Moral

Moral character

Assets | Humility

Three women smiling and laughing while walking.

Being honest with ourselves about what we can offer, acknowledging that there’s always more to learn, with a genuine desire to advance the best interests of the community.

1. Highlights

Humility involves being willing to honestly evaluate our own abilities, beliefs, experiences and privileges. Because humility requires self-reflection, humility goes hand-in-hand with honesty. This means accepting both our strengths and weaknesses and recognizing the limits of our knowledge.

Use self-reflection and honesty to accept our strengths and weaknesses

Recognize the limits of our own knowledge and be willing to change our minds

Be open to new ideas, information, and creative approaches

While we might, in fact, have some answers — and honest humility doesn’t shy away from that possibility — none of us ever have all the answers, and we need to be open to the views and perspectives of others, recognizing that we have much to learn from those who are different from us. Similarly, gratitude emerges for others when we recognize the value they bring and the ways in which we can work in teams and play off each other’s strengths.

Because we never have all the answers, finding the best solutions to the challenges we face requires that we learn about our own biases and shortcomings. And that requires hearing from people who have different ways of seeing our world. It requires thinking about how perspectives that differ from our own should affect our own assumptions and beliefs. When we listen with open minds to how others may view the world differently, we often find that we, ourselves, are part of the problem and that solving that problem requires being willing to accept that the change must begin inside of us. Addressing challenges in ways that “create positive change for humanity” — practicing Principled Innovation — means we must be open to new ideas, quality information, and divergent, creative approaches. We all need to have the intellectual humility to admit that we don’t have all the answers.

Woman smiling and listening.
Humility requires a genuine curiosity for the world and for others.
Two women looking at documents.
Humility means recognizing that we have much to learn from those who are different from us.

2. Context

Two women looking at documents.
Humility means recognizing that we have much to learn from those who are different from us.

Humility requires a genuine curiosity for the world and for others. But it can be challenging to truly hear the opinions of those with whom we disagree, and the news bubbles created by social media platforms make it even harder to hear ideas that greatly diverge from our own. Applying self-reflection strategies can foster an open mind and an open heart. As a reflective practice, observe the body’s responses when engaged in dialogue and observe the way you respond. Ask yourself how often you open yourself up to being challenged by others, and reflect on the last time you changed your opinion, and what you found difficult or helpful in that change. Reflections like these remind us that engaging humility takes grace and patience with ourselves and others.

It is not uncommon to find that there are some students who just seem to match up better with one teacher and not with another. As students, most of us had that experience at one point along our educational pathways. As educators, though, it can be difficult to accept that we ourselves may be part of the reason for that mismatch. Humility gives us the openness to ask what we can do differently to improve the student-teacher dynamic (or the family-teacher dynamic or the teacher-teacher dynamic) and gives us the courage to reach out to others in our community who may help us fill in the gaps in both our own self-awareness and our own skillset.

As human beings, it is natural to deflect our role in creating a problem and to focus on the shortcomings of others. Because learning systems are made up of human beings, this tendency is often seen on a large scale within educational environments. Just as we need to enact humility on a personal and professional level, we need to own our limitations and shortcomings at an institutional level as well. The biases and limited perspectives of the individuals working within our learning institutions are compounded at the systems levels to create blind spots that become hardened into the way we do business. We need others to help us see blind spots and recognize these structures that stand in need of Principled Innovation.

3. Resources

Select one of our featured resources or visit the PI toolkit library for more tools.

How humility will make you the greatest person ever

  Article

  10 minutes

  By: Greater Good Science Center

Open

To unite the country, we need honesty and courage

  Article

  10 minutes

  By: Boston Globe, Robert P. George and Cornel West

Open

Intellectual humility

  Video

  3 minutes

  By: John Templeton Foundation

Open

Notice, think, feel, do

  Tool

  5 minutes

  By: Principled Innovation® (PI)

Open

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