How many times in your life have you said to yourself I don’t belong, or how did I get to be here with these people?  Is there a feeling that you haven’t worked hard enough or deserve to be where you are?  Are you afraid to take a next step in your life because you don’t feel like you could stand toe to toe with others, intellectually, academically, socially or otherwise?  And are there people in your life who have convinced you not to have higher expectations for yourself?

The prescribed road to success in our country right now seems to be this, in this particular order; preschool to prepare for school, then you graduate high school while participating in as many extracurricular opportunities as possible, taking the ACT/SAT enough times to score high enough to get into just the right college to major in just the right degree program to get the perfect high paying job, then have the perfect little family and live in suburbia with the SUV and minivan.  It’s conveniently formulaic and easy to people to interpret as success, and yet so limiting.

My road was a little rockier.  I think I was a pretty smart kid and I did pretty well in school.  I didn’t have to work very hard to get good grades in school, until high school and then came geometry and computer science.  Hence the reason I didn’t major in anything remotely needing any math!  It was assumed that I would go to the state university in town, and as nobody ever sat down with me to see what I wanted to major in, I just picked music education because band was the class I really liked.  After three years of struggling and several major changes, I dropped out.  I remember my mother saying to me at my husband’s graduation a year later, “this could have been you but you failed”.  It took eight years, several job changes, and community college credits before I took the plunge again, this time at a regional university and I stuck with music education.  According to the “plan”, I was already ten years behind, and by the time I graduated at age 30, married and with three children, explaining my non-traditional time line proved difficult and it took me two years to get my first teaching job.  As you may have read before, I have started two separate Master’s degrees but fall short because I decide it’s not really where my passion is.  And yet, I believe that all this happened because it was meant to happen.

Fast forward to now.  I tend to give others all the credit for where I am and the opportunities I have, and yes, they have surely contributed to any success I’ve achieved.  But while I used to think it was ALL their doing that I had these opportunities, I’m starting to realize that they saw something in me that caused them to believe I would be an asset doing something else.  Despite my late start, my uncertainty and my no-name college degree, there is apparently something about me and not the “prescribed” success story that has put me where I am right now.  Please understand that I don’t think that I’ve “arrived” at all, but what I have done in the past has allowed me the opportunity to hang out with, learn from and contribute to conversations with people who are much more educated than I, who followed the prescribed route.   I’ve stopped questioning “why am I here”, but am now looking to where I can go next as my expectations for myself have been raised.  That in combination with help and encouragement from others can send me places I haven’t dreamed of yet.

You are where you are at this moment because you were meant to be.  You are there to affect change, to touch other people, to make yourself better, to prepare you for what’s to come.  It’s also however your choice to stay there and be content, or raise your expectations to see where or how else you can make a difference.  I think I’m learning that I went through what I went through because I needed to see and experience how encouragement helped me to overcome the prescribed method of success to find my own pathway.  Now it’s my turn to do that for others, especially my students from elementary to college but also friends and family.  Everyone has the potential to do great things for themselves and others and you are where you are and experiencing the things you are for that very reason.

For years, my pastor tried to tell me this and I fought him like crazy because where I was and what I was doing did fit my idea of that prescribed success we talked about.  But now in hindsight (I’m a late bloomer : ), I see the wisdom in his words.  That mindset allows me the freedom to just continue to follow the path that I’m on and wait for the next great adventure instead of fearing the unknown and my imagined lack of experience.  Sometimes the path is still rocky and I may stumble a few times, but my experience has told me it won’t last for long and where God closes a door, he opens a window. My hope for you and my students is that I can encourage you to accept that same philosophy and use it to see where you can go from here and what a real difference you can make in your life and the lives of others.