One of the challenges of growing up is to progress from the me me me-ness of two and three-year-olds to something more nuanced as an adult. This can manifest itself in a number of ways, depending on your intelligence, your neediness, and the degree to which you are a shades-of-gray person or a black-and-white person.

You can dig into this as much as you want, but I think when it really comes down to is how much can you get over yourself. If you're someone like me who has and unnaturally high opinion of himself this can be quite a challenge, but the thing that makes it possible for me is that I have no trouble distinguishing between what is appropriate when I'm by myself versus when I'm interacting with another person.

What tends to impede getting over yourself is people's natural tendency to want to win. This is a primal urge and difficult to combat, and often manifests itself in the need to get the last word or to be RIGHT. This is typically not a useful urge. The core problem is that everyone wants to get the last word in and everyone thinks they're right. Otherwise, why bother? So going into a discussion sure of your rightness is a recipe for disaster, or at least for nastiness, and being insistent on that point only raises the stakes.

I'll get to a broader discussion of this in a moment, but I think it's best illustrated by and example, and I'll use my current job because it's unique in ways yet generalizable.

The teacher-student relationship is one with a clear authority figure. As the teacher, I have ultimate say in pretty much everything that goes into the functioning of the class. This allows me to say "because I said so, that's why" or perhaps something slightly more mature-sounding. In fact, it compels me to do so, because if I don't there's chaos. What the authority position does not do, however, is make me right. The only thing that makes me right is being right, and what's right isn't always clear. It just allows me to say, "I understand what you're saying, but the discussion's over." Of course that only works if I can refrain from saying anything else, but since I don't actually like to talk that's not too hard.

Getting back to the larger topic, I think the key to getting over yourself is listening. I've gone off before about how I think good listening is a skill that we really ought to spend more time teaching and developing, and what's needed here is two kinds of listening. First, you need to really listen to what the other person is saying an evaluate it on its own merits, not filtered through your own feelings. Second, you need to listen to yourself and get an idea of how you are sounding to others. It's all part of looking outside yourself.

In advertising there are two-plus questions that must be answered right off the bat. What am I trying to accomplish, and who am I talking to and what do they want? I am not in school to talk about math for math's sake or for my own. I am there to fulfill the needs of my students and their parents. Doing this effectively requires understanding what they want and how they expect to get it. That doesn't mean you have to do everything they want or the way they want it. What is does mean that it's not all about you and you must consider how what you do will be received.

This is very easy to say but can be very difficult to do, and it means being able to live without being right all time, but I can tell you from experience growing up as the "smart kid," being right isn't all it's cracked up to be.