When I’m standing in front of a room full of people—something I do a lot in my job—I never know what to do with my hands. It’s not so bad when I’m speaking, and can use a gesture to emphasize a point. But when I’m standing next to a co-presenter or co-instructor and watching the other person talk, my hands feel like little beacons of awkwardness. I tend to be most comfortable sticking them in my pockets, but when I see others do that they look nervous and goofy. When I let them fall at my sides, I imagine that I must look stiff, like a robot. When I cross my arms across my chest, I imagine that I look wound-up and self-protective. When I clasp one hand with the other behind my back, I imagine I must look pretentious, or just contorted. As thoughts like these distract me from what the other person is saying, I’ll sometimes move my hands and arms from one position to another and back again, and I imagine they look like the blades of a helicopter whirling around me.
My insecurity in those moments is a throwback to an earlier time in my life, when my acute awareness of my own awkwardness was sometimes socially paralyzing. Filled with anxiety and self-doubt, I shied away from people at gatherings because I imagined that my trying to connect with them would be experienced by them as an unwanted intrusion. I yearned to understand the social rules that most other people seemed to have mastered, and was painfully conscious of my unwitting transgressions.
Eventually I became more confident and less self-conscious. In the meantime, my struggles to navigate my social world had some surprising benefits. I began to see things: subtle patterns in interactions and situations. I started to find that certain books and articles about leadership, civic engagement and education really spoke to me because I recognized, from personal experience and lifelong observation, the human dynamics they described. When I became a community organizer and began pulling a variety of people together to solve complex problems, I was able to draw on years of insights gained largely from trying very hard to look a little less like a dork.
Now I work at a job I love, and to which I feel called. It involves helping students to transcend their own sources of self-doubt, figure out who they are and what they care about, and discover their capacity to pull people together—navigating the nuances of complex interactions—to make a difference. And every single day I use and teach what I learned, and continue to learn, from struggling through my own doubts.
Every experience counts in life, not just the ones you can list on a resume. Anxiety and failure contain the seeds of wisdom and empowerment. If you can, be thankful for them, and embrace them for all they’re worth, even as you try to overcome them. And if you have an idea about what I should do with my hands when I’m standing next to the person presenting, feel free to share. I’m ready to learn.
