Malcolm Gauld
If you ever attended school or played on an athletic team, you probably recall a motivational or inspirational gem that a teacher or coach said to you. However, we rarely stop to think about the probability that that teacher or coach probably got that gem from… another teacher or coach. Here are some gems that I’ve stol-…er… appropriated from others.
1. “Your fastball works a lot better if you mix in a change-up from time-to-time.” – Bill Clough
Bill, former head of school at Gould Academy (ME), was my go-to mentor when I was starting out as a school head in the late 1980s. As soon as he uttered this line, I knew what he meant. To translate: If you’re a hard taskmaster, you can really get their attention when you give an unexpected day off… Or, if you’re known for using a lot of sports analogies in your teaching, throw in a story about an artist or maybe a ballet dancer. Keep ’em guessing.
2. Thirty+- years ago at a conference, I heard Washington “Tony” Jarvis, then head of school at Roxbury Latin School (MA), tell our roomful of school heads, “It is perhaps unfortunate that tolerance has become the supreme virtue of our time.” Referring to tolerance as the least common denominator of virtue, he likened it to the mathematician’s maxim of “necessary but not sufficient.” You will never have a strong culture without it, but tolerance, by itself, will not deliver inspiration… Yup.
3. “Baby a loser, beat on a winner.” – Gary Kent, RIP, legendary Hyde teacher-coach
Forty+ years ago, I found myself coaching a Hyde lacrosse team mired in a losing streak. One day, Gary observed me reaming out my players at practice for their lackluster play. He later sidled up to me and muttered the above line. Sensing my confusion, he explained, “When your team is losing, praise their efforts and tell them you believe in them, assuring them that the next win is just around the corner. When they’re winning, tell them they’ve been snacking on cream puffs and need to improve or else they’re gonna get seriously spanked by the next team on the schedule.” I had been doing the exact opposite. I changed. He proved to be right.
4. “Leadership is a behavior, not a position.” – Pearl Kane, RIP, a cherished mentor
In 1995, I was honored to spend a month at Columbia University on a Klingenstein Fellowship with a dozen other school heads. Beyond the sheer awesomeness of being a 40-year-old “college kid” on the loose in Manhattan for a month, the highlight of the experience was working with Pearl, the longtime executive director of the program. Twenty-five+ years later, I still write this quote at the top of my desk calendar with each passing month. I think it helps my students. It know it helps me.
5. Dom Starsia, former Brown and UVA lacrosse coach and nationally respected ambassador for the “Creator’s Game,” recently tweeted this observation about great teams he has coached: “All my best teams had exceptional internal leadership…at least one person willing to stand up in front of their peers…never at its best served top down…it is transcendent when born of spontaneous combustion and needs to bubble up from within.”… So true!
6. For years I carried (and distributed) copies of this statement in my wallet: Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
– Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (1978)
7. “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
This one goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. I learned of the work/luck concept during my mid-80s stint at a Boston life insurance company. At Hyde, I tweaked it into a construct we call the Effort Savings Bank: Any effort I extend toward my best or toward helping others toward their best goes into an imaginary savings bank where it accrues interest and will be returned to me in the future, perhaps even when I least expect it… So, keep making deposits and behold the wonder of compound interest!
8. “You can’t soar with the eagles if you’re hanging out with the turkeys.” – Gary Kent
The very fact that Gary Kent shows up twice in this post speaks to his magic as a master teacher. It sounds simple, but when you’re negotiating the halls of a typical school, the “birds” can all look the same. Pay close attention, and after a while, you’ll notice that some fly and some don’t. Keep your eyes on the flyers. Those are the eagles. Go with them.
8B. Q: “So, you label some kids as ‘turkeys’ and don’t care about them in your school?”
A: Not exactly. They’re all good kids. The problem is that certain combinations add up to bad chemistry. So, sometimes we have try our hands at being chemists.
9. “Don’t Lie; Don’t Quit” – Former Hyde teacher, coach, and head of school Don MacMillan was the first person I heard say this. The message is so disarmingly simple that it’s easy to miss the point. Every person who excels in life tends to hold up both sides of the equation. Every person who continually fails in life tends to fall down on one or both. (And like the Domino Theory, one often leads to the other.) So, don’t do either and good things will likely happen.
10. “You’re more likely to act your way into feeling than feel your way into acting.”
This is another one that I stole from my Boston life insurance days. We’ve all heard the phrase “Fake it ’til you make it make it.” Sometimes we think that if we don’t feel like doing something, we shouldn’t have to. At other times, we might wait around for motivation to magically enter our lives. Unfortunately, life isn’t like that; there’s lots of things we might not want to do. A good way to get started when we are resistant is to just take the first step. That can lead to the second, and before we know it, we begin to feel good… about the progress we are making. This can lead to more action and, ultimately, more feeling good.
All for now. Please do not hide your wallet in your front pocket. Just pass those gems along before I sharpen my pick-pocket skills on you.
Onward, Malcolm
