π I write the Feel Change Build newsletter about trusting your emotions, transforming your thought patterns, and building lives that break the mold through the science of expanding who you already are.
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π Teaching Is the Greatest Act of Optimism
Published 14 days agoΒ β’Β 7 min read
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I'm thinking of all the teachers out there as we go back to school and how much I appreciate their hard work. I'm so grateful that they chose their profession and think we could all benefit from being more like them.
TEACHING IS THE GREATEST ACT OF OPTIMISM
"Teaching is the greatest act of optimism." - Colleen Wilcox
Back to school season has a particular energy to it that I don't think ever fully leaves us even after our own school days are long behind us. Something about the new year feels like a fresh start. New notebooks. Sharper pencils. The particular hopefulness of beginning.
This year that quote from Colleen Wilcox, Santa Clara County's superintendent of schools, got me thinking about what it means to teach.
Teaching is a bet on the future. Every time we share what we know with another person we are saying, implicitly and profoundly: what I've learned matters, you are worth sharing it with, and something good is going to come from this exchange that I may never fully see.
And here's what I've been thinking about as the back-to-school displays go up: most of us don't think of ourselves as teachers. We reserve that word for people with credentials and classrooms and lesson plans. But every one of us has lived something, learned something, figured something out the hard way that someone else is still in the middle of. Every one of us has something worth sharing.
This week I want to make the case that teaching what we know is not just generous. It's one of the most powerful things we can do for our own flourishing, for the people around us, and for a world that is desperately short on people willing to pass wisdom forward.
We teach and we become more of what we're teaching. This is probably why I enjoy sharing so much of what I learn with you.
But the mental health benefits go further than memory and comprehension. Teaching activates something in us that pure achievement doesn't touch. When we help someone understand something they were struggling with, something lights up in the brain's reward system that isn't activated by accomplishing things for ourselves alone. It is the particular satisfaction of mattering to someone else's growth. Of being genuinely useful in a way that goes beyond completing a task.
For those of us who carry the Over-Achiever or People Pleaser patterns, this is worth understanding. So much of what we produce is aimed at proving our worth or managing other people's comfort. Teaching is different. Teaching is giving something real from a place of genuine abundance and sharing what we actually have because we believe the other person is worth having it.
Teaching also forces us into the present moment in a way that few other activities require. When someone is looking at us waiting to understand something, there is no room for rumination or future-tripping. There is only this person, this question, this moment of contact. Teaching is one of the most reliable pathways to genuine presence that exists. Which is, as we explored in our savoring newsletter, one of the primary sources of human flourishing.
Teaching also does something specific for anxiety. When we share what we know with someone who is where we used to be, we get the rare experience of seeing our own path from the outside. We see that we have actually traveled somewhere. That the struggle we went through produced something real and transferable. That we are not, as anxiety often insists, still at the beginning of everything.
We have been somewhere. We know something. And that knowledge is worth passing on.
Change
Why Teaching Others Matters
We tend to underestimate what we know. This is not false modesty. It's a genuine cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge: once we understand something well, we lose the ability to remember what it felt like not to understand it. Our knowledge becomes invisible to us. We stop seeing it as knowledge and start seeing it as obvious, as basic, as not worth sharing because surely everyone already knows this.
They don't.
The thing that feels obvious to us because we lived through it and figured it out and integrated it into how we move through the world is not obvious to the person who hasn't done that yet. The lesson we learned from the hard experience, the pattern we finally identified after years of bumping into it, the perspective that changes things and these are not small things. They are exactly what someone younger, someone earlier in their journey, someone in the middle of what we've already been through, is desperately looking for.
Teaching isn't something we do when we've arrived. It's something we do from wherever we are, with whatever we've learned so far. You don't need a degree. You don't need a platform. You don't need to have all the answers. You need to have lived something and be willing to share what it taught you.
Teaching from fear sounds like: who am I to share this, what if I get it wrong, what if they judge me, what if I'm not qualified enough.
Teaching from love sounds like: I know something that would help this person and I'm going to share it because they're worth it and the knowledge is worth passing forward.
One of those orientations produces generous, imperfect, genuine transmission of real wisdom. The other produces silence. And the world has enough silence.
Think about the people who changed the trajectory of your life. The teacher who saw something in you before you saw it yourself. The mentor who said the exact right thing at the exact right moment. The older friend who told you the truth when everyone else was being polite. The person who shared their experience without being asked and gave you the map you didn't know you needed.
Someone is waiting for us to be that person for them. Right now. In the communities and relationships we already have.
Build
Small Ways to Start Teaching
We don't have to build a course or start a podcast or write a book (though none of those are bad ideas). We can start where we are, with the people already around us, in ways so small they barely register as teaching at all.
At work or in our organizations
Offer to walk a newer colleague through something you've figured out. Not in a formal training way. In a "let me show you what I wish someone had shown me" way. Share the workaround you discovered, the lesson from the project that went sideways, the thing nobody tells you when you start that would have saved you months of frustration. This is knowledge transfer in its most human form and it costs nothing but a conversation.
If you're in a position of leadership, consider making your own learning visible. Talk about what you're figuring out, not just what you've figured out. Model that growth is ongoing and that not knowing something yet is not the same as being unqualified. That permission alone changes what the people around us believe is possible for them.
In our families and communities
Teach the children in your life something you know how to do. Not as a lesson. As an invitation to share time. Cook something together. Fix something together. Explain how something works because they asked and you actually know. These moments of intergenerational transmission are exactly what the Kauai study was pointing at, the one reliable adult who shows up consistently and communicates through their presence that this young person matters and is capable.
We don't have to be extraordinary to be that person. We just have to be there and willing to share what we know.
Think also about the women around us who are where we used to be. The friend going through the divorce we went through three years ago. The colleague navigating the career pivot we made. The younger woman in our community asking the questions we used to ask. A conversation. A "I went through something similar and here's what I found" text. An offer to share not the answer but our experience of looking for it.
In our own communities of learning
The Feel Change Build community exists because sharing what we're figuring out, together, is one of the most powerful forms of teaching and learning there is. Not the expert speaking down to the students. All of us, at different points on the same journey, sharing what we've seen from where we're standing.
If you have something you've learned about your protective pattern, about what helped, about what the 90-second practice actually feels like after you've done it a hundred times, about what changed when you started building from love instead of fear, please share it. In a reply to this newsletter. In your community. In a conversation with one person who needs to hear it.
Your experience is not just yours. It's a map someone else is looking for.
Teaching is a bet that the future is worth investing in. That the people around us are worth our knowledge, our time, our honest account of what we've learned. That something good will come from this exchange even if we don't get to see it.
It is, as Colleen Wilcox said, the greatest act of optimism.
And we are, all of us, more qualified to teach than we think. Not because we have all the answers. But because we've lived something real, learned something true, and have the capacity to pass it forward to someone who needs it right now.
That's enough. That has always been enough.
What do you know that someone else needs to hear?
Hit reply and tell me one thing you've learned about yourself, about your pattern, or about what it looks like to change that you've never shared with anyone. Sometimes naming it is how we realize it's worth teaching.
π I write the Feel Change Build newsletter about trusting your emotions, transforming your thought patterns, and building lives that break the mold through the science of expanding who you already are.
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