I am an educator, like my father before me.*

I realized this recently in a way I had not before.  Or, I became comfortable with this statement in a way I had not been before.  Sometimes we spend much of our career or even lives being overly careful about the language we use to describe ourselves.  We don’t want to put boxes around ourselves.  In the world of consulting, it’s even worse most of the time.  My choice of the word “educator” comes with high risk, or at least I thought it did.  I’ve spent most of my professional career trying to present myself as anything but an “educator”.  Being an educator implies “academic” which is sometimes interpreted as being impractial or (gasp) theoretical.  Those aren’t good things to be when one is trying to be of value to some, but not all, business clients.

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