I grew up in a home where being smart was prized above almost everything. With a father who was a writer and a mother who was an editor, it was a given that I would learn how to write well. I learned math from cribbage and spelling from Scrabble. By the time I was six or seven, I was playing both cribbage and Scrabble regularly with the adults in my world – and they weren’t dumbing down their games to play with me. It was simply assumed that I would be a good student – and the one time that I brought home a B+ during junior high school, there was hell to pay from my father.
Suffice it to say, I expected myself to be smart. If possible, I wanted to be the smartest person in the room. It was a protection mechanism. If I were smart enough I could act perfectly, and if I acted perfectly my father wouldn’t get mad at me. It was a warped childhood belief that I carried into adulthood with me. But the behavior that seemed to protect me as a child isn’t working so well in adulthood.
Today I was working at the newspaper. I ended up in a strategy session with a couple of the editors about the upcoming Town Meeting season – what information to collect, how to collate it, and how to present it to the readers.
A few years ago, I spent some time working in a town office, so I’m familiar with some of the lingo they were using…but the truth is that, for the most part, I didn’t know what they were talking about. I was aware that my brain was trying to formulate something to say that would prove to them how smart I am. I wanted to use the lingo in a way that showed them that I knew exactly what they were talking about…even though I didn’t. But letting my brain go to town trying to prove how smart I am meant that I wasn’t being present for their conversation and was actually missing some important information – things that would actually be useful for me to know! And, truth be told, when I give in to that desire to sound smart, I often end up saying something that I later regret.
Today I surrendered to the peace of knowing that I wasn’t the smartest person in the room. And I didn’t need to be. And no one thought less of me. It was okay that I was simply there to do my job, rather than trying to figure out how to do theirs. Perhaps that’s the distinction between being smart and being intelligent.
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