Safety ≡ Love!

There is a surprising identity at the heart of Constructive Mutualism

I am finalising the analysis of an eight-school survey designed to explore what are the key elements or factors that can ensure that a teacher has teacherly authority-based relationships with her students.

It is looking as though making their students feel safe is enough (and that factor subsumes all the other elements in the core capacity that I have called ‘Caring’).

I have done a great deal of coaching over the years and key to an effective coaching relationship is that the coachee feels completely safe – no matter what they say (or do), the coach will never embarrass them, or be disgusted by them or humiliate them or dismiss what they are saying or doing anything else by omission or commission that will make them feel unsafe (under threat, unvalued, etc.).

Doing this requires the coach to use the listening mode where we are open to the new and the different and always responding in the coachee’s best interest i.e., with compassion, to increase their wellbeing or reduce their suffering.

It took a lot of practice to do this well and I considered this to be the practice of unconditional love towards another (and doing this changed me profoundly as well).  I now realise that my practice of unconditional love was experienced by the other as unconditional safety.

This means that there is an identity between these two experiences: providing the experience of unconditional safety is identical to the practice of unconditional love.

If we think of a newborn baby, this identity is obvious.  The baby absolutely needs unconditional safety, and the parent provides the experience through unconditional love.

It seems that this is the primary basis for a relationship of teacherly authority.  It is not so much what the teacher knows but how much she cares which matters.

And that care needs to be unconditional, which is possible within the Constructive Mutualism paradigm but not within Behaviourism.

100% student engagement in the 21st century is only possible by shifting paradigm.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation.  At the core of this work is the concept and practice of teacherly authority.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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