Stress & the YES, part 3: Seeing Teaching, Coaching & Leading in a New Light
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This is part 3 of a 4-part series. It will only make sense if you have already read part 1 and part 2.
Masterful teachers teach for the Smile, not the skill.
Good teachers fill us up with enormously useful knowledge and skills. Great teachers use skills to get access to the stress that makes us to grow.
Good teachers work primarily within our PDP. Great teachers work primarily at the edges of it.
I have studied many truly remarkable teachers in diverse areas from singing to mathematics; from acting to horse training – and there is only one thing that I have seen that consistently sets them apart from really good teachers: it’s their use of stress.
The primary difference between good teachers and great teachers is their willingness to openly face the stress of their students and hold them in it until they can get the energy to flow. And this is always done within a framework (the “core P’s”) that provides a safe and benevolent place for growth to occur.
What great teachers do within the growth framework is to create or capitalize on natural stresses, then boost the student to a personal YES.
And how do they do that? They do it through a, typically innate, 4-step process that I call The Stress & the YES (Stay With?). This is a process that most everyone who helps others has used at some point or another, but without conscious awareness of it. When it is brought into conscious awareness, you can hone this skill and become masterful at it.
Here’s the process (always within the framework for growth):
- Notice the stress
- Trigger the core P’s (the framework for growth)
- Stay With and hold the stress
- See the Smile
The best teachers use a 5-step advanced version of this for maximum growth:
- Increase the drive
- Seek the stress
- Trigger the core P’s
- Push and stay with
- See the smile
In the next post, we'll take an in-depth look at this process and how it works.
