Ready for next.

I had the privilege of working with an amazing kindergarten teacher, Mr. Elmer, who taught his students to transition by being “ready for next.” Being “ready for next” meant that you were ready to hear the next instruction, that you were ready to listen and to be open to what you were about to hear. It didn’t mean that you had perfected everything, or that you were completely finished with your current task, but you were in a state of readiness for whatever was next and you were taking that pause to acknowledge that you were ready.

I love that for kindergarteners, who so often need “just 5 more minutes.” And I love that for us, at whatever point we are at in our lives. Even if we aren’t quite finished with whatever we are working on, we can find that pausing point and get ready to listen; get ready for next.

I’ve been thinking about this idea of “ready for next” for awhile because I don’t know what “next” is for me, so I keep looking, hoping for a sign that will say, “Hey, this is it! Over here!” And while nothing has revealed itself to me in the drive-thru lane, I am listening if NPR wanted to send me a personalized message during my daily commute.

In the meantime, I keep checking in on my core values and it pleases me when I discover that they are the same. (I’m not sure how I would react at this point to find that my core values had shifted dramatically!) One of my core values is making a difference. So, one important question is, “what kind of difference am I looking to make in this next part of my life?” Is it a lower-case d difference? Or is it an upper-case “D” difference?

This weekend, I joined other women in a retreat about leadership. I heard similar stories to my own experiences in leadership; stories of women being told that they are too intimidating, that they need to dumb it down, that they are too bossy, that they don’t have enough of an executive presence. We don’t do this to men in leadership. And we need to stop doing it to ourselves and to other women.