Labor of Love

One of my favorite motivational authors and speakers, the late Leo Buscaglia, once wrote “Don’t spend your precious time asking, ‘Why isn’t the world a better place?’ It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is ‘How can I make it better?’ To that there is an answer”.

Indeed, there is.

And the answer always comes back to one word – love.

Not love in the romantic sense, but a labor of love writ large – the giving of oneself to others in order to make their world better and, by extension, our own more satisfying.

I have discovered this in my own life and would like to share this experience.

After a forty-year diplomatic career, I decided to spend my golden years teaching international relations at the Universidad del Valle de Mexico in Merida, Mexico.

My objective has been to share whatever wisdom and knowledge I may have accumulated over the course of a fascinating and multifaceted career with a new generation.

In my view, the role of the educator is to help students bring out the best in themselves. To provide them with the tools that they need to contribute to humanity in a small or large way and yet remain true to themselves.

Of the three courses that I teach, my favorite is Strategic Communications. This course encourages students to communicate in the most effective way possible. Not to make them conform to a cookie cutter persona, but to develop their natural instincts and talents and their own individual language with which to reach others.

I have seen how my students develop their communications skills after three months of classes and practice.

I have seen how they learn to empathize and identify with their audiences, and how they learn to make a difference. This addresses the “How can I make it better” aspect of Buscaglia’s question.

I share with them that, as Buscaglia put it, there are two big forces at work, external and internal. 

We have very little control over external forces such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, disasters, illness and pain. What really matters is the internal force. How do I respond to those disasters? Over that I have complete control.

But students have complete control over their actions and reactions, and this realization empowers them to enhance their use of their own creativity in meeting the challenges that they will face in their personal and professional lives. 

I share with them how to change their perspectives so that what seems impossible becomes possible, so that they can address difficult questions with aplomb, and how to express their creativity in a focused and effective manner.

I share my own experiences not so that they can copy them, but as an exercise for them to relate to and use them as a point of reference with which to develop their own.

At the end of the semester, I see how much they have developed, both as communicators and as people.

I am always pleased when they themselves recognize how far they have progressed and share in their satisfaction.

This is a labor of love – in the broadest sense of the word.

It’s a sharing of oneself and ones’ experiences with others not to seek to control them but rather to give them a reference they can use to expand their horizons.

It’s a respect for the other’s individuality and freedom to be themselves.

Likewise, it’s a desire to awaken another’s creativity and help them recognize their own potential in their own way.

In Buscaglia’s words, change is the end result of all true learning. Change results from the humility of admitting that we don’t know it all which, in turn, provides us with the mindset to learn and grow.

And labors of love are the catalysts for encouraging change in others, and the satisfaction that one receives from this sharing repays in spades the efforts that we make.

Edición: Estefanía Cardeña