What if you are suddenly thrust into the role of a teacher, either home-schooling your children in these days of staying at home in the fight against the coronavirus crisis or filling in for a quarantined colleague? What’s the first thing you need know to lead others as a teacher?

Yourself.

At least that’s the insight of Parker J. Palmer writing in his book The Courage to Teach. Effective teaching like effective leading is rooted in the identity and integrity of the teacher/leader.

“Knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject. Good teaching requires self-knowledge,” Palmer says.

Here are 3 questions that  Harvard professor Thomas DeLong poses in his book Teaching By Heart to get to really know yourself as a teacher:

How do you experience other people?

How do other people experience you?

How do others experience themselves
when they are with you?

Veteran teachers — and leaders -know only too well that their emotional intelligence, their ability to sense the feelings of themselves and others around them -is critical to their ultimate outcome: learning something new or leading others toward a new way of thinking.

And to know others well, you first have to know yourself as philosopher a Lao-Tsu noted: He who knows much about others may be learned but he who knows himself is more intelligent.

For more ideas on enriching the lives of others with empathy, purchase a 300-page book available on Amazon.com filled with 77 examples from business, sports and politics.

It’s titled:   LOVING Like a Leader with Empathy- one of three books in The Leadership Mints Series designed to help leaders refresh their feeling for leading.

And as a bonus, the postscript titled- BUSINESS: A HUMAN EXPERIENCE — shares the impetus for this book on empathy impacting the bottom line. The two other books in The Leadership Mints Series -now available on Amazon.com — include THINKING Like a Leader with Clarity and SPEAKING Like a Leader with Civility.

All three books in The Leadership Mints Series are designed for busy leaders seeking to refresh their feeling for leading in 5-minutes or less — the average reading time of a Leadership Mint.

The 3-books
in The Leadership Mints Series
available on Amazon.com
in print and e-book

Consumed like a breath mint — quick and on-the-go — a Leadership Mint is a short story that energizes leadership behaviors and personalizes leadership principles so they are more easily remembered, more readily acted upon and more fully applied.