Last night I was reminded of probably my greatest life error which was to treat my professional life with too much familiarity and not enough professionalism. This error was due to ignorance rather than choice--I simply didn't understand the professional landscape with accuracy. I expected all colleagues to be there for one another and didn't recognize the level of competition, ambition, dishonesty, and disinterest that comes with professional environments.
It's impossible for the professional environment to be a family-like environment simply due to the numbers, goals, and complexity of professional environments. If I had to do it again, I would hone my professional skills more and spend less time treating the professional environment like a family.
That said, there were collegial relationships that were deep, warm, and positively life changing. Within a professional environment that can happen, but it's almost impossible for it to happen within the entire professional sphere.
If I were to do it again, I would keep the positive professional goals as the focus with regard to working relationships. I would foster relationships that were based on those good goals which in my case included optimal student learning and student experiences at school. Those are worthy professional goals that form a positive foundation for good working relationships.
Instead, at times, when trying to figure out what was happening amongst the professionals in the complex teaching/learning environment, I deviated from those goals in my attempts to understand other dynamics at play at school--dynamics such as questionable decisions, people's personalities, and behaviors at play in the environment.
I want to apply that lesson learned to my personal life today as I simply listen with interest, but not opinion, about the many diverse choices that people make in life. I want to keep the goal of good, honest, caring living at the center of my focus for my life and my interactions with others.
It's challenging to accept one's errors in life, but I suspect that there are few amongst us who don't have errors to accept as that's part of our imperfection and natural to the lives we live. Onward.
