April 27, 2021
I Believe in My Own Work…
Those of us who are familiar with the Extension Professionals Creed can finish the rest of that line:
“I believe in my own work and in the opportunity I have to make my life useful to humanity.”
I have rarely met an extension professional, especially those who have been an extension professional for a long time, who did not buy into this statement. As one of our colleagues has put it, we tend to take a missionary zeal to our work. We yearn to be useful to humanity. We need to be impactful in the lives of others by empowering them with the relevant, science-backed education they need to improve their lives and world.
With that being said, we often take this aspect of our job for granted. We get too caught up in this tyranny of the urgent or another. This deadline or that. This round of complaints or the previous round of complaints.
Please do something for yourself. Take a moment and think back on your recent career as an extension professional. Write down the five times in your extension career when you felt the most useful to humanity. Perhaps it was helping a client, a learner group, a volunteer, or a colleague or team of colleagues. Whatever the circumstances, if you felt most useful to humanity, write it down. If you recently started your extension career, maybe include things from your life when you were involved in an extension-like activity. Then, write a paragraph for each of those times explaining why you were useful to humanity in those five instances and how it made you feel.
Read those top five successes over and over again. Feel how the pride swells up in you as you read them. Let the excitement build as those five instances remind you about why you became an extension professional.
Then, share those five examples of your success. Share them with a colleague, a volunteer, your boss, and or your better half (or better 7/8, as the case may be). Send them to me at ghadley@ksu.edu. Share them at a staff meeting. Share them with your Extension Board. Put them up on our Difference Makers Facebook page. Seriously, put your top five up there. Let other people be amazed at and share in the joy of your most proud extension-professional moments.
It is so easy to get caught up in what experts are calling this time of “languishing.” Let’s stop languishing. Redirect and refocus your thoughts to our and your why. We want to be useful to humanity, and we have been useful to humanity. Let’s celebrate how we have been useful to humanity this week!