I'm Scared to Teach!
“Now, some of you may be shy by nature or consider yourselves inadequate to respond affirmatively to a calling. Remember that this work is not yours and mine alone. It is the Lord’s work, and when we are on the Lord’s errand, we are entitled to the Lord’s help. Remember that whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies.”—President Thomas S. Monson of the First Presidency, “Duty Calls,” Ensign, May 1996, 4.
Sometime after the initial call is issued and before the first class begins is a stage commonly known as sheer panic. What were you thinking when you said yes? What was God thinking when He chose you? What are you going to do now? Is it too late to change your mind?
This feeling of panic is normal when you are called to something outside your comfort zone. Ask me to teach a class of four-year-olds and I will bounce into the class cheerfully and confidently. Ask me to teach a class of adults and I will have nightmares all week. The difference is confidence and self-image. My self-image says that I am a good teacher to little children, but that I will bore adults. My self-image also says I don’t know how to teach without finger puppets, flannel boards and glue sticks. Of course, I have taught adults, and even resisted the urge to hand out stickers at the end of Relief Society (every now and then), but it hasn’t become a part of my self-image just yet, so I have to start over every time I am asked to teach adults.
When I was called to be the Primary President several years ago, I went into the Primary room on Wednesday night and stood in there quietly for a long time. Someone came in, saw me standing motionless, and asked what I was doing. “I’m trying to take ownership of my calling.” What I meant was that I was standing in that room telling myself that I was a Primary president, that I was called of God, and that I could do this job. I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself conducting Primary, teaching sharing time, comforting crying Sunbeams, encouraging a nervous new teacher, and leading presidency meetings. I have read that our minds don’t know the difference between doing and imagining, so I was trying to imagine myself being capable of the job so clearly that my brain and heart would be tricked into believing I really was. Taking ownership is a step I have to take every time I am asked to do anything other than teaching a Primary class.
Another step I take when accepting a frightening calling is to pray and pray and pray. My prayers are never better than when I have a scary new calling. I pray to know the calling came from God. I pray to know I can learn to do the calling. I pray to find out why I was called to the calling when 200 other people could do it better than I could. And then I pray for help in learning how to do the job.
Before I can succeed in a calling, I have to trust Heavenly Father. He called me, He wants me here, and He wants to help me. I don’t always have a lot of faith in myself, but I do have faith in God, so I rely on Him. That takes prayer, and pondering, and time. I try to ease my schedule as much as possible in the week or two following a call, so that I have time to ponder and to grow my faith.
Then I start to focus on the skills I need in order succeed. Sometimes I do an inventory. I write down all the skills I think I will need. Then I star the ones I feel fairly secure about. The remaining skills become my goals. I know I can’t develop all the skills I need at once, so I try to decide which ones are the most important and work on those first. Gradually, I add one more at a time until I am doing the job or until I’m released. It’s always a nice feeling to finish the list before I am asked to move to the next job, but it doesn’t always happen that way. Then I just reward myself for the goals I did achieve and move on to the next list.
When teaching your first lessons, keep the lesson plan simple. Spend as much time as possible becoming comfortable with the material, but don’t try every trick in the teaching manual your very first week. The more complicated your lesson plan is, the harder it will be to do it correctly. The most important parts of the preparation to remember are:
1. Pray
2. Prepare
3. Trust Heavenly Father
4. Trust yourself.
5. Have fun preparing and teaching.
6. Smile when you face the class.
The rest will come with time!
By Terrie Lynn Bittner