Early indications
Kristin, Jennifer, and the Librarian
These articles aren’t a memoir (there’s a previous article titled “not a memoir” and I encourage you to believe everything you read here.) But they do take place in my timeline. This one tells you a bit extra about me for context, as a backdrop for the people I’ll describe. Also, because I haven’t been clear about this before, while I aspire to be Competent, and I’m closer than I once was, that’s an easy bar because I didn’t start out with any of these qualities. At all. Which plays in to my thesis for today.
I don’t think this “package” of Competence is an inborn set of qualities. I think it can be learned, because any part of it I’ve got now has been learned. Some at a young age. Some painstakingly taught to me or inspired in me or otherwise deliberately cultivated by parents, teachers, friends. Other aspects I’ve studied hard to achieve. I think these qualities do occur more naturally in some people than others, like any skills. Today I’ll describe two folks for whom that seemed to be the case, and a third who succeeded in her life’s work maybe more than she ever realized, by cultivating these qualities in others.
In our last episode I was up in Northern Wisconsin being very well babysat. When I was around four, my Dad got himself transferred to a college in a bigger city where they needed needed a math professor. So we packed up the truck (kidding, it was a Chevy Nova, the truck came later) and moved to Beverly (Appleton Wisconsin.)
Coming from a family of educated conservatives, my Dad took seriously his responsibility for my education. The reason I recall for the move, away from their dear friends and an environment that seemed to suit my parents, was to get me to the best school district in the state. I’m sure they had many reasons, but one thing my parents always did was to make sure I felt I was important to them. So that was the reason they gave me. (That sort of parenting, by the way, contributed to some of these skills.)
Appleton is a paradoxical place. Appropriate for the birthplace of Houdini, the first house to have electricity, home of the John Birch Society, and a place with a bust of Joe McCarthy in the courthouse (I think it’s in a broom closet now, but it was out and proud when I was a child). Growing up there was…well I can’t really compare it to anything else because that’s where I grew up, but it was a little weird.
My premise today: I suggest that even if you start out missing most of the characteristics of Competence, you can learn them. To give contrast to the folks this article is about, I’ll describe myself as a young child.
I was an anxious, painfully-shy, geeky little person, self-centered, awkward, with a quick temper, who quite literally (pun intended) kept her nose in a book at every possible opportunity. I might have been smart and good at some school-related things, but if I was scouting for Competence and looked at young me, I’d have walked right on by.
My Mom was home for my early childhood years raising me. Other than school, I stayed in a hermitage where my mother adored me, my Dad expected big things from me, and I loved my books and television. I had no social skills. In those years, my excruciating shyness was taken for standoffishness, made worse by being good at school. So I wasn’t much liked and didn’t accomplish anything of note (no sports, no particular goals, lazy about music lessons, no discipline). Super not-Competent.
Since bullying was a pretty normal and school-sanctioned activity in that day and age, I was picked on. I remember being targeted as a good source of amusement for my classmates.
For all that, I was in no way the lowest in the schoolyard pecking order through elementary school. Some kids in my class had awkwardness like my own portfolio, but also had poverty, disabilities, or other differences. This was squarely in the time when it was totally fine to use words we only have letters for now (“the R word” the “N word” etc.) You may hate the term “privileged” but my misery was privileged compared with a few of the kids I pitied then who were outright abused. But I was still low enough in the hierarchy, and socially isolated enough to be an easy target.
I had stomach aches many school days out of anxiety, and had coping mechanisms that surely made my situation worse. Fortunately, childhood is a temporary disorder and those bullies mostly grew up to be human; and I gained skills and empathy from the experience more than lasting damage.
So with that backdrop: an awkward child with no particular indicia of becoming Competent someday, I’d like to tell you about a couple of people I knew at the time who did have earmarks early, and another who cultivated some Competence skills in others.
In that weird awkward stage of my life, I had two amazing neighbors. Sisters. Kristin was a year older, and Jenny a year younger than I was. Occasional other neighborhood kids entered the picture, but those two were a constant. I cannot imagine life without them. We lived a good 1970’s/1980’s childhood. We played on the giant wooden pirate ship at Summit Park. We rode bikes. Walked down the street to Taco Bell, got good pizza and generic soda from Orv’s, rented every horror movie (on Beta) at the video store next to Shopko (no one cared about movie ratings when VCRs first came out, kids could rent ANYTHING (seriously, anything)).
My neighbor friend Kristin was the sort of Competent you would go to for babysitting, team captain, odd jobs, any sort of responsibilities a child might do. You just knew that she was being forthright with you, always. She was athletic, smart, had a good sense of humor, and followed her Mom’s example as someone who might get tetchy with you if you were being ridiculous, but who always saw the good in people and would find a positive spin. She would rescue you even if you got yourself into the mess. Everyone liked Kristin, for good reasons.
In school, Kristin was a source of safety. Like an older sister who didn’t tolerate people being mean to you. She told me what to expect and how school operated. She walked to school with me those first years (ten miles uphill both ways in a blizzard). In Junior High, Kristin was a lifeline my first year. She certainly didn’t need an unpopular younger neighbor sitting with her at lunch, but she felt a sense of responsibility (I assume) and did what she could to reach out. I think that’s an element of Competence, of seeing a whole picture of something, spotting a bit of “that’s not right” and making it her business to right it as much as possible.
Her younger sister, then-”Jenny” now-Jennifer, had early Competence hallmarks as well. She was younger than I was, but I sensed her awesomeness even then. We were close as kids, but after high school I rarely saw her, which is a darned shame. But totally understandable given the life she’s lived since. She’s had a lot going on, and I moved to another state. Even as a very young child she was quick, sharp, insightful, and determined. SOOOOO determined. Jennifer would get a “look” when she’d decided something would happen and might meet resistance. It was (and surely still is) best to get out of her way when that look appeared. She was the youngest kid in the neighborhood for most of our childhood, but I don’t recall anyone ever suggesting she wasn’t up to joining whatever we were doing. It wasn’t possible at the time, but I think Jennifer would have been a star HS quarterback in an alternate reality.
Skipping ahead to “how right I was about her Competence,” out of college Jennifer became a mental health case worker for folks in jail in Milwaukee. She did that long enough to show she had what it took, and made a change when family demands necessitated a change.
Pausing for a moment, think about the work done by folks like Jennifer. Mental health and other case managers, social workers, and the myriad “helping” professions. Those appear to be an enormous reservoir of competence in our culture. People who are paid to solve problems and make society work for those who can’t manage it alone.
What frustrating jobs we make those. Not enough funds, respect, or support to make their jobs as effective as they ought to be, but they do hero work in spite of us. What could we have if we listened to them to understand what was needed, provided it, and gave them more freedom to do that work? Folks like Jennifer could be handed any amount of budget, told to just “make things better,” and if you came back two years later a big circle all around them would indeed be much better. These are high-ROI people we’re talking about. But that’s so rarely our process.
So If you had been building a school for Competence (like an X-Men kind of a thing) and wandered through my childhood neighborhood, you would have scooped up Kristin and Jenny without a second thought. In a better world, they would be running a lot of that world now.
But I don’t think that’s the end of the line for those of us who start out more inept. The ones who wouldn’t get the Hogwarts letter (to mix a metaphor). So my third example is of an adult who supported competence development regardless of her targets’ starting state.
My years at Highlands Elementary were fine as a student but the bullies made it hard to be there. Miss Kinney, the Librarian, was a refuge to me. She knew how to lure kids into reading and thinking. Her library was quiet and safe. I still remember several books she steered me toward that were challenging and interesting. She had no nonsense about “levels” of books. If it was interesting, it was appropriate (within the bounds of what was allowed on the shelves.) It always seemed when I visited the library that she would light up. It occurs to me now to wonder if everyone felt as if they personally were responsible for her joy. I bet that was the case. I can’t speak to Miss Kinney as a whole person, only as a source of safety and support, but I gained lifelong qualities from her presence, and making school more bearable earned her a gold star in my mind.
The Competence (and building-competence) characteristics she embodied are that intangible quality of making people feel competent themselves, and worthy, safe, and a bit inspired. She was excellent at her job because she had those skills. They are the sort of thing you would look for specifically in a school Librarian. But I’ve found, watching Competent people in all spheres of life, that those qualities are part of the “package.” Whether it’s a manager making employees feel worthy, safe, inspired, and capable, or parents cultivating Competence in their children, or a Coach drawing the most from their team, a Competent person provides a sense of safety, inspiration, and worthiness to others and that’s part of what makes them good at achieving things.
Competent people aren’t one-person-bands (though if you need a one-person band you absolutely need them to be Competent or you’ll just have a loud mess). They usually work with others to achieve goals, and need some “soft skills” to be good at it. I’ll get more into “drawing out Competence” in later articles, this is just an introduction.
Kristin, Jenny, and Miss Kinney all came thematically together for me not just because they shared similar parts of my childhood, but because of the lesson of Competence I think they each embody. Competent people notice when others need help, and they help effectively. Doing that can have the effect of making the people they help more competent as well.
Whether that drive to help is inborn or socialized I think doesn’t matter. Kristin and Jennifer had it early in life. Miss Kinney retired while I was still a student, she appeared to me to be maybe 100 years old at the time. No idea when she learned to help. I wasn’t much of a helper as a child, but it’s become a thing I take seriously as an adult. I think that element is learnable. I was fortunate to have examples like these three early on, and I’m sure you have examples in your life as well.