The Mirror Principle
When I was very young—just twenty—I worked in a mental hospital in Switzerland. This was the early ’90s. Zurich’s Needle Park was still active, and many of the patients in our clinic were addicted to heroin or other drugs. What struck me, even back then, was a kind of hypocrisy that ran quietly beneath the surface. The staff members who were the harshest with the patients—who lectured them, punished them for smoking a joint, looked down on them—were often the same ones who drank heavily or used drugs themselves outside of work. It wasn’t funny. It was... disturbing. Intriguing, maybe. But mostly, it was not believable.
I’m not saying every social worker, nurse, or therapist needs to be a saint. That’s not the point. But if you want to guide someone, you need to be at least on the path yourself. If you can’t be a role model in some form—authentic, struggling maybe, but real—then you’re in the wrong job. At best, you’ll be ignored. At worst, you’ll do harm.
The lesson crystallized early for me, but it has only deepened over the years as I’ve built connections with children, teenagers, and adults through social work.: you cannot ask transformation from another person if you are unwilling to change yourself. This is not just a pedagogical truth. It is not a trick of rhetoric or method. It is a principle—spiritual, ethical, existential. A mirror held up to anyone in a position of guidance, authority, or care.
I call this the Mirror Principle:
“Don’t ask for change in others if you’re not working on yourself.”
It’s a kind of inner Golden Rule—not about how we treat others, but how we guide them. A deep ethic of credibility. Of embodied integrity. You can’t demand someone confront their chaos if you hide from your own. You can’t call someone toward growth while standing still. The world doesn’t work that way, and neither do people.
We live in a world that’s drowning in advice. “You should eat better,” “you should control your temper,” “you need to let go of your trauma,” “you need to change.” The word should is thrown around like holy water. But when people feel that the one offering the advice is not practicing what they preach—when they sense that the advisor is not also on the battlefield—it creates resistance. Worse: it breeds cynicism. It breaks trust.
I have found that personal transformation is the only valid ground for requesting transformation from another. If you’ve walked the path, or are visibly walking it, something changes. The atmosphere shifts. You don’t have to convince anymore. You don’t have to push. People feel it. There is something cosmological about it. Something karmic. When you do the work yourself, you become more believable—not by credential, but by vibration. Call it moral gravitation. Authenticity begins to radiate in a way that others can sense, even if they can’t explain it.
In pedagogy—in any helping profession, really—this is not optional. It is foundational. And yet, the systems we work in rarely emphasize it. We are trained to assess, to diagnose, to intervene. We are taught methods, models, and theories. But rarely are we taught to transform ourselves. Rarely are we asked, "Are you living what you teach?"
There is something deeply dishonest in asking a child to confront their fears when you haven’t faced your own. There is something broken in demanding discipline from a teenager when your own life is a mess of impulsivity. There is something hollow in preaching self-regulation while seething silently with unacknowledged rage. Children, especially, are perceptive. They smell inauthenticity like smoke. They may not articulate it, but they feel it. And they will resist it, consciously or unconsciously.
This doesn’t mean perfection. Perfection is a trap, and often a lie. What it does mean is participation. You must be actively engaged in your own growth. You must be willing to confront your own ego, to wrestle with your own shadows, to challenge your own comfort. That work never ends. If you want to be a credible force for change, your own transformation must be ongoing.
This is why I say: to demand change is to take on a sacred responsibility. You are entering a shared field. A relational contract. And it works best when you don’t stand above, but beside. When you say, through your presence more than your words: I know this path, because I am walking it too.