The Fairness Rule

 

Sometimes Fairness Means Not Getting the Same

Being a teacher I feel I get to practice my leadership style on 25 test subjects each and every day. Over the past 7 years of teaching I feel I have greatly improved as a transformational leader. Many skeptics may say that leading children is vastly different than leading adults, but I disagree.

If you would like me to prove it to you, please volunteer to be an assistant in my classroom. We can see how well you can keep my students motivated through reading, writing, and math assignments. Have them line up in a perfect line, or be silent and focused through hours of standardized testing. Just try getting students excited about a book when they are now surrounded with video games, the internet, and other more entertaining technologies. Finally, make every student leave each day feeling happy and excited to come back tomorrow. If you easily manage all of this, then you can criticize my leadership skills.

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Although I feel I am strong leader, I have experienced my share of failures. One failure that soon became a triumph was when I learned the rule of fairness. When I was a new teacher I wanted a very fair and equal classroom. My goal was to not show favoritism, and to have the same rules and expectations for everyone. In order to be consistent with my students, I felt I needed concrete rules, with unbendable consequences if they were not followed.

WHAT A HORRIBLE IDEA THAT WAS

Leadership Lesson: Not everyone is the same, quit treating them that way.
In my example, when a student would forget their homework (regardless of the reason) they had to miss recess. Homework was due exactly at 9:30 a.m. without exception, and to miss it was a detention. Soon I began having two students that missed homework every day. They would try to tell me their excuse and I wouldn’t even listen to them, I just saw their excuses together with many of the other sad stories I heard from other students, and thought that this firm approach was going to help teach them to be responsible.

The truth is I was being very irresponsible. It was the lazy way out. It’s very easy to make a blanket statement and be unbendable, it allows you to be mentally dormant and ignore those upper level thinking skills of rationalization and compassion. What I didn’t know, and was too stubborn to learn at first, was that these students had issues they could not control.
The two students that were not getting their homework done every night didn’t have a home to do it in. One of the students was living in and out of random hotel rooms with whoever her mom could stay with that night. The second student was either spending his nights in a shelter or in his parent’s car. Who was being irrational, irresponsible and an overall jerk? Me.

After learning this, my approach changed. I minimized their homework or gave them extra time to do it before or after school. They only had to take work home that was really important, and I removed any assignments that were review. I realized that they were trying their best, but I was not putting them in a situation that would make them successful. With this new approach, I was seeing greater results as they were given an opportunity to do their best.
Soon after the other students saw that their classmates were not getting as much work, many of them cried out with, “That’s not fair!”

At that moment I had one of the best thoughts I ever had in my life. (I don’t know if it was a saying I have heard before, and I could remember who told me this, I would give them all of the credit.) My response to my students was:

“Fairness is not everyone getting the same; fairness is everyone getting what they need.”

After learning this lesson I have been a much better leader. Obviously there are situations in which everyone needs to be treated the exact same, but are you providing all of the people you lead and guide with the compassion, resources, and opportunities to succeed? Do you examine your leadership style, and make adjustments to maximize everyone’s potential? Or are you trying to make everyone the same, and hope for the best?

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Life is as Easy as YOU Make it.

“Life is as easy as you make it.”

(Purposeful Pause)

Do you agree or disagree? It took me many years until I agreed with that statement. Even now at my most stressful moments I don’t know if I hold this statement to be 100% true, but it is a line I can repeat in my mind to bring me back from my most trying times in life.

My mother said these words to me every time I was stressed throughout my childhood. I was wound pretty tight in my youth and would let the littlest things bother me. From problems with my peers, school projects, sports, and dealing with my father, my mom had a way of putting life into perspective and bringing me back from the edge. But having the power to make your own life easy? I still never believed her. It was easier to make mountains out of molehills, and give up without trying to solve my problems.

Every time she would say, “life is as easy as you make it” it would annoy me and anger me all over again. How can life be as easy as you make it? With all of these obstacles, problems, and stress, how could someone make life easy? Life never seemed that easy, as soon as I would overcome one obstacle, another would present itself, and frustrate me down to my core all over again. Where was this easy way she was talking about?

The older I get, the more I realize how right she is. Most of the obstacles in our life are mental, but we build them up within our mind until they seem insurmountable. I wish I had a time machine to go back to the most frustrating and helpless moments in my life and shake some sense into myself. I would tell myself to calm down, put myself at ease, and realize these horrible dilemmas were really only minor speed bumps.

We are so quick to tell ourselves that we are stuck where we are at, we are not worthy of anything more, and it keeps us from daring to be great. No one likes change, and often is easier to be “comfortably miserable” than strive for something bigger and greater. How many people do you know, or maybe you’ve said it your self: “it’s just easier to keep it the way it is.”

Often the most depressing part in facing these mental obstacles is that we surround ourselves in helplessness and feel there is nothing that can be done. Settling becomes acceptable, and we feel we are destined to be miserable and that there is nothing we can do to improve our situation. I think depressing thoughts are like a stack of dominos, it can cause a chain reaction of negative thoughts that can get out of hand before you know it.

Take a moment to think about the biggest problem in your life, whether it is your career, your relationship, being out of shape, etc. What is truly stopping you from making an improvement in this area? Is someone literally blocking your doorway and not letting you out? Or have you wrapped yourself in a cocoon of self-doubt, and this fear of failure is what’s really holding you back? You are most likely not as stuck as you think you are. Maybe now is your moment to dare to be great.

“Life is as easy as you make it.”

Thanks Mom, you were right.

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