Are you a victim or a hero?

I wrote this post after being inspired by the opening circle that Ellie led on the subject “the mindset of a hero vs. the mindset of a victim”.

The basic belief which Acton’s educational system is based on, is that every Eagle at Acton is a hero and has her own unique mission in the world. Acton’s goal is to help each Eagle find this mission and prepare him for his journey in real life in the best way possible.

There is no doubt that this sentence is very non-trivial and it raises a lot of thoughts and points of discussion. To me, this is one of the most inspiring features at Acton and this is what makes it so special, innovative and suitable for the 21st century. On the other hand, it’s certainly not an easy feature to comprehend and to me, it was not clear on the practical level before I started working at Acton: what does it mean, in practice, that every Eagle is a hero? Does it come to fruition at all, or is it just some kind of sentence that is very nice to write on the website, but in the field, it has no meaning?

From my first day at Acton, I understood that this sentence was deeply reflected in the simplest everyday life in the studio:

• Every opening circle offers Eagles a different dilemma, in which they are asked to say what they would do as “heroes”. What does a “hero” do in such a situation?
• When the Eagles formulated the contract, they kept asking themselves: how should a”hero” behave? What is expected of him?
• On the board in the studio, hangs a schematic sketch of “A hero’s Journey” (sets out, finds a mentor, finds friends for the journey, fights monsters, fails,gets up and tries again, fails again, gets up and tries again, succeeds and completes the mission successfully).
• When one of the Eagles completes a major task in the core skills, Alden will always praise her great effort and remind her that this is another achievement in her “Heroic Journey”.
• At the parents’ meeting, the main topic was how parents can help Eagles in their “hero’s journey”, and much more.

But for me, the best illustration for this topic was the circle which Ellie led about the mindset of a hero vs. the mindset of a victim. Ellie described a situation of an Eagle who came across a particularly difficult task, and asked them how they thought a hero would respond to difficulty, what would he say to himself? The Eagles gave many answers, such as: “I will succeed”, “I will try again and again until I succeed”, “I will look for someone to help me”, etc. She then asked them how they thought a victim would respond to difficulty. Here too, there were good answers like “It’s not worth the effort anyway, it’s boring”, “There’s no way I’ll succeed,” and”It’s not fair” Ellie continued the circle by reading a cute story that explains the difference between a hero and a victim, but I want to focus on these sentences because, to me, they were a wonderful expression of such an important principle.

How many times a day do our Eagles (and us too!) blame troubles on the outside world? How often do we hear the phrase “It’s not me, it’s him”,”It’s too hard/It’s stupid/It’s silly” and how many times a day do we hear or say, “It’s not fair!”??? The essence here is taking responsibility. Once we teach ourselves, and our Eagles, to take responsibility for ourselves and our choices, this will be the moment when we start hearing sentences like “I’ll do it”, “I’ll try again”, “It happened because of me, I’ll fix it”, “I need help because I don’t know what to do now”. This is a formative insight, in my opinion, and a very significant lesson because we are so used to throwing responsibility on someone else. If we fail, then it’s always because the test was hard/unfair/it was too hot in the room or that I did not feel well. It’s almost never because I didn’t study hard enough, and next time I’ll be better prepared and improve my score. It’s so much easier to blame the teacher/cashier at the supermarket/the guy who banged up my car, than to look at ourselves and take responsibility for what happened and – no less important – to agree to try again after we failed.

It was only after Ellie’s circle that I realized how important Acton’s assumption was that every Eagle is a hero. It teaches the Eagles an extremely important lesson in being in the mindset of a hero (not a victim): take responsibility for your actions and move on after failure, get back up after each fall. Did I mention inspiration?