My Leadership Legacy

I want to leave a legacy that I cared for and helped students grow and become better people. I want to be remembered as a teacher who empowered and enriched the lives of students and athletes. I want to have played a positive role in the future innovators of our society. I want to be remembered as creating a safe and open environment for all, a place where every student and athlete belongs. 

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How can my Clifton strengths help me achieve this legacy? Using context, I can look at the educators and mentors that have impacted my life in positive ways. I look at my coach growing up. He is a mentor to me and I would not be where I am today without his help. I am a coach and work in education because of the impact and knowledge that he has given me through the years. I am not the only one that he has positively impacted. There are people from the early 2000’s that come and visit him in the wrestling room and at school all the time. They talk to him about being a father figure, mentor and at times a friend. I look up to him and can learn from the way he teaches and molds the minds of his students and athletes. I can see first hand how he impacted me and is currently impacting the students today.

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Using my responsibility strength, I can tell myself that it is my responsibility as teacher to make sure I am doing everything I can to help these students grow. I can have reminders at my desk and in my classroom of the legacy that I want to leave. I am not teaching to make a paycheck and get summers off. I want to teach because I want to enrich the lives of students. I want to create a safe and open learning environment where students are not afraid to learn and be themselves. I can remind myself that that is my responsibility.

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Using the harmony strength, I can help make the environment better for my students and athletes. Dealing with fights, break ups, family issues, etc are all ways that I can use harmony. As I stated previously, as an educator, I want to create a safe place for my students to learn and grow. When working with students there are a lot of emotions, tensions, and arguments that are bound to happen. As an educator I can use my harmony strength to make sure I can catch on to when a situation is about to happen so I can calm it down. 

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To achieve my legacy I will also need to use my consistency strength. I look at this as showing up to work each day with a positive attitude. I need to show up to work everyday and leave any issues and concerns at the door. Being an educator isn’t a job where you can have a bad day or slack off. It is important that each day I am positive and ready to teach. The students deserve to have a consistent teacher who pushes and encourages them daily. If I am having a bad day and it bleeds into work, I could lose the trust of my students. If I am annoyed and I snap at a student, I may never be able to reach them again. So I need to be consistently positive and ready to encourage. 

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My last strength is relator. I want to use my relator strength to establish relationships with my students. I know how easy this is because during the school year and competition season I frequently say, when talking about a kid, that he/she is one of  “my students” or “my wrestlers”. A bond is formed between educators and students that is created because we are together for multiple hours each day. We have highs and lows and work through them together. I celebrate their victories and pick them up in their defeats. Then help them work on their next task or goal.

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Using the relator strength will be the most important strength in creating my legacy. The legacy isn’t about being the most knowledgeable or experienced teacher. It is about the relationships and bonds that are created. The coach that I used as an example before, the athletes don’t visit him because they were state champions , they visit him because they know that he cares about them and truly worked to make them a better person. That is what I want my students and athletes to remember me for. A mentor who truly cares about them and wants them to succeed in life.