by Jillian Shannon
It’s 5:55pm. Class starts at 6pm. You pace the room waiting for people -anyone!- to arrive. A part of you hopes no one shows so you can call the whole thing off. (You’re not as prepared as you would like.) You play scenarios in your head: I would rather nobody show up than just ONE person. Imagine teaching a class to just one person?! How awkward!
Jillian Shannon is the pastoral assistant at TCL and a spiritual entrepreneur. She is the owner of Neotopia, a non-profit bookstore in San Antonio, TX that holds classes and events surrounding subjects of theology, philosophy and culture.
At 6pm on the dot, two people arrive simultaneously. You begin the class, but you’re already in your head. You float above your body and watch yourself speak, and judgmentally tally the amount of times you end a sentence with “right?” - your nervous tick. You wonder what the students are thinking as they watch you with blank stares. Are they into this? Are they bored? Did she just look at her phone?\
It’s 6:25 and you’re out of material. Class is supposed to end at 6:50. Usually you leave space at the end of class for questions and comments, but this group is particularly quiet.
Luckily the students pull through and ask some interesting questions! Maybe they enjoyed the subject matter after all. Still--you know this wasn’t your best. And you will beat yourself up for it for the rest of the night. Maybe tomorrow too.
The above scenario happened to me a few weeks ago. I wonder if any of you can relate? As a newbie in the spiritual entrepreneurship world, a recent graduate and sudden “authority” on complex subjects, I so often live beyond my comfort zone. Most of the time, the uncomfortability pays off. Then there are times when you feel like you failed and you are tempted to question what you’re doing.
As the name “The Church Lab” suggests, spiritual entrepreneurship involves experiments, and not all experiments go according to plan. But failures (or perceived failures) are an important part of the process. Here are some of the take-aways from my reflection on this night:
It would help to establish my personal rules and boundaries. What is my minimum number of participants? i.e. if only one person shows up to a class, do I cancel? Reschedule? Adjust the style of the class and continue as a one-on-one?
My personal style (this may be different from person to person) is to overly prepare. I thought I knew the subject well enough to swing it in the moment, but when the circumstances threw me off balance, I became insecure with the material. If I had a solid lecture prepared, it would have helped a lot.
The irony of this particular situation is that the topic of that class was Thomas Merton’s false self/True Self. The false self is our superficial identity, our preferences, our appearance, or, as we call it in the West, our “personality.” The false self worries about gaining the approval of others. Our “True Self”, or our “essence” as they call it in the East, is our incorruptible spiritual nature. The True Self is attentive to a different vibration in the room. In that particular class, I worried how I was being received and that worry interfered with my role as a vessel for information and connection.
Pastors, teachers, leaders and speakers of any kind dealing with spiritual matters must face this issue a lot. We know that the reason we feel called to speak is to connect other people to something greater than ourselves and to access that sacred space beyond the superficial realities to which we’re accustomed. Yet, we occasionally collapse into the smallness of the moment, concerned for our own image and the reputation of our work.
Spiritual entrepreneurship requires us to put our egos and personal agendas to the side and act as a vessel for whatever mission we are trying to accomplish. This leads us to accept failures as a part of the learning process. Perhaps, then, we can more easily laugh off the flops and find more joy in our vocational process.