Who’s on my team?

Good morning.

Thank you for having me here again. It’s very special to me to be able to address you today and to report back on what I’ve learned during the research process that I’ve been conducting in boys’ schools in South Africa. I’ll focus mostly on what I’ve learned over the past two years of surveys, focus groups and conversations in what is called The Excellence in South African Boys’ Schools Project but I might also go back a bit further. I began this work in association with the International Boys’ School Association and the Association of Public Boys’ Schools of South Africa in 2018. I want to thank them and your school and you for your support of this process over this time.

I think I know you pretty well by now. You’ve given me thousands and thousands of data points, of words in response to questions I’ve asked you. Almost all of you took the process seriously. A handful of you were a bit silly but usually that just made me giggle. I am a boy at heart, after all.

So what do I know about you?

Although I don’t know each of you personally, I think I know you pretty well as a group.

I know you want to be good. Three quarters of you told me that when I asked you if that was the case. And most of the rest of you told me you probably want to be good. But perhaps you doubt yourselves.

That’s ok. It’s not a bad thing to have a bit of doubt and also to be a bit confident and also to live in between the two of those states. You don’t want too much doubt or too much confidence though.

So you want to be good men but I know you also want to be a bit naughty - maybe sometimes very naughty. Mostly you tell me that you want to have a bit of fun, a laugh - most often with your mates. Many of you also tell me that you want to find your way forward. That, perhaps, is less about being naughty and more about being free to chart your own course.

So, mostly, you want to be good. That’s a good thing. It’s good for you to want to be good men. We need you to be good men - “good” men”, not “perfect” men. For none of us is perfect. I believe that’s why we need God in our lives. You can believe what you will about that. But you should also know that my Mum told me to tell you that God loves every one of you. She’s a good girl, my mum.

I know also that nearly four out of five of you not only want to become better versions of yourselves - you believe that you are working towards that already. A lesser number of you, however, recognise that you are in fact already doing this important and noble work of becoming a better version of yourself day by day.

Knowing who you are, earning your place, going on a journey from me to you to us, and finding your calling is a pathway to excellence that we can all take. My research and books (that you contributed to by sharing your thoughts and answers to the questions I asked) show how you can do this.

But on this pathway to excellence, you can slow down, you can get stuck.

Up to half of you don’t necessarily see how you are developing the creativity, communication skills or leadership to be excellent. Less than half of you know how to find your voice and make it heard at school.

I suspect that I understand why that might be the case. I think that we often look at ourselves, where we are now and where we need to get to. We have too strong doubts, fears about ourselves, about challenges we don’t think we can overcome. We see something we can’t do that we want to be able to do. And often (as a result) we see something missing in ourselves. We think we are not good enough.

We tell ourselves that the reason we are not good enough is that we are weak and that, somewhere at its heart, this weakness is a moral failing. Worse still, we can feel like cowards because we can’t cope with the challenges presented to us.

Somehow we equate not being good enough to do something as not being good. And not being enough. In our minds, it seems that we are what we do, or what we don’t do. We feel as though we aren’t enough.

And I think that’s unfair, because when we are young (and often when we are old too) the reason why we aren’t good at doing something, the reason why we don’t have the mastery in which true confidence is vested, is because we lack the experience to be good at doing the thing we wish to master. Or we lack the consistency of judgment to be both good and wise just yet. Or because - let’s be honest - we lack the talent.

If we are to be honest with ourselves, there’s not much we can do about an initial lack of talent. It’s not our fault - we are who we are. You might, in fact, be able to learn to make up for this - it might not be a lack of inherent talent that is getting in the way. Even if it is, there’s any number of stories about how application beats talent. Your stories tell me of memorable moments when this has happened to you and they’re wonderful, inspiring reading.

Yet, sometimes working hard is not the answer; talent does sometimes trump application. And denying this – assuming that you can make something happen just because you want it to happen – is a dangerous form of magical thinking that can set you up for a life of disappointment or delusion or both.

There comes a time when we need to accept our limitations. Try as we might, some things just won’t happen. And that’s ok. Because you are enough. Even if your performance does not hit the mark and you can’t reach your goal, you are not a failure and you are not a coward.

Trying to see the difference between a lack of talent and a lack of experience and a lack of the right attitude can be hard. Especially if we aren’t honest with ourselves. Or if we fool ourselves into believing we can be good at doing something when we probably should be focusing on something else. Just because we believe a thing doesn’t make it true. On the other hand, often our belief in ourselves needs to come before our ability to do the thing we want to be able to do. Then we need to work towards it. Step by step. Improving a little bit at a time.

The things we say to ourselves while we try to take the steps of that journey I’ve called the pathway to excellence often conflict, don’t they?

You tell yourself you can do it and then that you can’t do it. That you are not too bad a bloke after all and yet that you are terrible, an idiot, a failure, a coward.

There are so many voices in our head that make it difficult to know what’s what, what’s real and true.

We need another voice or set of voices from outside to give us advice, to help us to test the assumptions we have about ourselves, to put things into perspective, to cancel out or at least counterbalance the negative attitudes we can hold about ourselves.

Making this change of attitude towards ourselves can be difficult when we feel alone, when we don’t feel supported, when we don’t feel loved, when we don’t really love ourselves. I know that at any given point in time that one third to one half of you feel like that. There’s what you told me when I asked you.

A change of attitude can also be difficult without a trusted adult. Someone to ground us, give us perspective, remind us of our strengths, teach us to ask better questions, show us that we can fit in, that we are not weak, or a failure, or a coward. I know that around a third of you don’t necessarily feel that there is such an adult at school for you. Most of you can find someone like that at home. Ideally you need supportive adults both at school and at home.

Often those around us – both adults and your peers – can say things or seem to say things that confirm this negative attitude, this lack of belief in ourselves, this destructive self-talk that sees an inability to do something considered important or necessary become a weakness of character, a sign of moral failure.

These people can also tell us that we must simply work harder to overcome this weakness. And that we must not stop working hard – ever.

Don’t get me wrong; I believe strongly in the power of hard work. In my family, we have a saying that “hard is good”. We value diligence and determination.

But not when we are blinded to the reality that hard work alone will never get us all the way. And particularly when the narrative of “I must work harder because I am a bad person” is so very wrong and destructive of who we are.

Yet these people tell us that we must accept this false narrative as true and that we must continue to dig deep into ourselves to find an answer to a question that life seems to present to us: “Am I good enough?”

So, hear me now. You are enough. You are enough. You are enough. You may have flaws, you might not get everything right, you might not be able to do everything by yourself, you might have areas of your character on which you need to work. You might not be perfect and you could be better but you are enough.

And the people who tell you otherwise? The people who tell you that life is a lonely struggle to figure things out for yourself and guess the secret code that gives you entry into the group? That you need to fix yourself because there’s something wrong with you?

I’m not sure those people are really on your team.

Your team helps you feel as though you belong and helps you to fulfil your potential. The more you feel as though you belong and are fulfilling your potential, the more good and right you do in the world. That’s what I mean – that’s what you mean – by becoming a “better version of yourself”.

In the stories you have told me, your team members are the people who help you to fit in and belong, to work to improve on your performance of the things that matter with you, to make a difference by doing good things for yourself and those you love, for your school, your community, your country and maybe even the broader world.

Different members of your team bring you different gifts.

Your friends are most powerful in their influence on you on a day to day basis. When they’re not around, you’ll admit that they can be a distraction and not always helpful in managing your time well, but they can bring you a sense of companionship, of brotherhood, that lets you know that you belong and therefore that you matter. They can also be a lot of fun, even if that’s sometimes too much of the wrong fun. You also appreciate that a really good friend goes beyond belonging to help you become a better version of yourself. In this way, your friends and mates become the warp and weft of the fabric of daily life at school.

Your teachers and coaches and mentors are most powerful in the knowledge they bring to you. They help you to improve your performance in the things you need to do to make progress and achieve on your pathway to excellence. You value the model they give to you of qualities like decency, patience, curiosity, persistence. In this way, these meaningful adults make a difference in your lives by showing you the way forward in the areas that prepare you for life beyond school.

Your parents are most powerful of all. They provide you with the necessities of life; the way they do this speaks to their long-term impact in setting the moral and material foundations of your life. You believe that you can be more honestly yourself around your family. You rate them highest of all (although perhaps you don’t tell them this that often). You know, therefore, of the ways that family frames the through lines of your lives. And you appreciate them deeply for this enduring contribution to your sense of belonging, the fulfilment of your potential and your capacity to be a good man.

You tell me that every member of your team needs to give loyalty, commitment and respect. It’s what makes them a team. It’s how they show their love.

And even though your team wraps you in their love, it doesn’t mean that there won’t be times when you need to think deeply and act with intent by yourself to become a better version of yourself. This doesn’t mean you’re alone. You just need to do your own work sometimes.

So, please know this …

You are not alone.

You have a team.

I said earlier that the reason why you aren’t good at doing something can often be because you lack the experience to be good at it.

If you’re not experienced enough, you can go out and get that experience. And patiently and steadily you can work at becoming better at that thing you want to be better at doing. And, if you’re fortunate, you can have a coach or a mentor or a friend show you how to do that thing. And a team to practise it with.

I said that the question “Am I good enough?” is a fraught question, particularly if that’s what drives you. It’s a question with fear at its heart, especially when it means you’re constantly trying to live up to someone else’s expectations and you feel as though you can’t because the bar is impossibly high.

Most dangerous of all is when it’s your own expectations that you believe you can’t live up to – the fear that you can never become the man you need to be. In the face of this fear, no approach will work. You can keep working harder or you can give up. Either approach won’t soothe the ache caused by the fear that you won’t be perfect.

You need to find something else other than fear to drive you forward. You need to get beyond that feeling of not fitting in, of failure, of moral weakness, of cowardice. You need to think about where you were yesterday and where you are today, and where you might go tomorrow. And how you might get there.

You need to replace that one question, “Am I good enough?” with a much better set of questions that will help you to become a better version of yourself: “Who am I? Where do I fit in? How might I best serve others? Whose am I?”

I want to give you some more questions to ask. They’re not actually questions about yourself.

“Who teaches me what?”

“Who helps me become the man I want and need to be?”

“Who helps me feel as though I belong?”

“Who shows me how to be a good man?”

“Who holds me back when I need to slow down?”

“Who gets me moving when I can’t get going?”

“Who’s got my back?

“Who do I most want around me?”

“Who gives me the most value?”

“Who shapes my values?”

“Whose respect do I want to win?”

“Who do I want to give back to?”

“Who’s on my team?”

I hope there’s something helpful in all of this for you.

Thank you for all you’ve done for my project by answering all those surveys and contributing to focus groups and taking part in many, many conversations over the years. You’ve taught me so much about how it’s relationships – positive relationships – that line the pathway to excellence that we all must take in our lives. I can now pass that on to others.

I wish you a good day, a good week and a good life, a life of purpose!

Let’s go!

Phil