student. This is even more exhausting as an instructor, and it took a team effort for sure. What is the attack? Well, let’s say that your student is giving a presentation or a briefing on a topic that is common to your organization. You make sure that you yourself and the other instructors in the room have the aggregate knowledge to challenge every word your student says during this briefing. The moment he seems like he is giving his “opinion” and not given a solid fact you attack them with questions on “where did that data come from?” or “can you explain that in more detail, I’m not understanding it” and you force your student to constantly make different approaches to the knowledge set they are presenting. You force your student to begin questioning what they really know about the subject in the first place. Possibly, and most importantly, you make your student think before he speaks.
John, that sounds like your team is just being a bully to him and you’re teaching him how to be a better briefer. What does that have to do with humility? Let’s go back to our definition: it is the acute understanding of what you don’t know and that you have the willingness to admit that you don’t know it. You are literally making sure that your student is aware that they don’t know everything. You are technically force them to go learn more…
That brings us to our final phase of building them up. Your student is going to go through a low point. They are going to think about quitting because you have been so hard on them. At this point, it is time to start building them back up with some confidence. If they are the right person, the right character, the right personality to be an expert teacher and life-long learner they will have a wealth of knowledge built up from trying to ensure they answer all of the unanswered questions from their briefs and missions lately. They are probably way smarter than they realize at this point but they are just mentally defeated because your team has just constantly challenged them with being 100% correct with everything they say. Now, you need to give them some wins though. You need to be in the briefs with not a whole lot of questions now. You need to reassure them after they answer questions with a “wow, I had no idea…” or a post brief compliment of “that was the best brief I have sat in on…” or even a “you have improved a ton, I am very impressed with your performance”. You can do all of this and keep the pressure on at the same time, but your student will need these confidence boosts after the beat down they have received. Keeping the pressure on involves making sure that the student doesn’t get too comfortable with their new confidence boost. You still need to make sure they speak the truth and facts when required.
So, that is a very long explanation of the importance of humility as well as a method to teach humility to your students. I will remind each of you that this is a very time intensive process. It is exhausting for both your student and your instructors. But what you get on the back side of all of this is an instructor or a student who is willing to admit that they don’t know everything. You get a student and instructor that is willing to go and research as well as follow-up on questions they didn’t have the answers to. You will have a student and an instructor who is credible because they are willing to admit they don’t know everything but go find the answer and teach the new stuff they learned. You will have a student and instructor who is more approachable because of those same things. You will also have a student and an instructor who is as aggressive as they need to be with the pretense and understanding to read the room on their aggression dial in order to get their points across as needed.
Humility is important, arguably one of the most important things as a teacher, student, and life-long learner. I hope you all understand the importance of humility not just in teaching but in our daily lives.
[1] The Cambridge Dictionary, accessed 12 February 2022, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/
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