“When you learn, teach. When you get, give.”

The title of today’s post is a quote from Oprah Winfrey’s introduction to the reprint of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and is a quote of something Maya Angelou had said to her more than once.

I got to hear Oprah give the commencement address at Agnes Scott college a few years ago, when the first of the young women she’s sponsored through education was graduating.  In that same graduating class, a young woman I sponsored (following her transfer from Sweet Briar in the tumult of 2015’s closure) was also walking the stage. I feel like she and I both live this advice. Oprah clearly has more resources than I do, but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep giving what we have.

There is no post for Tuesday’s prompts, though I did do them on my own. My lifelong best friend was here earlier this week, and I spent the time unabashedly disconnected from my email and social media. In a lovely twist of luck, the prompt asked Questers to get in touch with our “young genius” – the childhood self still full of possibility.  My childhood self had just spent her week playing with her best friend, so she was easy to find.

However, just as my friend had to fly home to her real life, I’ve also got to wake up to mine, and show up and do my work.  What I like about this week’s WORK theme prompts is that they really ask me to dig in and explain what I’m working for in a way that I haven’t examined in quite some time.

The prompt is in 2 parts, so I’ll tackle them separately.

One, how can you view your work in the coming year as a catalyst to help people become more of who they want to be?

The thing that lights me up is teaching other people. Empowering others to make their own success and providing the insight and understanding they need to do that.

When I think about the people I want to work with the most, it’s people who want to learn skills for themselves. I am less satisfied when I’m doing for others without teaching them how to do it, too.

In the coming year I want to move away from tactical nuts and bolts delivery of work, and grow toward communicating and teaching the how and the why to empower my clients for their own long term success.

What is one way you will habitually step out of your familiar zone this year in order to open yourself up to new experiences, new points of view, and new ways to handle challenges?

I am in grad school, and that work is a constant whirl of shifting out of and back into comfort zones. I travel across the country once a month, and I travel all over the world in my readings of mythology.

But to support the goal of teaching others, I need to learn more tactical skills in terms of how to train others. Instructional design, assessment and test-writing skills. I’ve been learning these things on the fly this year, and I need to keep doing so.    If I want to do this via video, I have to learn how to edit or produce videos.  There’s a lot of growth in areas I’ve never tread before. Luckily, my friends at Tracking Wonder are adept at all of that, so perhaps I’ll have brains to pick!

Even though we’re almost halfway through the month, I promise you can still sign up for the Quest. Go here: http://quest2019.com

Also, follow the #WeQuest hashtags on instagram, twitter and facebook if you want to see what other Questers are up to.