The Best Teachers

I've been thinking about teaching a lot lately. I'm still very excited to be teaching Business Plans Deciphered in October at the AMTA national convention (and I'd love to see any of you there!). I'm working on promoting the workshops of The Healing Core and the very first workshop we're offering is Create Quality Continuing Education. I keep coming up with courses and seminars I want to offer next year and I get excited by the possibilities.

Teaching is on my mind.

I am also in a group with a few other MTs who meet monthly to work our way through Twelve Months to Your Ideal Practice. This month's exercises are all about marketing, starting with writing a newsletter for you practice. Well, don't I feel pretty smug about that, what with being a professional writer and having written a newsletter for my practice for 10 years now!

Then my "teaching" brain and my "writing" brain collided. I started contemplating whether I should offer a workshop on writing newsletters for your practice. And I quickly realized I am the wrong person to teach that class. I, literally, do not know how to teach people how to write.

We often assume that the best teachers are the ones who are the most skilled at a certain task. However, some of my worst training experiences were with teachers who were excellent at their craft....and always had been. Therein lies the problem.

When something has always been easy for you, has always come naturally to you, it is very difficult to put yourself in the shoes / mind / heart of someone who has never been adept at a thing, who is struggling, who just doesn't get it. A teacher who teaches from their own personal experience of a subject or task rather than from the student's experience with a subject or task is rarely a good teacher.

The best teaching is less about the data than it is about empathy with the student. It's about the instructors ability to recognize and appreciate where the student is and help the student move from a place of discomfort / ignorance / inexperience to a place of competence, comfort, and knowledge. A great teacher is as much a guide and a mentor as they are the resident expert, especially when a workshop is geared to beginners.

I think this happens a lot with energy work. The teachers are often people who have always been able to feel chakras / see auras / feel energy / etc. and they genuinely want you to have and enjoy that experience too. But they've never had to learn to feel chakras, see auras, or feel energy so it's difficult for them to teach that part of the experience.

I can't teach writing because I've never had to learn how to write. Oh, I've had to learn how to write well and I've had to work at honing my craft but words have always come easily to me. I was a writer in the first grade! I never had to learn to write, I could always write (well, once I learned how to read). I do not know how to put myself in a non-writers shoes, to feel that experience.

Think about your favorite courses and instructors. Think about your least favorite courses and instructors. How often was the difference between them an instructor who genuinely understood where you -- as the student, as the novice -- were coming from?

And if you're thinking about taking up teaching, honestly ask yourself if you can put yourself in the shoes of someone who genuinely does not know how to do the thing you want to teach. (And if you want to ensure you design a great course, sign up for our workshop! You really will be amazed at how much goes into creating a truly great course.)