Is Humility A Luxury Item Or A Necessity?

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Recently, I’ve been flooded with proof of how special people can be, and I’d never have seen it if I hadn’t paid attention.

It’s easy for me to pay more attention to myself when I’m around others. While I’m busy mentally processing my thoughts and reactions to what others are saying, I miss the full display of the people in front of me. If I didn’t feel like I had to be integral to the conversation, then I’d more readily see the special, instructive, or inspiring offerings of others.

There’s always something there.

I’m working hard to shift this in myself. I’m a work in progress, but when I have those moments when I’m awed by the beauty of others — thanks to putting the beauty of myself in my back pocket — I walk away inspired to listen better than I do sometimes.

Just like with any of us, as an ADHD coach I’m in a forever learning curve. There’s always more insight circling among my coaching peers in classes, workshops, conferences, and conversations. The idea is we’ll never stop learning about what this all is — being alive. We’ll never truly know either, but the more understanding you get, the more stunning it becomes — in every sense.

I don’t only learn from other coaches. I learn from my clients, too. I learn from family, friends, strangers, and my kitty, Kitten. This is to say nothing of the birds, trees, clouds, and stars. For me, learning and growing are the big perks of being alive.

Of late, my various sources for learning and inspiration converged around the same time, bringing me to a busy several days of collaboration on life with a dense crowd of beautiful minds offering their grappling and wonderment — and I will tell you: people are gorgeous things.

The other day I was in a coaching group, and we were discussing which voice we should listen to as coach — ours or the client’s. Obviously, we’re supposed to listen to the client’s voice, but it’s difficult sometimes to ignore our own voice running the show in our heads. The coaches swapped notes.

One of them, a fellow long in the field named Neil, spoke up about what can happen when we quiet our internal insistence and devote our attention to what the client is saying — no urge to solve their problem, no worry whether we’re offering value at that moment, no knowing what’s best for the client. Only genuine, focused listening.

“What can happen,” he said in his gentle way, “is an opportunity for humility — for us to realize we’re human and we’ll be tugged by our inner voices. Then we can decide to pivot and learn from the discussion ahead rather than bring ourselves into it.”

That was subtle and beautiful. Only by holding ourselves at bay can we fully listen to another person. By allowing ourselves to take a backseat, we can ride in the front seat with someone and see what they see — at least a little. There’s more learning there than we realize. Our understanding of the world is always bigger when we see how other creatures see it.

When I see familiarity in them, it gives me a deeper love for being human. This is remarkable because being human is a royal trainwreck sometimes.

Riding in the backseat doesn’t mean we drift and yawn. It’s an active role of appreciating what we see, of taking it in with wide-open ears and eyes.

But what is humility? There are many nuanced or conflicting definitions of it that span human history. Maybe I don’t need to know what it’s meant to everyone over time. Maybe I can imagine what it might mean that could be helpful for me.

Is humility a pause perhaps? It’s one thing to define it, but another to understand the mechanics of how to get there. If I pause my role as player, speaker, proselytizer, advocate, or knower — then what am I left with? An observer with more questions than answers, more curiosity than assumptions.

You could say it’s the difference between throwing the ball and catching it, but I think neither of these roles describes humility. Instead, it’s the wide-eyed middle-schooler standing at the fence of an MLB Spring training game in Florida, watching the extraordinary practice in front of him. I’ve been there and seen this. The kids gawk like no tomorrow, silent, watching everything.

What if humility isn’t about self-demotion? What if it’s respecting the self enough to let go of it? What if it’s making space in the self to invite the unedited story of someone else into our personal anthology?

Easy to say, harder to do.

How can you do any of these things if you’ve been stomped on by the world and the one desperation you hold is to be known — just once — for doing something of value? To prove the self. Is humility a luxury item then for folks who have enough self-confidence to allow themselves to observe the world self-free? Does it require a certain emotional bandwidth to choose it?

Or is humility a necessity for us to make our way past hurt and self-doubt? Is it a pristine place of curiosity that gives us permission to be self-free? If we can shun self-flagellation but embrace curiosity, this is when we learn from others’ strengths and weaknesses. We soak it all in. We gain knowledge and hopefully a little confidence, too.

I’m an intellectually excitable, hyper-curious person. This means I’m a creature who can easily jump ahead of someone’s story with verve to imagine anything imaginable — questions, ponderings, what-ifs. With gusto, I grab one of the oars and start fervidly rowing our boat, the storyteller and me. And it’s all going on in my mind.

But the boat isn’t mine, and the rowing isn’t for me to do. The waterway isn’t my river. I’m not even in the boat. I’m on a rock that juts out into the water and for the time it takes the boat to approach, pass me, and then float off, I have the opportunity of a lifetime to see someone for all their glory in that moment.

It’s an ongoing journey to realize what high value it is to be standing on that rock.

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Hope you have a great week, friends.