A Modest Attempt to Appreciate My Past Teachers
We got an email the week of this post from our daughter’s elementary school saying that it was teachers appreciation week. While making plans for my daughter’s teacher, I reflected on those whose influence I have felt in my career thus far. In this post, I want to highlight individuals who have served me in a teacher role and have influenced my career decisions.
I do this knowing that I will not quite do them justice, leave out deserving people, and fall short in communicating what it really has meant to me to have such great people to help me along the way. But I wanted to pay some kind of tribute anyway. I believe that lessons are to be learned throughout one’s life many times since they are applied in different situations, so I’m still learning about these same lessons often.
I try to keep this to a list of strictly professional influences. Obviously, people like my parents played a big role in my development, but this list is for a different purpose. I highlighted people from high school all the way through to my first job after grad school at Advocate Health Care. So here it goes. Here are some of my most influential teachers in chronological order of when they taught me (descriptions to follow below the table).
John Duellman- Potomac Falls High School Football Offensive and Defensive Line Coach
The summer of my sophomore year of high school, I was excited for football to start. Despite my enthusiasm, the days started to drag while wearing football pads in 90+ degree heat and 70% humidity. Finally, it came time to scrimmage another team. It was a great change of pace for me. I was excited for everything during that scrimmage. Every play, whether I was watching from the sidelines or playing on the field, there was something to celebrate. It was probably a little over the top, given that it counted for nothing. I didn’t notice, but apparently, the rest of the team was less excited than me during the scrimmage.
At the next practice after the scrimmage, Coach Duellman (our line coach) started off talking to our position group about our energy level. He said that he was disappointed in the group because everything in football starts on the offensive and defensive lines and nobody in our group even looked like they wanted to be there. Then he said something that always stuck with me: “There’s only one guy here that looks like he loves to play football right now and that’s Brandon King”. There I was, a 5-foot 7-inch, 157-pound defensive end with a lot of large high school students looking at me.
It hadn’t occurred to me before then that enthusiasm was important for anything but my own enjoyment. But Coach Duellman apparently noticed. While I can’t tell you if there was any meaningful performance difference in the team, the lack of that level of enthusiasm has become an indicator of when I need variety in my work or if I need to do a self-check. I learned something important about what makes me “tick” thanks to Coach Duellman.
James Whitehead- Potomac Falls High School A.P. U.S. History
I was in James Whitehead’s first section of A.P. U.S. history class. He was calm and had a drive to challenge us intellectually. He pushed us to think more deeply about the material and tried to help us understand how texts are written with a context that isn’t always explicitly mentioned. Let me tell you that I did not appreciate his efforts early on in the year. I was not used to the amount of reading he assigned, and the writing assignments were really challenging for me. Sometimes I aired my frustration openly during class. I even said some words that I would later regret.
Mr. Whitehead continued to patiently encourage me, no matter how frustrated and upset I felt that I couldn’t figure out how to succeed in his class. He changed his teaching approach without lowering expectations, and I improved. The interpretation of information, the writing, it all started to come with greater ease. Mr. Whitehead could have been snarky and sarcastic with his praise of my work at the end of the course, but he wasn’t. He could have talked about my bad attitude in the early part of the year, but he did not. He had only compliments about my hard work and integrity to share. He stuck with me throughout the course and as a result, I kept trying.
After his class I knew exactly how my hard work could improve any perceived academic weaknesses. I knew it in other contexts like sports or music, but now I could see the academic application of it very clearly and had a blueprint for doing so. Before that class, I just accepted those weaknesses as inevitable. About 7 years later, I started graduate school and there were some stats courses that I struggled with early on. But since I had already done this before, I knew I could succeed with sustained and consistent effort thanks to Mr. Whitehead.
Rob Bubb, PhD- Brigham Young University Graduate Instructor for Organizational Psychology
As I continued on to my undergrad studies, I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to major in. I bounced around to different classes and emphases and finally landed on majoring in psychology and taking classes to go to physical therapy school. My first semester taking physical therapy pre-requisites, I also took an elective for my psychology major called Organizational Psychology. I thought that if I wanted to open my own PT practice one day it might be helpful. Helpful was an understatement, but not the way I expected.
Rob’s class was structured differently than most classes allowing for several benefits. Students chose many assignments they completed. He could give true feedback on assignments without killing our chance of making good grades. I gained an appreciation for the ability of research to inform work. And it allowed him built in time to mentor us as students. Which meant that I was able learn about the field of Industrial-Organizational (I/O) psychology and ask questions that would eventually lead me to change my career path completely.
Obviously, changing my career path was a huge factor for me. I also learned a lot about choices and opportunity. With clients, contractors, or even with my kids I try to offer choices and provide those choices to everyone that I can, which can be a bit nerve wracking sometimes. I’m still not perfect at it, but I know that I shouldn’t be afraid of allowing choice to others in my consulting work thanks to Rob Bubb.
Terry Beehr, PhD; Kim O’Brien, PhD; Neil Christiansen, PhD- Central Michigan University I/O Psych Professors
I picked these three professors at Central Michigan University’s I/O psychology program because I appreciated and took similar things from them, though in varying degrees and in different ways. I admired all three of them for their intelligence and competence. But I especially appreciated how well these three gave feedback. They were tough and honest. It prepared me for the workplace in ways I never would have imagined. As I began my career, it was nothing for me to hear from others that I needed to improve a report or presentation I was doing. And I wasn’t just prepared to hear the tough feedback at work; I also became effective at using it. It has been one of the most useful professional skills I have to date.
These three were also great mentors. They have provided me with some of the best professional guidance I have been given. Neil once said that your first work team is going to establish the professional habits you have for much of your career so make sure it’s a great one. That shaped many of my early career decisions. Kim always made an emphasis to employ the best practices of our field in her own lab, which got me into a habit of self-reflecting on how research could inform my work processes. Terry was a big believer in studying what you are interested in. He taught us that when you do what you love and work at it, the opportunities will come.
When I finished my PhD at CMU, their advice and mentorship would come to shape a lot of what I have become as a professional and what I hope to provide to others. I learned that honest feedback is the quickest path to improvement and that I should look for ways to professionally develop others thanks to Terry, Kim, and Neil.
Christopher Litcher, PhD- Advocate Health Care Manager of Organizational Development Systems and Metrics
Remember that advice I got to make sure my first work team was a good one to develop good habits? Chris was a big part of that for me as my first manager out of grad school. Chris gave me opportunities to show my skills and abilities. He made sure that I was progressing as a professional and he was an example of handling the frustrations of work better than anyone else I know. He managed to balance imposing team structure with job autonomy seamlessly and I still strive to find that balance in my own work. Project management was never an issue because of it.
There is so much about my day to day understanding of the process of consulting work that I take from my time as Chris’ subordinate. When I work with clients and with others, I often think of how Chris gave me the chance to shine and look for opportunities to do that with others. When I organize my projects, I do it very similarly to what I learned there, looking at the project from start to finish as much as I can. I learned that my skills and abilities, no matter how great, can’t be shown without a work structure to support it thanks to Chris.
Last Thoughts
Writing this gave me time to reflect on important lessons and people in my life along the way. I hope that you can also find ways to appreciate those who have helped you in your career and/or life. I still have a long way to go in applying these lessons well, but I am grateful that I at least have them to guide me. There are so many people in an exercise like this that I would have loved to have highlighted. This post was long enough though so I made sure to list some honorable mentions below.
Thanks for reading!
-Brandon
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