🌿 The question that might land harder than expected

Hello Reader!

I have been thinking about asking folks a question that may land harder than expected: Of everything you have learned to do over the years, what do you actually still do well, without having to think about it?

I wonder if folks will name the workshops they attended, the credentials they earned, the initiatives they once championed, and the binders of strategies still sitting on a shelf somewhere. I think it may take a gentle pause before we realize that none of those things quite answer what was asked.

The obvious seems simple, but it rarely is. There is a real difference between the professional skill we embody and the professional development we collect, and schools often measure the second while quietly assuming it produces the first. That connection is far from automatic, and most of us have felt the gap at some point. Sitting in a session that was genuinely useful and then returning to a classroom or a coaching cycle where nothing about our daily practice actually shifted.

Leidy Klotz, whose research at the University of Virginia became the book Subtract, found that when people set out to improve something, they overwhelmingly reach for additions and routinely overlook the option of taking something away. Professional learning is hardly immune to that pull, because we add another workshop, another framework or acronym, and another tab to the binder, and yet capability rarely grows through accumulation. It grows when we choose a small number of things, practice them deliberately, and let the rest go long enough for those few things to take root.

If we sit with the question honestly, the answers that come back will be short and remarkably specific:

• I ask good clarifying questions when a student is stuck,
• I can read a room during a hard conversation, or
• I give feedback that tells a teacher exactly what to try next.

Those answers are worth more than any list of trainings, because they describe what has actually become part of how we work, and they almost always point to a skill someone built on purpose, through repetition, over time.

From here, this week's invitation is to ask yourself that same question, and to resist the pull toward credentials long enough to find the real answer underneath them.

A few questions to sit with:

1. What is one thing you do well now that you had to build deliberately, rather than something you simply arrived knowing?
2. How did that skill actually get built, and how long did it take before it started to feel natural?
3. What does that tell you about how your next skill should be built, and what you might need to set aside to make room for it?

Paring down what we carry is often the first step toward clarity, focus, and real growth, and we hope this question helps you see your own practice a little more clearly this week.

We would love to hear your honest answer to the question this week.

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Warmly,

Tammy

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