Enlightened teachers!
We now know that enlightened teachers – who cause all their students to willingly do their best work and self-regulate to avoid disruptions – achieve this by providing psychological (and of course, physical) safety to their students.
We know how they do this. They offer unfeigned love.
This means that they are unconditionally accepting of their students, they are fully invested in their students’ successes and joys, they are attuned to how students might be “stuck” and they act proactively to help these students change their perceptions and become “unstuck”.
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Let’s embrace!
I have done a lot of cognitive coaching in my time. The hardest first step was being able to listen. This came in three stages: just keeping my mouth shut and letting the coachee freely respond to key questions. Second was extinguishing the impulses I had to share my own experiences, or to follow my agenda not theirs. The third was to notice things in them that were new to me and, to my surprise, found my own interior life reacting and modifying itself so that the connection between us deepened – things I noticed increased my own depth of knowing and connection.
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The bar has been raised!
The sudden rise of ChatGPT provides an almost visceral sense that if young people don’t develop the skills that robots and AI can never access then they will literally have their lunch eaten for them.
To develop these skills, young people need to be in environments – continually, if not actually continuously - where they feel they are physically and psychologically safe. One of those environments should be the home, a second should be the school or tertiary institute and a third should be the workplace.
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What is unfeigned love?
Unfeigned love is long-suffering, is kind, is not envious, is not boastful, has no agenda, is not easily provoked, is not malicious, does not rejoice in wrongdoing but in truth, bears all things, accepts things as they are, hopes eternally, endures all trials.
Those possessed of unfeigned love look for and find the needs of others and use their resources to enhance them. When they see the life of someone they love being enhanced, they rejoice as if it were their own life being enhanced.
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