“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
C. S. Lewis
It is easy to tell others what THEY should do. As leaders, mentors, advisors, parents, and teachers, we all want to impart the knowledge we have received through our life experiences, which have sometimes been painful. But if we tell someone what to do, we are robbing them of the experience of learning, and more importantly, we assume that we have a complete understanding of the challenge or opportunity, and we don’t. We are not that person; we don’t have their unique and specific set of life experiences and views on the world. We never will.
This past week, I watched my fifteen-year-old daughter wrestle with a big decision. It was hard for me not to “tell her what I would do” but instead to provide her with questions to consider and frameworks to help her clarify her thinking. I am so proud of her ability to pause and think through the process and the intentional thought she put into her decision.
Did she make the decision I would have made? It doesn’t matter; she made the right decision for her, and the method of making that decision is where she gained wisdom. For the record, I believe she made the right decision, but more importantly, she learned a valuable lesson in how to decide.
We are all educators, and finding a way to ‘irrigate the desert,’ means we have to make sure we focus on who we are trying to serve; it isn’t ourselves…
