Two Things to Teach Children

It is early morning. After seeing my husband off to work and my son off to school, I go to my home office to work. Definitely not a morning person, I am still drowsy! I sit at my desk and start reading mail. Within a couple of minutes, I hear a command from inside my head “Sit up straight!”. I notice that I am slouching and automatically I straighten my back, raise my chin and immediately feel more comfortable and more alert.

The auto reminder is in the form of the voice of my elementary school teacher from grade 1 and grade 2. He would frequently warn us to sit up straight at our desks during class. He would say “Stand straight” when we walked around crouching. Call me crazy, his warning is recorded in my subconscious and to this day, whenever I slouch, my brain automatically replays it along with showing split second image of his face with dark hair and moustache, accompanied with a flash of warmth in my heart.

My teacher came from a little village in the Black Sea coast of Turkey and he had the special Turkish accent of the people raised in the Black Sea coast. Though I do not remember it, the only incident about him, being told in my family is this: One day my mother is talking to my father and referring to my teacher’s accent, she says “Nilgun’s teacher is laz.” (Laz is a common word to refer to people of the Black Sea coast.) Hearing this and not knowing what the word meant, I yell at my mother with the top of my lungs “HE IS NOT LAZ, HE IS TURKISH!” When I was a little girl, I was very obedient and quiet. My inner bossy girl with leadership skills, as Sheryl Sandberg would say, came out much later. That I summoned the courage to scream at my mother, shows how much I cared about my teacher.

The only picture I have of him is a fading, black and white, class picture in 1972 spring, at the school front yard, with the beautiful Bosphorous scenery in the background. Our school was on top of a hill, at Cengelkoy, with a direct view of the Bosphorous bridge.

I get up, find the picture and look at it once more. In the photo, I am snuggled at his side and he is resting his hand, protectively on my shoulder. Obviously, it is sunny and bright, because I am squinting. This time I look at it from a different perspective, not as a photo of a personal memory but as detached snapshot of life in early 1970’s. First time I notice that only a couple of the kids are smiling, most of us look serious, quite a few are downright frowning. This is a picture of old people in little bodies. Their eyes don’t emanate carefree childhood fun.

It is difficult times in our country, most of the people are poor, the kind of poor that you don’t know how poor you are, because everyone you know is almost the same. Some of the kids in our class are regularly hungry. We are supposed to bring lunch to school, some kids can’t bring any or can bring only a little piece of fruit such a handful of grapes from their garden. Us more lucky ones, bring a sandwich of 2 small pieces of bread with feta cheese inside and along with an apple. All our stationery is notebooks from coarse yellow paper, couple of lead pencils, a red pencil, a hard white eraser and a little pencil sharpener.

Sometimes the state distributes flour to classrooms as food aid. Each time the distributed ingredients are given to one of the mothers, who bakes something with them and brings it back to school. I never forget the day when my mother baked cookies with the aid ingredients and brought to class. How my classmates attacked her to snatch cookies, shoving each other to reach the cookie tray she was holding, she was almost toppled.

Each kid is facing a tough situation of different kind at home. Some kids even face violence. We intuitively know our friends who are beaten or who live with violence in their homes. They are the ones who are always afraid and usually can’t keep up with homework. But our teacher is tolerant, he accommodates for the situation of each child. He loves and accepts each child no matter how they behave or how smart they are. Occasionally, when he is worn down, he gets angry and shouts at us. But we never hold a grudge because we know that it does not come from the heart and that it will pass within a few minutes.

I recall being disappointed because he uses most of our physical education and art classes as math classes. He puts a lot of emphasis on math, because he believes it will bring success in life. Now I understand, it was his way of compensating for kids who could not study at home and at the same time improving kids with potential even further.

Yes, this is more like a war picture of a troop with their sergeant, instead of 7 years old grade 1 students with their teacher. I stare at him in the picture. Sergeant, he sure is, standing up straight, his chin up, his thin shoulders down and pushed back, he looks determined and hopeful that the war will be won. He is thin, but he refuses to be frail.

By continuously warning us about our posture and modelling it, our teacher wired in us to “stand up straight no matter what”. Many times during my education or working life, after a stressful situation such as a debate, an oral exam, an important presentation, a public speech, I have been told that I looked very confident and relaxed, by people who watched. A lot of the times, I was surprised because I thought I was anxious and stressed inside. I realized that, I exuded confidence unconsciously, because I was standing up or sitting up straight. It is not just physical, along with the posture, my first teacher, imprinted us with a philosophy of tenacity that comes as a side effect of “standing up straight”.

In his book “The Pressure Principle”, famous sports coach Dave Alfred, recommends assuming command posture in stressful situations and making ourselves as big as possible. He describes command posture as “Shoulders down and packed, neck stretched and chin held in line with sternum. Despite the title command, think less of a military-style standing to attention and more of a trained dancer, upright, lithe and graceful: you are in control of your situation, not standing to the attention of someone or something else.”

The metaphor of the ballet dancer is right on spot. My sports teacher often uses a different description of the same posture during workouts. He says “Imagine that you are hung by a straight line going through your body from the top of your head and through your spine, and you are continuously pulled upwards by this line from the top of your head. At the same time imagine there are weights on your shoulders and they are pressed down, keeping the distance of your head and shoulders as far as possible.”

If done incorrectly, trying to make yourself bigger with alpha-male postures, might result with being perceived as arrogant, pretentious and cocky. When high-power poses are not appropriate, in social situations the idea is to hold a neutral power position, having the head centered above the neck and the neck centered on shoulders. If sitting, sit straight up, don’t lean forward or backward; nor to the left or the right. Give yourself a strong foundation by holding your legs straight if standing up or both feet flat on the floor if you are sitting down.

The best thing about good posture is not the effect it has on other people. Yes, body language does have an impact on how others perceive you. However much more importantly, your body language determines how you feel and how you think about yourself by effecting the mix of hormones, such as testosterone and cortisol, your brain secretes, your “brain juice” as NLP people affectionately call.

In her widely-watched TED talk the Harvard Business School Professor and social psychologist Amy Cuddy has shared research on how assuming a high-power pose for just 2 minutes changes your hormonal mix to make you assertive, confident, optimistic and comfortable, whereas assuming a low power pose such as slouching changes your hormonal mix to make you feel stress reactive and shut down.

High power poses, also called command postures, are poses in which you expand your body as much as possible. An example of a high-power pose is, often called the Wonder Woman pose, hands on hips, feet wide apart, erect spine, shoulders back, chest pushed out, eyes staring confidently forward, is a strong high power pose. After watching her 2012 speech, I plead guilty of sometimes following Amy Cuddy’s recommendation during my management years, and holding a Wonder Woman pose for a few minutes at the elevator or a bathroom stall prior to important presentations, such as executive committees. Breathing deeply from the diaphragm during the pose enhances it. When I remembered doing it, I noticed that it really lowered the anxiety and increased my confidence. Afterwards keeping the neutral power position during the event, preserves the momentum as well as effecting how your audience perceives you.

“I just won a race” pose, raising arms above your head, hands locked in fists, legs apart is another example of a high-power pose that can be used prior to performance to go into the zone.

In coaching, we work with the body, because you can access a state by embodying it. Emotions have different embodiments that go along with them.

Hence with an intuition far beyond his time, what my elementary school teacher did, was trying to instill in us a strategy to feel confident, to be able to perform well under pressure and cope better with stress.

If you would teach one single thing to children, condition them to sit and stand tall, like a ballet dancer. If you would teach a second thing, show them to do a high-power pose for a couple of minutes, to use when they are about to perform. These two things alone might change the course of their life.