Goethe & Teaching, A Should-be Teachers Maxim

As many of you know I manage a small but international business that makes products for the construction industry, needless to say I have to manage many people; including myself. Although I think I’m a better leader than a manager, I still love to watch people grow and expand; hence this blog and my spiritual growth & teaching adventure. Sitting here today I was thinking about my favorite Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quote:

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being”

I’m a firm believer in this but there is one caveat that most don’t understand when they manage & teach people, treating people as if they were what they ought to be is completely up to the other person and should never been viewed through the lens of the manager/teacher’s ego. Often we get caught up in how people should perform and spend less time looking and feeling what a person’s actual potential is. Not everyone is to be treated the same for we all have different capabilities and paths. The key to feel what a person should be and treat them that way. The recipient may not reach this point for a long time or not at all in this lifetime but as long as it’s a true capacity of that person and not what you want them to be, eventually they will rise to this level.

I’ve seen it again and again, as long as I check my ego, seeing the potential in a person and treating them this way will provide a door for them to walk through.

Not familiar with Goethe?

From Wikipedia:

Goethe’s works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, humanism, science and painting. Goethe’s magnum opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part dramatic poem Faust.[1] Goethe’s other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther and the semi-autobiographical novel Elective Affinities.

Goethe was one of the key figures of German literature and the movement of Weimar Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; this movement coincides with Enlightenment, Sensibility (”Empfindsamkeit”), Sturm und Drang, and Romanticism. The author of Faust and Theory of Colours, he influenced Darwin[2] with his focus on plant morphology.[3] Goethe’s influence spread across Europe, and for the next century his works were a primary source of inspiration in music, drama, poetry and philosophy.

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