Notes From a Teacher’s Workbench
October 5, 2019 | Kelly G. Wilson
All will not go well. You should know that to speak out loud is to be misunderstood. You should know that you will go out and pour your whole heart into the world and someone will watch and then sit back and say: “Well, that’s not much!”
Over the years, I have provided hundreds of workshops and I suppose thousands of lectures. I get feedback in a variety of forms. Sometimes I get formal feedback from workshops and teaching. I also get informal feedback in the form of emails, tweets, DMs, and other social media exchanges. I get a third source of feedback, which is direct, but delayed: do I continue to be invited to teach and consult? On this trip, I will return to Italy, Denmark, and Spain, which have become regular stops.
But do not imagine that my life is all affirmation and sweetness. Reading formal feedback from workshops and college courses is painful. Not everyone is happy with my work. I recognize that I have a highly idiosyncratic teaching style, both in terms of my teaching process and in terms of the content I believe to be relevant. As I travel, I have persistent doubts about the relevance of what I have to say. Though, if I get feedback from 100 people at a lecture, 95 will be positive. But those five will complain bitterly.
I have been excoriated for joking that I do not read feedback. Of course, I do read it, but I am not sure that I profit from the reading it. It is common to have several participants complain in the harshest terms that my workshop had nothing to do with the proposed topic, that I tell too many stories, and on. And in the same workshop, the exact same workshop, I will get people saying that the workshop or college course was life changing.
So what should I do with that feedback? I have no clue. But I do know people around the world who have married, divorced, retired, come out of retirement, changed careers, begun painting, had children, and very often, learned to sit together with clients (and with themselves) in a new, more authentic, and more effective way.
Others, who have listened to lectures and read my theoretical and meta-theoretical writings rely on the orienting value of my understanding of behavioral science. I remain odd. At the beginning of my big section on philosophy of science and meta-theory in my grad learning class, I begin with a short reading from the feminist sociologist Jessie Bernard and a sonnet by Shakespeare. These all seem terribly relevant to me.
So, what to do with the complaints? I will remain faithful to my own process, whether teaching, doing clinical work, or just living my life. I will engage that professionally until the world stops asking for me, and then I will continue to do so in my nonprofessional life. I will not adopt some other conventional method. I will not embrace some pose to please a critic. And I will continue to teach students and clinicians to do the same. I will teach them that they can be trusted. Yes, really! That they too have a song in their hearts that needs to be sung. They need it to be sung and the world needs it too.
All will not go well. You should know that to speak out loud is to be misunderstood. You should know that you will go out and pour your whole heart into the world and someone will watch and then sit back and say: “Well, that’s not much!”
On those days, and many others, you will weep great gouts of tears. Welcome. Welcome to my world. Thank you for joining me. The road is, at once, hard, worth it, and better traveled in good company. I am happy if I can count you among them.
This morning, I will join a group of students and friends in Milan. We will talk about new directions in psychotherapy research and about particular clinical cases. And I will bring my whole self. I will bring all my teachers taught me. And, I will release my whole heart into that room, come what will!
Many blessings from the road,
Milan, Italy,
October, 2019
Kelly G Wilson
Photo Credits: Estelle Mae and Mauro Leoni