Nashville. Vero Beach. Naples (FL). Savannah. Montréal. Los Angeles. San Francisco. In the last week six weeks I have found myself in all of these places for alumni events and/or conferences. While I have enjoyed every one of the trips, I was pleased when my last plane ride, a red-eye from California this past Tuesday, set down in Philadelphia.

During my different trips I had the wonderful opportunity to talk with alumni, teachers, and colleagues from around the country about any number of issues. While I was never gone for more than a few days at a time and it was rewarding to be with others and to share thoughts, I must admit that I missed my family and the students. I felt as though I was on a perpetual roller coaster ride that stopped only momentarily to see the ground; my sense of equilibrium was off. It reminded me just how important it is to know who you are and what is important to you. For me, being with my family and having day to day contact with people here at the School are essential.

On a number of occasions while I was gone, I found myself involved in discussions about the interrelationship of trust, self-confidence, and success. Everyone with whom I spoke emphasized the importance of trust in the dynamic. As one person said, "If you can’t trust people, you can’t rely on them.” The word—trust—means different things in different contexts. There are at least three different kinds of trust that play important roles in our lives: personal trust, the trust in ourselves and in our ability to do things effectively; interpersonal trust, which revolves around our interactions with others and our confidence in them based on those interactions; and professional trust, which revolves around our confidence in others’ competence. When people engage with each other on a regular basis, they count on consistency, continuity, and integrity. While trust may be difficult to develop on an interpersonal level, it is easily lost when someone doesn’t follow through.

Ironically, when we don’t know the people, professional trust becomes implicit based on perception. Each time I got into a plane I had no knowledge of any of the pilots. Yet, I automatically assumed that they were competent and capable. Otherwise I could not have made the trips.

Why is interpersonal trust so hard to come by and maintain while professional trust is less complicated? In part this is because of the emotional involvement associated with relationships. Simply put, it hurts when friends, families and associates do things that contradict our expectations. It leads me to wonder about the lessons we teach our children about trust, integrity, and perception. We need to emphasize the importance of having a clear value structure, a structure that we believe in and live by on a consistent basis. And we need to model those attributes for our children.

One of the highlights for me on my trips was spending time with a few former students whom I taught and/or coached at different points in their lives. As I listened to two of those people (one, a former Women’s National Intercollegiate Squash Champion and All-American at Harvard, whom I coached at Harvard, and the other, a former United States Men’s Amateur Squash Champion and All-American from Princeton, whom I taught and coached in high school), they talked abut the importance that trust played in their ability to become better players and better people. The trusts they spoke of were trust in themselves and trust in their coaches and teammates. Well into their thirties, they believe that their experiences on the squash court are the basis for the success they experience in other areas of life today. Although neither one is as serious a squash competitor anymore, both highly value what they experienced on the court. They attribute their willingness to take risks and ability to succeed to the trust, self-confidence, and success that they experienced through squash. Clearly, for them, and as I suspect with most others, the trust and self-confidence they developed helped lead to some of their successes on the court. Those successes on the court reinforced their trust and self-confidence, which led to further successes on and eventually off the court.

When I returned from the first trip last month, I had an email from another former athlete, a football and basketball star at his high school, who had just been selected to his high school’s Hall of Fame. In it, he reiterated what the other two athletes had told me. As he talked about the trust that allowed him to develop as a player and person, he noted that the lessons he learned through athletics—knowing how to practice, the importance of effort, the importance of teamwork, and playing with confidence—are the basis for his day to day happiness and success in life. Now into his forties, he takes particular pride coaching his own and other children in youth sports with the hope that he can create the same opportunities and teach the same lessons that helped to make him so successful.

Although all three people learned these lessons through athletics, the lessons can be learned through myriad activities. Artists, academics, thespians, musicians, and others talk about the same things. More often than not these lessons are by-products of work being done, and people are not immediately conscious of the lessons they are learning. Clearly, whether it is through athletics, the classroom, art, music, or some other area, developing confidence and trust in oneself and others is the essence of success. We appreciate and observe the importance of this dynamic on a daily basis in the classroom, and through special opportunities such as the student art work that hangs on our walls, the class plays and the Upper School production of “Grease,” which was so enjoyable, and through the wonderful work of our students in The Philadelphia Flower Show, to name just a few examples. Clearly, it is our responsibility as parents, teachers, and friends to work together and do everything we can to help our children develop these attributes.

My thoughts and wishes are with you for a wonderful spring break. I look forward to seeing you in warmer weather.

Warmest regards,

Steven S. Piltch
Head of School